that light

It had been a cool day and the sky had been open and there was the light of a thousand winters; it was short, penetrating and expansive; it went with you everywhere, it wouldn't leave you. Like perfume, it was in the most unexpected places; it seemed to have entered into the most secret corners of one's being. It was a light that left no shadow and every shadow lost its depth; because of it, all substance lost its density; it was as though you looked through everything, through the trees on the other side of the wall, through your own self. Your self was as opaque as the sky and as open. It was intense and to be with it was to be passionate, not the passion of feeling or desire, but a passion that would never wither or die. It was a strange light, it exposed everything and made it vulnerable, and what had no protection was love. You couldn't be what you were, you were burnt out, without leaving any ashes and unexpectedly there was not a thing but that light.

-- J. Krishnamurti Krishnamurti's Notebook

listening for something

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck on the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room ...

My own belief is that all music has an expressive power, some more and some less, but that all music has a certain meaning behind the notes and that that meaning behind the notes constitutes, after all, what the piece is saying, what the piece is about. This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer to that would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No." Therein lies the difficulty.

-- Aaron Copland What to Listen for in Music

feathers

S'pose for a moment that we could excise Weight-Lifting from the events of the Vocal Olympics -- and substitute Musical Feathers.

S'pose the gold medal were given not for kilograms of decibels, but rather to the team which could keep afloat the greatest number of Musical Feathers. S'pose those feathers could pilot themselves lightly through Time and Tonal Space in the most exacting, elaborate and labyrinthine of contrapuntal maneuvers, never at less than the full speed of sound, and never obstructing, obscuring or deflecting other feathered rights of flight, until they finally floated to common rest in a scarcely audible millisecond of mutual fulfillment.

S'pose what this world really needs is a still small voice?

-- Robert Shaw, on rehearsing Bach The Robert Shaw Reader (ed. Robert Blocker)

unruly love

Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.

-- William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

the well

When Andreas was a child he had asked his mother where he had come from. And his mother answered him by showing him the well near their house. In his solitudes, the child returned to the well. His reveries in front of the well would sound the origins of his being. The child's mother would come and tear him away from this obsssion with the origin, this obsession with the water lost in the depths of the earth. The well is too strong an image for a dreaming child.

-- Karl Philipp Moritz Andreas Hartknopf

When, at the pinnacle of age, at the end of age, one sees such reveries, he draws back a bit, for he recognizes that childhood is the well of being. Dreaming this way about unfathomable childhood which is one archetype, I am well aware that I am taken by another archetype. The well is an archetype, one of the gravest images of the human soul.

-- Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie
Translated by Daniel Russell

Plymouth

A box of teak, a box of sandalwood,
A brass-ringed spyglass in a case,
A coin, leaf-thin with many polishings,
Last kingdom of a gold forgotten face,
These lie about the room, and daily shine
When new-built ships set out towards the sun.

It they had any roughness, any flaw,
An unfamiliar scent, all this has gone;
They are no more than ornaments, or eyes,
No longer knowing what they looked upon,
Turned sightless; rivers of Eden, rivers of blood
Once blinded them, and were not understood.

The hands that chose them rust upon a stick.
Let my hands find such symbols, that can be
Unnoticed in the casual light of day,
Lying in wait for half a century
To split chance lives across, that had not dreamed
Such coasts had echoed, or such seabirds screamed.

-- Philip Larkin

Collected Poems by Philip Larkin

return

image from l'Association Chartres, sanctuaire du Monde

It seems that the knowledge of the Golden Mean was greatest at Chartres. It is the largest gothic span that was done up to that date; nobody knows how they calculated it, nobody knows how they had the audacity to think it would stand up, and it has not shifted in seven hundred years. The curvature of the huge interior is based precisely on a five-pointed star and therefore embodies the Golden Mean. The height above the ground has to do with the delayed action of the voice going out and coming back. So, it's the old Sufi saying -- if you ask "Where is God?" the response is, "Here I am." So the whole experience of the chanting rising to the vaulting and returning or coming back down is like the angels replying to you and yet of course it is yourself. It's an amazing experience. You can have that experience if you go very early in the morning and do some personal chanting. Then you can hear this delayed action. It is good to remember that it was constructed for Gregorian chanting; it was not constructed for the organ, or for orchestras; it was constructed for plainchant, and when plainchant is sung there the whole thing suddenly has life; it's staggering. That shape is not only the shape that your body is subtly drawn into, but of the way the sound is returned to you.

-- Keith Critchlow "The Golden Proportion" Parabola 16:4

more on the architecture of Notre-Dame of Chartres

what is love?

What is love? For all that I have read every word that certain self-styled sages have written concerning its nature, for all that I have philosophized on it myself as I have grown older, I will never admit that it is either a trifle or a vanity of vanities. It is a kind of madness over which philosophy has no power; a sickness to which man is prone at every time of life and which is incurable if it strikes in old age. Inexpressible love! God of nature! Bitterness than which nothing is sweeter, sweetness than which nothing is more bitter! Divine monster which can only be defined by paradoxes!

-- Giacomo Casanova History of My Life
Translated by Willard R. Trask

on Giacomo Casanova

The Stolen Branch

In the night we shall go in
to steal
a flowering branch.

We shall climb over the wall
in the darkness of the alien garden,
two shadows in the shadow.

Winter is not yet gone,
and the apple tree appears
suddenly changed
into a cascade of fragrant stars.

In the night we shall go in
up to its trembling firmament,
and your little hands and mine
will steal the stars.

And silently,
to our house,
in the night and the shadow,
with your steps will enter
perfume's silent step
and with starry feet
the clear body of spring.

-- Pablo Neruda
Translated by Donald D. Walsh

honey in the lamplight

Vigil of my fiftieth birthday. A bright, snowy afternoon, delicate blue clouds of snow blowing down off the frozen trees ... The past: I am inarticulate about it now ... I suppose I regret most my lack of love, my selfishness and glibness (covering a deep shyness and need of love) with girls who, after all, did love me, I think, for a time. My great fault was my inability really to believe it and my efforts to get complete assurance and perfect fulfillment ... What I find most in my whole life is illusion. Wanting to be something of which I have formed a concept. I hope I will get free of that now because that is going to be a struggle. Yet I have to be something that I ought to be -- I have to meet a certain demand for order and inner light and tranquillity ... Snow, silence, the talking fire, the watch on the table. Sorrow. What would be the use of going into all of this? I will get cleaned up (my hands are dirty) ... [S]o many misunderstand the meaning of contemplation and solitude and condemn it. But I no longer have the slightest need to argue with them. I have nothing to justify and nothing to defend. I need only defend this vast simple emptiness from my own self, and the rest is clear... The beautiful jeweled shining of honey in the lamplight. Festival!

-- Thomas Merton (b. 31 January 1915), from journal entries for 30 January 1965 and 31 January 1965 Dancing in the Water of Life

transmission

It is said that all the sciences can trace their roots to Aristotle: but the science of cosmic aesthetics started with Sarutobi Sasuke, a famous ninja (a samurai who mastered many fantastic arts, including that of making himself invisible, chiefly to spy upon an enemy). The first step for a ninja is learning how to shorten distances by shrinking the earth, that is, how to transcend the law of gravity. For the satellite, this is a piece of cake. So, just as Mozart mastered the newly-invented clarinet, the satellite artist must compose his art from the beginning suitable to physical conditions and grammar. Satellite art in the superior sense does not merely transmit existing symphonies and operas to other lands. It must consider how to achieve a two-way connection between opposite sides of the earth; how to give a conversational structure to the art; how to master differences in time; how to play with improvisation, in-determinism, echos, feedbacks, and empty spaces in the Cagean sense; and how to instantaneously manage the differences in culture, preconceptions, and common sense that exist between various nations. Satellite art must make the most of these elements (for they can become strengths or weaknesses), creating a multitemporal, multispatial symphony...

