Man Ray
“Enough Rope”
1944

Beautiful
morning with no need of myths, sipping honey without blasphemy.

Beautiful
morning, this or some other morning,
this life or some other invention,
without any ghosts in the shadows.

The sand's dampness clings to my feet.
I swallow the sea, which swallows me.
Seashells, curved thoughts, shades of complete
blue
light
over materialized forms.

Beautiful
passing body, blended into the whole
body of the world.

An urge to sing, but so intense
I hold my tongue, replete.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Sponge Song, from Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Richard Zenith

Toshihiko Shimizu
Letter Picture No.2
1967-1970

Louise Bourgeois
From La Réparation
2003

“But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways; we would recapture the reflexes of the "first stairway," we would not stumble on that rather high step. The house's entire being would open up, faithful to our own being. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands.”

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The successive houses in which we have lived have no doubt made our gestures commonplace. But we are very surprised, when we return to the old house, after an odyssey of many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, the earliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme. The word habit is too worn a word to express this passionate liaison of our bodies, which do
not forget, with an unforgettable house.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Helena Almeida
Desenhos Habitados / Inhabited Drawings
1975

And shall we have to deny thee then,
God of the tumors, God of the living
flower, begin with a no to the obscure
rock "I am," consent to death
and on each tomb inscribe our only
certainty: "thanatos athanatos"?
Without a name to tell the dreams the tears the furors of this man defeated by still-open questions.
Our dialogue alters; now the absurd
becomes possible. There, beyond
the smoke of fog, within the trees
the potency of leaves awakes, true is the river pressing on the banks.
Life is not dream. True is man
and his jealous plaint of silence.
God of silence, open solitude.

Salvatore Quasimodo, Thanatos Athanatos, from The Selected Writings of Salvatore Quasimodo, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

Horst P. Horst
Lucia Bosé
c. 1950

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
1975