The Great Book Caper » Writing Desk
Hypatia
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.-
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Denise Levertov
When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.-
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Plato
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.Categories
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Postmodernism
Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.Robert Anton Wilson
Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).Witold Gombrowicz
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Gustav Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.Dušan “Charles” Simić
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Monique Wittig
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
W.S. Merwin
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
Thomas Aquinas
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Chromapoetica 
Oh Anna, this is just overwhelmingly cool! I love your gorgeous writing desk, so loving decorated with icons(how appropriate) vessels and containers of beauty. I only made it through shelf 17 before I had to stop and comment about how I wish I could take so many of those tomes down and thumb through them. Your books are in much better shape than mine–my older ones (some of which go back to high school in the 60’s) were all bought used with a few exceptions, and age and being moved a million times by hands however loving, has taken its toll on them. But I love them nonetheless in all their bedragglement, even though they have that old musty pasty smell now. This is just so much fun–so glad you rose to Brendan’s and my bait and gave us this look into the world of chromapoesy, a chromacornucopia, as it were, of literary delight. Your notebooks and working materials in particular look so clean, neat and organized–the sign of a creative but disciplined mind, I’m sure. And there is no such thing as a ‘book problem’–only a ‘space problem.’ ;_)
‘lovingLY’ decorated…sigh
Only for you Joy :). I too wish you could look at them, they’re ever more exciting that way! It’s weird it stuck your comment here under the picture instead of at the main post. I didn’t know it could do that. Yes, I find the moving process the hardest (some of these books have moved 15 times or more). Oh, I forgot my collection of children’s books (those have been moved some 40+ times). Well, thankfully I don’ t have a space problem. I do enjoy my writing desk very much, my computer desk is on the next wall (under the giant window). It wasn’t fit for pictures this morning. I should post some time later my Underwood No 5 typewriter, you’d get a kick out of that. It’s for show.
I bet it put it here because I enlarged the picture, was overwhelmed with the need to comment and just started writing. ;_) Apparently you can comment on individual photos, or something. I wish I still had my children’s books, especially my Childcraft Encyclopedia, where I read through every volume cover to cover. That’s where I read my first poem (The Highwayman, by Noyes) But books were not overly valued in my family, and they fell by the way. I still have some of my son’s old kid’s books, though, many of which I bought because they were personal faves. Wish I still had my old old copy of Wind in the Willows.
I’m so glad you enjoyed the pictures I sent of my Wind in the Willows book. If you notice all the notebooks are shut. If they were open you wouldn’t call them neat :). I make a big mess while creating but I have to clean it up as I successively work each draft until I have the immaculate printed copy filed neatly away. When I paint it looks like an explosion (I have hundreds of tubes of paint) then I clean it all up while I pondering what I’ve made and to be ready for the next big mess. So the point is my workspace either looks like this or chaos depending on what stage of the process I’m in :).
Thank you Anna! The profusion of arts revealed on your bookshelves is like the MRI that in 2003 finally revealed the mass in my left temporal lobe — probably congenital — that explained, at last, my seizure disorder. Your bookcase is a smoking gun for the range of your thought and poems. I think of all your “Chroma” websites as extrapolations of each of those shelves … the order of those shelves, too, somehow reflecting the ordering of those sites, and the “rage for order” that somehow holds the flukes of your poems (sometimes reading them I feel like I’m on mescaline and swimming). And you add to the one fixture of the writer — The Bookcase — that other, the Writing Desk, both as Relic and Altar (here) and the functional one (the one you didn’t show). When my dad dies, the only things I care to inherit from his house are some of his books and a monk’s table I’ve always used to study from on my visits to his house. And all those journals — do you keep a different one for each of the twelve modes of your expression? When i moved into this house 15 years ago, I lugged 30 boxes of books and papers; perhaps the main reason I care less to move than my wife is the thought of how many, many more boxes are now a part of that count … And finally, one thing these revelations of book-sanctums shows to me is how no collection can ever be complete — how I’ve lusted after titles I’ve seen on your shelves and Hedgewitch (that book on Chauvet looks, as they say in the parlance of porn, like a tiny hiney of a honey …) – Brendan
You’re welcome, I was never encouraged in art as a young person so I suppose my art library is my own declaration of fascination as it were (12 shelves of catalogues, monographs, eclectic choices, outsider art, history, etc.). I could see these shelves as a smoking gun, though I have to add the internet for reference as I often read research articles that spark ideas. I hadn’t thought about the ‘rage for order’ but I see it, a response to all the disorder I was raised in. Also, it does help provide an outer border for the whirling of my mind which loves to draw from so many sources to create. I have a friend who’s a painter and her palette consists of 12 colors. She came to my studio and was floored to see hundreds of colors and many different types of materials. For her, everything she wants to say can be explored through the limited choice of those 12 colors (granted they can be combined into an exponential number of products). My creative process requires a larger scope of material in order to induce the experience you describe without the aid of psychedelic drugs :). I do try to keep the modes of expression organized but it’s somewhat of an aftereffect. Starting one thing leads to thoughts of another, composing gives insights into structure for writing and themes in painting inform essays, etc. I think my next peek behind the curtain will be the studio and music area (and the functional desk), along with my typewriter.