-- Nam June Paik, in "Art & Satellite" Nam June Paik: Art for 25 Million People: Bon Jour Mr. Orwell: Kunst und Satellite in der Zunkunft (1984)

Nam June Paik 20 July 1932 - 29 January 2006

complex interlocking

I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about Jeepaxle my work. The concept I planetarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical community lift tab inherent in language horses and communication. My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex interlocking if disparate visual facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliché. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object freightways by this I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built-in. .

The outcome of a work is based icy ice on amount of intensity concentration and joy that is pursued roadcrossing in the act of work. The character of the artist has to be responsive and lucky. Personally I have never been interested in a defensible reason post card for working achievement functionally is a delusion to do a needed work short changes art. It seems to me that a great part Indian moccasins of urgency in working lies in the fact that one acts freely friends and associates may become more closely allied with you real soon. U.S. postage stamps — sanitarily packaged — save a trip to post office shapes . . files . . cleans with key chain forget to bring it with you . . . to make something the need of which can only fishing 7 springs be determined after its existence and that judgment subject to change at any moment. 15'18". It is extremely important that art be unjustifiable.

-- Robert Rauschenberg, "Note on Painting" in Pop Art Redefined by John Russell and Suzi Gablik

Rauschenberg's Combines at the Met

Rauschenberg's photography in Studies for Chinese Summerhall

Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI)

names

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned though it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them. Those with originality have for the most part also assigned names.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science
Translated by Walter Kaufmann

Gray Room

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl—
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you...
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.

-- Wallace Stevens

nightwalking

After moonrise had woken me that morning, and after I had danced, I looked around. I was in a metal world. The unflawed slopes of snow on the mountains across the valley were fields of iron. The deeper moon-shadows had a tinge of blue to them; otherwise, there was no colour. Ice gleamed like tin in the moonlight. Everything was neuter greys, black and sharp silver-white. The hailstones which had fallen on me earlier lay about like shot or ball-bearings, millions of them, drifted up against each rock or nested in snow-hollows. My face felt burned by the cold. The air smelled of minerals and frost...

I began walking the monochrome ridge. These were the only sounds I could hear: the swish of my breathing, the crunch my foot made when it broke through a crust of hard snow, the wood-like groans of plate ice cracking and sinking as I stepped down on it. Once, stopping on a crag-top, I watched two stars fall in near-parallel down the long black slope of the firmament.

-- Robert Macfarlane "Nightwalking" Granta 90

on Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane

more writing by Robert Macfarlane

at the press of a switch

The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio -- rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and new-mown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord -- a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up. In the synthetic music machine the sound-track roll began to unwind. It was a trio for hyper-violin, super-cello and oboe-surrogate that now filled the air with its agreeable languor. Thirty or forty bars -- and then, against this instrumental background, a much more than human voice began to warble; now throaty, now from the head, now hollow as a flute, now charged with yearning harmonics, it effortlessly passed from Gaspard Forster's low record on the very frontiers of musical tone to a trilled bat-note high above the highest C to which (in 1770, at the Ducal opera of Parma, and to the astonishment of Mozart) Lucrezia Ajugari, alone of all the singers in history, once piercingly gave utterance.

-- Aldous Huxley Brave New World

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree, but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Great nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

-- Theodore Roethke

the colors of Saint Agnes

The colours in the big portasanta marble columns that stand round the altar -- a deep pink with grey inclusions -- provide the church with the keynote for its colour scheme. The background colour throughout is pale and darker grey for the marble floors and apse walls, the painted side walls, most columns, and all capitals. The pink is picked up by the eight pink marble sections of the dome over the altar, with its grey and white cornices, ribs, finials, and capitals. It deepens into porphyry in the gorgeous small columns holding up the dome, the echoing porphyry verticals of the pilasters in the apse, and the porphyry horizontal band above them; and it metamorphoses into purples in the robes of the figures in the mosaic above. Gold gleams from the mosaic background and from the ceiling; ochre and pink (an exact match for the pink of the columns) are the main colours of the ceiling, together with plum and blue for the sunken coffers...

During the annual week of festivities in honour of Saint Agnes, red and plum velvet hangings with gold embroidery clothe the apse; there are red hangings at the parapets of the gallery and also at the door to the canonry from the street. Passersby note the hangings and know that the church of Sant'Agnese is celebrating its feast. The clergy wear seventeenth-century red-and-gold vestments on the saint's special day, January 21. Pink and purple flowers (orchids on the occasions I have been there) deck the altar. The overall effect is delicate, solemn, and intensely female.

-- Margaret Visser, describing Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura in The Geometry of Love

always something more

Music is the most entirely human of the fine arts, and has the fewest analoga in nature. Its first delightfulness is simple accordance with the ear; but it is an associated thing, and recalls the deep emotions of the past with an intellectual sense of proportion. Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause, -- a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate expression.

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge "On Poesy or Art"

falling through space

Late one evening I stepped out of my little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali and found myself falling through space. Over my head the black sky was rippling with stars, densely clustered in some regions, almost blocking out the darkness between them, and more loosely scattered in other areas, pulsing and beckoning to each other. Behind them all streamed the great river of light with its several tributaries. Yet the Milky Way churned beneath me as well, for my hut was set in the middle of a large patchwork of rice paddies, separated from each other by narrow two-foot-high dikes, and these paddies were all filled with water. The surface of these pools, by day, reflected perfectly the blue sky, a reflection broken only by the thin, bright green tips of new rice. But by night the stars themselves glimmered from the surface of the paddies, and the river of light whirled through the darkness underfoot as well as above; there seemed no ground in front of my feet, only the abyss of star-studded space falling away forever.

I was no longer simply beneath the night sky, but also above it -- the immediate impression was one of weightlessness. I might have been able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity, were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely: between the constellations below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt myself at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting. I simply could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness; the paths of the fireflies, and their reflections in the water's surface, held me in a sustained trance. Even after I crawled back to my hut and shut the door on this whirling world, I felt that now the little room in which I lay was itself floating free of the earth.

-- David Abram The Spell of the Sensuous

interview with David Abram

presence

When Wells went to lunch at the college dining room, a group of students always gathered around his piece, watching the progress and remarking about the careful and intuitive way he was working. When he came back he would walk around the room and touch each student-piece, talk a little about it and make a few suggestions, passing easily from one table to another. It would seem that he was not really "instructing" the student. But he was a powerful presence just by his being there, especially by his working along with the students in that room day in and day out. His teaching was done by his personal presence, his atmosphere, and above all by the work he was doing among them. It was as if they were in the atelier of a fifteenth century Italian master sculptor, allowed to watch as long as they kept their hands busy working on their own pieces. This seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, the highest level of teaching. One might call it in Chinese manner the "Teaching-No-Teaching-Method."

-- William Harris "Charles Wells: Sculptor and Printmaker"

Charles Wells

Charles Wells etchings

what lies beyond

The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent. As Wilde pointed out, art does more than school us on how and what to appreciate in nature. (He was thinking of poetry and painting. Today the standards of beauty in nature are largely set by photography.) What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such -- of what lies beyond the human and the made -- and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.

-- Susan Sontag, in "An argument about beauty" Daedalus Fall 2005

perfumery

Their beautiful names - styrax, patchouli, frangipani, amber, myrrh, geraniol, opoponax, heliotrope - and their familiar/strange aromas attracted my curiosity, and I bought over a hundred bottles. Soon I found myself actively collecting the primary materials of perfumery - in Madrid I found a crumbling apothecary's with dozens of mysteriously labeled phials; in San Francisco I discovered the strange olfactory world of Chinatown, of five spices and jasmine and ginseng; a woman I met in Ibiza gave me a minute bottle containing just one drop of an utterly heavenly material called nardo (I later came to think that this was probably spikenard oil, extracted from a shrub growing at between six and eight thousand feet on the Himalayas and used by wealthy Indian ladies as a prelude to lovemaking).

