Hughlings Himwich

Winter

 

A bear walks in winter

Every growl commanding

The moon to rise, the sun

To dim, holds back

The spring, its claws

marking the trees

With fire, a song

More ancient than man.

Oliver Sacks' Footnote to "The Lost Mariner"

Kosakov’s Syndrome

“Gross disturbances of the organization of impressions of events and their sequence in time can always be observed in such patients,” he wrote. “In consequence, they lose their integral experience of time and begin to live in a world of isolated impressions.” -- Luria

Footnote

Further, there may be a profound retrograde amnesia in such cases. My colleague Dr. Leon Protass tells me of such a case seen by him recently, in which the patient, a highly intelligent man, was unable for some hours to remember his wife or children, to remember that he had a wife or children. In effect, he lost thirty years of his life—though, fortunately, for only a few hours. Recovery from such attacks is prompt and complete—yet they are, in a sense, the most horrifying of "little strokes" in their power absolutely to annul or obliterate decades of richly lived, richly achieving, richly memoried life. The horror, typically, is only felt by others—the patient, unaware, amnesiac for his amnesia, may continue what he is doing, quite unconcerned, and only discover later that he lost not only a day (as is common with ordinary alcoholic"blackouts"), but half a lifetime, and never knew it. The fact that one can lose the greater part of a lifetime has peculiar, uncanny horror.

There could be only one thing worse—and that would be to lose one's entire lifetime. My friend Dr. Isabelle Rapin, author of Children with Brain Dysfunction: Neurology, Cognition, Language, and Behavior, tells me that very rarely, in consequence of certain brain tumors or degenerative diseases, children may develop a severe Korsakov's syndrome. If this happens, it has been thought, they risk losing their childhood and even their infancy from a retrograde amnesia which may extend back to birth. Such children may not only become as helpless as newborns but may also become deeply "autistic" as they lose and forget all human relationships, even the most elemental—the memory of mother love.

In adulthood, life, higher life, may be brought to a premature end by strokes, senility, brain injuries, etc., but there usually remains the consciousness of life lived, of one's past. This is usually felt as a sort of compensation: "At least I lived fully, tasting life to the full, before I was brain-injured, stricken, etc." This sense of "the life lived before," which may be either a consolation or a torment, is precisely what is taken away in retrograde amnesia. The "final amnesia, the one that can erase a whole life" that Buñuel speaks of may occur, perhaps, in a terminal dementia, but not, in my experience, suddenly, in consequence of a stroke. But there is a different, yet comparable, sort of amnesia, which can occur suddenly—different in that it is not "global" but "modality-specific."

Thus, in one patient under my care, a sudden thrombosis in the posterior circulation of the brain caused the immediate death of the visual parts of the brain. Forthwith this patient became completely blind—but did not know it. He looked blind—but he made no complaints. Questioning and testing showed, beyond doubt, that not only was he centrally or "cortically" blind, but he had lost all visual images and memories, lost them totally—yet had no sense of any loss. Indeed, he had lost the very idea of "seeing"—and was not only unable to describe anything visually, but bewildered when I used words such as "seeing" and "light." He had become, in essence, a nonvisual being. His entire lifetime of seeing, of visuality, had, in effect, been stolen. His whole visual life had, indeed, been erased—and erased permanently in the instant of his stroke. Such a visual amnesia, and (so to speak) blindness to the blindness, amnesia for the amnesia, is in effect a "total" Korsakov's, confined to visuality.

A still more limited, but nonetheless total, amnesia may be displayed with regard to particular forms of perception. Thus, in one patient whose history I have already described ("The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat," London Review of Books, vol. 5, no. 9, May 1983), there was an absolute "prosopagnosia," or agnosia for faces. This patient was not only unable to recognize faces, but unable to imagine or remember any faces—he had indeed lost the very idea of a "face," as my more afflicted patient had lost the very idea of "seeing" or "light." Such syndromes were described by Anton
in the 1890s. But the implication of these syndromes—Korsakov's and Anton's—what they entail and must entail for the "world," the lives, the identities, of affected patients, has been scarcely touched on even to this day.

Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Heraclitus Fragment 124

 

Heraclitus 124: σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος

Balis’ translation: “The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.” (p.18)

What is odd about Balis’ translation of the Greek (and of all others I have found) is that there is no evidence for the word ‘but’ in the original Greek. Here is a literal translation in the order of the actual Greek:

Sweepings at random piled up the most beautiful, says Heraclitus, (the) kosmos.

'Kosmos' in Greek has a variety of meanings: order, arrangement, universe. A more graceful rendering of the original Greek:

The most beautiful kosmos, says Heraclitus, is sweepings piled up at random.

By leaving out the ‘but’ a jarringly different meaning emerges. Things swept up at random somehow present an ‘arrangement’ that is most beautiful to behold. Frazier in Cold Mountain does begin with the pejorative meaning that the ‘but’ implies, but ends with something surprisingly more positive and more faithful to the original Greek. Here is Inman’s last vision:

When she reached the place, the boy had already gathered up the horses and gone. She went to the men on the ground and looked at them, and she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plans blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There was something he wanted to say. (p. 353)

We do not know what Inman wanted to say. We are left with "everything coming around at once' and with "a home", a kosmos, a beautiful arrangement of things all out of order. Disorder order, order disorder. The way things are and are not.

Luck by Langston Hughes

Sometimes a crumb falls

From the tables of joy;

Sometimes a bone

Is flung.

To some people

Love is given,

To others

Only heaven.

Ode to the Brain

 

Burn

 

Mind is alive

with the same

force that drives 

the stars to seek

their own demise

 

so mind creates

the light that guides

our steps at night

yet yearns

for that very dark

ness that alone endures

and alone

makes all things right.

 

Burn, burn

with the beauty

of the night. 

 

Oliver Sacks: A Neurology of Identity

The patient’s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient’s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined. Such disorders, and their depiction and study, indeed entail a new discipline, which we may call the ‘neurology of identity’, for it deals with the neural foundations of the self, the age-old problem of mind and brain. It is possible that there must, of necessity, be a gulf, a gulf of category, between the psychical and the physical; but studies and stories pertaining simultaneously and inseparably to both—and it is these which especially fascinate me, and which (on the whole) I present here—may nonetheless serve to bring them nearer, to bring us to the very intersection of mechanism and life, to the relation of physiological processes to biography.

---from Oliver Sack's Introduction to The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Stars Below

 

Mind runs like water

over rock and root

and seeks to fall

to the stars below.

Birdle Burble by Alan Watts

(for James Broughton)

 

I went out of mind and then came to my senses

By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses,

Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs,

And insisted that logic is bad for the birds.

     With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit;

     The grammar and meaning don't matter a bit.

 

The stars in their courses have no destination;

The train of events will arrive at no station; 

The inmost and ultimate Self of us all

Is dancing on nothing and having a ball.

      So with a chat for chit and with tat for tit,

      This will be that, and that will be It!

now east now west

 

now east now west

 

the road has a mind of its own

and my feet obey

 

the rest of me stays behind

treelike

 

above

the sky grows gentle

 

MY HEART OPENS

 

the road goes on

as if not knowing

 

which way is best. 

 

 

Below the pond

 

On a walk through the field we come out below the pond

And see a bird floating as if on its own reflection

 

It is still early though the light seems of an evening

When first I found rest in the quiet of your eyes. 

 

A Creepy Long Sentence from David Foster Wallace's "Mr. Squishy"

What makes this long sentence so creepy is that by the time we arrive at its end Schmidt has unwittingly revealed himself to be the kind of creepy guy he ostensibly disavows. I have highlighted some of the structural elements.

Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on himself, and he knew THAT a certain percentage of his reaction to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on the coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was just his insecurity, THAT he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and THAT this sometimes MANIFESTED VIA PROJECTION as the feeling that people he was trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine HAD SOMEHOW COLORED HIS WHOLE BEING and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career – which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Δy, or even that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and introspected a great deal – but in his personal affairs as well, AND THAT somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills HAD METASTASIZED THROUGH HIS WHOLE CHARACTER so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Δy staff meetings, or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another Team Δy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat & Assoc. had thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, Darlene holding her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost as much upper gum as teeth, the ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to match her lipstick and the small scarlet rainbow she often wore just right of center as a sort of personal signature or statement. (Oblivion, “Mister Squishy,’ 25-26)

I keep you close

 

The loneliest thought

Is not knowing you are there

and care for me.

