Hughlings Himwich

My Name is Charles: A Memoir

It is with great pleasure that I share this poetic memoir from my friend Charles Eaton, who is now entering upon his eighty-seventh year. It is a precious gift to those who already know and love the man and his dear wife Pauline. Those who will here discover our Charles for the first time will recognize, as do his friends, that Charles' story is also our own.  

Download MY NAME IS CHARLES

"Written in pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car: Dan Pagis

WRITTEN IN PENCIL IN THE SEALED RAILWAY-CAR

here in this carload

i am eve

with abel my son

if you see my other son

cain son of man

tell him that i

                    -- Dan Pagis

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.

"Una corbata parra Nicanor" by Pablo Neruda, "Saranguaco" and "Cambios de Nombre" by Nicanor Parra

"Una Corbata para Nicanor" by Pablo Neruda, translation by Suzanna Geisel-Zamora

Download Una corbata parra Nicanor- Spanish:English

 

Saranguaco N. Parra                                    Hodgepodge  

Es de noche, no piensa ser de noche                It’s night, it doesn’t think to be night
Es de día, no piensa ser de día.                        It’s day, it doesn’t think to be day.

Cómo va a ser de noche si es de día                How is it going to be night if it is day
Cómo va a ser de día si es de noche                How is it going to be day if it is night
¿Creen que están hablando con un loco?         Do you believe you are talking with a crazy man?

Ojalá fuera realmente de día.                           Hopefully it is really daytime.

Hace frío pero yo tengo calor                          It’s cold but I am hot
Hace calor pero yo me muero de frío.             It’s hot but I am freezing to death.

Dije que hacía frío pero miento                       I said it was cold but I am lying
Hace un calor que derrite las piedras               It is so hot the rocks are melting
Eso lo veo con mis propios ojos:                     I see this with my own eyes:

¡Falso! ¡No veo nada!                                      Lie! I can’t see anything!
¡Tengo los ojos herméticamente cerrados!      I have my eyes hermetically sealed!

Lo que sucede es que me siento mal               The thing is I feel bad
Ese dolor de estómago de siempre                  That constant stomach pain
La sensación de vértigo no cesa.                     The dizziness never stops.

Cómo que mal: ¡me siento perfectamente!     What do you mean bad: I feel fine!

¡En mi vida me he sentido mejor!                   I’ve never felt better!
¡Ojalá me sintiera desdichado!                        If only I could feel unhappy!

Observen bien y verán                                    Watch closely and you’ll see
Que estoy riéndome a carcajadas.                   That I am roaring with laughter.

                                                                                            Translation by Suzanna Geisel-Zamora

 

Cambios de Nombre                                                 Name Changes

A los amantes de las bellas letras                          To the lovers of belles-lettres
Hago llegar mis mejores deseos                            I extend my best wishes
Voy a cambiar de nombre a algunas cosas.           I am going to change the names of a few things.
Mi posición es ésta:                                               My position is this:
El poeta no cumple su palabra                              The poet does not fulfill his word
Si no cambia los nombres de las cosas.                 Unless he changes the names of things.
¿Con qué razón el sol                                            For what reason has the sun
Ha de seguir llamándose sol?                                Always been called the sun?
¡Pido que se llame Micifuz                                    I say call it Pussy Cat
El de las botas de cuarenta leguas!                        The one with forty league boots!

¿Mis zapatos parecen ataúdes?                              My shoes look like coffins?
Sepan que desde hoy en adelante                          From here on out
Los zapatos se llaman ataúdes.                              Shoes are going to be called coffins.
Comuníquese, anótese y publíquese                      Communicate it, note it down, and publish it
Que los zapatos han cambiado de nombre:           That shoes have changed name:
Desde ahora se llaman ataúdes.                             From now on they will be called coffins.
Bueno, la noche es larga                                        Well, the night is long
Todo poeta que se estime a sí mismo                     Every poet who considers himself such        
Debe tener su propio diccionario                           Should have their own dictionary       
Y antes que se me olvide                                       And before I forget
Al propio dios hay que cambiarle nombre            God himself has to change names
Que cada cual lo llame como quiera:                    That every individual names him what they want:
Ese es un problema personal.                                That is a personal problem.

