useless objects

When Arp writes of a “bladeless knife from which a handle is missing,” when Norge speaks of a “time when the onion used to make people laugh,” we have images, configurations, which employ archetypal elements but are not properly speaking archetypes. Instead, we have the emergence of entities which only by the force of utterance and the upheaval they cause in the imagination and thought acquire existence and even reality. These “useless objects” have a strange authority. Even as visionary acts, they consist of particulars and thus curiously provide us with a semblance of actual experience.

—Charles Simic, “Negative Capability and its Children,” Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (Tendril, 1984), edited by Paul Mariani and George Murphy

playing against archetype

Look for the exception to the archetype.

image for the ages

The underside of any good image is an archetype.

superimpose and infuse

The image is superimposed over its archetype. It’s the archetype that infuses an image with a numinous glow.