Hughlings Himwich

Where I first heard Robert Creeley

In 1966, I happened to be at Harvard at the time Robert Creeley was visiting. My sense of poetry forever changed that day.  Here is a full recording of that 1966 reading: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/creeley.cfm.  "A Form of Women" has never left me.


A Form of Women

I have come far enough
from where I was not before
to have seen the things
looking in at me from through the open door

and have walked tonight
by myself
to see the moonlight
and see it as trees

and shapes more fearful
because I feared
what I did not know
but have wanted to know.

My face is my own, I thought.
But you have seen it
turn into a thousand years.
I watched you cry.

I could not touch you.
I wanted very much to
touch you
but could not.

If it is dark
when this is given to you,
have care for its content
when the moon shines.

My face is my own.
My hands are my own.
My mouth is my own
but I am not.

Moon, moon,
when you leave me alone
all the darkness is
an utter blackness,

a pit of fear,
a stench,
hands unreasonable
never to touch.

But I love you.
Do you love me.
What to say
when you see me.

Nozick: the experience machine

Download Exper_machine_nozick

Kafka: On Parables

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.

Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares.

Another said: I bet that is also a parable.

The first said: You have won.

The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.

Mother Picking Produce by Richard Blanco

 

She scratches the oranges then smells the peel,

presses an avocado just enough to judge its ripeness,

polishes the Macintoshes searching for bruises.

She selects with hands that have thickened, fingers

that have swollen with history around the white gold

of a wedding ring she now wears as a widow.

Unlike the archived photos of young, slender digits

captive around black and white orange blossoms,

her spotted hands now reaching into the colors.

I see all the folklore of her childhood, the fields,

the fruit she once picked from the very tree,

the wiry roots she pulled out of the very ground.

And now, among the collapsed boxes of yucca,

through crumbling pyramids of golden mangos,

she moves with the same instinct and skill.

This is how she survives death and her son,

on these humble duties that will never change,

on those habits of living which keep a life a life.

She holds up red grapes to ask me what I think,

and what I think is this, a new poem about her--

the grapes look like dusty rubies in her hands,

what I say is this: they look sweet, very sweet.

 

Yeats on how a poem begins . . . .

"Do you feel that you have voluntary control over ideas so that you can force them to come?"

Yeats: "Usually. The actual ideas comes (sic) in a moment of unconsciousness & forgetfullness but the effort must be kept upuntil the stream produce what may be only a momentary passivity."

"Do you find that actual execution starts with a series of apparently futile attemps to work?"

Yeats: "Always."

(from a questionnaire Yeats responded to; NLIM 30,098)

Basho: Windswept spirit

"In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones
and nine orfices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept
spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is
torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took
to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making
it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times
when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit,
or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain
victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has
never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and
another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a
court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying
to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable
love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing
poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly."

(Introductory paragraph from The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, from
a translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa).

Yeats: Knowledge of Reality

The knowledge of reality is always in some measure a secret knowledge.  It is a kind of death. 

        -- Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 482

Gaeta's Lament

http://youtu.be/P3gUY940chg

alone she sleeps in the shirt of man 
with my three wishes clutched in her hand 
the first that she be spared the pain 
that comes from a dark and laughing rain 
when she finds love 
may it always stay true 
yes I beg for the second wish I made too 
but wish no more 
my life you can take 
to have her please just one day wake 
to have her please just one day wake 
to have her please just one day wake

--- Michael Angeli, Karen Angeli, Brian McCreary

Wittgenstein's Preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Preface

---

This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it -- or similar thoughts. it is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather -- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to thnk both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.

How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before my by another.

I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts.

If this work has a value it consists in two things. First that in it thoughts are expressed, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. the more the nail has been hit on the heard. -- Here I am conscious that I have fallen far short of the possible. Simply because my powers are insufficient to cope with the task. -- May others come and do it better.

On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.

