raina maria rilke on birds

dam i want to be converted from a lifeless piece of clay into the receptacle of a god

i wish only to be small and quick and bright

from 'The soul danced into the body: Nation and improvisation in Istanbul'

from dreams of flight by fran martin (about chinese female students in melbourne). I LOVE THIS BOOK

speaking while waiting to speak... (from the cradle of humanity: prehistoric art and culture)

hall of the bulls in lascaux. it is crazy business seeing cave art in scale with human beings. sometimes you see photos of them with no size reference and they kind of look like, or you assume that it would be, something about the size of what you would draw on a piece of A4, maybe A3 paper. a totally baseless assumption but kind of an affectionate one - i can't help subconsciously inviting the artists into my own world of logic, yes because i do not know any better, but also because there is something suggested both by what i do know from looking at the art itself, which is so masterful and thus so human, that no matter the millennia seperating us, we are the same - to borrow a line from a book review i wrote a few years ago, the centuries are not nearly as far apart as they seem. as far as i'm concerned that is really the point of all this, all my interest in microhistory and autobiography and diary literature and cave art and whatever - that is the universal 'discovery' every little piece leads back to

“Maybe early people at that time, to them, they saw themselves as an indivisible part of the animal world... This special bond between humans and animals was so strong that culturally and philosophically, they might have seen themselves as part-animal, part-human, for all we know.” - study coauthor Adam Brumm (*,*)

respectively from: the 13th-century Poèmes de l'infortune / the 80s song Nannas Lied, which borrows the line from the 15th-century Ballade des dames du temps jadis / unnamed quatrain by Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) / 15th-century Coplas por la muerte de su padre

ainu lullaby ('60 Cradles'), about how the world-creator god hears the cries of fussy babies and cradles them to sleep :) i love the quality of her voice

more on biography and microhistory (*) - a sweet attempt at reconciling gaps in archival material

intro to the journal article Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography ... beautiful. Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai reads as one-shot prose based on this apparently scholarly concern, but really there is little substantive distinction between the two, despite one being a peer-reviewed article and the other absurdist fiction. the human tendency to fall in love with the object of what is supposed to be strictly scholalry curiosity - you cannot write even distantly about (let alone partake in) this without falling into prose, academic journal culture bedamned

this kind of sticks out like a sore thumb on my blog thus far but i found it so funny and charming i had to bookmark it somewhere... 😭 "the moment that the videogame has to admit to you that it's just a videogame... it's like having a secret handshake with the developer, but also directly with the videogame [itself]."

20th century table screen 𓍢ִ໋🀦 ๋࣭ (common decoration on scholars' desks) - marble stone. WOW so lovely.

illustration in the 1890s exploration of mount kinabalu - inside a datuk's house - the datuk has a cat :)