This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Description is revelation. It is not the thing described, nor false facsimile. It is an artificial thing that exists, in its own seeming, plainly visible, yet not too closely the double of our lives, intenser than any actual life could be.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves and hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
That would be waving and that would be crying, crying and shouting and meaning farewell, farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre, just to stand still without moving a hand.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, a wave, interminably flowing.
Man |
The honey of heaven may or may not come, but that of earth both comes and goes at once.
The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold, the catbird's gobble in the morning half-awake these are real only if I make them so. Whistle for me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green, intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin and I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.
Body |
For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the under-side of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the under-side of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth... Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.
Appearance | Compensation | Desire | Pleasure | Search | Will |
The earth is not earth but a stone, not the mother that held men as they fell but stone, but like a stone, no: not the mother, but an oppressor, but like an oppressor that grudges them their death, as it grudges the living that they live.
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
A man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.
I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder - I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid - a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing - and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note - and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.
Art | Beauty | Dawn | Doubt | Light | Literature | Nonsense | Sense | Yielding | Art | Beauty |
What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?
Absence | Children | Distinguish | Listening | Melody | Nothing |
There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
Battle | Books | Growth | Life | Life | Loafing | Man | Mind | Obsession | Pleasure | Rest | Science | Search | Struggle | World | Old |
There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.