Eleni Karaindrou - An Ode Of Tears!

Sing, oh Muse,
Sing, oh Muse, a new melody
A tune for the dead, an ode of tears
On Troy's tomb,
For Troy I shall now wail a melancholy melody
For Troy I shall now wail a melancholy melody
I'll recount how I was lost
And how I was enslaved, miserable me,
By the Argeians four-wheeled carriage.
How the Achaeans left the Horse
Neighing to the sky
With the golden ornaments
Outside our portals
Sing, oh Muse, a new melody,
A tune for the dead, an ode of tears
On Troy's tomb.

Kayhan Kalhor- Waiting for the Rain

ZAKIR HUSSAIN - Music of the Deserts

again more of Tuebingen

from home to Tuebingen

why jump

why jump shadows

when you can just 

step across

to meet?

when you are afraid

i will build bridges

drawn with flowers

and the smile of donkeys

but if you walk  away

i will search oblivion

in the forest of life

and swim in my waters

the lakes are deep

and silvery from the moon

the birds pause in their song

when i reach the shore

there i will rise

with the wind

like smoke, gone

far into the sky

where i will be nameless

and cannot be called

to drift with fate

until.

Eleni Karaindrou - On the road.

Music video - ELENI KARAINDROU - Seabirds.avi

On Pain, Khalil Gibran

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within
you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy
in silence and tranquillity:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by
the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has
been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has
moistened with His own sacred tears.

 Khalil Gibran

Auguries of Innocence, William Blake, extract

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. 

An almost made up poem, Charles Bukowski

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.

Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. 

Simplicity, Jorges Luis Borges

Simplicity

It opens, the gate to the garden
with the docility of a page
that frequent devotion questions
and inside, my gaze
has no need to fix on objects
that already exist, exact, in memory.
I know the customs and souls
and that dialect of allusions
that every human gathering goes weaving.
I've no need to speak
nor claim false privilege;
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness.
This is to reach the highest thing,
that Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable Reality,
like stones and trees.

Jorges Luis Borges 

Pour faire le portrait d'un oiseau

stolen~beautiful.

next poem:

how to paint  the cage so it can be opened from inside....







To Paint a Bird's Portrait



Paint first a cage
with the door open
next paint
something pretty
something simple
something lovely
something of use
to the bird
then put the canvas near a tree
in a garden
in the woods
or in a forest
hide behind the tree
say nothing
don’t move…
Sometimes the bird comes quickly
but it can just as well take many years
before deciding
Don’t be disheartened
wait
wait years if need be
the pace of the bird’s arrival
bearing no relation
to the success of the painting
When the bird comes
if it comes
keep very still
wait for the bird to enter the cage
and once it has
gently shut the door with the brush
then
paint out the bars one by one
taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers
Next paint the tree’s portrait
choosing the loveliest of its branches
for the bird
paint likewise the green leaves and fresh breeze
the sun’s scintillation
and the clamor of crickets in the heat of summer
and then wait until the bird decides to sing
If the bird does not sing
that’s a bad sign
A sign the painting is no good
but if it sings that’s a good sign
a sign you can sign

Hierarchy

i grew up with my father forwarding to me and discussing with me the paths of spiritual enlightenment and of eastern wisdom and the path of compassion, the grace of the avatars, those free of re-incarnation who decided to step down again and help us in our need and suffering.

in his younger years my father had found inspiration in theosophy (H.Blavatsky) and he kept busy studying Paracelsus all his life, the Kabbalah and the Bhagavad Gita.

i grasped as a child that all religions have just one source as all words have, of which the latter  was not  hard to believe  with continous exploration of etymology.
my young curiosity made me ask questions without end.

at school i met the teachings of christianity in various aspects, crude and ridden with guilt and sacrifice and blood and a history of martyrdom and heroism. I couldn't see any path to follow in it, and i could not find to "believe" as requested.

in my later years, what put me off in my mid-twenties, was not so much studying medicine and coming to modern scientific thinking: it was the mistrust in a hierarchical order of the universe.

in theosophy  though admitting multiple universes which i find attractive to this day, a human is shown to consist of lower and higher levels from the mere physical to the highest spiritual level.

only: up to this day i cannot see the division between matter and spirit, i see matter is spirit. it is a perception, a working in the mind.

i feel the human should not bee seen in this way, in the division of parts less worth and more worth
nor in a light centered only on the human itself. i rather put the question: is the rose bush worth less than the rose as a flower? and is not the rose the same as we are, the universe and the earth unfolding?

hierarchy thinking is quickly arrogant and creates a division between "them" and "us".
when hierachically structured systems are used, this is easily taken as a tool for domination.

