Today

 

Just feeling human the way a cloud’s a cloud tinged with blue.. Human, a kind of element, a fire, an air, today.. a house without doors, open to sun or snowdrifts. --Denise Levertov.

Lockdown Blues

I imagine this veil
shall be lifted again and something like a face in a mirror
appear. And it will be me. Will be a room as rooms used to be to us.
And us in them.
As a family or as lovers. We shall be lifted and we shall touch
in the old way. Just a hand on another. Not meaning that
much but still a small weight. With
meaning. A feeling of a harbouring inside which reminds one of having a
mind. A feeling that one could
die for instance.
So there was
mystery, hope, fear, loneliness.
A sudden alarm from not-knowing and being startled by an in-
comprehensible terror or some other reaction
to change. There was
change. A person could be-
come. You could look into a face &
not know. There was rain & you would hardly notice.
It could rain for hours. The face would be there inside
its otherness, the way its body, which you could not imagine the in-
wardness of, moved, each one
moved,
differently, completely
differently. Why is it now you summon
streets. How they ran everywhere away. You could be in a strange
place and not know. You could be
lost. You could be as if
thrown away from the real. A trembling thing. A
journey. Lost yes – but not wrong in being. And from there you
could see a face which was a stranger. And it
would have a look which you had to wait for.

--J.Graham.

Winter:north

Winter is out for a lot this year

the beach already is stiff

all will be one will be one this year

wings and ice will be one in the world

all will be changed in the world:

the boat will hear its steps on the ice

the war will hear its war on the ice

the woman will hear her hour on the ice

the hour of birth in the ice of death

winter is out for a lot.

Out for the houses the cities

out for the forests the clouds

the mountains the valleys fear

the heart the children peace.

Winter is out for a lot this year

the hand already is stiff

the crying of children is heard in the house

one will we be one life

I hear my house slip with the world..

--I. Christensen

The end of a day

And how does a day begin? With what light, and whose hand brings it forth? Not, 'how did time enter the world', but how is your own life formed by the warp and woof of time and silence. Which gifts will you deny, asks the Qur'an. 

Denise:

And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for the blessing,
a festive right, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along
the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.

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.

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

The old East

Time and disease have hollowed everyone out. A young woman escorts her tall, weak father back home, her arm in his. How old is that scene? At the hospital there are Greeks, Chinese, Africans, desis..

Near Wick Lane, the old, mystical east. West Ham supporters flow out of a pub, some in their t-shirts braving the cold. The only forms of religion to survive are these old-worn rituals of belonging. There is a lot of brutal, soulless, utilitarian architecture here. Stalinist. Whole rows of streets are covered in graffiti. On the car radio 'Vienna' from the 1980s is playing; the hours of your life have stalled around this moment. Around the corner an abandoned church; the upper part is burnt out, adding to the darkness within; the window must have blown out years ago. On the wall are painted the words 'HORROR!' in large black print. I'd like to roam the streets here and make a film. Call it 'East Germany' or something. The look on people's faces isn't so different from the buildings.

Near Stratford some of the lights in the high rises are going on. From a distance there's a kind of beauty to it, like a floating spaceship..if you look at it sideways. What strange galaxy is this?

A few of the patients (English) are reading (newspapers, books and what looks like a film script). One of the women takes a red pen and works vigorously on the text. She's lost some of her hair and has a large gap between her teeth. Professionalism is what she's all about, down to the bone. Another English patient comes in, an old and frail woman with a square face. Her son is dressed identically to me (down to the hat and scarf). Colin floats in. Hard to imagine a Colin who is a threat to anyone. You'll never find a murderer called 'Colin'. You try to pick out a word, a tone of voice. Only a few northern notes survive in this harsh winter...what can you recognize in these times?

With great age, Ahmad said, there is time for forgiveness. Did he mean time for God to forgive us or for us to forgive one another?

Robert Bly's afterword to Transtromer's selected poems is wonderful. Pure extravagance but I bought these translations even though I've got the collected poems. It seems that Bly gives him more space, more room, leaves the door a bit further open. 