L. W.

Vienna, 1918

 

Two Important Sources for Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Download Undifferentiated aesthetic continuum an essay by N.S.C. Northrup

Download Principles of Research-2  an address by Albert Einstein

Golgonooza

"All imaginative and creative acts, being eternal, go to build up a permanent structure, which Blake calls Golgonooza, above time, and, when this structure is finished, nature, its scaffolding, will be knocked away and man will live in it. Golgonooza will then be the city of God, the New Jerusalem which is the total form of all human culture and civilisation. Nothing that the heroes, martyrs, prophets and poets of the past have done for it has been wasted; no anonymous and unrecognised contribution to it has been overlooked. In it is conserved all the good man has done, and in it is completed all that he hoped and intended to do. And the artist who uses the same energy and genius that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it at the same time."

Northrop Frye, 'Fearful Symmetry: a study of William Blake'

 

The Builders of Golgonooza (William Blake)

(Jerusalem, f. 12, ll. 25–44.) WHAT are those Golden Builders doing? Where was the burying-place Of soft Ethinthus? near Tyburn’s fatal Tree? Is that Mild Zion’s hill’s most ancient promontory, near mournful Ever-weeping Paddington? Is that Calvary and Golgotha Becoming a building of Pity and Compassion? Lo! 5 The stones are Pity, and the bricks well-wrought Affections Enamell’d with Love and Kindness; and the tiles engraven gold, Labour of merciful hands; the beams and rafters are Forgiveness, The mortar and cement of the work tears of Honesty, the nails And the screws and iron braces are well-wrought Blandishments 10 And well-contrivèd words, firm fixing, never forgotten, Always comforting the remembrance; the floors Humility, The ceilings Devotion, the hearths Thanksgiving. Prepare the furniture, O Lambeth, in thy pitying looms! The curtains, woven tears and sighs, wrought into lovely forms 15 For Comfort; there the secret furniture of Jerusalem’s chamber Is wrought. Lambeth! the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife loveth thee; Thou art one with her, and knowest not of Self in thy supreme joy. Go on, Builders in hope! tho’ Jerusalem wanders far away Without the Gate of Los, among the dark Satanic wheels. 20

 

For those who would like more:

http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2432&context=cq

 

"I have returned to my beginning." -- Camus

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"Straight from the heart"

Principles of Research

address by Albert Einstein (1918)

(Physical Society, Berlin, for Max Planck's sixtieth birtday)

---

IN the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

I am quite aware that we have just now lightheartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the buildings of the temple of science; and in many cases our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do, if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in tbe narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

What place does the theoretical physicist's picture of the world occupy among all these possible pictures? It demands the highest possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give. In regard to his subject matter, on the other hand, the physicist has to limit himself very severely: he must content himself with describing the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our experience; all events of a more complex order are beyond the power of the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and logical perfection which the theoretical physicist demands. Supreme purity, clarity, and certainty at the cost of completeness. But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe?

In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles; this is what Leibnitz described so happily as a "pre-established harmony." Physicists often accuse epistemologists of not paying sufficient attention to this fact. Here, it seems to me, lie the roots of the controversy carried on some years ago between Mach and Planck.

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself, as we see, to the most general problems of our science, refusing to let himself be diverted to more grateful and more easily attained ends. I have often heard colleagues try to attribute this attitude of his to extraordinary will-power and discipline -- wrongly, in my opinion. The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart. There he sits, our beloved Planck, and smiles inside himself at my childish playing-about with the lantern of Diogenes. Our affection for him needs no threadbare explanation. May the love of science continue to illumine his path in the future and lead him to the solution of the most important problem in present-day physics, which he has himself posed and done so much to solve. May he succeed in uniting quantum theory with electrodynamics and mechanics in a single logical system.

 

 

Luck by Langston Hughes

Sometimes a crumb falls

From the tables of joy;

Sometimes a bone

Is flung.

To some people

Love is given,

To others

Only heaven.

Birdle Burble by Alan Watts

(for James Broughton)

 

I went out of mind and then came to my senses

By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses,

Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs,

And insisted that logic is bad for the birds.

     With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit;

     The grammar and meaning don't matter a bit.

 

The stars in their courses have no destination;

The train of events will arrive at no station; 

The inmost and ultimate Self of us all

Is dancing on nothing and having a ball.

      So with a chat for chit and with tat for tit,

      This will be that, and that will be It!