                                                                                        Translation by Suzanna Geisel-Zamora

Rebecca Torrez: "Lacrima Borealis" with audio

Lacrima borealis

Lacrima Borealis

Blue, light blue like the top of the sky. Black real black not brown not green ink green black. Inside, in the circle but really on top but really on bottom. And they implore. Staring into the whirling milk of forgetful coffee; cataracts. A ladder, silver – the spiderweb chain of a tender necklace – perched at the edge of the deep coffee bowl. Green soldiers, yes the soldiers from the box the shoebox size 8 under the bed, clamber mechanically up and dive into the rich lagoon and they are followed by the pretty shorthaired girls -coquettes. She teeters on her toes grip the smooth edge of the bowl and asks me a question, sorry what was the question? A plane flies by, I lose my balance and am plunged into sleepy coffee. Fight the fatigue. Remember. The swirling current draws me to a storm to la tempete du jour ferie. Un coup de foudre directement au milieu d’une pluie sous sédation et la enfin je suis arrivée a ressentir. La dernière fois, c’était cette nuit équivoque and the cup ran overflowing with tears.

(Rebecca lives in Albuquerque, NM)

 

Yeats: Knowledge of Reality and the Coming of Wisdom with Time

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

                                                                                    -- Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 482

                    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.

"Anonyme" by André de Richaud

 

Anonyme

Les biches de l'amour ont pleuré jusqu'à l'aube
les bêtes de ma vie ont toutes les yeux faux
Et toi — tête de gel qui sanglotte dans la flamme
sans pouvoir redevenir le nuage
visage étonné des étincelles du silence
calciné par l'odeur des cuivres emmêlés
et les chevaux du rire impatients
de mordre la chair des astres ennuyés
et les femmes de verre qui se brisent quand on ne pense plus à elle
et celui qui se décompose en souriant
au fond de la glace miroitante
et sa jambe lépreuse de soleil
et son sexe couvert de rosée
et le ventre de cette femme tout parsemé d'hirondelles évanouies
qui vont et viennent et passent à travers les anneaux de diamant comme
si le diamant ne pouvait se faire comprendre
sans le secours des oiseaux du ciel

- -

Parle nuit plus douce que les amandiers de sa bouche
qui neigent sur ma langue quand l'heure se couche
Parle, fantôme étonné du silence.

             * * * * *      

Nameless

Until dawn the does of love cried
all animals in my life have phony eyes
And you—frozen head sobbing in the flame
unable to be cloud again
your face baffled by the sparks of silence
charred by the smell of tangled brasses
and the horses of laughter eager to bite
the bored stars’ flesh
and the glass women breaking through oblivion
and the one who is smiling as he rots away
at the bottom of the shimmering ice
and his leg under the dappling sun
and his sex covered in dew
and that woman’s belly dotted all over with unconscious swallows
going in and out of the diamond rings as if
the diamond could not be grasped
without the help of the birds in the sky
_        _

Speak up night, softer than the almond trees in her mouth
falling like snow onto my tongue when the time retires at night
Speak to me, ghost amazed by the silence.

                                                -- English Translation, © Leonora; all rights reserved.

 

André de Richaud's "Anonyme" originally appeared in Transition: A Quarterly Review, No. 26, 1937.

Background: Transition: A Quarterly Review

 

Uncommon Wisdom 1 & 2

If you want to praise acceptably, be very precise. Inattentive praise is almost an insult.

                                    -- Eva Brann, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul, p. 423

 

I hope whatever you’re doing,

 you’re stopping now and then

and

not doing it at all.

                                --- James Fadiman, quoted in Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind, p. 282

 

The description of wind in Ondaatje's "The English Patients": excerpts

  There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The aim, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened are/or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.
  There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days —burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob—a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days—the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.
   There is also the ———, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it.
   And the nafliat—a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen —a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.” The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “black wind.” The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle. As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.
  Other, private winds.
  Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the “sea of darkness.” Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. “Blood rains were widely reportedin Portugal and Spain in 1901.
  There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was “so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.”
   Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The column. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the second you are surrounded by “waltzing Ginns.” The third, the sheet, is “copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire.” (4)