 

It is like rain that falls

but does not reach

the ground. 

 

Yea but for love

you would not be here at all:

I keep you close. 

 

 

 

December 21

In deepest winter

clouds gather along the ridge.

It is all souls' night. 

 

Those who help not

 

Those who help not

those in need

who come their way

 

Are worthless

as those who stay inside

and fear the rain.

 

It is what is:

No more to ask

No more to give.

 

Rain cleans all bones the same.  

 

But for night

 

But for night

When eyes are blind

When you and I

 

Think as one

And touch as though

Were earth and sky

 

(So turn around

In mind and space

Our sighs in time)

 

Love would break

Like light the day

Those it would unite. 

 

"Where the sound goes" Collection

Download Wherethesoundgoes

Warning

 

so close your eyes

and let the dark

ness be thy sight

 

and If you die

there's none to say

I lied.

The Symbolism Survey

I love the initiative of this kid, who is now my age.

 

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey/

For Ber

For Ber

 

like laughter or

like light to those

who know themselves

to be like trees

that root themselves

in common ground

though mind apart

for he is free

to give himself

so generously

Not another word

not another word

why even that

why not silence a blank page

cause one is also other

a phantom that can not be driven off

that lurks and lures and loves to be what it is not

the mirror holds no image yet

the other there waiting patient suffering

creates itself even in darkness

for the darkness is

we stride ever through

And if we turn within

"For Christ's sake, not another

Medusa: from beast to beauty

http://www.weltevreden.com/images/Medusa%20-%20From%20Beast%20to%20Beauty%20in%20Archaic%20and%20Classical%20Illustrations%20from%20Greece%20and%20South%20Italy%20-%20by%20Susan%20M.%20Serfontein.pdf

How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

How To Be a Poet
by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Ariel

On a bat’s wing I am flying:
Poetry is the art of dying.

There is a girl

There is a girl
so fell and free
she wants for love
like a memory

her hair like night
covers all the ground
and leaves behind
no trace of me.

Poet-Bashing Police

November 19, 2011
The New York Times
Poet-Bashing Police
By ROBERT HASS
Berkeley, Calif.

LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.

The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.

It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent graduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”

Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.

Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.

Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.

My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine.

My ribs didn’t hurt very badly until the next day and then it hurt to laugh, so I skipped the gym for a couple of mornings, and I was a little disappointed that the bruises weren’t slightly more dramatic. It argued either for a kind of restraint or a kind of low cunning in the training of the police. They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.

I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.

“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”) A week later, at 3:30 a.m., the police officers returned in force, a hundred of them, and told the campers to leave or they would be arrested. All but two moved. The two who stayed were arrested, and the tents were removed. On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air.

Robert Hass is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former poet laureate of the United States.

What is not there

Like a woman
who does not know
she is beautiful
turns to a mirror

and looks and looks
but does not find
what is not there

and does not know
the mirror clings
to her form

and ravishes her,
body and soul

so too the sun
burns and brings
all to life,

mere shadows
on the ground.

The end of the free will debate

The free will vs. determinism debate derives its relevance from dualistic thinking, i.e. that our conscious self is not the one driving the boat, as if there were on the one hand a consciousness that is ignorant of the source of its choices and on the other a brain that is purely mechanical and unconsciously drives our decisions. That argument presupposes that consciousness is something other than the natural unfolding of brain function. This notion of unfolding yields an organic and coherent understanding of how we make decisions. Consciousness is a dimension of a dynamic system, one that allows for self-correction and support for an organism’s fundamental integrity. That the dynamic system is deterministic says no more than that the unfolding of the brain is a natural process that realizes itself in awareness. It is one process, not two. How could it be otherwise? To move at last beyond such dualistic thinking allows us further to contemplate ourselves as an unfolding within a universal process -- as a wave that moves always at one with itself and the sea of which it is an expression.

Sir Ken Robinson on Changing Educational Paradigms

 

The night leaps up

The night leaps up
And paints the sky
Just so a kiss
Draws a lover’s sigh.

You love so much
You long to die
Your eyes are stars
Your soul is fire.

No You

What will you do
What will you do
You have to live
And do and do

O you O you
What will you do
No one comes
To rescue you

So too so too
They'll come for you
They'll talk you up
And do and do

No one knows
No no one knows
Just what it's like
To be like you

O you O you
What will you do
There's no one there
To be there for you.