How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

How To Be a Poet
by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

A Halloween Offering: Goethe's Der Erlkönig

The Erlking by Albert Sterner, ca. 1910

For more information on this poem and for an English translation go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Erlkönig

Download 21 Der Erlkönig, D. 328

performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskrau & Gerald Moore

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

"Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?" —
"Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?" —
"Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif."

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand." —

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?" —
"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind." —

"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehen?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein." —

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?" —
"Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. —"

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." —
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!" —

Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh' und Not;
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

Rilke on writing poetry when one is no longer a young man

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simple emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a simple poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very well blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Excerpt from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Aube by Rimbaud with audio file

Even if you do not know French, the audiofile below of Aube by Paul A. Mankin will deepen your appreciation of the poem. There are no translations of his poem that convey its beauty.

17 Arthur Rimbaud - Aube

AUBE from Illuminations (1875)

J'ai embrassé l'aube d'été.

Rien ne bougeait encore au front des palais. L'eau était mortre. Les camps d'ombres ne quittaient pas la route du bois. J'ai marché, réveillant les haleines vives et tièdes; et les pierries regardèrent, et les ailes se levèrent sans bruit.

La première enterprise fut, dans le sentier déjà empli de frais et blêmes éclats, une fleur qui me dit son nom.

Je ris au wasserfall blond qui s'échevela à travers les sapins: à la cime argentée je reconnus la déesse.

Alors je levai un à les voiles. Dans l'allée, en agitant les bras. Par la plaine, où je l'ai dénoncée au coq. A la grand'ville elle fuyait parmi les clochers et les dômes, et, courant comme un mendiant sur les quais de marbre, je la chassais.

En haut de la route, près d'un bois de lauriers. Je l'ai entourée avec ses voiles amassés, et j'ai senti un peu son immense corps. L'aube et l'enfant tombèrent au bas du bois.

Au réveil, il était midi.

**************************************************

DAWN from Illuminations (1875)

I embraced the summer dawn.

Nothing stirred on the face of the palaces. The water was still. Crowds of shadows lingered on the road to the woods. I walked, dreaming the warm, brisk winds, and precious stones looked on, and wings soared in silence.

The first venture, on the path already full of fresh and pale glitterings, was a flower who told me her name.

I laughed at the white waterfall dishevelled through the pine trees: at its silvery summit I recognized the goddess.

Then, one by one, I lifted her veils. In the pathway, waving my arms. In the open field, where I betrayed her to the cock. In the city she fled amid the steeples and the domes, and running like a beggar on the marble piers, I chased her.

At the top of the road, near a wood of laurels, I wrapped her in her mass of veils, and felt a little of her immense body. Dawn and the child fell at the edge of the woods.

When I awoke it was noon.

---Peter Y. Chou, WisdomPortal.com

— Above version based on the following translations:
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
translated by Bertrand Mathieu
Boa Editions, Brockport, NY, 1979, pp. 32-33
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
translated by Daniel Sloate
Guernica, Montreal, Canada, 1990, pp. 78-79
— Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and Illuminations
translated by Mark Treharne
J.M. Dent, London, 1998 (no page #)

Man's Disproportion (Pascal) French/English

For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared
to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle
point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from
an understanding of the extremes; and the end of things
and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in
impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which
he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. . .

Because they failed to contemplate these infinites, men
have rashly undertaken to probe into nature as if there were
some proportion between themselves and her.
Strangely enough they wanted to know the principles of
things and go on from there to know everything, inspired
by a presumption as infinite as their object (p. 199).

Car enfin qu’est-ce que l’homme dans la nature? Un néant `a
l’égard de l’infini, un tout `a l’égard du néant, un milieu entre rien et
tout. Infiniment eloigné de comprendre les extrêmes, la fin des choses
et leur principe sont pour lui invinciblement cachés dans un secret
impénétrable, également incapable de voir le néant d’o`u il est tiré, et
l’infini o`u il englouti. . .

