050 - Everything Flows
This is Issue 50 of Bombay Daak. We have taken 27 months to get here. Thank you for being part of this journey this far.
A mild breeze wakes up on the blue sea, thirsty it races behind the clouds on the horizon. The warm waters below give fire to its wings and there it goes faster and faster seeking the clouds; they seem always to be within reach yet just as far. Once, Twice, Thrice … it goes around the skies of its watery world before it tires and lets up. The clouds stop still. The day becomes night, the clouds becomes water, the breeze lies drenched; its thirst now quenched.
Everything about Heraclitus’s philosophy of Penta Rhei is disputed, including whether it is his philosophy. What did he mean by everything flows? What does he mean when he says nobody steps into the same river twice?
If the philosophy of Penta Rhei is the philosophy of change, of impermanence. What do we in a world in such flux?
A fire kept burning can melt iron. Water turns rocks to dust. In a world where everything flows, one claims it in the stillness.
I
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. . . . I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go
II
The black roots of jazz are reclaimed throughout Driftglass, whose title is borrowed from a book by African-American science-fiction author Samuel R Delany and applied as a metaphor for the fluid nature of improvised music, the way it evolves into compositions - on Cassie Kinoshi and her band Seed
III
In ancient Greek, there is a middle voice. It marks a moment most poetic because it is most paradoxical, when the action of a verb is performed against itself. To find one’s middle voice means to make poems to learn how to think. The thoughts in the poem can be found nowhere but in the poem. The poem is made, is a made thing, and then thought itself endures inside it - Permanent Transience
IV
The spell for mending was all in the sitting. Wear Your Stillness as a Disguise
V
Fishing in street photography is to get a sense of the place, get to know the light, anticipate, set your gear, set your scene like a bait and then wait, wait for your character to show up, to finish your story. The shutter doesn't last a second, the art is in the waiting
Saul Leiter’s Colour Photography