-- Brian Eno, in "Scents and Sensibilities" Details Magazine July 1992

the color of shadows

In travelling over the Harz in winter, I happened to descend from the Brocken towards evening; the wide slopes extending above and below me, the heath, every insulated tree and projecting rock, and all masses of both, were covered with snow or hoar-frost. The sun was sinking towards the Oder ponds. During the day, owing to the yellowish hue of the snow, shadows tending to violet had already been observable; these might now be pronounced to be decidedly blue, as the illumined parts exhibited a yellow deepening to orange.

But as the sun at last was about to set, and its rays, greatly mitigated by the thicker vapours, began to diffuse a most beautiful red colour over the whole scene around me, the shadow colour changed to a green, in lightness to be compared to a sea-green, in beauty to the green of the emerald. The appearance became more and more vivid: one might have imagined oneself in a fairy world, for every object had clothed itself in the two vivid and so beautifully harmonising colours, till at last, as the sun went down, the magnificent spectacle was lost in a grey twilight, and by degrees in a clear moon-and-starlight night.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Theory of Colours
Translated by Charles Lock Eastlake

Words, for E

The sky is blue, or something. Anyway it's there.
Your words are hands, stroking me, stroking the sky,
Blue sky, names, people. It's marvellous. I'm king.
And your words are a line of ships. The guns fire.
Blue sky, names, people. I take the salute.

You are beautiful, sometimes. Now.
I feel for words for you. The ship rising, falling,
The horizon, a line rising, falling, behind your hair.
Words rise, spray. I like to think of you as giving
Structure. A gentleness. A constancy.

-- Tom Leonard

thunder-dreamers

A clown in our language is called a heyoka. He is upsidedown, backward-forward, yes-and-no man, a contrarywise. Everybody can be made into a clown, from one day to another, whether he likes it or not. It is very simple to become a heyoka. All you have to do is dream about the lightning, the thunderbirds. You do this, and when you wake up in the morning you are a heyoka. There is nothing you can do about it.

Suppose you have a dream. What happens then? It is very unpleasant to talk about. What I mean is that a man who has dreamed about the thunderbirds, right away, the next morning, he's got a fear in him, a fear to perform his act. He has to act out his dream in public.

If I had a heyoka dream now which I would have to re-enact, the thunder-being would place something in that dream that I'd be ashamed of. Ashamed to do in public, ashamed to own up to. Something that's going to want me not to perform this act. And that is what's going to torment me. Having had that dream, getting up in the morning, at once I would hear this noise in the ground, just under my feet, that rumble of thunder. I'd know that before the day ends that thunder will come through and hit me, unless I perform the dream. I'm scared; I hide in the cellar; I cry; I ask for help, but there is no remedy until I have performed this act. Only this can free me. Maybe by doing it, I'll receive some power, but most people would just as soon forget about it.

The wise old people know that the clowns are thunder-dreamers, that the thunder-beings commanded them to act in a silly way, each heyoka according to his dream. They also know that a heyoka protects the people from lightning and storms and that his capers, which make people laugh, are holy. Laughter -- that is something very sacred, especially for us Indians.

-- John Fire and Richard Erdoes Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions

irregularities

Did not Goethe speak of those "objects that favor man"? If we would hear an object invite us to enjoy life, if we would hear this excellent advice to be happy in the world of things, in the "order of things," let us reread the passage in which Brosse is meditating on that loveliest of all fruits -- the peach.

It is round. Objects of happiness are always round. Happiness rounds out everything it enters. But the peach's roundness is of course a full, substantial, inner roundness. This is no mere embodiment of some Platonic form in a geometry of ideas; the ball formed by the peach will never be a sphere. Its perfection stems from its irregularities. "The peach is irregular, like flesh and, like flesh, resistant to all geometrical synthesis."

-- Gaston Bachelard, in the preface to L'ordre des choses by Jacques Brosse
Translated by J.A. Underwood

thrum

As far back as I can remember, things seen or heard or smelled, things tasted or touched, have provoked in me an answering vibration. The stimulus might be the sheen of moonlight on the needles of a white pine, or the iridescent glimmer on a dragonfly's tail, or the lean silhouette of a ladder-back chair, or the glaze on a hand-thrown pot. It might be bird song or a Bach cantata or the purl of water over stone. It might be a line of poetry, the outline of a cheek, the arch of a ceiling, the savor of bread, the sway of a bough or a bow. The provocation might be as grand as a mountain sunrise or as humble as an icicle's jeweled tip, yet in each case a familiar surge of gratitude and wonder wells up in me.

Now and again some voice raised on the stairs leading to my study, some passage of music, some noise from the street, will stir a sympathetic thrum from the strings of the guitar that tilts against the wall behind my door. Just so, over and over again, impulses from the world stir a responsive chord in me -- not just any chord, but a particular one, combining notes of elegance, exhilaration, simplicity, and awe.

-- Scott Russell Sanders Hunting for Hope

attention

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation. And the true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note. He does not have to concern himself with a beautiful landscape, he does not need to surround himself with rare and precious objects. He does not have to put forth in search of discoveries: they are always within his reach. He will have only to cast a glance about him. Familiar things, things that are everywhere, attract his attention. The least accident holds his interest and guides his operations. If his finger slips, he will notice it; on occasion, he may draw profit from something unforeseen that a momentary lapse reveals to him.

-- Igor Stravinsky Poetics of Music
Translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl

the green man

I turned the radio on, mid-sentence. A distant voice from the BBC World Service was describing something very strange - a face made out of leaves, a pagan carved image found in Christian cathedrals, a descendant of the horned god of the woods, the spirit of nature, lover of the Goddess.

-- Nigel Rushbrook, from Canterbury Green Man

... our universe came into existence in its particular form so that God could look on his works through our unclouded eyes. The Green Man, watcher and transmitter of life, is a perfect symbol of this process. If we take this image to look inwards, then we see the dark garden of the imagination woken up by the rays of the sun of consciousness. That dawn sets in train the process of psychic photosynthesis through which the symbols of the soul are renewed and flourish.

-- William Anderson The Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth

Like antlers, like veins of the brain the branches
Mark patterns of mind on the red winter sky;
'I am thought of all plants,' says the Green Man,
'I am thought of all plants,' says he.

The hungry birds harry the last berries of rowan
But white is her bark in the darkness of rain;
'I rise with the sap,' says the Green Man,
'I rise with the sap,' says he.

The ashes are clashing their boughs like sword-dancers,
Their black buds are tracing wild faces in the clouds;
'I come with the wind,' says the Green Man,
'I come with the wind,' says he.

The alders are rattling as though ready for battle
Guarding the grove where she waits for her lover.
'I burn with desire,' says the Green Man,
'I burn with desire,' says he.

In and out of the yellowing wands of the willow
The pollen-bright bees are plundering the catkins;
'I am honey of love,' says the Green Man,
'I am honey of love,' says he.

The hedges of quick are thick with may blossom
As the dancers advance on the leaf-covered King;
'It's off with my head,' says the Green Man,
'It's off with my head,' says he.

Green Man becomes grown man in flames of the oak
As its crown forms his mask and its leafage his features;
'I speak through the oak,' says the Green Man,
'I speak through the oak,' says he.

The holly is flowering as hayfields are rolling
Their gleaming long grasses like waves of the sea;
'I shine with the sun,' says the Green Man,
'I shine with the sun,' says he.

The hazels are rocking the cups of their nuts
As the harvesters shout when the last sheaf is cut;
'I swim with the salmon,' says the Green Man,
'I swim with the salmon,' says he.