To be clear, it is as if to say: this is more beautiful than this. such a statement must be untrue. either something or somebody whatever these words can mean is seen as beautiful or as not beautiful.
the quality of beauty is lost in comparison.

it is the same with ugliness. i could say, it is ugly as an experience to see somebody
cruelly torturing an animal. when i should start to compare it to other ugly experiences,
the quality of ugliness may be lost in its full meaning.

unfortunately our perception of the experiene of qualities gets blunted by repetition and comparison.

as an example, this is brought on to happen with the daily news. one war and one suffering after the other appear on our tv screens for commercial entertainment. it is too easy to say, this is bad. and o, this is really bad. this is worse. in the end, thanks god i am not there.
this is exactly what happens: this stream of ugliness takes our presence away and in the end may even bore us and leave us in total estrangement from us and  reality.
the quality of ugliness is lost, and boredom is the result.

now comes the difficult part, and it confuses me.it will continue to confuse me.
it is the badness in the world as i wouldn't know another name or term.
it confuses me, even my own..
it is very clearly there.

and there are people whom i experience as more bad than others.
it see it as important in each case NOT to compare them to other bad people.
it would again make badness a matter of "relatively" bad or "absolute" bad or not "so" bad.
i cannot accept this. bad is bad.

the difficult part now is: are people who concentrate a lot of badness in them less developed
spiritually than others? i don't know because there are many people who are not in any visible way developing much at all, they are just living restrained in their badness by law, opinion  and habit, their narrow perspective doesn't allow their badness to come outside the full way. under other circumstances i could easily imagine them as wardens in a concentration camp.

so, without fixing this to hierarchical systems, i think there are persons spiritually more developed than others and it is not just a matter of intellect and intelligence acquired from books but a result of the heart of life itself flowering and smiling.

and it appears to me that it is more easy for some to allow this to be than for others, from birth.
for the "many" it can be true that they remember this in their depth and they have to fight through rubbish and obstacles, through clouds and memories and tears to create space for their heart and spirit to flow.

the old teachings in zen, in meditation, as long as they don't give a system, they can be some of the tools to create space by dissolving the inner noise and clouds.

the only wisdom i can see is kindness.
not a temporary personal enlightenment nor to reach a far and egoistic goal of non-reincarnation.
just light.

http://www.transpersonalstudies.org/ImagesRepository/ijts/Downloads/Friedman%20et%20al%20Spiritual%20Development.pdf

Lewis Carroll, What theTortoise said to Achilles

Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back.

"So you've got to the end of our race-course?" said the Tortoise. "Even though it does consist of an infinite series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or other had proved that the thing couldn't be done?"

"It can be done," said Achilles. "It has been done! Solvitur ambulando. You see the distances were constantly diminishing; and so --"

"But if they had been constantly increasing?" the Tortoise interrupted "How then?"

"Then I shouldn't be here," Achilles modestly replied; "and you would have got several times round the world, by this time!"

"You flatter me -- flatten, I mean" said the Tortoise; "for you are a heavy weight, and no mistake! Well now, would you like to hear of a race-course, that most people fancy they can get to the end of in two or three steps, while it really consists of an infinite number of distances, each one longer than the previous one?"

"Very much indeed!" said the Grecian warrior, as he drew from his helmet (few Grecian warriors possessed pockets in those days) an enormous note-book and a pencil. "Proceed! And speak slowly, please! Shorthand isn't invented yet!"

"That beautiful First Proposition of Euclid!" the Tortoise murmured dreamily. "You admire Euclid?"

"Passionately! So far, at least, as one can admire a treatise that won't he published for some centuries to come!"

"Well, now, let's take a little bit of the argument in that First Proposition -- just two steps, and the conclusion drawn from them. Kindly enter them in your notebook. And in order to refer to them conveniently, let's call them A, B, and Z: --

(A) Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other.

(B) The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same.

(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other.

Readers of Euclid will grant, I suppose, that Z follows logically from A and B, so that any one who accepts A and B as true, must accept Z as true?"

"Undoubtedly! The youngest child in a High School -- as soon as High Schools are invented, which will not be till some two thousand years later -- will grant that."

"And if some reader had not yet accepted A and B as true, he might still accept the sequence as a valid one, I suppose?"

"No doubt such a reader might exist. He might say 'I accept as true the Hypothetical Proposition that, if A and B be true, Z must be true; but, I don't accept A and B as true.' Such a reader would do wisely in abandoning Euclid, and taking to football."

"And might there not also he some reader who would say 'I accept A and B as true, but I don't accept the Hypothetical '?"

"Certainly there might. He, also, had better take to football."

"And neither of these readers," the Tortoise continued, "is as yet under any logical necessity to accept Z as true?"

"Quite so," Achilles assented.

"Well, now, I want you to consider me as a reader of the second kind, and to force me, logically, to accept Z as true."

"A tortoise playing football would be -- " Achilles was beginning

"-- an anomaly, of course," the Tortoise hastily interrupted. "Don't wander from the point. Let's have Z first, and football afterwards!"

"I'm to force you to accept Z, am I?" Achilles said musingly. "And your present position is that you accept A and B, but you don't accept the Hypothetical --"

"Let's call it C," said the Tortoise.

