A.’s Reviews > Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy > Status Update

What makes a poem a poem,...is that it is unparphrasable...I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing

Still life. The deep pun hidden in the term; life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.

Deep paradox; things placed right next to us, in absolute intimacy, yet unknowable. Full of history, but their history is mute; full of association with particular poeple, moments, gestures, emotions, and all...unavailable now..they offer us intimacy and distance at once, allow us to be both here and gone.

As if the world were a corridor through which the body moved.

We're accustomed to not seeing what is so near to us; we do not need to look at things that are at hand, because they are at hand every day. That waht makes home so safe and so appealing, that we do not need to look at it

A still life is more like a poem than a portrait...It is at the eyes of a portrait always, that our seeing stops. But in still life, there is no end to our looking.

Desire brings us back

They refuse perfection, or rather they assert that this is perfection, this state of being consumed, used up, enjoyed, existing in time.

There is a Japanses word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating makrs of time's passage:a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it

The first Dutch still lifes are texts of abundance...they are celebrants of prosperity and obervers of the consequences of relative stability...but in only a matter of years, something happens; these paintings of indulgence give way to something more rigorous certainly poetic...their import seems to lie not in plenty but in the poetry of relation...sharpnes and translucency of lemon...light on white damask cloth...