The globes of the grapes are robing with bloom
Like the hazes of autumn, like the Milky Way's stardust;
'I am crushed for your drink,' says the Green Man,
'I am crushed for your drink,' says he.

The aspen drops silver of leaves on earth's salver
And the poplars shed gold on the young ivy flowerheads;
'I have paid for your pleasure,' says the Green Man,
'I have paid for your pleasure,' says he.

The reedbeds are flanking in silence the islands
Where meditates Wisdom as she waits and waits;
'I have kept her secret,' says the Green Man,
'I have kept her secret,' says he.

The bark of the elder makes whistles for children
To call to the deer as they rove over the snow.
'I am born in the dark,' says the Green Man,
'I am born in the dark,' says he.

-- William Anderson

possession

"And what of this?" says an airy spark, no friend to meditation or deep thought. "What means this catalogue or scale, as you are pleased to call it? Only, sir, to satisfy myself that I am not alone or single in a certain fancy I have of a thing called beauty; that I have almost the whole world for my companions; and that each of us admirers and earnest pursuers of beauty (such as in a manner we all are) if peradventure we take not a certain sagacity along with us, we must err widely, range extravagantly, and run ever upon a false scent. We may (in the sportsman's phrase) have many hares afoot, but shall stick to no real game, nor be fortunate in any capture which may content us.

"See with what ardour and vehemence the young man, neglecting his proper race and fellow-creatures, and forgetting what is decent, handsome, or becoming in human affairs, pursues these species in those common objects of his affection, a horse, a hound, a hawk! What doting on these beauties! What admiration of the kind itself! And of the particular animal, what care, and in a manner idolatry and consecration, when the beast beloved is (as often happens) even set apart from use, and only kept to gaze on and feed the enamoured fancy with highest delight! See in another youth, not so forgetful of human kind, but remembering it still in a wrong way! Φιλόκαλος of another sort, a Chaerca. Quam elegans formarum spectator! See as to other beauties, where there is no possession, no enjoyment or reward, but barely seeing and admiring; as in the virtuoso-passion, the love of painting and the designing arts of every kind so often observed. How fares it with our princely genius, our grandee who assembles all these beauties, and within the bounds of his sumptuous palace incloses all these graces of a thousand kinds? What pains! study! science! Behold the disposition and order of these finer sorts of apartments, gardens, villas! The kind of harmony to the eye from the various shapes and colours agreeably mixed and ranged in lines, intercrossing without confusion, and fortunately coincident. A parterre, cypresses, groves, wildernesses. Statues here and there of virtue, fortitude, temperance. Heroes' busts, philosophers' heads, with suitable mottoes and inscriptions. Solemn representations of things deeply natural -- caves, grottoes, rocks, urns and obelisks in retired places and disposed at proper distances and points of sight, with all those symmetries which silently express a reigning order, peace, harmony, and beauty! ... But what is there answerable to this in the minds of the possessors? What possession or propriety is theirs? What constancy or security of enjoyment? What peace, what harmony within?"

--Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times

tasting notes for Thomas Hardy's Ale

1993 Immature aroma; sweet, fruity, and noticeably alcoholic. A slightly saline front on the palate, a peach and apricot sweetness, and a warming brandy-like finish.

1990 Very full, complex aroma, with a deep fruitiness and notes of burnt toast, dark chocolate, and anise. Well-developed body, with lingering alcohol on the finish.

1987 The fruitiness had aged out of this one, leaving a curious chocolate-mint aroma. Thin body, with notes of chocolate, fresh dates, and burnt spice. Quick finish.

1987 This was a special additional bottling of the '87, aged in sherry casks. A huge, smoky aroma; a woody body with notes of vanilla bean, sherry, and black cherry. An unusually dry finish.

1984 Spoiled. Black cherry, currant, and licorice in the aroma. Tart, acidic body and finish.

1982 Some deterioration, with bitter chocolate, anise, and mulled fruit in the aroma, and sour cherry, bitter chocolate, and red and black currants in the musty, astringent body. Woody, bitter-sour finish.

1974 Complex nose, suggesting chocolate, caramel, dates, allspice, roasted chestnuts, marshmallows, and other aromas. The body had more in common with whiskey than with beer -- very dry, with notes of wood, walnuts, bitter chocolate, and a hint of brine. The finish was drier still and very woody.

1968 Rich, full aroma with notes of crème brûlée, cognac, bitter chocolate, and tanned leather. Lightly fruity and tannic in the front, leading to a complex body of burnt wood, dried black currants, vintage port, fino sherry, and a faint hint of bitter chocolate. Lingering, off-dry finish with a suggestion of fresh dates.

-- Stephen Beaumont, in "The Brewer of Casterbridge" Saveur No.4 (1995)

 identity

I am not what I am, and I am what I am not.

-- Jean-Paul Sartre  Being and Nothingness 

Praying the Sunset Prayer

I'll let you in on a secret
about how one should pray the sunset prayer.
It's a juicy bit of praying,
like strolling on grass,
nobody's chasing you, nobody hurries you.
You walk toward your Creator
with gifts in pure, empty hands.
The words are golden
their meaning is transparent,
it's as though you're saying them
for the first time.

If you don't catch on
that you should feel a little elevated,
you're not praying the sunset prayer.
The tune is sheer simplicity,
you're just lending a helping hand
to the sinking day.
It's a heavy responsibility.
You take a created day
and you slip it
into the archive of life,
where all our lived-out days are lying together.

The day is departing with a quiet kiss.
It lies open at your feet
while you stand saying the blessings.
You can't create anything yourself, but you
can lead the day to its end and see
clearly the smile of its going down.

See how whole it all is,
not diminished for a second,
how you age with the days
that keep dawning,
how you bring your lived-out day
as a gift to eternity.

-- Jacob Glatstein
Translated by Ruth Whitman

respondes

The Protheros were part-time neighbors of Henry James in Rye, Sussex, and Mrs. Bryan was their housekeeper.

Dear Mrs. George!

Just as black despair was seizing us -- that is 10 minutes ago -- the Devotee to the interests of the Idol (though we won't say who the Idol in this case is) arrived with an "I hope you don't mind me coming" & a nice little fat-faced boy. I said "Oh dear no, Mrs. Bryan: always so glad to talk with you about them" & then she broke it that she had just had a postcard & that they would be with us tomorrow. You could have knocked me down with a feather -- the revulsion was so violent. For you see we had, the others of us, met of late in such at last almost deathly tension. It had been, it had become, more & more this kind of thing.

"Have you heard --?["]
"Oh yes -- one 'hears': that's the bitterness of it. She is clearly indisposed --"
"Indisposed? Don't tell me!"
"Indisposed, I mean" -- this very gravely indeed -- ["] to come."
Oh, that? Don't call it indisposed. Call it firmly resolved, call it fundamentally determined."
"Well -- since you go straight to the terrible truth of it -- there we are. But she professes --!"
"Oh, she dresses it with ribbons & gardens: you know her enchanting way -- !"
"Ah yes, her enchanting way is the bitterness of it. She does deck it out -- !"
"As with streamers & a band of music! But all the while -- "
"Yes -- but don't too awfully say it -- !"
I must -- for we must face the worst! She has cooled."
"Aïe!" -- as of a nerve in anguish. "Not cooled, put it -- only just a little (in this weather) lowered her temperature."
"Oh, weather me no weather! She has frozen!"
"Let us then melt her!"
"We can't -- all our tears won't. It's the icy smile."
"yes, that smile! It muddles, but it means -- "
"It 'means' -- ?" (hanging on one's lips.)
"That she will never come again."
"Aïïee!" -- the shriek of ten thousand wincing nerves -- a piercing wail, a heavy fall & silence; from my gloomy gaze on the prostrate presence of which imagine the revulsion, as I say, of Mrs. Bryan's breathless approach to yours in ecstasy

