the ongoing moment

For Roxana:

To always resist being defined is to be defined.

Notes from Geoff Dyer's 'Ongoing Moment':

'Somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own. And yet, at the same time, Every Difference is a Likeness too.'

Arbus on photographing the blind:

He lives in an atmosphere as dense and separate as an island with its own sea so he is more autonomous and vulnerable than anyone, and the world is rendered into shadows and smells and sounds as though it was being remembered...We believe in the invisible and what he believes in is the visible.

To live, from the beginning, is to become separate.
At the same time I feel, with the light, with the lips, the heart
the anguish of being a ciego and alone for the day.
--Courtesy of Jonah

Aleph, Borges. To see everything simultaneously. But we live and write in time.

Hands have a history of their own, they have, indeed, their own civilisation, their own beauty.
----Rilke

Previously, even in Egypt, men had learned not to see straight. They fumbled in the dark, and didn't know where they were, or what they were. Like men in a dark room, they only felt their own existence singing in the darkness of other creatures.

We, however, have learned to see ourselves for what we are, as the sun sees us. The Kodak bears witness. ..We see as the All-Seeing Eye sees, with universal vision. And we are what is seen: each man to himself an identity, an isolated absolute. A picture! ..The identifying of ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct; the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen. , is me.
--D.H.Lawrence, Art and Morality.

'The people in the streets, heading to shops, are emissaries of his own sadness.'

Gedney: 'Life of the solitary man is rendered bearable by a " window looking on to the street" (Kafka) ..solitude can be expressed in terms of other people : the figure on the street. '

W.Whitman: I do not doubt that interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, and that eyesight has another eyesight.

The door: a place-as well as a symbol- of transition, of transactions, between the inner and outer. The silent passageway, barzakh, between the inner life and the world, between one person and another.