Manque d’avoir contemplé ces infinis, les hommes ne sont portés
témérairement `a la recherche de la nature, comme s’ils avaient quelque
proportion avec elle. C’est une chose étrange qu’ils ont voulu comprendre
les principes des choses, et de l`a arriver jusqu’`a connaître tout, par
une présomption aussi infinie que leur objet. Car il est sans doute qu’on
ne peut dormer ce dessein sans une presomption ou sans une capacité
infinie, comme la nature. Blaise Pascal, Pensees (72)

Swordplay

In the evening, all the cats who had participated in the rat-catching had a grand session at the Swordsman's house, and respectfully asked the great Cat to take the seat of honor. They made profound bows before her and said: "We all wish you to divulge your secrets for our benefit." The grand old cat answered: "Teaching is not difficult, listening is not difficult either, but what is truly difficult is to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own."

From a 17th century master's book on swordplay, The Swordsman and the Cat

For more, see http://www.rubinghscience.org/zen/cat1.html

Kierkegaard: Aphorism 1

The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes -- but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.

Meno's Paradox

Meno:

καὶ τίνα τρόπον ζητήσεις, ὦ Σώκρατες, τοῦτο ὃ μὴ οἶσθα τὸ παράπαν ὅτι ἐστίν; ποῖον γὰρ ὧν οὐκ οἶσθα προθέμενος ζητήσεις; ἢ εἰ καὶ ὅτι μάλιστα ἐντύχοις αὐτῷ, πῶς εἴσῃ ὅτι τοῦτό ἐστιν ὃ σὺ οὐκ ᾔδησθα;

Socrates:

μανθάνω οἷον βούλει λέγειν, ὦ Μένων. ὁρᾷς τοῦτον ὡς ἐριστικὸν λόγον κατάγεις, ὡς οὐκ ἄρα ἔστιν ζητεῖν ἀνθρώπῳ οὔτε ὃ οἶδε οὔτε ὃ μὴ οἶδε; οὔτε γὰρ ἂν ὅ γε οἶδεν ζητοῖ—οἶδεν γάρ, καὶ οὐδὲν δεῖ τῷ γε τοιούτῳ ζητήσεως—οὔτε ὃ μὴ οἶδεν—οὐδὲ γὰρ οἶδεν ὅτι ζητήσει.

TRANSLATION:

Meno:

And in what way, Socrates, will you seek that which you do not at all know what it is? For having proposed it, what sort of thing of the things you do not know will you seek? Even if, in the best case, you should happen upon it, how would you know that it is that which you had not known?

Socrates:

I understand what you want to say, Meno. Do you see that you are bringing to shore (spinning, drawing out, landing, conjuring, launching) an eristic argument, that it is consequently not possible for a man to seek for what he knows, nor for what he does not? He would not seek for what he knows -- for he knows it, and there is no need at all to such a one for searching -- nor for what he does not know -- for he does not know what he will be looking for.

Henry James and Cid Corman: Letter to Grace Norton & No Consolation

Henry James to Grace Norton:

I don't know why we live--the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about, and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, and though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one's place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake! You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses--remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other--even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others live. Sorrow comes in great waves--no one can know that better than you--but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see . . .

Cid Corman: No Consolation

I dont know
why we live--
but believe

we can go
on living
because life's

finally
all we know
anything

about. In
other words
consciousness

is power--
though it may
seem at times

to be pure
misery.
Yet the way

it propa-
gates itself
from wave to

wave so that
we never
cease to feel--

though sometimes
we appear
to--try to--

pray to--there
is something
holding one

in one's place--
makes it a
standpoint in

the cosmos
probably
wise not to

forsake. We
are--yes--all
echoes of

the same. But
dont--please--too
much gener-

alize these
feelings--each
life is its

own special
problem--so
be content

with your own
terrible
algebra.

Don't melt in-
to the u-
niverse--

but be as
solid and
dense and fixed

as you can.
Sorrow comes
in great crests

and it rolls
over us
and almost

smothers us--
yet leaves us
on the spot

and we know
that if it
is strong we

are stronger:
it passes--
we remain.

It wears us--
uses us--
but we wear

it--use it
in return
and it is

blind whereas
we--after
a manner--

see. But wait.
We will help
each other.

You have my
tenderest
affection

and all my
confidence.
Henry James.

PASSING REMARK by William Stafford

In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don't like too much to happen.

In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.

My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, "Then why did you choose me?"