Henry James

-- Henry James Letter to Mrs. George Walter Prothero 18 October 1907

mad dog

She gave birth to a small stuffed bear, which she protected with extraordinary savagery from predators like Victoria and myself. When she wasn't crouched snarling over it, she was drooling over it and cuddling it, and then would suddenly rampage around the house screaming... The worst was Christmas... Toto in a frenzy because somehow her stuffed bear of a baby had vanished and she decided that she had delivered herself of all the presents under the Christmas tree, and crouched, snarling among them—this meant that no one could approach the tree without being threatened—a mad dog is a mad dog, however charming to look at and sweet her nature, and her shows of teeth, saliva dripping from her muzzle, were terrifying among the pink and gold and silver and scarlet packages—when she went on one of her looping, screaming runs, we tried to gather up the presents, but either she would be back before we'd done, or if we shut her out she would patrol the hall screaming—so when it came down to it there was nothing we could do but leave them under the tree and let her embed herself. Eventually the stuffed bear was found on a high shelf in the kitchen and was placed on the floor some way from the presents. Toto ran to it, buried her face in it, licked it, stroked it and rolled it about, then carried it gently down to the basement, and put it to bed—and so, apart from sudden rushes upstairs to check briefly on her other family, under the tree, and other rushes through the flap and screaming circuits of the garden—which led to a petition from some of the neighbours asking us to confine her to the house, her garden screams were too distressing, and set their own dogs off—the situation held through to Boxing Day... In the New Year we got canine Prozac from the vet.

-- Simon Gray, in "Wish You Were Here" Granta 91

the line

Hope and sadness produce a line whose direction is faith, whose sound is love. In the instant of making its mark, the line knows what to say... The line can begin on the point of a pencil, on the tip of a brush, at the edge of a chisel, in a cup of tea... So much comes together here. The line is fragile and wants to disappear, but the ending of it is made new each moment. Here is real hope, real sadness. The line advances; at the vanishing end of it, creation takes place.

-- Harry Remde, in "Sadness in Art" Parabola 11:3

Where Does the Dance Begin,
Where Does It End?

Don't call this world adorable, or useful, that's not it.
It's frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.

But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn't the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven't the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?

Don't call this world an explanation, or even an education.

When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking

to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,

as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?

-- Mary Oliver

a certain place

It was not there that we saw it:
it was here.
The mass of the sun is three-hundred thousand times the mass of the earth,
yet it is on the earth that you have whippoorwills, hollyhocks, the poems of Catullus, ripe strawberries, the sonatas of Scarlatti...

I have walked the long hillsides
singing to myself deep songs: I did not know where they came from.
There were blue windflowers and deep grasses and in the distance the similar blue of the sea.
The songs were of special things: you had become very exact to me...

The ending of expeditions:
what was discovered in all that?
Can we say that at a certain place we did arrive at love?
Cannot we realize that that was enough?
O shining ones! O shining ones!

-- Peyton Houston, from XVI Complex Songs at the Borders of Silence

hope

Life is -- or has -- meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

-- Carl Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections

winter trees

Few things are more directly beautiful than winter trees: stripped of all ornament, clearly etched against the changing sky, moving in the stiff manner of wood into and then back against the wind. If leaves can be compared to clothing, then the deciduous tree in winter is naked. If clothing can be deceptive, then the tree in winter is true. If leaves represent an extreme profusion of form that is more finally articulated than the eye can register, much less language describe, then the form of the tree in winter is stark, particularly against the steel gray monochrome of the sky as snow comes.

But the form of a winter tree, though it may be stark and withered, is liable also to be extraordinarily complex. The bare bark is channeled and cracked, and the directions of growth frozen into the form of each branch include saggings, twistings, splinterings, angles at which the branch has reached out or up. The form of the tree is a register of its history. The coloring, too, becomes as subtle as our approach is proximate: all the grays, blacks, and browns of wabi, with perhaps the weathered white of dead lichen or the blasted green of last year's moss.

-- Crispin Sartwell Six Names of Beauty

imagine

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

-- Henry David Thoreau Journal 12 November 1859

This quote comes from a small hardback compilation of Thoreau's writings called Thoreau on Man and Nature assembled by Arthur G. Volkman and printed by the Peter Pauper Press in 1960. I was curious to see where it originated and in the process discovered that Thoreau has two blogs, one I visit occasionally here and another one here.

You Came as a Thought

when I was past such thinking
you came as a song when I had

finished singing you came when
the sun had just begun its setting

you were my evening star.

-- James Laughlin

Desunt Non Nulla

Then she is leaning, facing north & numberless in pleated light. How the sheets appear as driven by a scurvy wind, the bedclothes end in quivering, the red lead of their folds asail, Northumbrian. Her face is primitive & spare, her neck an ill illumination, unnatural, prolonged — Are missing not no things. One morning I woke in the garden, night's lanterns snuffed & hung in alder trees, & was surrounded like an English leopard quartered on a coat of arms, the night gone in the glass eye of its final thirteen hours. Above — a bird, half cut off from the binder of the sky, flies north. At west, a calendar, a corridor, scriptorium.

And took the book & opened it, to this — a flinched life where nature has no place or folio. The adversaria were gold & partially erased; in the margin there, the furnishings of falcons glaired, their jesses & their tiny bells & hectic hoods. The glove is flanged, a color I will never know. He puts on his one right cuff. The rustre of two raptors, fisted, sit on a stone, a blush of iron, wonder, drear. At left, a hound is whistled up, & bounds. Above the sequence are two copper birds, the one in flight, the other perched. The first is prey; flies upward.

And thou not there -- a miniature of dread. Nothing is not not there.

-- Lucie Brock-Broido The Master Letters

piping

And into these dreams Josephine's piping drops note by note; she calls it pearl-like, we call it staccato; but at any rate here it is in its right place, as nowhere else, finding the moment — wait for it — as music scarcely ever does. Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people's daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while.

-- Franz Kafka , from "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

choice

We stand on the peak of the consciousness of previous ages, and their wisdom is available to us. History — that selective treasure house of the past which each age bequeaths to those that follow — has formed us in the present so that we may embrace the future. What does it matter if our insights, the new forms which play around the fringes of our minds, always lead us into virginal land where, like it or not, we stand on strange and bewildering ground? The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it.

For in every act of love and will — and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act — we mold ourselves and our world simultaneously. This is what it means to embrace the future.

-- Rollo May Love and Will

the spirit need not be spare

The spirit or soul -- should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul? -- This I was keeping "spare" in my desire for the essential. But the spirit need not be spare: it can grow gracefully and beautifully like a tendril, like a flower.

-- Theodore Roethke On Poetry and Craft

A Light Breather

The spirit moves,
Yet stays:
Stirs as a blossom stirs,
Still wet from its bud-sheath,
Slowly unfolding,
Turning in the light with its tendrils;
Plays as a minnow plays,
Tethered to a limp weed, swinging
Tail around, nosing in and out of the current,
Its shadows loose, a watery finger;
Moves, like the snail,
Still inward,
Taking and embracing its surroundings,
Never wishing itself away,
Unafraid of what it is,
A music in a hood,
A small thing,
Singing.

-- Theodore Roethke

blinking

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed or weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.

-- Plato The Republic
Translated by B. Jowett

that should be enough

"I am beautiful, O mortals, like a dream of stone," says
Beauty, in Baudelaire's sonnet "La Beauté," where Baudelaire, in
Fewer words than I, has set down his ideas on the subject. Essentially he
Sees Beauty as eternal and pure, an enslaver of poets.
Rilke says that we love beauty because it "so serenely
Disdains to destroy us." In making works of art, then,
Is the excitement we feel that of being close to the elements of
Destruction? I do not want any mystery in this poem, so I will
Let that go. Or, rather, I want the mystery to be that it is clear
But says nothing which will satisfy completely but instead stirs to action
(or contemplation)
As beauty does -- that is, I wish it to be beautiful. But why I want that,
Even, I do not entirely know. Well, it would put it in a class of things
That seems the highest, and for one lifetime that should be enough.

