signs on the frontier

 

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It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and arranging your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.


—Italo Calvino
If on a winter's night a traveler

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It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from our view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. 

If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. 

This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.

—Franz Kafka

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So what can they tell us,
the writers of dreambooks,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors
with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times
even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

—Wisława Szymborska

Dreams, excerpt

Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version

 

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