                                                                    *.    *      *     *.    *.    *.    *     *    . *

   Still night. He can hear nighthawks, their faint cries, the muted thud of wings as they turn. The cypress trees rise over his tent, still on this windless night. He lies back and stares into the dark corner of the tent. When he closes his eyes he sees fire, people leaping into rivers into reservoirs to avoid flame or heat that within seconds burns everything, whatever they hold, their own skin and hair, even the water they leap into. The brilliant bomb carried over the sea in a plane, passing the moon in the east, towards the green archipelago. And released.
   He has not eaten food or drunk water, is unable to swallow anything. Before light failed he stripped the tent of all military objects, all bomb disposal equipment, stripped all insignia off his uniform. Before lying down he undid the turban and combed his hair out and then tied it up into a topknot and lay back, saw the light on the skin of the tent slowly disperse, his eyes holding onto the last blue of light, hearing the drop of wind into windlessness and then hearing the swerve of the hawks as their wings thudded. And all the delicate noises of the air.
   He feels all the winds of the world have been sucked into Asia. He steps away from the many small bombs of his career towards a bomb the size, it seems, of a city, so vast it lets the living witness the death of the population around them. He knows nothing about the weapon. Whether it was a sudden assault of metal and explosion or if boiling air scoured itself towards and through anything human. All he knows is, he feels he can no longer let anything approach him, cannot eat the food or even drink from a puddle on a stone bench on the terrace. He does not feel he can draw a mateh out of his bag and fire the lamp, for he believes the lamp will ignite everything. In the tent, before the light evaporated, he had brought out the photograph of hisfamily and gazed at it. His name is Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is doing here.
   He stands now under the trees in the August heat, untur-banned, wearing only a kurta. He carries nothing in his hands, justwalks alongside the outline,of hedges, his bare feet on the grass or on terrace stone or in the ash of an old bonfire. His body alive in its sleeplessness, standing on the edge of a great valley of Europe. (69)

   

Mr. Rabinovich from Peter Nash's "Parsimony": profound confusion

 

     In his many years of living in Ithaca, he’d made a hobby of drafting simple sketches of its most distinguished buildings and trees—the Masonic Temple, State Theater, and Clinton Hall; the white oaks, striped maples, and shagbark hickories—and making crabbed black notes in a small black journal he’d kept for the purpose in his oilskin vest. With no regard for chronology, and with the occasional prompting from his journal itself, licking a finger to turn the wrinkled pages, he’d told me about the once-thriving Tutelo Indian village of Coreorgonel, destroyed by Washington’s troops in his war against the Iroquois, and about Ithaca’s largely unsung role in the Underground Railroad, even taking me into his house one day to show me the cupboard behind which a half a dozen runaway slaves had once been ingeniously, luxuriously, concealed.
     Such was the illusion of Ithaca, he’d insisted to me, on more than one occasion, the town I knew, the town I saw with my eyes each day, but a fraction of some larger, more numinous whole. “Take the lake down there,” he’d remarked to me one day, directing my attention to the wintry sliver of gray through the trees. Did I know that there were caverns deep beneath it, a dazzling netherworld of tunnels and chambers more than 18,000 acres in size? Of course I’d had no idea, had never even heard of the Lansing salt mine in which he’d served as foreman for nearly twenty years, though I remember the delight I’d expressed at the thought of that ghastly, Stygian realm. It was a reaction, however innocent, that had only angered the man, furrowing his normally placid brow.
     “No, no!” he’d exclaimed, swatting the air with impatience, only to cock his head at me, as if appraising me anew. “It’s nothing like that, no, nothing dreadful at all.” And there he’d faltered, so that for a moment his lips had quivered mutely where he’d stood. “It’s like…it’s like nothing you could know,” he’d stammered at last. “The darkness, the light… the deep thrumming silence down there—so ancient, so lonely, it sits upon your chest like a billion tons of rock. And then there’s the air,” he’d whispered, amazed, snuffling abruptly through his thick, bullish nostrils, “like a baby just born—that greedy, gobbling breath…”
     In our frequent encounters he’d often talked that way, circling round some mysterious core, which he’d never seemed willing or able to name.
                                                                                            Parsimony, 24-25

Comment: Mr. Rabinovich arrives at that profound confusion (amazement!) out of which all true poetic utterance arises.  Thus, when he tries to tell David about the air in the caverns, he expresses it in poetic analogy,“like a baby just born—that greedy, gobbling breath . . .”  It is from such 'profound confusion' that all true poetic utterance arises, the rest being but decorative verse. 

Borges: Le regret d'Héraclite / Matilde Urbach

Yo, que tantos hombres he sido, no he sido nunca
aquel en cuyo abrazo desfallecía Matilde Urbach.

                                        GASPAR CAMERARIUS, en Deliciae Poetarum Borussiae, VII, 16.

