Robert Frost: "For Once, Then, Something"

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing

Deeper down in the well than where the water

Gives me back in a shining surface picture

Me myself in the summer heaven godlike

Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,

I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,

Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.

Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

BY ROBERT FROST

Alexander Calder at Pace Gallery, London

I recommend the glorious works of sculptor Alexander Calder who came from three generations of artists and trained originally as an engineer.  His mobiles and stabiles from the mid forties are the exceptional jewels amongst his work.  They are mesmerising conversations with Nature, humble and powerful in their economy, making visible the forces at play. 

Festival Pattern Group

The Festival Pattern Group worked with scientists to make new designs inspired by science for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Twenty-eight manufacturers took part in the Festival of Britain's Festival Pattern Group, which used diagrams of atomic structure to provide design inspiration. 80 designs were produced in all, including glass, ceramics, metal, plastics, textiles and wallpaper.  

Ray and Charles Eames - 'A Communications Primer'

John von Neumann, Claude Shannon and others helped the Eames create this elegant, poetic, economical and informative film in 1953.

Theo Jansen

Wonderful and extraordinary creations by physicist/artist Theo Jansen.

Kay Ryan: Repulsive Theory

Little has been made   

of the soft, skirting action   

of magnets reversed,   

while much has been   

made of attraction.   

But is it not this pillowy   

principle of repulsion   

that produces the   

doily edges of oceans   

or the arabesques of thought?   

And do these cutout coasts   

and incurved rhetorical beaches   

not baffle the onslaught   

of the sea or objectionable people   

and give private life   

what small protection it's got?   

Praise then the oiled motions   

of avoidance, the pearly   

convolutions of all that   

slides off or takes a   

wide berth; praise every   

eddying vacancy of Earth,   

all the dimpled depths   

of pooling space, the whole   

swirl set up by fending-off—   

extending far beyond the personal,   

I'm convinced—   

immense and good   

in a cosmological sense:   

unpressing us against   

each other, lending   

the necessary never

to never-ending.