It was the most enjoyable afternoon for me as we inspected the fish traps. I felt I was very lucky because these chaps had invited me to join them. I was certain this friendship would turn out to be very important to the path of my life thereafter.
I had so much to learn. I could’nt swim and I didn’t know how to handle a fish and I thought it was up to these fellows to teach me.
I was extremely proud to be with them.
Heliotrope sent me this this evening: one in a long line of brilliantly odd, uncomfortable, and almost brutally self-indulgent ways of maybe living a little longer. While the CRONies and large quantities of white tea have their places in other peoples’ lives, this one I just might go for. Pair a house like this with odd amounts of rigorous exercise, slightly destabilizing desk chairs, and my existing tendency to be tense and uncertain – or perhaps tentative – and I may well live forever. Heliotrope already will. At least, with a homespun version of this practice, we will not risk the slow decline into my nightmare, a deep couch and Thursday night television.
Romance has no part in it.
The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together.
It has its seasons,
for and against,
whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
to assert
toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
is to tear flesh,
I have proceeded
through them.
Keep
the briars out,
they say.
You cannot live
and keep free of
briars.
Children pick flowers.
Let them.
Though having them
in hand
they have no further use for them
but leave them crumpled
at the curb’s edge.
As our imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.
1
The gift was never named. We lived and a hit light created stood in
its sphere.
Castles on rocky spurs, herbs in river valleys, descents into the bays
under ash trees.
All past wars in the flesh, all loves, conch shells of the Celts, Norman
boats by the cliffs.
Breathing in, breathing out, o Elysium, we would kneel and kiss the
earth.
A naked girl crossed a town overgrown with green moss and bees
returned heavy for their evening milking.
Labrynths of species at our headrest up to the thick of phosphorous
woods at the entrance of limestone caves.
And in summer rainstorm putting out paper lanterns on the dark
village square, couples laughing in flight.
Water steamed at dawn by Calypso’s island where an oriole flutters in
the white crown of a poplar.
I looked at fishermen’s dinghies stopped at the other shore and the
year once again turned over, the vintage season began.
2
I address you, my consciousness, when in a sultry night shot with
lightnings the plane is landing at Beauvais or Kalamazoo.
And a stewardess moves about quietly so not to wake anyone while
the cellular wax of cities glimmers beneath.
I believed I would understand but it is late and I know nothing except
laughter and weeping.
The wet grasses of fertile deltas cleansed me from time and changed all
into a present without beginning or end.
I disappear in architectural spirals in lines of a crystal, in the sound of
instruments playing in forests.
Once again I return to excessive orchards and only the echo seeks me
in that house on the hill under a hundred-year-old hazel tree.
The how can you overtake me, you, weighing blame and merit, now
when I do not remember who I am and who I was?
On many shores at once I am lying cheek on the sand and the same
ocean runs in, beating its ecstatic drums.
3.
And throughout the afternoon the endless talk of cicadas while on the
slope they are drinking wine from a traveler’s goblet.
Fingers ripping at meat, juice trickles on graying beards, a ring
perhaps or glitter from canopied beds, from cradles on rockers, washed
and combed by her mother’s hand so that undoing her hair we
remove a tortoiseshell comb.
Skin scented with oils, arch-browed on city squares, her breasts for
out cupped hands in the Tigris and Euphrates gardens.
Then they beat on the strings and shout on the heights and below at
the bend of a river the campground’s orange tents slowly
surrender to shadows.
4.
Nothing but laughter and weeping. Terror and no defense and arm in
arm they drag me to a pit of tangled bones.
Soon I will join their dance, with bailiffs, wenches, and kings, such as
they used to paint on the tablecloth at our revels.
With a train of my clock carried by the Great Jester, not I, just the
Sinner to whom a honey-sweet age was brought by winged
Fortune.
To whom three masked Slavic devils, Duliban, Kostruban, Mendrela,
squealing and farting, would offer huge smoking plates.
Fingers grabbing at fingers, tongues fornicating with tongues, but not
mine was the sense of touch, not mine was the knowledge.
Beyond seven rocky mountains I searched for my Teacher and yet I
am here, no myself, at a pit of tangled bones.
I am standing on a theatrum, astonished by the last things, the puppet
Death has black ribs and still I cannot believe.