The Regret of Heraclitus

I, who have been so many men, have never been
The one in whose embrace Matilde Urbach swooned.

There is misinformation roundabout that Matilde Urbach is a character in William Joyce Cowen's Man With Four Lives. There is no such character in that novel.  Fool that I am, I bought and read the book. 

"old children of god" by Catharine Stewart Roache

The author, Catharine Roache, has chosen not to capitalize any of the words in the title of her short book of poems and photographs of the very old folks she writes about. This choice may express her sense of helplessness. The poems are simple and without any of the usual verbal play that is characteristic of poetry. They come unadorned, straight from the heart and the anguish of her experience.  Here is one of the poems: 

            as children hurt    

eyes
old tired eyes cover me and speak more
than words in any tongue can say
of what it is to hurt

hurt
as a child hurts
over little things
but what is little when you are old?

when you spend your days
lying, sitting, thinking, waiting
is it a little thing for someone to speak
without a hint of care?

when friends are far
and sick and moving and you fear they will forget
is it a little thing for one to die
and leave you more alone?

when night comes
and dark will give you peace and rest and quiet
is it a little thing to hear someone weeping
far down some hallow hollow hall?

when you lie in hate
and despair of life, remembering good times, bad times
is it a little thing for your mouth to dry
into a yellow crust?

the world
tells me war is big
and profits and space and the price of gold
and I think about these things

but today
the cup of water seemed the world
and all those little things became
the only big.

old children of god was published by 'hermosa publishers' in 1973 and revised in 1978.  

 

Ted Hughes: "Last Letter"

Background: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/27/ted-hughes-lover-night-sylvia-plath-died-biography-claims

“Last Letter” by Ted Hughes

 What happened that night? Your final night.
Double, treble exposure
Over everything. Late afternoon, Friday,
My last sight of you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,
With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
That nobody would open
Still holding your letter,
A thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment
For me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,
As often as I read it, or thought of it.
That would have remade my brains, and my life.
The treatment that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagine
How I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?

Your note reached me too soon—-that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office
And added to your load. I moved fast,
Through the snow-blue, February, London twilight.
Wept with relief when you opened the door.
A huddle of riddles in solution. Precocious tears
That failed to interpret to me, failed to divulge
Their real import. But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you
To blow its ashes off your plan—-off the ashtray
Against which you would lean for me to read
The Doctor’s phone-number.
                                                 My escape
Had become such a hunted thing
Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted,
Only wanting to be recaptured, only
Wanting to drop, out of its vacuum.
Two days of dangling nothing. Two days gratis.
Two days in no calendar, but stolen
From no world,
Beyond actuality, feeling, or name.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their bloody tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

                                       That night
My dellarobbia Susan. I moved
With the circumspection
Of a flame in a fuse. My whole fury
Was an abandoned effort to blow up
The old globe where shadows bent over
My telltale track of ashes. I raced
From and from, face backwards, a film reversed,
Towards what? We went to Rugby St
Where you and I began.
Why did we go there? Of all places
Why did we go there? Perversity
In the artistry of our fate
Adjusted its refinements for you, for me
And for Susan. Solitaire
Played by the Minotaur of that maze
Even included Helen, in the ground-floor flat.
You had noted her—-a girl for a story.
You never met her. Few ever met her,
Except across the ears and raving mask
Of her Alsatian. You had not even glimpsed her.
You had only recoiled
When her demented animal crashed its weight
Against her door, as we slipped through the hallway;
And heard it choking on infinite German hatred.

That Sunday night she eased her door open
Its few permitted inches.
Susan greeted the black eyes, the unhappy
Overweight, lovely face, that peeped out
Across the little chain. The door closed.
We heard her consoling her jailor
Inside her cell, its kennel, where, days later,
She gassed her ferocious kupo, and herself.

Susan and I spent that night
In our wedding bed. I had not seen it
Since we lay there on our wedding day.
I did not take her back to my own bed.
It had occurred to me, your weekend over,
You might appear—-a surprise visitation.
Did you appear, to tap at my dark window?
So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you,
In our own wedding bed—-the same from which
Within three years she would be taken to die
In that same hospital where, within twelve hours,
I would find you dead.
                                                  Monday morning
I drove her to work, in the City,
Then parked my van North of Euston Road
And returned to where my telephone waited.