With Transstromer there's always a sense that you've got an extra quarter of an hour. Note to self: get Andreas Schiff's version of Schubert.

~~~

Early morning. The W14 glides by in the opening light, its own lights small and magical in the dispersing gloom. The 275 on the other hand roars and heaves up a hill, going through all the motions. Nearby you see the corpse of a fox (Aquinas says one shouldn't call a dead dog a dog. Why? As if it became an 'it', without a name). 'It' is lying there in the middle of the road, sleeping peacefully, its small head pointing north. 

I don't have the money for The Observer. For the same money I purchased Ronald Blythe's book on old age. 

Shadows of ourselves

I was a shadow of myself-and have been so for a long time now if truth be told. If I could measure time, that is, so to speak, in some sense, if you know what I mean.

You, too, were two shadows: of yourself and of me (even though it would kill you to admit it). And then you would be one. 

"Take aim and take care!", said the Queen.

He stood there, quivering, unresolved, at the centre of absence, a loss for words; a black sun eclipsed by a darker sun. Some silver coins in the deep inner pockets of his outer coat; with time the silver inheriting the black. The winter light on his hands, alive, the deep creases on his face, the dark river of his mind. All that he owned, fading with time. 

A few crows suddenly took flight and broke the silence. The queen's black net turned heads. Medusa let down her hair and froze a thousand hearts."You fool for so fooling me!" , she said to her shadow. No matter how close, no-one could find the way to her heart, if truth be told, in some sense, if you know what I mean. But it was November, the time of forgiveness. She read him some lines in her barbarian tongue, as if to comfort him: the way is short, the night is so dark, and still you do not find the way...   


What you are supposed to hit
is the bull’s-eye, that black spot,
that precise spot, and the arrow
is supposed to stand there quivering!
But that’s not where the arrow goes.
You get close to it, closer and closer;
no, not close enough.
Then you have to go out and pick up all the arrows,
walk back, try it again.
That black spot is highly annoying
until you finally grasp
that where your arrow stands quivering
is also the center of something.

---Olav Hauge

And there it was: the swell
and glitter of it like a standing wave –
the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising
through the blue,
the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint,
the glamour of buried light
as the world turned round it
very slowly
this autumn morning, all amazed.

Robin Robertson.

In my coat I sit 

At the window sill 

Wintering with snow 

That did not melt 

It fell long ago 

At night, by stealth 

I was where I am 

When the snow began.

--S. Menashe.

Time is moving on forward with such rapidity that there's isn't even time to pause and look back, and see who I am.

The world as phantom and as matrix

A shadow on the wall

boughs stirred by the noonday wind

that’s enough earth

and for the eye

enough celestial participation.

How much further do you want to go? Refuse

the bossy insistence

of new impressions—

lie there still,

behold your own fields,

your estate,

dwelling especially

on the poppies,

unforgettable

because they transported the summer—

where did it go?

---G. Benn

~~

The summer is over, the storms grow, and your coffee doesn't taste right. Retreat, as far as you can go, to the very heart of the poppy seed, perhaps? We speak a darkness between us.

This image was brought to you...

The world, as sponsored by...

In 1956, two years before Arendt's Human Condition, Gunther Anders wrote a prescient essay describing the beginnings of a "phantom world". This is before the 'society of the spectacle' as well. In the article he talks about the mass production of "hermits" for whom the world will be brought to their private living rooms. This "phantom" world, always half-absent, the stage of representations, images, background banter and music..always brought to you with the express intent of rooting us to the spot, of making us consumers of images and therefore our own producers of a mass, isolated self.

The political ramifications of the loss of the public world, of the ability to act in the world, would be spelled out by Arendt. The loss of speech that comes about when we're beholden to the manufactured image has, of course, political consequences: thoughtlessness and speechlessness. 

~~~

The faraway nearby

And now I look for the word 'faraway' and find it everywhere. Or rather I don't look - not trying to jinx it - and it returns.

'There's a word for each leaf and each
wall and
a word for nothing.' 

There'sawordforeachleafandeachwallandawordfornothing.

Larry Eigner, I should have said, from yesterday, in case you were wondering, faithful reader. And what of you, o faithless one?



I have felt it as they've said
there is nothing to say


there is everything to speak of
   but the words are words

when you speak that is a sound
what have you done, when you have spoken 





of nothing





or something i will remember 

Awakenings

One day we’ll look back on it ... the time of the sun
when light fell on the smallest twig
on the old woman the astonished girl
when it washed with colour everything it touched
Followed the galloping horse and eased when he did

that unforgettable time on earth
when if we dropped something it made a noise
and like connoisseurs we took in the world
our ears caught every nuance of air
and we knew our friends by their footsteps

time we walked out to gather flowers or stones
that time we could never catch hold of a cloud

and it’s all our hands can master now.

(“Le regret de la terre”, version by Peter Sirr)

~~~

The rain falls and collects in pools and makes
Our grave old planet shine. 

I love that line by Supervielle.

And this by Anselm Hollo (not read):

Carried by silver and star and reflection.

&

This is a world of books gone flat.

This is a Jew in a newspaper hat

that dances weeping down the ward

This is the time 

of the tragic man

These are the years and the walls and the door

This is me, my country, my people.

This is the time I forgot

that shows my missing watch, the empty hands

this is my absent love.

(Elizabeth Bishop & me)

~~~

&




(Courtesy of Tom)

When the axe first entered the forest all the trees could say was: "At least the handle is one of us".
---Turkish proverb

Today, they are making bread out of breadcrumbs.
---Karl Kraus.

Read some Ceravolo in the dying sun. My eyes hurt but my body feels at ease in the warm sunshine. Small leaves fly into the sun...

As evening descends you sit outside on the green bench, under a starless sky, the moon directly above your head like a cup pouring down its light. At dusk: a few immobilized students under the trees, like hieroglyphs; the birds flying back together when so many below them are alone. The light grows dimmer by the minute and I struggle to pick out the words, the last dark words on the paper, sinking back...

God created his image.
I love him like the door.
Speak to me now.
Without god there is no god.

--Joseph Ceravolo. 

Where are you from? Who were you?

Old Friend

Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence 
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language 
and all these years I have looked through your limbs 
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world.

--W.S. Merwin, Elegy for a Walnut Tree.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Old friend, I saw you in a dream, face to face, my other self. The hidden, brighter life I've lost. Is this the way we see the world now, in dreams? Our face, only recognizable in the night. The soul is not a many-roomed house, but a river in which your dark image flows.

[Fall..
... 
..

why don't you?]]

You left me a black key on a latch..for whose heart? The heart, a wooden block, memory escaping its inner rings. You told me I'd find bridges within myself.  With my old way of being none would lead to you. You brought an axe with you, confident as always. Easier done than said, you imperiously reckoned. You tipped it over with a finger but, just then, the open thing caught you with a single splinter. 

{A single line, a fragment, by Supervielle}

Or, as I remember it, memory escaping the inner rings:

"Was the act of dreaming synonymous with the act of dismantling the block? I don't know how many pieces the block was divided into. The task took all night. Not usually dismantled but rather 'broken away' or 'split open'. Perhaps each piece of the block was unwound like a cloth from her whole body? All I know is that the process proceeded by stages and that each stage meant there was less block left. Eventually there was none. All that was not her made space for her."

---John Berger.