-- Kenneth Koch, from "On Beauty"

lit up

In line with recent breakthroughs in neurological brain research, I fancy that one day the mental event that is an experience of beauty will be X-ray photographed. I predict that the photograph will show the brain lit up like a Christmas tree, with simultaneous firings of neurons in many parts of the brain, though not very brightly. It will show a suddenly swelling diffused glow that wanes gradually.

-- Peter Schjeldahl, in "Notes on Beauty" Columns and Catalogues

garden of dreams

The great naturalist, Linnaeus, once said that he could spend a lifetime in studying as much of the earth as he could cover with his hand. However small the patch we investigate, it will lead us back to the sun at last. There is nothing too minute or too trivial. I have often remembered with a pang, how, long years ago, I once gave pain by saying, with the arrogance of boyhood, that it was foolish to tell one's dreams. I have done penance for that remark since. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin,' said the wise philosopher of the eighteenth century. I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe.

-- Havelock Ellis The World of Dreams

John Lennon's #9 Dream

Lyrics

Still Life with Apples by Lawrence Gowing


APPLE: Try and remember what I am. I am alive, not a studio property or a figment of thought, or a peg to hang tone values on. I am an apple.

PAINTER: Yes?

APPLE: And an apple is an organism of some dignity, greater perhaps than a painter's, and with a longer history.

PAINTER: I am afraid there is no question of painting your history.

APPLE: I reminded you of it in passing.

PAINTER: And your dignity, you thought I needed reminding of that? I respect your dignity.

APPLE: But even your respect, your bare respect is not immoderate.

PAINTER: What more is due to you?

APPLE: I am a fruit, a feast, a reproductive organ.

PAINTER: Shall I sell you or eat you, if you prefer it, or sow your pips?

APPLE: I would prefer not to forgo my functions merely in order to be judiciously measured until I wrinkle and rot.

PAINTER: Come, come. I am very fond of you, you know. If your fate disturbs you ...

APPLE: Does my ripeness, my round lustre, mean nothing to you? A summer has done its best to make me an attractive prize, make my shape an irresistible invitation. And yet you resist me.

PAINTER: I am quite distressed.

APPLE: Look at your picture and at me. I offered you a taste of the ravishment to which the ages have not been indifferent. I gave you a clue to a receding perspective of life which men have found good, of work done and appetites satisfied. But you have seen only a cultivated commonplace, an artistic impression. Really the Greek painter who deceived the birds did better.

PAINTER: I am sorry, you must believe me ...

-- Lawrence Gowing Painter and Apple

a way of happening

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

-- W. H. Auden, from "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

what happens

But the poet, Aristotle says, never makes any real statements at all, certainly no particular or specific ones.  The poet's job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place.  He gives you the typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event.  You wouldn't go to Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland -- you go to it to learn what a man feels like after he's gained a kingdom and lost his soul.  When you meet such a character as Micawber in Dickens, you don't feel that there must have been a man Dickens knew who was exactly like this: you feel that there's a bit of Micawber in almost everybody you know, including yourself.  Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and remain for most of us loose and disorganized.  But we constantly find things in literature that suddenly co-ordinate and bring into focus a great many such impressions, and this is part of what Aristotle means by the typical or universal human event.

-- Northrop Frye  The Educated Imagination 

quintessential D-ness

Absolute pitch is as much a quandary for philosophers as it is for neuropsychologists. Is there really such a thing as F-sharpness? The analogy to color, and to color blindness, doesn't really make sense. Whatever the color red may "be," it corresponds to a particular range of wavelengths of light, just as an adjacent range corresponds to the color orange. The brain finds distinct color experiences within the two ranges. If we were to begin referring to the spectrum differently, so that what we called "red" extended from the middle of normal red to the middle of normal orange, our brains would not obligingly regard the reddish orange at the center of the new range as a distinct color. But we do just this with absolute pitch. As we've seen, the tuning of instruments has shifted markedly over centuries. Mozart's D is not our D. Yet somehow the absolute-pitcher hears quintessential D-ness in today's D just as Mozart did in the D of his time.

-- Robert Jourdain Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy

kiss me

The moth’s kiss, first!
Kiss me as if you made believe
You were not sure, this eve,
How my face, your flower, had pursed
Its petals up; so, here and there
You brush it, till I grow aware
Who wants me, and wide ope I burst.

The bee’s kiss, now!
Kiss me as if you entered gay
My heart at some noonday,
A bud that dares not disallow
The claim, so all is rendered up,
And passively its shattered cup
Over your head to sleep I bow.

-- Robert Browning, from "In a Gondola"

(A re-posting for the sublime Anne-Carolyn)

there they were

Then much more vaguely I remember subsequent half-furtive moments when I would absorbedly scribble at verse for an hour or so, and then run away from the act and the production as if it were secret sin. It seems to me that "knowing oneself" was a sin and a vice for innumerable centuries, before it became a virtue. It seems to me, it is still a sin and a vice, when it comes to new knowledge. – In those early days – for I was very green and unsophisticated at twenty – I used to feel myself at times haunted by something, and a little guilty about it, as if it were an abnormality. Then the haunting would get the better of me, and the ghost would suddenly appear, in the shape of a usually rather incoherent poem. Nearly always I shunned the apparition once it had appeared. From the first, I was a little afraid of my real poems – not my "compositions," but the poems that had the ghost in them. They seemed to me to come from somewhere, I didn't quite know where, out of a me whom I didn't know and didn't want to know, and to say things I would much rather not have said: for choice. But there they were. I never read them again.

-- D.H. Lawrence, in the Foreword to Collected Poems

empty stage

When I sit alone in a theatre and gaze into the dark space of its empty stage, I'm frequently seized by fear that this time I won't manage to penetrate it. And I always hope that this fear will never desert me. Without an unending search for the key to the secret of creativity, there is no creation. It's necessary always to begin again. And that is beautiful.

-- Josef Svoboda The Secret of Theatrical Space
Translated by J.M. Burian

something that is bigger

...for thousands and thousands of years, all our fears, all our hopes, the sighs and longings have crystallized a certain religious feeling inside, an eternal gift from all those generations. So when you hear certain works of art, suddenly the roof opens up to something that is bigger than the limitations of the human being. That makes me very happy. That is a treasure we carry within us. To make a film is to try to open the roof -- so we can breathe.

-- Ingmar Bergman, in Life 15 October 1971

resilience

Love, poetry, art, it's only through their resilience that confidence will return, that human thought will succeed in setting sail again.

-- André Breton Arcanum 17
Translated by Zack Rogow

we are surrounded

We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it — a little? To devote your life to the discovery of the divinity in Nature or to the eating of oysters: would they not be attended with very different results?

-- Henry David Thoreau Wild Fruits

emblems

Artists have many signatures. Conventionally they supply name and date in lower corner, an indication that the painting is finished and ready for its public career. Another kind of signature... can be read not in a a single painting but in the recurrence of certain objects or combinations of details through a whole series... [the] tendency of the artist to include a few familiar items in painting after painting: the cupped candle in the best of Georges de la Tour's works, the smokestacks on the horizon of Degas's race-track paintings, the ubiquitous cow that wanders in and out of Chagall's dreams. Such a repeated detail can easily become a mannerism: for example, certain letter combinations in cubist collages, like journal and vins, went through such an evolution. Or... it can be incorporated into the normal signature: Whistler's butterfly. Used discreetly or unconsciously, these details are best described as emblems, objects whose recurrence gives them heightened significance. They are like tiny still lifes carried over into landscape and portraiture and noticeable only to the unhurried eye.