What happened that night, inside your hours,
Is as unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,
Like effort unconscious, like birth
Pushing through the membrane of each slow second
Into the next, happened
Only as if it could not happen,
As if it was not happening. How often
Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver—-
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with the snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’

Edward Frenkel: The Rites of Love and Math

http://www.edwardfrenkel.com/film/

Paula Gunn Allen: Taku Skanskan

that history is an event
that life is
that I am event
ually to go do something
the metaphor for god.
eventuality.
activity.

what happens    to be.
what happens    to me.
god.  history.  action.
the Lakota word for it is:
whatmovesmoves.
they don’t call god
“what moves something,”
not “prime mover”
"first mover" or
“who moves everything or nothing;”
not “action.” “lights.” “movement.”
not “where” or “what” or “how”
but
event.     GOD
is what happens, is:
movesmoves.

riding a mare
eventuality.
out of the corral into morning
taking her saddled and bridled
air thick with breath movesmoves
horsebreath, mybreath, earthbreath
skybreathing air  ing.
breathesbreathes movesmoves
in the cold. winterspringfall.
corral. ing. horse and breath.
air. through the gate moveswe.
lift we the wooden crossbar
movesmoves unlocks movesbreathes
lifebreath of winter soul
swings wide sweet corral gate
happens to be frozenstiff in place
happens to be cold. so I and mare
wear clothes that move in event
of frozen. shaggy hair dressers for the air
breathes breathe we: flows: movesmoves:
god it’s cold.
no other place but movesmoves
horse me gate hinge air bright frost lungs
swing gate out far morning winter rides
movesmovingmoves Lakota words: god.
what we do.

(Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, 1987)

Note on Taku SkanSkan: http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/pla/sdo/sdo51.htm

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.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS

                                                                                                                                    DUBUFFET: FLUENCE

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 #)

The Prankquean

 

nonsun blob a -- e e cummings

 

nonsun blob a
cold to
skylessness
sticking fire

my are your
are birds our all
and one gone
away the they

leaf of ghosts some
few creep there
here or on
unearth

 

 

Richard Blanco's "Matters of the Sea"

 

Tribute to C.P. Cavafy

 

At the end of the tribute above is an astounding piece of performance art. 

 

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you.   Hope the voyage is a long one. May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.   Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.   Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.   And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.  Σα βγεις στον πηγαιμό για την Ιθάκη, να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος, γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις. Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας, τον θυμωμένο Ποσειδώνα μη φοβάσαι, τέτοια στον δρόμο σου ποτέ σου δεν θα βρεις, αν μέν’ η σκέψις σου υψηλή, αν εκλεκτή συγκίνησις το πνεύμα και το σώμα σου αγγίζει. Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας, τον άγριο Ποσειδώνα δεν θα συναντήσεις, αν δεν τους κουβανείς μες στην ψυχή σου, αν η ψυχή σου δεν τους στήνει εμπρός σου. Να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος. Πολλά τα καλοκαιρινά πρωιά να είναι που με τι ευχαρίστησι, με τι χαρά θα μπαίνεις σε λιμένας πρωτοειδωμένους· να σταματήσεις σ’ εμπορεία Φοινικικά, και τες καλές πραγμάτειες ν’ αποκτήσεις, σεντέφια και κοράλλια, κεχριμπάρια κ’ έβενους, και ηδονικά μυρωδικά κάθε λογής, όσο μπορείς πιο άφθονα ηδονικά μυρωδικά· σε πόλεις Aιγυπτιακές πολλές να πας, να μάθεις και να μάθεις απ’ τους σπουδασμένους. Πάντα στον νου σου νάχεις την Ιθάκη. Το φθάσιμον εκεί είν’ ο προορισμός σου. Aλλά μη βιάζεις το ταξείδι διόλου. Καλλίτερα χρόνια πολλά να διαρκέσει· και γέρος πια ν’ αράξεις στο νησί, πλούσιος με όσα κέρδισες στον δρόμο, μη προσδοκώντας πλούτη να σε δώσει η Ιθάκη. Η Ιθάκη σ’ έδωσε τ’ ωραίο ταξείδι. Χωρίς αυτήν δεν θάβγαινες στον δρόμο. Άλλα δεν έχει να σε δώσει πια. Κι αν πτωχική την βρεις, η Ιθάκη δεν σε γέλασε. Έτσι σοφός που έγινες, με τόση πείρα, ήδη θα το κατάλαβες η Ιθάκες τι σημαίνουν.  (Από τα Ποιήματα 1897-1933, Ίκαρος 1984)

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carl Sandburg's 38 Definitions of Poetry

Download Definitions_of_poetry_carl_sandburg

Karawane: Hugo Ball

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_8Wg40F3yo&list=PLGkoDW3eTxOFIOAM54vHULAbEqOefuugP

 

 

Love Poem by Audre Lord

Speak earth and bless me with what is richest
make sky flow honey out of my hips
rigid as mountains
spread over a valley
carved out by the mouth of rain.

