phosphate of calcium

What reconciles me to my own death more the anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower). The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. it is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet is does. With you I could imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough. 

--John Berger
and our faces, my heart, as brief as photos

Once Upon a Time

"Unlike what most people think, storytelling does not begin with inventing, it begins with listening" 

- John Berger

Brilliant article about John Berger and his work here

Recommended Read

John Berger: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photo

I have just finished reading this, for the second time, and i recommend it highly!

It is a very sensitive, poetic book. A reflection on time and space, in relation to love, pulled together by poetry, essays, reviews and philosophy...it's so hard to describe you need to read it!

It's definitely the most beautiful meditation on love I've come across thus far.

images from here.

“Its All About Choice - The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today. Nevertheless their idea of Hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining - as well as to their experience of the pain of burns. When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match : a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate. Yet this seeing, which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye's retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach - though not necessarily within arm's reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. (Close your eyes, move round the room and notice how the faculty of touch is like a static, limited form of sight.) We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are. ”

-- John Berger (pg 8, Ways of Seeing)