5
The scent of freshly mown clover redeemed the perished armies and
the meadows glittered in headlights forever.
An immense night of July filled my mouth with a taste of rain and
near Puybrun by the bridges my childhood was given back.
The warm encampments of crickets chirped under a low cloud just as
in our lost homelands where a wooden cart goes creaking.
Borne by an inscrutable power, one century gone, I heard, beating in
darkness, the heart of the dead and the living.
6
What separates, fall. Yet my scream “no!” is still heard though it
burned out in the wind.
Only what separates does not fall. All the rest is beyond persistence.
I wanted to describe this, not that, basket of vegetables with a
redheaded doll of a leek laid across it.
And a stocking on the arm of a chair, a dress crumpled as it was, this
way, no other.
I wanted to describe her, no one else, asleep on her belly, made secure
by the warmth of his leg.
Also a cat in the unique tower as purring he composes his memorable
book.
Not ships but one ship with a blue patch in the corner of its sail.
Not streets, for one there was a street with a shop sign:
“Schuhmacher Pupke.”
In vain I tried because what remains is the ever-recurring basket.
And not she whose skin perhaps I, of all men, loved, but a
grammatical form.
No one cares that precisely this cat wrote The Adventures of Telemachus.
And the street will always be only one of many streets without name.
7
From a limbo for unbaptized infants and for animal souls let a dead fox
step out to testify against the language.
Standing for a second in an ant-wing light of pine needles before a
boy summoned to speak of him forty years later.
Not a general one, a plenipotentiary of the idea of the fox, in his cloak
lined with the universals.
But he, from a coniferous forest near the village Zegary.
I bring him before the high tribunal in my defense, for what remains
after desires are doubt and much regret.
And one runs and sails through archipelagoes in the hope of finding a
place of immutable possession.
Till chandeliers in the rooms of Heloise and Annalena die out and
angels blow trumpets on the steps of a sculptured bed.
A cheerless dawn advances beyond a palm-lined alley, loudly
proclaimed by the rattling surf.
And whatever once entered a bolted house of the five senses now is
set in the brocade of a style.
Which, you honour, does not distinguish particular cases.
8
At dawn the expanse takes its rise, a high horizontal whiteness up to
the slopes of Tamalpais.
It is torn apart and in the wood of vapor a herd of islands and
promontories on their watery pastures.
Knife-blue in twilight, a rose-tinted tin, liquid copper, isumrud,
smaragdos.
Quiverfuls of buildings touched by a ray: Oakland, San Francisco,
before the mica in motion lights up below: Berkeley, El Cerrito.
In the oceanic wind eucalyptus husks clashing and disentangling.
Height, length, and width take in their arms a sleeping caterpillar of a
rolled body.
And carry it over a frozen waste of the Sierras to the most distant
province of the continent.
Layers of Christmas tinsels wheel around, cities on the bay, buckled by
luminous ropes of three bridges.
In the hour of ennding night it amazes—this place, this time, assigned
for an awakening of this particular body.
9
I asked what was the day. It was St. Andrew’s Eve.
She and her smashed little mirrors under the weeds and snows where
also the States and banners molder.
Outlandish districts in mud up the axle-tree, names I alone
remember: Gineitai, Apytalaukis.
In the silence of stopping spinning-wheels, fear by the flame of two
candles, a mouse scratching, a nuptial of phantoms.
In electronic music I heard lugubrious sirens, people’s panicky calls
crushed into flutters and rustles.
I was sitting before a mirror but noo hand reached out of darkness to
touch me on the shoulder.
There, behind me, flash after flash, flocks of birds were taking off from
the banks of spring ice.
Fanning with their four wings storks stoood on their nest in a majestic
copulation.
My dishonest memory did not preserve anything, save the triumph of
nameless births.
When I would hear a voice, it seemed to me I distinguished in it
words of forgiveness.
10
The dream shared at night by all people has inhabitants, hairy animals.
It is a huge and snug forest and everyone entering it walks on all fours
till dawn through the very thick of the tangle.
Through the wilderness inaccessible to metal objects, all-embracing
like a warm and deep river.
In satin tunnels the touch distinguishes apples and their color that does
not recall anything real.
All are quadrupeds, their thighs rejoice at the badger-bear softness,
their rosy tongues lick each other’s fur.