-- Roger Shattuck The Banquet Years

 
from Machine with Wishbone, by Arthur Ganson

FAT (Friday After Thanksgiving) Chain Reaction

at MIT Museum

choreographed by Arthur Ganson

watch Machine with Wishbone (and others) here

via SuperNaturale:  Usually these contraptions are quite elaborate, involving spinning Barbies, rolling jars of honey, Lego ramps and falling marbles, balloons inflating to cause a weight to drop, causing a rabbit to amble down an incline... 

Sustenance

For an hour there is nothing
but rain on the stones, trillings of light
that signal a world into being.

For an hour there is only this hunger --
twilight settling into the trees, a bird
whose song I do not know, vanishing.

In an hour I will be home,
my jacket thrown onto the couch,
my wet shoes kicked off at the door.

Later, sipping wine in the kitchen,
watching candlelight refract in the
burn-sienna prisms of Chilean cabernet,

I will lift the large knife and lean
into the apple, fruit of New Zealand,
fruit of Madagascar, halving, quartering.

eighth- and sixteenth-ing it open--
this good, widely divisible world.
The walnuts from Jerusalem, green onions

from Spain, and then, if ripe, that visceral avocado.
I will sing to my daughter while stirring
the balsamic into the first cold-pressed
pressing of oil, grinding the pepper
as my voice grinds out the song,
doing the artichoke dance that she loves.

And when I say to my daughter say grace
she says grace, gracefully, gratefully,
a word for it sung into the air.

That we eat of what is given, these few
resilient gifts of a day, that we bow and eat
and watch the world for signs of who we are:

vanishing bird, circles and circles,
the rain perhaps slowing, perhaps
gaining on us all over again.

-- Ralph Black

making contact

The bumpers filled, Mr. Blandois, with a roystering gaiety, clinked the top of his glass against the bottom of Mr. Flintwich's, and the bottom of his glass against the top of Mr. Flintwich's, and drank to the intimate acquaintance he foresaw.

-- Charles Dickens Little Dorrit

Clinking glasses -- rapping them to call everyone present to attention, or tapping them together when toasting -- has always given people pleasure. Clinking one glass against another is making contact, an action we perform precisely because we are not sharing one cup; in doing it we remind ourselves that the wine, now separated into glassfuls, is still one, and we reach out to each other even though we do not hand our glasses on. Russians go one further and smash their glasses after particularly fervent toasts, vows, or oaths. The half-Russian poet Apollinaire loved using the image of a smashed glass to express exultant joy. People have often felt that disposing of the wine in a toast was really not sufficient: the cup should go too -- either broken or given away -- otherwise the words symbolized in drinking are not finalized, and the action is lacking in generosity. Smashing the glass also ensures that no less worthy toast shall ever be made in that glass.

-- Margaret Visser The Rituals of Dinner

Point Lobos by Edward Weston

Edward Weston

It was an obsession with the formal perfections of the image that led Weston "inside" those onions and artichokes. What mattered finally was the photographic look of the thing, its imageness. His cloud studies of 1936 were the most enthusiastic and brilliant expression of that impulse. The tonal consistencies in any one image might run from flaked, jagged slate to silky marble. The textures of immateriality go from leather to rock to foam. In the cloud studies, and also in the images of those broad, eddying, scalloped stone formations at Point Lobos, Weston succeeded in expressing emotion with every nuance of line and light. His best subjects, in other words, were those that stood at the frontier where resemblance becomes abstract transparency.

-- W.S. Di Piero Out of Eden

movement in balance

No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly. Only in such a balance could humility be found, humility which was a lucid speed to welcome lucidity whenever and wherever it presented itself. How much he owed to Quentin! How much — not pride but delight urged the admission — Quentin owed to him! Balance — and movement in balance, as an eagle sails up on the wind — this was the truth of life, and beauty in life.

-- Charles Williams The Place of the Lion

things that mattered

And here, now, by night, with this huge clock ticking on my right hip and the flashlight in my hand and sneakers on my feet, I feel as if everything had been unreal. It is as if the past had never existed. The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.

-- Thomas Merton The Search for Solitude

a great work

Self-transformation is precisely what life is, and human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, rising and falling from minute to minute, and lovers are those in whose relationship and contact no one moment resembles another...

Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work. -- So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work; he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!

For believe me, the more one is, the richer is all that one experiences. And whoever wants to have a deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.

-- R.M. Rilke Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties
Translated by John J.L. Mood

center and cause

Just as a stone flung into the water becomes the center and cause of many circles, and as sound diffuses itself in circles in the air: so any object, placed in the luminous atmosphere, diffuses itself in circles, and fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself. And is repeated, the whole everywhere, and the whole in every smallest part.

-- Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo's Notebooks ed. H. Anna Suh

take me by the hand

And this it does not seem unreasonable or ungrateful to demand, that the artist should pierce the soul; should command; should not sit aloof & circumambient merely, but should come and take me by the hand and lead me somewhither...

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Alfred Jarry

He was stubborn, shy, arrogant, incredibly proud, a rebel who liked to show off but was fundamentally mild and good-tempered. He loved the country, exercising, bicycling, fishing, and had a reputation for being able to catch fish where there were none...

He lived in a picturesquely filthy room on a floor called the second-and-a-half; the ceiling had been lowered and the room was a sort of cupboard between the second and third floors. He lived with two owls, (originally alive, later stuffed), a guitar, stinking flowers, masses of dirty papers, a stone phallus. Jarry's personal décor sounds familiar. He was certainly different from the bourgeois, but perhaps not so different from those who differ from the bourgeois. But his brilliance and wit were uncommon. Giving a lecture on art and artists he spoke of everything from Turkestan to Bergson, from Fragonard to angling. Afterwards one of his friends told him that he had found it very interesting but hadn't understood a word of it. Jarry answered: 'That's exactly what I wanted. Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind and falsifies the memory, but the absurd exercises the mind and makes the memory work.'

-- Barbara Wright, in the preface to her translation of Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry

creating

Galileo... saw a church lamp swinging and was led to find the laws by which a body swings. He did not see that the laws that made his experience comprehensible were of his creation. He did not simply discover some natural process, but in fact added to the world an act of his own true individuality. I am not saying that Galileo impressed his subjectivity onto the world; rather the breakthrough was an act of his individuality uniting with the world. The point of individuality is that by creating, it creates what is actually there -- albeit not there in the form of comprehension, but only in the form of perception, until the creative act of comprehension takes place. Then the world rejoices, for it has become more whole; perception and comprehension together reveal the world more fully. The mistake of the natural sciences is that, until very recently, scientists believed they simply discovered the laws of the natural world, not recognizing that their observations were also creating in part what was being observed.

-- Robert Sardello Love and the World

catbirds

There is a certain lawless freedom to the song of the Catbird, for he does not entertain any regard for set rhythm, and he proceeds with a series of miscellaneous, interrupted sentences which bear no relationship with one another. His music set on paper in a thoroughly complete manner would appear thus:


It is like some long rigmarole, which is humorously incomprehensible, though the bird apparently considers his strophes both serious and important. Listen to him sometime while he is singing in the shadowy tangles of the briers and willows through which winds the brook with gurgling, petulant impatience, and you will hear some unmistakable tuneful expostulations, persuasions, and remonstrances... The fact is, he is an imitator. He can imitate anything from a squeaking cartwheel to the song of a Thrush. He intersperses his melodic phrases with quotations from the highest authorities -- Thrush, Song Sparrow, Wren, Oriole, and Whip-poor-will. The yowl of the cat is thrown in anywhere, the guttural remarks of the frog are repeated without the slightest deference to good taste or appropriateness, and the harsh squawk of the old hen, or the chirp of the lost chicken, as always added in some malapropos manner. All is grist which comes to the Catbird's musical mill, and all is ground out according to the bird's own way of thinking.