Mildly I lower my brown eyes --
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

Sic Semper Sit

From James Joyce's Ulysses:

O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
Me. And me now.
Stuck, the flies buzzed.

(“Lestrygonians,” 904-918)

. . . . the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I could get always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know of . . . .

(“Penelope,” 1571-1582)

James Dickey reading "Falling"

Reading:

audio: Download Falling1

print: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171431

Kabir: Except that it robs you of who you are

Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without,
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you.
Speak with a wise man, there'll be
Much to learn; speak with a fool
All you get is prattle.
Strike a half-empty pot, and it'll make
A loud sound; strike one that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.

--Kabir (1440-1518)
translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

H. R. Hays: Montauk Shell Heap

Digging here in the clutter
Of clam and scallop shells, I sift the detritus,
Betraying like broken porcelain
The haunt of humanity . . . pathway
into time.

Here the dark dirt is
Rich in ancient death. The sunlight
Washes the hills heaped by glaciers.
In the curve of the shore
A fisherman rakes the same shelled nutrient
From the velvet ooze. The upright animal's
Needs change hardly at all -- food, a little
Love -- but to-day the flint
Grows a menacing edge. Old hunter, the tool,
The shell, filled your pragmatic eye, your world
Was rimmed by this blue shore, these hills.
Archaic realist, you are too close to us!

The legacy speaks for itself --
A few fragile bones,
The passionate dust of appetite and fear,
And a stone scraper that fits accurately
Into the palm of the hand.

H.R. Hays: The New York Public Library

Consolatio by Robert Creeley

What’s gone is gone.
What’s lost is lost.

What’s felt is pulse –
what’s mind, what’s home.

Who’s here, where’s there –
what’s patience now.

What thought of all,
why echo it.

Now to begin –
Why fear the end.

Linda Duncan: Sarah

Sarah said she came back to life
Though her battered lungs gave up the fight.
Her body, thrown into spasms of terrors
as her soul slid out of the doctor's hands.
It was as through an oven she fell
Crying for breath
Into the eye of the silent sun.

Sarah
With awe I heard you speak about it.
In the cool autumn morning I walked from my car
Into your room that smelled of sweat.
I could not ease your fear.
I could not speak.
But you cried and begged me not to leave.

There are many halls that a nurse must walk
And many hands to hold and soothe.. . .

But you were all alone
When the last hiss of air escaped your lips
As your lungs filled with red

Red as the eye of the silent sun.

(This is the third poem of Linda's I have posted.

Louise Gluck: Lullaby

The poet Louise Gluck is giving a reading tomorrow night at Albuquerque Academy where I teach. This is a poem that expresses my transcendental mind, the one that lives on despite my occasional cold stare at how things really are.

Lullaby

My mother's an expert in one thing:
sending people she loves into the other world.
The little ones, the babies--these
she rocks, whispering or singing quietly. I can't say
what she did for my father;
whatever it was, I'm sure it was right.

It's the same thing, really, preparing a person
for sleep, for death. The lullabies--they all say
don't be afraid, that's how they paraphrase
the heartbeat of the mother.
So the living grow slowly calm; it's only
the dying who can't, who refuse.

The dying are like tops, like gyroscopes--
they spin so rapidly they seem to be still.
Then they fly apart: in my mother's arms,
my sister was a cloud of atoms, of particles--that's the difference.
When a child's asleep, it's still whole.

My mother's seen death; she doesn't talk about the soul's integrity.
She's held an infant, an old man, as by comparison the dark grew
solid around them, finally changing to earth.

The soul's like all matter:
why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form,
when it could be free?

Cervantes & Bembo: a madrigal

I am looking for a literal or poetic translation of the either the original Bembo or Cervantes's translation, even perhaps offering commentary, annotations or ideas about the place of this madrigal in the larger work. I am not interested in already published translations.

Don Quijote (II, 68):

Amor, cuando yo pienso
En el mal que me das terrible y fuerte,
Voy corriendoa la muerte,
Pensando asi acabar mi mal inmenso.
Mas en Ilegandoa l paso,
Que es puerto en este mar de mi tormento,
Tanta alegria siento,
Que la vida se esfuerza, y no le paso.
Asi el vivir me mata,
Que la muerte me torna a dar la vida.
iOh condici6n no oidal
La que conmigo muerte y vida trata!

