“The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.”
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The mind has mountains, to lift a phrase from Hopkins, even for people who have spent all their lives in the flatlands; and most of us would be dazzled if the mountains turned out to yield sacred texts rather than terrors or an empty, confused landscape.”
— Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence

“My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ‘most everywhere.”
— James Joyce

“I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward influence which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards.”
— Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

i am a dirty little room
with spiders in the corner of my skull
my mouth a dark pit
into which human droppings disappear
the speck of rust in my heart worries me
many people breathe in and out of me
i am at ease with the world
only the speck of rust worries me
— Wopko Jensma, “Lo Lull” (1973)