Sunday, May 16, 2010

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Touch"; Mills (The Blue Hour); Ponge







[Eberhard Weber, "Touch," from Yellow Fields]

Deborah A. Mills, an artist walking along the promenade on the lower Hudson, captured l'heure bleue in all its cobalt beauty yesterday evening.

She sees the inner being of things, how they manifest themselves as fields of color, color we can almost (but not quite) touch.

See deeply, see the thing-in-itself, and then search for the words to be that thing.

Francis Ponge phrased it this way:

"...man will make marvelous strides if he returns to things (just as we must return to the level of words in order to express things properly) and applies himself to studying them and expressing them, trusting simultaneously his eye, his reason, and his intuition, with no encumbrance to keep him from pursuing the novelties they contain--and knowing how to consider them in their essence as in their details."

---Ponge, Mute Objects of Expression (orig. 1938, trans. Lee Fahnestock, 2008, Archipelago Books).

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