Bembo: Gli Asolani, o Los Asolanos (1515)

Quand'io penso al martire,
Amor, che tu mi dai gravoso e forte,
Corro per gir a morte,
Cost sperando i miei danni finire.
Ma poi ch'io giungo al passo Ch'?
porto in questo mar d'ogni tormento,
Tanto piacer mi sento,
Che l'almas i rinforza,o nd'ion ol passo.
Cost il viver m'ancide:
Cosi la morte mi ritorna in vita.
O miseria infinita,
Che l'uno apporta e l'altra non recide.

A Reading of the Bembo madrigal by Vincenzo De Cristofano:

Download Aug 4, 2010 12-14-41 PM

Grandpa: another poem by Linda Duncan

I sang as you lay dying,
softly did I sing
washing you with warm water,
my eyes held not a tear.

I could feel your spirit leaving
so I dressed you in your best,
all alone in the summer heat
Singing as you slept.

I remembered you in a thousand forms --
in still life paintings -- still
not a tear fell on my cheek
as I felt your fever chill.

As a mother sitting rocking
I hummed a haunting tune
and held you in my aching arms
until your spirit loomed.

The Coming of Wisdom with Time: William Butler Yeats

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

Linda Duncan: Midwife

Linda was a hospice nurse and poet and back in '83, when I lived in Oklahoma, she entrusted me with a sheaf of her poems. I have lost track of her. Perhaps if she is still of this world, she will find her way to this page. Or perhaps a friend who remembers her as I do: alive like spring, empathic, fiercely independent. I know that her last name changed both before and after '83. I heard one rumor of her violent death. May that not be true! Whatever the circumstances are she should be remembered for her special gift of midwifery as described here in one of her poems. The last face that many dying souls saw, the last caring touch they felt, the last radiance, was hers. I will post other poems of hers from time to time.

In the winter hours
I paced the lonely hall
Waiting for a birth (of sorts)
Within a dying fall.

Much of birthing's easy,
But some births,
they are hard,
Hard as the hickory nut
Whose sprout waits for the sun,
Hard as the knife within my breast
When grieving's on.

But midwives must keep birthing
new or dying souls,
A kind of birth it was that night,
And, Lord, the wind was cold.

E.M. Cioran: "under the spell of inspiration"

Those who write under the spell of inspiration, for whom thought is an expression of their organic nervous disposition, do not concern themselves with unity and systems. Such concerns, contradictions, and facile paradoxes indicate an impoverished and insipid life. Only great and dangerous contradictions betoken a rich spiritual life because only they constitute a mode of realization for life's abundant flow.

(translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, On the Heights of Despair)

I think of you, my friend,
on your great height:
so stood Icarus
poised for flight

You have only
inspiration
and words
that catch fire

Your only safety
is in that fire:
you shall burn
and know life.

Thomas Bernhard: Existence is something else

Speech at the Awarding of the Georg Buchner Prize

Honored guests,

What we are speaking of here is unfathomable, we are not properly alive, our existence and suppositions are all hypocritical, we are cut down in our aspirations at the final, fatal conclusion of our lethal misunderstanding with nature, into which science has led us and abandoned us; appearances are deadly and all the hundreds and thousands of hackneyed words we play with in our heads in our loneliness, the words that are recognizable to us in any language and within any context as the monstrous truth revealed in monstrous lies, or better, monstrous lies revealed within a monstrous truth, the words we say and write to one another and the ones we dare to suppress, the words that come from nothing and go to nothing and serve nothing, as we know and keep secret, the words to which we cling because our impotence makes us insane and our insanity makes us despair, these words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything; by mouth and on paper they abuse by means of their abusers; the very character of words and their abusers is an outrage; the spiritual condition of words and their abusers is that of helplessness and catastrophic good cheer.