The “I” is felt with amazement in the heartbeat, but so large it cannot
be filled by the whole Earth with her seasons.
Now would the skin guarding a different essence trace any boundary.
Later on, in crude light, separated into you and me, they try with a
bare foot pebbles on the floor.
The two-legged, some to the left, some to the right, put on their
belts, garters, slacks, and sandals.
And they move on their stilts, longing after a forest home, after low
tunnels, after an assigned return to It.
11
A coelentera, all pulsating flesh, animal-flower.
All fire, made up of falling bodies joined by the black pin of sex.
It breathes in the center of a galaxy, drawing to itself star after star.
And I, an instant of its duration, on multilaned roads which penetrate
half-opened mountains.
Bare mountains overgrown with ageless grass, opened and frozen at
a sunset before the generations.
Where at large curves one sees nests of cisterns or transparent towers,
perhaps of missiles.
Along brown leaks by the seashore, rusty stones and butcheries where
quartered whales are ground to powder.
I wanted to be a judge but those who I called “they” have changed
into myself.
I was getting rid of my faith so as not to be better than men and
women who are certain only of their unknowing.
And on the roads of my terrestrial homeland turning round with the
music of the spheres
I thought that all I could do would be done better one day. (C. Milosz, Berkeley, 1965)
Tags: CzeslawMilosz, Thistle and Nettle, poetry, poems, Berkeley, 1965
“Is” comes from the Aryan root, as, to breathe. The English “not” euqals the Sanscrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish. “Be” is from bhu, to grow.
I say the syllable, king, as that is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s that it has the mind’s speed…
it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener…
it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born.
But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing, the—what shall we call it, the Boss of all, the “Single Intelligence.” And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, that line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination.
The trouble with most work, to my taking, since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas, and from such wholes as, say, Chaucer’s Troilus or S’s Lear, is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.
Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
And the Joker? that is in the 1st half of the proposition that, in composing, one lets-it-rip; and that it is in the 2nd half, surprise, it is the LINE that’s the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going.
*
( c. Olson)
A long hiatus – during which I put the blog to sleep, woke it up, and let it lie still for a while, thinking.
But now, in honour of getting up and doing things, and the kind of massive cleanout, reassessment and courage that is only possible during the lunarially determined festival of discardia (thank you F), a very small post in praise of athleticism, endurance, and excellence on all. After all, blogs are, I learn, like gym memberships: it’s keeping them up that counts.
And Joyce Carol Oates on running, writing, and taking flight. (Or, for a negative example, 52 Projects offer (nearly) 52 ways to avoid running.)
And a recommendation to read H.U. Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty, and then to go swimming for as long as possible.
This spring, f and I will be here, experimenting with the art of going places without going places. Picnics in the park, wide-beamed sunglasses, covert tropical bikinis, beer and oysters on the porch. postcards to come, from the edge of the northern edge of a small piece of a small country.
Below, some notes from Michele Serre’s Genesis:
(faces and bodies)
We sometimes encounter bodies of such a singular nature, that they do not let convention have their face; their mannerisms belong to no one but themselves. We can recognize them anywhere and at any time, they’re so unusual. They are themselves, and they are only themselves, that what they are, that alone. If these individuals, such oddball, had nothing banal about them at all, we might deem them a bit more than eccentrics, we might be a bit worried, perhaps we would shuffle them toward the asylum. To the convensional we also owe communication between ourselves. There must be stereotype in every face. No doubt the old painter of the unknown masterpiece was said
…
(gymnastics and nakedness)
It is imperative to be nothing, all you need to think is to be nobody. The hygiene of thinking, the asceticism of thinking, comes down to gymnastics. Gymnastics means one seeks nakedness. Not that it is a question of taking off one’s clothes. One can remove one’s clothes, that isn’t the point. Gymnastic or gymnosophic or gymnopedic nakedness is very close to the absence that thinks. Nakedness goes back to the underdetermined. To dismiss every opinion fro one’s mind, every idea, every hate, is to level of the contours of opinionated determination, it is to find the care and barren pain. The unwritten wax tablet has lost, forgotten its determinations, with no writing, it iis un-differentiated. Opinion is stable, it is stiff, it s singular,. it defines someone through hates. The opinionated person is differentiated like a lobster’s claw. Inventive thinking is unstable, it is undetermined, it is un-differentiated, it is as little singular in its function as is our hand. The latter can make itself into a pincer, it can be fist and hammer, cupped palm and goblet, tentacle and suction cup, claw and soft touch. Anything. A hand is determined, accordingly. So what is a hand? It is not an organ, it is faculty, a capacity for doing, for becoming claw or paw, weapon or compendium. It is a naked faculty. A faculty is not special, it is never specific, it is the possibility of doing something in general. To talk about the faculties of the soup is a great misnomer, when we are differentiating between them: the soup is also a naked faculty. It is nakedness. We live by bare hands. Our hands are that nakedness I find in gymnastics, that pure faculty, cleared up by exercise, by the asceticism of un-differentiation. I think, un-differentiated. Thus I am anyone, animal, element, stone or wind, number, you and him, us. Nothing. Nobody. Blank. Bare.
