and now become something like stelae of the air / whose outer edges tremble a little / before the invading light that is going to absorb them. [after Jaccottet on Morandi]

"I was raised under a bell jar with forget-me-nots in my hair." Thank you, Miriam Hopkins.

My painting "No Omen but Awe" is on view at the permanent collection gallery at the Bolinas Museum. Come west & stop by.

Make contact with yourself—lay down a list of notes—and the discourse that must bind them together will grow among them on its own, like a creeper among stones. — Cristina Campo

If you find yourself in New York City, please stop by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in Tribeca to see Louise Despont's beautiful solo exhibition—Afterlifes. I'm working on a book with Louise & wrote the exhibition's accompanying text, which can be found here: nicellebeauchene.com/exhibitions/...

My partner in crime, @herbert_pfostl, has an exhibition opening at Bolinas Museum next Saturday! "Between Field and Firmament” will be up through August 6th. He will be in conversation with the curator in an event titled "The Hard Part is Silence" on June 24th. Details below!

Rena Papaspyrou's "Photocopies directly from matter," 1980-1981. Thanks to Steve Roden for introducing me to Papaspyrou's work. Sadly, it's nearly impossible to find any of her books in print.

Rena Papaspyrou (b. 1938), "Geography—Images through Matter," 1981, Metal Sheet with Traces of Cement and Graphite. For S.R.

As we enter the "rainy season" in California, I turn to Mary Webb, unabashedly, and look for those passages about about how the low lands draw storms & night after night on the apples descend rains that are thick, permanent wires taut between heaven and earth.

Liliana Porter, Plate V from Wrinkle, photogravure, 1968.

It's that time of year when the westering sun sets the windows on fire at the end of the day. And the Golden-Crested Sparrow has arrived with its melancholy, whistling song. Image: Sun flares & light leaks in the last exposed sheet of decades-old Polaroid film.

A favorite: "And the heaps of coral of every type and hue, animated by a melancholy and bracing light, began to glow as though each little stone carried its own microscopic lantern within its delicate interior." — Joseph Roth, Der Leviathan, 1938.

Yet at times between two everyday words a few syllables of 'dead' languages will slip out, ghost-words that have the transparency of a flame at high noon. — Pierre Klossowski, Diana at her Bath, 1968

Notes from this evening's reading: phosphorous in a fawn’s finest bone; pearl in a sparrow’s buried vocal chord; iron in the last breath of a badger.

Days when nothing particular happens, but which are made secretly resonant by a nonetheless unfamiliar dimension, like the hollow space inside a musical instrument. — Philippe Jaccottet, Through an Orchard, Aquila Publishing, Isle of Skye, 1978

These Days: Projecting Super 8 and staring at the wall. #Bolex

The earth was like a magnet which pulled me and sometimes I came near it, this identification or annihilation that I longed for. — Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, 1979.

Couple standing in front of Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1951-1952.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947. HBD S.W.

Pasted on the cover of an old notebook: "source of, may be extinguished while we still see its rays.

Signal Lights: Hedda Sterne's drawings from the 1960s and 1970s—the Baldanders and the Lettuces. A mystic who loved Simone Weil & road-tripped with Delores Del Rio, who used a magnifying glass to continue drawing when she lost her vision as she neared the age of one hundred. Yes!

Evening Commute—Bolinas to Point Reyes by way of Olema Valley—a literal suture resting above the San Andreas fault, binding two entirely different tectonic plates. Different stones, flora, fauna, & sounds straddle the center, & there is often a fine layer of fog above the valley.

"When I was in Germany, there was an adorable swan. His name was Erich [...] and very often we would walk together [...] When I left, I suffered, because I didn’t see the swan anymore. And he was wounded. Because there were animals in the woods. But he’s always on my mind." — FJ

Home: The wild & unpredictable coastline of the Point Reyes Peninsula—separated by time & tectonics from the North American continent. “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back” — Motto attributed to the California Life Saving Service, 19th century

Poetry is the daughter of silence — George Mackay Brown, A Carrier of Stones, 1969.

David Gatten, "The Enjoyment of Reading, Lost and Found" (film still), 2001. Book as strata.

One must look for the eternal in the alluvium of the insignificant, in that which revolves around the eternal like an erratic comet, without ever entering its ordered constellation. — Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)

A beautiful image of the ephemeral & uncommon Riella plant, a genus in the liverwort family Riellaceae. Although widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere, populations are fleeting and found in only a few known locations. From a Swedish botanical I picked up in Memphis, TN.