We say we’re putting on a performance in a theater that will last for all eternity . . . but the theater in which we’re prepared for everything and competent in nothing is, from the time we’re able to think, a theater of ever-increasing speed and lost shorthand . . . it is absolutely a theater of the body and secondarily of spiritual angst and thus of the fear of death . . . we don’t know whether we’re dealing with tragedy or comedy, or comedy for the sake of tragedy . . . but all of it deals with the terrible, with misery, with mental imbalance. . . we think we should keep quiet: he who thinks destroys, annuls, metes out disaster, corrodes, demolishes, for thinking is consistent with the dissolution of all ideas . . .we are made up (and this is history and the spiritual condition of history) of anxieties, bodily anxiety, spiritual anxiety, and the anxiety about death that drives creativity . . . what we reveal is not identical with what is, being shattered is something else, existence is something else, we are something else, it isn’t illness, it isn’t death, those relationships are quite other, as are those circumstances. . .

We say we have a right to what’s right and just, but we only have a right to what’s not right and what’s unjust . . .

The problem is to get work done, which means advancing over all one’s inner resistance and evident mindlessness . . . and this means advancing over myself and the bodies of dead philosophers, over all literature, all of science, all of history, everything . . . it is a question of one’s spiritual concentration, of isolation and distance . . . of monotony . . . of utopia . . . of idiocy . . .

The problem is always to get work done while thinking that work will never get done and nothing will ever get done . . . The question is: to go on, heedless of the consequences, to go on, or to stop, to call it a day . . . it is the question of doubt, of mistrust and impatience.

I thank the Academy, and I thank you for your attention.

(translated by Carol Brown, My Prizes: An Accounting)

William Burroughs: Last Words

“Love! What is it?
Most natural painkiller what there is.
LOVE”

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

 

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we brought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy, to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic by Edward Hirsch

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater 
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall. 

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field, 
each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering. 

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies 
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation. 

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text 
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter. 

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel 
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia. 

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs 
as if my whole future were constellated upon it. 

I will walk home alone with the deep alone, 
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries. 

The Drawing of a Tree: Vincent to Theo

Frantically and fervently rooting itself, as it were, in the earth, and yet being half torn up by the storm, I want to express something of life's struggle . . . in those gnaled black roots with their knots.  Or rather, because I tried without any philosophizing to be true to nature, which I had before me, something of that great struggle has come into . . . them inadvertently.  

SZOMORÚ VASÁRNAP by László Jávor:

 

Szomorú vasárnap száz fehér virággal

Vártalak kedvesem templomi imával

Álmokat kergetô vasárnap délelôtt

Bánatom hintaja nélküled visszajött

Azóta szomorú mindig a vasárnap

Könny csak az italom kenyerem a bánat...

 

Szomorú vasárnap

 

Utolsó vasárnap kedvesem gyere el

Pap is lesz, koporsó, ravatal, gyászlepel

Akkor is virág vár, virág és - koporsó

Virágos fák alatt utam az utolsó

Nyitva lesz szemem hogy még egyszer lássalak

Ne félj a szememtôl holtan is áldalak...

Imagine!

Reality is more fluid and elusive than reason, and has, as it were, more dimensions than are known even to the latest geometry.  --George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty

What is left?

"Wer will was Lebendigs erkennen und beschreiben
 Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben,  
Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand,  
Fehlt, leider! nur das geistige Band."                          (Goethe, Faust I) 

Number 20 from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind"

The pennycandystore beyond the El

is where I first

                       fell in love

                                        with unreality

Jellybeans flowed in the semi-gloom

of that September afternoon

A cat upon the counter moved among

                                        the licorice sticks

                        and tootsie rolls

          and Oh Boy Gum

 
Outside the leaves were falling as they died

A wind had blown away the sun

A girl ran in

Her hair was rainy

Her breasts were breathless in the little room

 
Outside the leaves were falling

                                  and they cried

                                                        Too soon! too soon!

Soft as the massacre of Suns by Emily Dickinson

Soft as the massacre of Suns
By Evening's sabres slain. 

from "Black Riders and Other Lines" by Stephen Crane

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"

"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;

"But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart."

Chris McCandless. by Jay-James May

Chris McCandless. by Jay-James May

Everything
About Icarus
Is
A lie.

He never
Flew too high
Burning
His wings.

He
Died in the
Back of a bus
Alone and smiling.

He smiled
And his teeth were yellow.
He laughed
And we all laughed too.