Sunday, January 31, 2021
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Idol, Arthur Rimbaud
Hidden, wrinkled as a flush violet wedged
Humbly amid the moss, it breathes
Still wet with love that leaves
Along the gentle white curve of buttock to its edge.
Like milky tears, a flow,
Wept in a cruel wind forcing travel
Back across the russet marl and gravel
To be lost where the curve bids it go.
Often my dream with this opening has played,
My soul, jealous of the fleshly lay,
Has fashioned it a tawny reservoir, its nest of moans.
It is the enthralling olive, the seductive flute,
The burnt almond of heaven descends this chute
—Astarte of the Dews enclosed!
(-translated from the French by Michael Thomas Davis-)
Friday, January 29, 2021
Anais Nin, quotes from diaries
...."When we are in conflict we tend to make such sharp oppositions between ideas and attitudes and get caught and entangled in what seems to be a hopeless choice, but when the neurotic ambivalence is resolved one tends to move beyond sharp differences, sharply defined boundaries and begins to see the interaction between everything, the relation between everything."....
..."I opposed subjective to objective, imagination to realism. I thought that having gone so deeply into my own feelings and dramas I could never again reach objectivity and knowledge of others. But now I know that any experience carried out deeply to its ultimate leads you beyond yourself into a larger relation to the experience of others. If you intensify and complete your subjective emotions, visions, you see their relation to others’ emotions. It is not a question of choosing between them, one at the cost of another, but a matter of completion, of inclusion, an encompassing, unifying, and integrating which makes maturity."....
Love Crown, Paul Celan
Now autumn nibbles its leaf from my hand: we are friends.
We take time out of a nutshell and teach it how to go:
time turns and goes back into its shell.
Now in the mirror it is Sunday,
in the dream there is a place for the calm of sleep,
in the mouth, the taste of truth.
My eye moves down the belly of my love:
we see one another,
we speak the darkness to ourselves,
we love one another like poppy and remembrance,
we sleep like the liquor in seashells,
like the ocean in the bloodbeams of the moon.
We stand at the window embracing, they see us from the street,
it is time they knew!
It is time that the stone let itself break into flower,
that the unresting heart beat.
It is time there was time.
It is time.
( translated from the German
by Robert Pinsky)
Monday, January 25, 2021
On 'love', quotes from : Roland Barthes
"Does not this whole paroxysm of love’s declaration conceal some lack? We would not need to speak this word, if it were not to obscure, as the squid does with his ink, the failure of desire under the excess of affirmation."
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"There’s no help for it: I love you is a demand: hence it can only embarrass anyone who receives it, except the Mother — and except God!"
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The Sea is History , Derek Walcott
The Sea is History
by: Derek Walcott
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea
has locked them all. The sea is history.
First, there was the heaving oil
of nothing, heavy as chaos,
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,
the lantern of a lonely caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning;
Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone
on the tilting sea-floor
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,
that was The Ark of The Covenant.
Then came through the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea-floor
the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage
as the cowries clustered white on the manacles
of the drowned women,
and those were the ivory bracelets
of The Song of Solomon,
and the ocean kept turning its empty pages
because this was not history,
then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs
brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palmleaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw
of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
and where is your Renaissance?
Sir, it is locked in the sea-sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the man-o-wars floated down;
strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself,
it’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral
past the gothic windows of sea-fans,
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed
blinks, weighted by its jewels like a queen,
and these groyned ribs with barnacles
pitted like stone,
are the cathedrals,
and the furnace before the hurricanes
and the bones ground by windmills
into marl and corn-meal,
and that was Lamentations
that was just Lamentations
it was not history;
then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,
and at evening, the midges’ choirs
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God
bleeding to sunset and that was The New Testament.
The came the white sister’s clapping
like the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation—
jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,
but that was not history,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation,
then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,
fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,
and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each page closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns
and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea-pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo
of history, really beginning.