Our body comes down time, it comes down the valley, the thalweg of difference. It runs fatally along determination. Cracking with rheumatism, gnarled, arborescent, daily inured to one gesture and only one, the hand becomes a mere terminal, either technical or bestial. Old Renoir’s hand is the organ of the painter species. Difference is our old age. metamorphsis, metempsychosis, tragic moments when our body altogether collapses into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus. These are fables, or myths, or tall tales, this is the regular and physical march of time toward the determined. The beast difference cries help in the direction of beauty undetermined. La fontaine, the fountain of indifference invents fables with stable forms… The joint loses—as they put it in mechanics—a certain degree of free play, it ends up with only one draft, its difference. The hand becomes a mere clamp, the body a mere animal, and thought becomes a mere opinion. The have lost their freedom.
Gymnastics does not require that one get naked to exercise freely. Quite to the contrary, it freely exercises in order to rediscover nakedness. It iis a practice for going back in time. It un-differentiates the body, it seeks to put it into the state of a bare hand. It turns the body into a faculty. It turns it into a capacity. It turns it into a possibility. Gymnastics bleaches the body. There it iis, in the abstract.
It has become the naked body of nobody.
I think naked and I am nobody.
I dance naked, I am nothing.
Tags: running, Joyce Carol Oates, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michele Serre, 52 Projects, writing, hiatus, spring break, discardia, gym memberships
(another pensive herbivore, seated.)
blowing snow and mist, a lamp at an elbow, a long morning in bed.
this year will be a big one. nerves, unusual for me at annum’s outset. but good nerves:
it seems right now that things are beginning to fall into a kind of possible order: a potential direct, or a potential for direction on many planes: in love, in work, in geography, in communication, in reading. a time for sweeping out a few mental and physical cobwebs, for, as we say sometimes, stepping out.
recent reading, from new year’s morning: some research on neuroplasticity and mental longetivity, from Sharpbrains and the New Scientist:
http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18625011.900
Also, awaiting the long-awaited publication (today) of Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food.” In the meantime, the NYT’s suggestions for the year’s most worthwhile turners:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/books/28intro.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=c3f0e0c20f968e63&ei=5087%0A
Today: taking a few long and vigorous walks in the torrential awe-inspiring landscape, working through Mohammad Ali and Darwish’s volumes for review, and making black-eyes peas, for luck.
happy new year to you all. may it bring bright days, may we meet it head on.
till later, L.
this is where she gathers her legs beneath her.
this silent month. full of motion and darkness, moving too quickly and too slowly at once, turning circles in rooms without eyes.
currently reading: Tennessee William’s notebooks, still – meticulously edited, carefully annotated. religiously kept from two weeks before his twenty-fifth birthday to well into his seventy-sixth year. so much coffee, confusion, sleeping tablets, but a different kind of clarity – the kind that sustains a life of dark writing and brutally true observation.
these days: spending the season with F., going inward, making slow and undersoil plans for next year.
beginning a job search for next year in the States – looking to be in New York or Seattle, working in some kind of publishing, writing, research or design field. beginning to learn various forms of design and web work, getting back to my language study, abandoned in the crunch to finish the dissertation.