And I knew when I entered her I was
high wind in her forests hollow
fingers whispering sound
honey flowed
from the split cup
impaled on a lance of tongues
on the tips of her breasts on her navel
and my breath
howling into her entrances
through lungs of pain.

Greedy as herring-gulls
Or a child
I swing out over the earth
over and over
again.  

Darwin, Gusinde, Conrad Martens and the Indians of Tierra del Fuego

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/08/09/lost-tribes-tierra-fuego/?printpage=true

Chapter 10 of The Voyage of the Beagle: http://www.bartleby.com/29/10.html

 

 

 

Jeremy Button waving farewell.  The ship is the HMS Beagle.  Painting by Conrad Martens. 

 

 

 

Set your mind to rest

Huike, the Second Patriarch, said to Bodhidharma, "My mind is not yet at rest, Master, I implore you, set my mind to rest."

The master replied, "Bring your mind here and I'll set it to rest for you."

Huike said, "I've searched for my mind, but am unable to find it."

"There," said the master, "I've set your mind to rest."

                    Case 1, Entangling Vines, Thomas Yuho KIrchnerm, Wisdom Publications, Inc. 2011

Rimbaud's Genie

 

Genie

Il est l'affection et le présent, puisqu'il a fait la maison ouverte à l'hiver écumeux et à la rumeur de l'été, - lui qui a purifié les boissons et les aliments - lui qui est le charme des lieux fuyants et le délice surhumain des stations. Il est l'affection et l'avenir, la force et l'amour que nous, debout dans les rages et les ennuis, nous voyons passer dans le ciel de tempête et les drapeaux d'extase.

Il est l'amour, mesure parfaite et réinventée, raison merveilleuse et imprévue, et l'éternité : machine aimée des qualités fatales. Nous avons tous eu l'épouvante de sa concession et de la nôtre : ô jouissance de notre santé, élan de nos facultés, affection égoïste et passion pour lui, lui qui nous aime pour sa vie infinie...

Et nous nous le rappelons, et il voyage... Et si l'Adoration s'en va, sonne, sa promesse sonne : "Arrière ces superstitions, ces anciens corps, ces ménages et ces âges. C'est cette époque-ci qui a sombré !"

Il ne s'en ira pas, il ne redescendra pas d'un ciel, il n'accomplira pas la rédemption des colères de femmes et des gaîtés des hommes et de tout ce péché : car c'est fait, lui étant, et étant aimé.

O ses souffles, ses têtes, ses courses ; la terrible célérité de la perfection des formes et de l'action.

O fécondité de l'esprit et immensité de l'univers.

Son corps ! Le dégagement rêvé, le brisement de la grâce croisée de violence nouvelle !

Sa vue, sa vue ! tous les agenouillages anciens et les peines relevés à sa suite.

Son jour ! l'abolition de toutes souffrances sonores et mouvantes dans la musique plus intense.

Son pas ! les migrations plus énormes que les anciennes invasions.

O lui et nous ! l'orgueil plus bienveillant que les charités perdues.

O monde ! et le chant clair des malheurs nouveaux !

Il nous a connus tous et nous a tous aimés. Sachons, cette nuit d'hiver, de cap en cap, du pôle tumultueux au château, de la foule à la plage, de regards en regards, forces et sentiments las, le héler et le voir, et le renvoyer, et sous les marées et au haut des déserts de neige, suivre ses vues, ses souffles, son corps, son jour.

 

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY JOHN ASHBERY

He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. He is affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy.

      He is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life

     And we remember him and he travels. . . And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: “Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!”

     He won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved.

     O his breaths, his heads, his racing; the terrible swiftness of the perfection of forms and of action.

     O fecundity of the spirit and immensity of the universe!

     His body! The dreamed-of release, the shattering of grace crossed with new violence!