Reading about the Nigerian folk custom of covering a fallen tree branch with green leaves. "This covering of verdure was spread over the fallen branch, as a corpse-cloth is laid over the limbs of one new dead, that the indwelling spirit might not feel neglected and untended."

Sierra Nevada mercury in the form of cinnabar crystals. A film still from a project I completed in 2012. #FromTheArchives

Basalt has been described as a singing stone. On hot days basalt columns are observed to break off with a ringing sound. That structures built of basalt might have been heard to sing, over the centuries, during their slow transition into ruins—is beautiful.

A plate from Claudio Gobbi’s beautiful & intriguing study of the persistence of symbol and style in Armenian architecture—Armenie Ville. With few variations, these structures are constructed of square blocks of stone—grey or red basalt found in the highlands of the Caucasus Minor

This exquisite book arrived yesterday—Don Domanski, Selected Poems, 1975-2021—published by @Corbel_Stone. At rest, for the moment, beneath another cherished gift—a Seghers print of the underside of stones, a vapour of trees, and some constellation of night.

They were floating, almost at one with the darkness, reflecting no light. They mingled with other almost inaudible nocturnal stirrings, like a small vibration in long wires. — Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace, 1963

Deciphering pages in my old notebooks, I found the following passage beside this photograph taken by Amélie Galup (1856-1943): "No sister should comb her hair at night, if she have a brother at sea." — John Francis Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands, 1862

“Drought teaches magic and prayer,” writes Aby Warburg in “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America.” Born & raised in California, which for the greater part of the year remains entirely without precipitation, this devotional to natural phenomena is welcome.

Walking the coastal trail back from Limantour Beach at six o'clock this evening, I rounded a bend only to encounter an adult mountain lion about seventy yards away. Beautiful to behold, but happy there were no cubs about & she did not find me or my friend to be very interesting.

"Listen to this. There is a need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower. It could be like a break on the radio. Such signals sometimes sound as if they lasted an entire life. Listen." —Arvo Pärt discussing "Für Alina

Indian muslin—described as being so fine that a hundred yards could pass through the eye of a needle—has been compared with the skin of the moon removed by the executioner-star. When the finest muslin is laid on the grass, & the dew has fallen upon it, it is no longer discernible

Signal Lights: "The Unpainted Landscape" (1987), published by Coracle Press. This book introduced me to Roger Ackling, Herman de Vries & so many others. It ends with a beautiful text by Clark titled "In Praise of Walking." Pictured: Roger Ackling's "Five Sunsets in One Hour.

"The more elusive the sign, the less chance of it being an illusion." — Philippe Jaccottet, "Pensées sous les nuages," Galllimard, 1983

Happy Birthday to this beautiful & dearly missed woman. My godmother, Diane, who taught me so much through her love of poetry, and by sending me to Field's bookshop on Polk Street in search of titles on mysticism & hermeticism.

"Once caught, the ox is no longer visible." — One of the fifty marvelous "Ox-Herding Pictures" Cage made while testing his brush on brown paper towels at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia.

Chesterton on Mary Webb: “In one sense it was the light that never was on sea or land, and in another sense the light without which sea and land are invisible; but...it is certain that without that dark...there would have never been any love of the land or any songs of the sea.”

Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, “poet of raw earth,” advocated for the return of “vernacular earth architecture,” devoting his career to rediscovering the increasingly lost and forgotten forms of traditional Arab structures, which were created by sand, history, wind, and shadow.

Great pleasure in reading the first chapter of “The Book of Unconformities,” which traces the presence of marble beneath Manhattan, especially in the neighborhoods of Marble Hill and Inwood, a place the Lenape called “Sabbeleu-aki,” often translated as “the Glistening Place."

Long fascinated by the last exposed frame in a roll of film, I’ve recently been finding and archiving these orphans in my own negatives. They are often beautifully blown out with streaks, fields, and flowers of light leaks, which expand over the image and bury it in brightness.

Archived Signal Lights: Jean Dubuffet's topographical earth studies from the 1950s. Pictured is Dubuffet's "Mechanism for destroying tracks," oil on canvas, 1957.

Silent Matter: Edward Lear's "Hagar and Silsilis, Egypt," 1856. Bequeathed to the Wadsworth Atheneum by Edward Gorey. Initially drawn to this watercolor because it reminded me of Seghers—later to learn of its provenance and Gorey's search for "silent matter" in all art.

I recently read Kingston Trinder's essay on John Cage's mycological forays, "Where the Whippoorwill Sound and the Morel Lay," and it's a lovely, almost musical telling. "Among these wanderings—and in the middle of them—here, all of a sudden, is a release. Or an opening" — Cage