(today has been very slow: waking, medicine, drinking tea, taking cold medicine, reading, digging through news files, making plans, as always. lately the plans have taken on their traditional energy, hope, passion. i was slow to realize the virus, and hurt someone important as a result. mistaking the blank coldness, the tired body, the weak mind for a problem between us, a lack of feeling. weakened defenses made everything barbed, stinging – particularly my own words as they came, each falling so much heavier than intended. i can only pray for his patience.)
a wonderful person told me recently that, whatever shape life takes, the only thing that really matters is maintaining passion, maintaining the inner, the secret, the vital – almost at any cost. at the cost of reason, at the cost of money, at the cost of stability, at the cost of sleep, at the cost of reputation. it is so easy to over-secure. it is so easy to act of of non-action – which, for me, means acting out of fear. the result is a kind of numbness, a kind of non-feeling, an inner, unrestful sleep. he called this passion tablets.
W spoke of the ease with which we fall asleep. How easy it is to push on with our decisions, making the best, putting up with the normality and tedium that we deserve.
Taking this thought forward, yes: we fall asleep ethically, poetically, artistically, sensorilly, visually, emotionally, soulfully.
What causes the slip into inertia? the single walk not taken, the plan left aside.
plans on the horizon:
waiting for a call, an email, a letter. obsessing. drinking tea. making soup. pacing. lying on the floor. obsessing. writing winter letters. reading two new poets, writing their reviews. drinking coffee. making dinner. going for another walk. and another. and another. watching the lights come on the the towers across the links. headlights passing along the river. a candle leaning out of a wine bottle, waiting for an occasion. bottles of hand cream, books of iranian writers. projects turning over in sleep. projects turning over in the mind. a jar of honey. a pack of pills. a bottle of night nurse. a garden of verses.
today, walking the length of king street, some notes:
a scrap of fabric wrapped itself about the upper branches of a tree – the gnarled twigs ensnaring it in return in a kind of bitter embrace, braced against a hard wind.
passing me, a woman walking her dog. her fragrance overpowering and thick. her blue coat pulled tight. her obesity painful to look at. her tired expression, sapped from hauling her body around the block with her small dog just shy of noon. the blueness of the coat, cobalt and fine, the blue and white stripes of her shirt. it was impossible not to imagine her standing in her room, at a dressing table perhaps, preparing to go out. the perfume sprayed one time too many, the coat pulled against her stomach, adjusted, pulled again. her skin was fine, thin as tissue, and pale – she looked so tired. i wanted to reach out and press her hand as i passed, smile and tell her how beautiful she was, how shockingly, brutally lovely. but i didn’t. i kept walking, still staring as long as my eye could catcher her from its corner.
rust.
circles.
shopkeepers.
wrappers gathering the elements in the street.
this morning: long bands of dove-gray, approaching noon. the sky lightens very slowly. soon the arc will peak and the sun will begin to slide low again, a dial being turned somewhere on a wall. F is downstairs on the porch. We ate separate breakfasts, in long pools of silence the color of the air. the porch was chilled and our breath showed near the windows. upstairs, my desk is cluttered. too many stacks of books, without which it seems naked. an empty teapot. an empty water glass. a clothespin. sea glass. at one elbow, an apple with one sliver removed. at the other a cup of very black coffee. there is so little to say. last night, lying in the dark, we talked about the future, by way of talking about sex. about love making. about wants. so much said, everything left unsaid, nothing left to say. Wael has been writing to me often. For some reason I cannot bear to answer. He only wants to know that I am well. It feels impossible to write back. It feels impossible. Outside my window, the river. moving only in surface ripples, dotted with white birds and something orange, abandoned like a life raft. beyood that, light scrub and marsh grasses. beyond that, darker tangled trees, some litter. beyond that, the road. beyond that, a stretch of green that reaches almost to the horizon – to the row of towers that marks the rest of the city, its lights. the green: would it make a difference to you if I called it a golf course? Right now I’m working on two reviews for the Warwick Review: one on Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden and one on Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What. Both very good. Both bilingual editions. Both difficult reads: such reminders. A nest of sadnesses and impotencies. Today: more reading, more writing. a few long walks, a trip to the bookstore. tea, the rest of the apple, the rest of the coffee. more stretches of silence. more rooms. As Agha Shahid Ali writes, more rooms unfinished. ”We miss more by what we do not see than what we do not know” — Sir William Osler, 19th c. medical doctor.