"-- but you don't accept

(C) If A and B are true, Z must be true. "

"That is my present position," said the Tortoise.

"Then I must ask you to accept C."

"I'll do so," said the Tortoise, "as soon as you've entered it in that note-book of yours. What else have you got in it?"

"Only a few memoranda," said Achilles, nervously fluttering the leaves: "a few memoranda of -- of the battles in which I have distinguished myself!"

"Plenty of blank leaves, I see!" the Tortoise cheerily remarked. "We shall need them all!" (Achilles shuddered.) "Now write as I dictate: --

(A) Things that arc equal to the same are equal to each other.

(B) The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same.

(C) If A and B are true, Z must be true.

(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other."

"You should call it D, not Z," said Achilles. "It comes next to the other three. If you accept A and B and C, you must accept Z."

"And why must I?"

"Because it follows logically from them. If A and B and C are true, Z must be true. You don't dispute that, I imagine?"

"If A and B and C are true, Z must he true," the Tortoise thoughtfully repeated. "That's another Hypothetical, isn't it? And, if I failed to see its truth, I might accept A and B and C', and still not accept Z. mightn't I?"

"You might," the candid hero admitted; "though such obtuseness would certainly be phenomenal. Still, the event is possible. So I must ask you to grant one more Hypothetical."

"Very good. I'm quite willing to grant it, as soon as you've written it down. We will call it

(D) If A and B and C are true, Z must be true.

"Have you entered that in your notebook?"

"I have!" Achilles joyfully exclaimed, as he ran the pencil into its sheath. "And at last we've got to the end of this ideal race-course! Now that you accept A and B and C and D, of course you accept Z."

"Do I?" said the Tortoise innocently. "Let's make that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and D. Suppose I still refused to accept Z?"

"Then Logic would force you to do it!" Achilles triumphantly replied. "Logic would tell you 'You can't help yourself. Now that you've accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z!' So you've no choice, you see."

"Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down," said the Tortoise. "So enter it in your book, please. We will call it

(E) If A and B and C and D are true, Z must be true. Until I've granted that, of course I needn't grant Z. So it's quite a necessary step, you see?"

"I see," said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.

Here narrator, having pressing business at the Bank, was obliged to leave the happy pair, and did not again pass the spot until some months afterwards. When he did so, Achilles was still seated on the back of the much-enduring Tortoise, and was writing in his note-book, which appeared to be nearly full. The Tortoise was saying, "Have you got that last step written down? Unless I've lost count, that makes a thousand and one. There are several millions more to come. And would you mind, as a personal favour, considering what a lot of instruction this colloquy of ours will provide for the Logicians of the Nineteenth Century -- would you mind adopting a pun that my cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be re-named Taught-Us?"

"As you please!" replied the weary warrior, in the hollow tones of despair, as he buried his face in his hands. "Provided that you, for your part, will adopt a pun the Mock-Turtle never made, and allow yourself to be re-named A Kill-Ease!"


The following links leads to
"Goedel,Escher, bach" by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Mind you, there are a lot of mistakes in it, wrong spelling etc.

http://www.physixfan.com/wp-content/files/GEBen.pdf

life

life is simple and complex.
all complexity starts with simple numbers.
the origin of simplicity is a mystery.
infinity, pi and zero are glimpses of  the universe.
the gates of perception open with beauty and joy:
to be lucid is to see the patterns flowing from their source.

on the way

silence

sometimes, and i am sure of this, it is not a good moment to write poems,
to write, to talk...

Michael Brook & Djivan Gasparyan - Take My Heart

"I wish you were a flower in my garden. I wish you were a bird flying over my garden. I wish you were with me, my love. Stay with me, don't cause me too much pain. You may take my heart away if you wish, only please don't leave me. Stay with me and I will do anything for you."

my secret lake

Hossein Alizadeh & Djivan Gasparyan - Birds, M.Azad

if anybody has the english lyrics from Mahoud Moshref Azad Tehrani's text:
please comment!

Yasmin Levy - Algo De Ti

Yasmin Levy - Algo De Ti

Algo de mi olvidarás cuando te vayas de aquí, algo de mi recordarás cuando te alejes de mi, y algo siempre quedara contigo después que atranques esta puerta y te vayas para no volver jamás. Algo de ti se quedará aunque yo me quede aquí, algo de ti permanecerá cuando me separe de ti, y algo siempre seguirá viviendo y dejará la puerta abierta, quizás llegará el día que vuelvas… Algo de ti se quedará aunque yo me quede aquí, algo de ti permanecerá cuando me separe de ti, y algo siempre seguirá viviendo y dejará la puerta abierta quizás llegará el día que vuelvas… Después que te fuiste el infierno llegó, parece que las calles están cubiertas de tristeza, estoy vagando por los callejones alejados  como una sombra de la mujer que fui, pero encontraré mis propias fuerzas  y de nuevo sonreiré porque la vida es tan bella que hay que vivirla plenamente, Y la felicidad sólo de mí depende