hænep

At the end, he said, No Metaphors! Nothing is like anything else.

Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one.

He said, Not even the rain—he quoted the poet—not even the rain has such small hands. So there was another.

At the end, I wanted to comfort him. But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arabian proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it.

Except I said to him before I said that, No metaphors! No one is like anyone else. And he said, Please.

So—at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him.

My arms the trees.

--Amy Hempel.

And now I find myself
with nothing
left to say.

The old human gestures, twenty centuries old, are forgotten in  decade. Time, like a bridge, draws to a close. Did you make it in time? 

The last light of the day. You run back with your heart in your mouth, the darkness falling around you in the streets. Everything in the old country lives and breathes in the shade. 

Moral education and the neo-liberal university

K
K
K
K

Antique Sound

Antique Sound

There was an age where you played records
with ordinary steel needles which grew blunt

and damaged the grooves or with more expensive
stylus tips said to be tungsten or diamond
which wore down the records and the music receded
but a friend and I had it on persuasive authority
that the best thing was a dry thorn of the right kind
and I knew where to find those off to the left
of the Kingston Pike in the shallow swale
that once had been forest and had grown back
into a scrubby wilderness alive with
an earthly choir of crickets blackbirds finches
crows jays the breathing of voles raccoons
rabbits foxes the breeze in the thickets
the thorn bushes humming a high polyphony
all long gone since to improvement but while
that fine dissonance was in tune we rode out
on bicycles to break off dry thorn branches
picking the thorns and we took back the harvest
and listened to Beethoven’s Rassoumoffsky
quartets echoed from the end of a thorn.

--- W.S. Merwin.

The world we have lost

In the early morning you awoke to the sound of a large plane flying above. Perhaps too close for comfort. Things are often thrown into sharp distinction in the silent hours. You pictured the sound of it passing over you as if it were a wave. And the birds were startled out of their slumber as well as they started to chirp wildly and this huge shadowed bird flying up above them. 

First one or two, then more and more until it peaked with the wave. All this seemed to be happening in slow motion. As the plane moved out of range the chirping also died down and came to a rest. You imagined a perfect bell curve with the chirping distributed in a smooth pattern.

In the morning you found a dead crow on the ground beneath one of the trees. What had happened to her? 

~~~

L. Daston writes in the Chronicle about great books (not Great Books) that we once read but have supposedly been surpassed by more narrowly focused disciplinary works. The kind of wide-ranging books with huge imaginative sweep written between 1920 and 1980, say. Not popular or general books but not specialized texts either. Instead, what one might call scholarly works (is there a distinction between intellectuals and academics now?)

~~~ 

Nothing that I do is finished
so I keep returning to it
lured by the notion that I long
to see the whole of it at last
completed and estranged from me

but no the unfinished is what
I return to as it leads me on
I am made whole by what has just
escaped me as it always does
I am made of incompleteness
the words are not there in words

oh gossamer gossamer breath
moment daylight life untouchable
by no name with no beginning

what do we think we recognize

-- W.S. Merwin

Water Margin

“I’m going to jump into one of the fires – I have no intention of continuing my life,” says Devi.

In the time that remains

The wheels have come off. Time is out of sync. No terrestrial ebb and flow. Isolated moments without duration = fleetingness = a sense of acceleration. But directionless, therefore 'endless'. The end of time means no time.

We work and then we die. Actually, death doesn't exist. "Afraid that if it did it might cause the robots to stop working for a bit and to start expressing themselves, falling in love, wondering what it all means. --S. Collini (more or less)

The sun returns; the old light warm on your hands. Stand next to tree and listen to the crows. The black and the green. Better than listening to the students! Time moves in spirals: Always the same, always different.

Next, I’m planning to read Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad. My cellmate’s reading it now. I’ve looked at a couple pages of it already and I have a good feeling about it. --Nico Walker. (Walser syndrome: asylum=peace=books)

"Inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship. The comparison [is] to the Venetian Republic, a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed." -- H. Gray

~~~

So, there you go, R, reduced to isolated sentences, fleeting thoughts- precisely the thing you're criticizing! Cut and paste, stitch it together, the way our mam did with the Guy Fawkes man all those years ago, wearing my yellow jacket, carted along in a makeshift trolley before being flung into the flames for reasons beyond him.

Pascal, it is said, stitched the few things worth remembering into his clothes, so that they'd be a living word.

Strange to think that after all of these years I still can't bring myself to thinking much of academia. It really does strike you as the most awful fraud. You're a stowaway on board, waiting for your moment to jump, just before the whole damned thing crashes.

It provides a space, though, and one is grateful (to God, of course. Becket: fidelity to what or who?). I'm in purdah. Safely -one hopes! - left alone for the time being..in the time that remains. So out of touch and out of date that I'm almost a museum piece. Which is good since it saves me all the small talk and from engaging in questions of 'success'.

What is your next 'project'?, a colleague asks

I think less about the future. Not that I ever did. Now where? Nowhere, as before ?

He lit a fire and all there was was smoke in his room.

He left the room, but nobody noticed. It stung his eyes, blinkered him. But there was warmth. The smoke lingered on his clothes for two days and then Spring came all of a sudden.

~~~

Are these posts generate by an algorithm? Question to self.