-- F. Schuyler Mathews Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music

When His Mouth Faced My Mouth

When his mouth faced my mouth, I turned aside
And steadfastly gazed only at the ground;
I stopped my ears, when at each coaxing word
They tingled more; I used both hands to hide
My blushing, sweating cheeks. Indeed, I tried.
But oh, what could I do, then, when I found
My bodice splitting of its own accord?

-- Amaru
Translated by John Brough

reverberation

If, having fixed the original form in our mind's eye, we ask ourselves how that form comes alive and fills with life, we discover a new dynamic and vital category, a new property of the universe: reverberation (retentir). It is as though a well-spring existed in a sealed vase and its waves, repeatedly echoing against the sides of this vase, filled it with their sonority. Or again, it's as though the sound of a hunting horn, reverberating everywhere through its echo, made the tiniest leaf, the tiniest wisp of moss shudder in a common movement and transformed the whole forest, filling it to its limits, into a vibrating, sonorous world.

-- Eugene Minkowski Vers une Cosmologie
Translated by Maria Jolas

the Atlájala

In the early morning the restless Atlájala would move through the halls of the monastery. The dark rooms sped past, one after the other. In a small patio, where eager young trees had pushed up the paving stones to reach the sun, it paused. The air was full of small sounds: the movements of butterflies, the falling to the ground of bits of leaves and flowers, the air following its myriad courses around the edges of things, the ants pursuing their endless labors in the hot dust. In the sun it waited, conscious of each gradation in sound and light and smell, living in the awareness of the slow, constant disintegration that attacked the morning and transformed it into afternoon. When evening came, it often slipped above the monastery roof and surveyed the darkening sky: the waterfall would roar distantly. Night after night, along the procession of years, it had hovered here above the valley, darting down to become a bat, a leopard, a moth for a few minutes or hours, returning to rest immobile in the center of the space enclosed by the cliffs. When the monastery had been built, it had taken to frequenting the rooms, where it had observed for the first time the meaningless gestures of human life.

And then one evening it had aimlessly become one of the young friars. This was a new sensation, strangely rich and complex, and at the same time unbearably stifling, as though every other possibility besides that of being enclosed in a tiny, isolated world of cause and effect had been removed forever. As the friar, it had gone and stood in the window, looking out at the sky, seeing for the first time, not the stars, but the space between and beyond them. Even at that moment it had felt the urge to leave, to step outside the little shell of anguish where it lodged for the moment, but a faint curiosity had impelled it to remain a little longer and partake a little further of the unaccustomed sensation. It held on; the friar raised his arms to the sky in an imploring gesture. For the first time the Atlájala sensed opposition, the thrill of a struggle. It was delicious to feel the young man striving to free himself of its presence, and it was immeasurably sweet to remain there... When he had finished and said a prayer, he crawled to his pallet and fell asleep weeping, while the Atlájala slipped out obliquely and entered into a bird which passed the night sitting in a great tree on the edge of the jungle, listening intently to the night sounds, and uttering a scream from time to time.

-- Paul Bowles "The Circular Valley"

Nur nimm sie wieder aus der Städte Schuld

Only retrieve them from the cities guilt,
where everything for them is anger and confusion,
and wounded patience sucks them dry.

Has the earth, then, no room for them?
Whom does the wind seek? For whom
is the wet glistening of streams?

Is there by the banks
of the pond's deep dreaming
nowhere they can see their faces reflected?

They need only, as a tree does,
a little space in which to grow.

-- R.M. Rilke
Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Read it in the original German here

penetrating the hollow

When we oppose proximate to distant vision, we do not mean that in the latter the object is farther away. To look means here, speaking narrowly, to focus both ocular rays on a point which, thanks to this, becomes favored, optically privileged. In distant vision we do not fix the gaze on any point, but rather attempt to embrace the whole field, including its boundaries. For this reason, we avoid focusing the eyes as much as possible. And then we are surprised to find that the object just perceived -- our entire visual field -- is concave. If we are in a house the concavity is bordered by the walls, the roof, the floor. This border or limit is a surface that tends to take the form of a hemisphere viewed from within. But where does the concavity begin? There is no possibility of doubt: it begins at our eyes themselves.

The result is that what we see at a distance is hollow space as such. The content of perception is not strictly the surface in which the hollow space terminates, but rather the whole hollow space itself, from the eyeball to the wall or the horizon.

This fact obliges us to recognize the following paradox: the object of sight is not farther off in distant than in proximate vision, but on the contrary is nearer, since it begins at our cornea. In pure distant vision, our attention, instead of being directed farther away, has drawn back to the absolute proximate, and the eyebeam, instead of striking the convexity of a solid body and staying fixed on it, penetrates a concave object, glides into a hollow.

-- José Ortega y Gasset, "On Point of View in the Arts" Partisan Review 16:8
Translated by Paul Snodgrass and Joseph Frank

on possibility

The sea boils and pigs have wings because in poetry all things are possible— if you are man enough. They are possible because in poetry the disparate elements are not combined in logic, which can join things only under certain categories and under the law of contradiction; they are combined in poetry rather as experience, and experience has decided to ignore logic, except perhaps as another field of experience.

-- Allen Tate Reason in Madness

bath

...I arrived at another hall, the roof of which was of a pale blue, spangled with constellations of silver stars, and supported by porphyry pillars of a paler red than ordinary... The whole of the floor of this hall, except a narrow path behind the pillars, paved with black, was hollowed into a huge basin, many feet deep, and filled with the purest, most liquid and radiant water. The sides of the basin were white marble, and the bottom was paved with all kinds of refulgent stones, of every shape and hue. In their arrangement, you would have supposed, at first sight, that there was no design, for they seemed to lie as if cast there from careless and playful hands; but it was a most harmonious confusion; and as I looked at the play of their colours, especially when the waters were in motion, I came at last to feel as if not one little pebble could be displaced, without injuring the effect of the whole. Beneath this floor of the water, lay the reflection of the blue inverted roof, fretted with its silver stars, like a second deeper sea, clasping and upholding the first... Led by an irresistible desire, I undressed, and plunged into the water. It clothed me as with a new sense and its object both in one. The waters lay so close to me, they seemed to enter and revive my heart. I rose to the surface, shook the water from my hair, and swam as in a rainbow, amid the coruscations of the gems below seen through the agitation caused by my motion. Then, with open eyes, I dived, and swam beneath the surface. And here was a new wonder. For the basin, thus beheld, appeared to extend on all sides like a sea, with here and there groups as of ocean rocks, hollowed by ceaseless billows into wondrous caves and grotesque pinnacles. Around the caves grew sea-weeds of all hues, and the corals glowed between; while far off, I saw the glimmer of what seemed to be creatures of human form at home in the waters. I thought I had been enchanted; and that when I rose to the surface, I should find myself miles from land, swimming alone upon a heaving sea; but when my eyes emerged from the waters, I saw above me the blue spangled vault, and the red pillars around. I dived again, and found myself once more in the heart of a great sea. I then arose, and swam to the edge, where I got out easily, for the water reached the very brim, and, as I drew near washed in tiny waves over the black marble border. I dressed, and went out, deeply refreshed.

-- George MacDonald Phantastes

The Gateway

Now the heart sings with all its thousand voices
To hear this city of cells, my body, sing.
The tree through the stiff clay at long last forces
Its thin strong roots and taps the secret spring.

And the sweet waters without intermission
Climb to the tips of its green tenement;
The breasts have borne the grace of their possession,
The lips have felt the pressure of content.

Here I come home: in this expected country
They know my name and speak it with delight.
I am the dream and you my gates of entry,
The means by which I waken into light.

-- A.D. Hope

what is

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity....nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insousiance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight of the graygull over the bay or the mettlesome action of the blood horse or the tall leanings of sunflowers on their stalk or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven or the appearance of the moon afterward with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him. The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what is... What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.

-- Walt Whitman Preface to Leaves of Grass