     The sight, the sight of him! all the ancient kneeling and suffering lifted in his wake.

     His day! the abolition of all resonant and surging suffering in more intense music.

     His footstep! migrations more vast than ancient invasions.

     O him and us! pride more benevolent than wasted charities.

     O world! and the clear song of new misfortunes!

    He has known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from the tumultuous pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail him and see him, and send him back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.

LOS PERROS ROMÁNTICOS / The Romantic Dogs by Roberto. Bolaño

Download LOS PERROS ROMÁNTICOS by Roberto

Th Junk Collector by James Laughlin

what bothers me most about
the idea of having to die

(sooner or later) is that
the collection of junk I

have made in my head will
presumably be dissipated

not that there isn't more
and better junk in other

heads & always will be but
I have become so fond of

my own head's collection. 

Malcolm Lowry and Edmund Wilson on Rimbaud

Malcolm Lowry's "On Reading Edmund Wilson's Remarks About Rimbaud" draws details from Edmund Wilson's account of Rimbaud's life in Axel's Castle, which is of interest in its right:

Download On Reading Edmund Wilson’s Remarks About Rimbaud

Download Edmund Wilson on Rimbaud

 

 

Excerpts from Henry Miller’s The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud

Download Time of the Assassins Excerpts

Angelus Silesius: Es ist auch genug.

Freund, es ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr willst lesen,
So geh und werde selbst die Schrift und selbst das Wesen.

    Friend, indeed it is enough. In case you wish to read more,
    Just go and become the Script and Essence itself. .

        Angelus Silesius: Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1965), VI, 263
        Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann ("The Cherubinic Pilgrim"), a collection of 1,676 short poems.

Etymology of philosophy

The etymological meaning of philosophy is usually given ‘as love of wisdom.’ This is misleading, perhaps even a serious misunderstanding.   ‘philos’ refers to the feeling that exists between friends. Thus, the proper understanding of the etymology of philosophy’ is not the solitary search for wisdom but the conversation that occurs among friends who pursue knowledge in common. It is the necessary propaedeutic to an ineffable and mutually private illumination.

Would that this moment could last forever! -- From the Fifth Reverie of Rousseau's "The Reveries of a Solitary Walker"

Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment; I doubt whether any of us knows the meaning of lasting happiness. Even in our keenest pleasures there is scarcely a single moment of which the heart could truthfully say: ‘Would that this moment could last forever!’ And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state which leaves our hearts still empty and anxious, either regretting something that is past or desiring something that is yet to come?

But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. Such is the state which I often experienced on the Island of Saint-Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether I lay in a boat and drifted where the water carried me, or sat by the shores of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of a lovely river or a stream murmuring over the stones.

What is the source of our happiness in such a state? Nothing external to us, nothing apart from ourselves and our own existence; as long as this state lasts we are self-sufficient like God. The feeling of existence unmixed with any other emotion is in itself a precious feeling of peace and contentment which would be enough to make this mode of being loved and cherished by anyone who could guard against all the earthly and sensual influences that are constantly distracting us from it in this life and troubling the joy it could give us. But most men being continually stirred by passion know little of this condition, and having only enjoyed it fleetingly and incompletely they retain no more than a dim and confused notion of it and are unaware of its true charm. Nor would it be desirable in our present state of affairs that the avid desire for these sweet ecstasies should give people a distaste for the active life which their constantly recurring needs impose upon them. But an unfortunate man who has been excluded from human society, and can do nothing more in this world to serve or benefit himself or others, may be allowed to seek in this state a compensation for human joys, a compensation which neither fortune nor mankind can take away from him.

Umwelt: Jakob von Uexkull

Download Unwelt - Eagleman

Download Jakob von Uexkull’s Theories of Life[3]

Download Uexkull

People ought to start dead -- Mark Twain

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

            Mark Twain in eruption: Hitherto unpublished pages about men and events

Father Zosima from "The Brothers Karamazov"

http://www.bluffton.edu/homepages/facstaff/bergerd/classes/las400/handouts/karamazov/book6chapter03p.html

An excerpt:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side--a little happier, anyway--and children and all animals, if you were nobler than you are now. It's all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.
                                                                                                                          Translation by Constance Garnett

Four Lectures by Stephen Rodefer

The Four Lectures: http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/FOUR/four.html

An excerpt:

My program is simple: to surrender to the city and survive its inundation. To read it and in reading, order it to read itself. Not a doctrine, but a public notice.
    The city, which even before Baudelaire had been a ready-made collage or cutup of history, constantly remaking itself-a work of art, founded on an anthill. And every art grows out of the same collective desire which informs and compels the idea and reality of a city (Latin colligere, to tie together.) A district, or a ghetto, is a segmentation, an alternative version which both resists and embodies in a different fashion, that is with an opposing ideology, the original model. Hence, dialect and civil strife are alternating codes of the same phenomenon: the city does not hold together. Language, which also binds together and extends, including as it isolates, is a city also. 
    In such a metropolitan of history, in which the city is literally the mother, the greatest art is painting, if only by the sheer weight of the temporal. Without a city and its structures there would be no painting. The only thing precedent to painting is caves-the Gilgamesh is not as old as Lascaux.
    The Greeks had painted sculpture and from the start all cultures have painted their deities. Today we have painted cities, painted conveyances, painted apartments, painted roads, painted people, even painted food. Is it not time for painted poetry as well?
    A poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition, every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation, every menace and response, every transformation of the color and reforming of the parts, necessary to express the world.
    Even the words and way of language itself will suffer the consequent deformity and reformation. The color beneath, which has been covered over, will begin to show through later, when what overcame it is questioned and scraped on, if not away.

https://poetry.sfsu.edu/events/28846-stephen-rodefer-memorial-tribute

 https://vimeo.com/146344794

Commentary: https://solutioperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/g8-heames3.pdf

Paintings: http://www.modernsculpture.com/stephenrodefer.htm

 

 

 

"I will put Chaos into fourteen lines" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines 

And keep him there; and let him thence escape

If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs

Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines.

Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,

His arrogance, our awful servitude:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less

Than something simple yet not understood;

I shall not even force him to confess;

Or answer. I will only make him good.  

 

XXXVI , final poem of James Joyce's Chamber Music

 

I hear an army charging upon the land, 


And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:

Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,


Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers. 



 

They cry unto the night their battle-name: 


I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter. 


They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame, 


Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil. 



 

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair: 


They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. 


My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?


My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

 

Here is a link to the complete 36 poems of Chamber Music. XXXVI has a radically different voice: Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani.  

http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/joyce01.html

Pure Intuition of the Artist: Marcel Duchamp

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

                                                                            -- Marcel Duchamp

Nicanor Parra: Antipoetry

 Technique of Antipoetry: http://www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/english/technique.html

Download La Trampa

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A Caution to Everybody by Ogden Nash

Consider the auk; 

Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk. 

Consider man, who may well become extinct 

Because he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked. 

 

Jenny Kissed Me by Leigh Hunt, 1838

 Jenny kiss’d me when we met,

    Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

 

    Sweets into your list, put that in!

 

Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

 

    Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,

 

Say I’m growing old, but add,

 

    Jenny kiss’d me.

 

Transition (Literary Journal) Manifesto

For background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_(literary_journal)

For scans of all issues: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb328797802/date.r=transition.langEN

Manifesto:  Download Manifesto

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)

Elemental Haiku by Mary Soon Lee

http://vis.sciencemag.org/chemhaiku/

Unamuno: the intimate point of departure for all human philosophy

"The longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort by which we strive to persevere in our own being, this is the emotional basis for all knowledge and the intimate point of departure for all human philosophy."

                                                                                             Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

Scrimshaw -- from Paul Harding's "Tinkers"

Another time, I found him fumbling for an apple in the barrel we kept in the basement. I could just make him out in the gloom. Each time he tried to grab a piece of fruit, it eluded him, or I might say he eluded it, as his grasp was no stronger than a draft of air threading through a crack in a window. He succeeded once, after appearing to concentrate for a moment, in upsetting an apple from its place at the top of the pile, but it merely tumbled down along the backs of the other apples and came to rest against the mouth of the barrel. It seemed to me that even if I could pick an apple up with my failing hands, how could I bite it with my dissipating teeth, digest it with my ethereal gut? I realized that this thought was not my own but, rather, my father’s, that even his ideas were leaking out of his former self. Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, and as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to be stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes. Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father’s fading was because he realized this: My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected that he was whittling at my skull—no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels. I looked away and ran back upstairs, skipping the ones that creaked, so that I would not embarrass my father, who had not quite yet turned back from clay into light.

                                                                            -- Paul Harding, Tinkers, 135-136