Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances..
---R.Hass.
Let us love this distance , which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.
--Simone Weil.
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Nothing is given; everything is fresh, wild. Unanticipated. If the wonder is that death, the impossibility, all of a sudden becomes a possibility; if the truly amazing thing is that life emerges from the infinite silence of stone, then it is also true that we are dazzled by the fact that death itself-even if for a flickering moment-becomes an impossibility.
There was a mole on your face, a full stop on the blank page..that took me to you. You looked for the place: a hole, a well in the sky, an opening so you could fall upwards...it took time, it took light, it took time to find my human form. And it was not so different from yours.
This earth, this sky, this place I call home. Nothing seems more beautiful to me right now. I am the space where I am.
Near Snaresbrook, on the Central Line, a young girl looked at me as I sat absorbed in Richard Ford's Sportswriter. Her mother and aunt sat there like some commanding matriarchs, stone-like in their solemnity, the world rolling off their sad blue-grey eyes, making no impression. Mountain people. One always recognizes them. They've seen it all before. The elaborate and profuse red and gold embroidered patterns on their black veils indicating the presence of a human soul. Three young white kids got on, boisterous, full of themselves. The young girl just plays with her pony tails-a dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops, who sees the end in the beginning- and then placed her head gently on her mother's shoulder, pulling her closer to her by the arm, nesting in that immense black assurance: 'Mother, you mean the world to me'.
I listen to the Molla and Reijseger. To listen to this is to hear the music of the earth before human beings set foot there, an earth still quivering, still holding something of the memory of the Creator's hands, the clouds still clinging to the mountains, like a dream, the stone dimly aware that a thousand images lie captive in its heart: But a voice made me come out of the angle where I was beginning to die of an angel's dream.
Or, better still, it is the soaring cry of the First Man. The infinite is placed in us finite beings (if only Descartes had been a Muslim!). This is why we break. This is why we long so much for other skies, for the wild blue. Every act of true perception takes us there.
I am not the space where I am.
I am not what I am.
All the looseness, the dispossessed details, the faint hints, of the rest of the poem settle into the firm order behind the last line. We discover in retrospect what Lowell was doing was keeping all the ingredients of the poem in a state of fluid suspension, floating in readiness for the net with which, in a single moment, he could scoop them up and contain them.
---Raban on Lowell.
The poet sees earth and sky; the scientist or philosopher: only earth-and that too through a prism. The more this earth, this sky reminds us of others, the more we come to love them.
(originally posted, Saturday, 28th of July)
~~~~~~~~~~
Today I was thinking of how little wild blueness is left; instead, we tend to speak in terrible cliches or, worse still, try to beat every ounce of "meaning" from anything we touch or come across. So, I instinctively flinch when I hear someone harp on about "class consciousness" when it comes to a film-in the same way I would if I saw a donkey being thrashed. Or the "nausea " of Hollywood, the "decadence" of the west (yesterday a student actually came up to me and said 'in the west they think freedom means you can have incest.' Yeah, like, keep on taking the pills bro')
Have you ever thought, maybe the beast was within.It's like hearing a mullah speak, or a Communist or George Bush. The same old record, stuck on the same old track. Thinking by slogans, painting by numbers! (Incidentally, found Mao's the Red Book last evening. What a load of utter crap! ) Science, Freedom, Progress..keep on repeating these words enough and, hey, who knows, you might actually convince yourself to believe them! There's no place like home, there's no ...
~~~
---R.Hass.
Let us love this distance , which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.
--Simone Weil.
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Nothing is given; everything is fresh, wild. Unanticipated. If the wonder is that death, the impossibility, all of a sudden becomes a possibility; if the truly amazing thing is that life emerges from the infinite silence of stone, then it is also true that we are dazzled by the fact that death itself-even if for a flickering moment-becomes an impossibility.
There was a mole on your face, a full stop on the blank page..that took me to you. You looked for the place: a hole, a well in the sky, an opening so you could fall upwards...it took time, it took light, it took time to find my human form. And it was not so different from yours.
This earth, this sky, this place I call home. Nothing seems more beautiful to me right now. I am the space where I am.
Near Snaresbrook, on the Central Line, a young girl looked at me as I sat absorbed in Richard Ford's Sportswriter. Her mother and aunt sat there like some commanding matriarchs, stone-like in their solemnity, the world rolling off their sad blue-grey eyes, making no impression. Mountain people. One always recognizes them. They've seen it all before. The elaborate and profuse red and gold embroidered patterns on their black veils indicating the presence of a human soul. Three young white kids got on, boisterous, full of themselves. The young girl just plays with her pony tails-a dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops, who sees the end in the beginning- and then placed her head gently on her mother's shoulder, pulling her closer to her by the arm, nesting in that immense black assurance: 'Mother, you mean the world to me'.
I listen to the Molla and Reijseger. To listen to this is to hear the music of the earth before human beings set foot there, an earth still quivering, still holding something of the memory of the Creator's hands, the clouds still clinging to the mountains, like a dream, the stone dimly aware that a thousand images lie captive in its heart: But a voice made me come out of the angle where I was beginning to die of an angel's dream.
Or, better still, it is the soaring cry of the First Man. The infinite is placed in us finite beings (if only Descartes had been a Muslim!). This is why we break. This is why we long so much for other skies, for the wild blue. Every act of true perception takes us there.
I am not the space where I am.
I am not what I am.
All the looseness, the dispossessed details, the faint hints, of the rest of the poem settle into the firm order behind the last line. We discover in retrospect what Lowell was doing was keeping all the ingredients of the poem in a state of fluid suspension, floating in readiness for the net with which, in a single moment, he could scoop them up and contain them.
---Raban on Lowell.
The poet sees earth and sky; the scientist or philosopher: only earth-and that too through a prism. The more this earth, this sky reminds us of others, the more we come to love them.
(originally posted, Saturday, 28th of July)
~~~~~~~~~~
Today I was thinking of how little wild blueness is left; instead, we tend to speak in terrible cliches or, worse still, try to beat every ounce of "meaning" from anything we touch or come across. So, I instinctively flinch when I hear someone harp on about "class consciousness" when it comes to a film-in the same way I would if I saw a donkey being thrashed. Or the "nausea " of Hollywood, the "decadence" of the west (yesterday a student actually came up to me and said 'in the west they think freedom means you can have incest.' Yeah, like, keep on taking the pills bro')
Have you ever thought, maybe the beast was within.It's like hearing a mullah speak, or a Communist or George Bush. The same old record, stuck on the same old track. Thinking by slogans, painting by numbers! (Incidentally, found Mao's the Red Book last evening. What a load of utter crap! ) Science, Freedom, Progress..keep on repeating these words enough and, hey, who knows, you might actually convince yourself to believe them! There's no place like home, there's no ...
~~~
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