A Halloween Offering: Goethe's Der Erlkönig

The Erlking by Albert Sterner, ca. 1910

For more information on this poem and for an English translation go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Erlkönig

Download 21 Der Erlkönig, D. 328

performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskrau & Gerald Moore

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

"Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?" —
"Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?" —
"Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif."

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand." —

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?" —
"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind." —

"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehen?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein." —

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?" —
"Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. —"

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." —
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!" —

Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh' und Not;
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

Where does the sound go? An invtation

What is this? An invitation to respond poetically to the question. I want to hear from all of all my former students and others who feel moved to respond.I will collect and publish all the responses I receive. So I dream.

Former students will remember an old bell in my classroom. It was forged in 1878, and has a wonderfully resonant sound. This bell of memory or some bell in your possession may spark a response.

If your first response to the question is baldly scientific, remember that the response is to be poetic, though I can easily imagine an objective statement curling like smoke into something beautiful and mysterious.

What is a poetic response? As one of my 8th grade students put it: something “on the edge of nonsense.” Perhaps like this very invitation.

Deadline for submissions: November 1

Using the search routine on this page, you can find a poetic response of my own. It was written for students from whom I was sadly departing. It is only meant for those who need a little push off the cliff of our everyday sensibility. If you don’t need that push, you may not want to read it just now. In any case, I plan to write another.

Rilke on writing poetry when one is no longer a young man

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simple emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a simple poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very well blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Excerpt from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Beauty

You were always the harlot

Then a mere thought

You patiently taught me

all you are not

Even if . . . .

Even if it is true that who we think we are is but a narrative the brain constructs, even if consciousness itself is every bit as much a construction as that narrative (as is that very light by which we see itself but neural machination), even if consciousness, I say, is an illusion, it is not nothing. Whatever consciousness is, it possesses quality and all the activity of the brain goes to create and maintain that quality. The quality of consciousness is our reality; it is what makes life worth living or not. You know it well. It is the rhythm of the sea, always at one with itself though wave after wave breaks upon the shore. We are forever returning to that sea

Aube by Rimbaud with audio file

Even if you do not know French, the audiofile below of Aube by Paul A. Mankin will deepen your appreciation of the poem. There are no translations of his poem that convey its beauty.

17 Arthur Rimbaud - Aube

AUBE from Illuminations (1875)

J'ai embrassé l'aube d'été.

Rien ne bougeait encore au front des palais. L'eau était mortre. Les camps d'ombres ne quittaient pas la route du bois. J'ai marché, réveillant les haleines vives et tièdes; et les pierries regardèrent, et les ailes se levèrent sans bruit.

La première enterprise fut, dans le sentier déjà empli de frais et blêmes éclats, une fleur qui me dit son nom.

Je ris au wasserfall blond qui s'échevela à travers les sapins: à la cime argentée je reconnus la déesse.

Alors je levai un à les voiles. Dans l'allée, en agitant les bras. Par la plaine, où je l'ai dénoncée au coq. A la grand'ville elle fuyait parmi les clochers et les dômes, et, courant comme un mendiant sur les quais de marbre, je la chassais.

En haut de la route, près d'un bois de lauriers. Je l'ai entourée avec ses voiles amassés, et j'ai senti un peu son immense corps. L'aube et l'enfant tombèrent au bas du bois.

Au réveil, il était midi.

**************************************************

DAWN from Illuminations (1875)

I embraced the summer dawn.

Nothing stirred on the face of the palaces. The water was still. Crowds of shadows lingered on the road to the woods. I walked, dreaming the warm, brisk winds, and precious stones looked on, and wings soared in silence.

The first venture, on the path already full of fresh and pale glitterings, was a flower who told me her name.

I laughed at the white waterfall dishevelled through the pine trees: at its silvery summit I recognized the goddess.

Then, one by one, I lifted her veils. In the pathway, waving my arms. In the open field, where I betrayed her to the cock. In the city she fled amid the steeples and the domes, and running like a beggar on the marble piers, I chased her.

At the top of the road, near a wood of laurels, I wrapped her in her mass of veils, and felt a little of her immense body. Dawn and the child fell at the edge of the woods.

When I awoke it was noon.

---Peter Y. Chou, WisdomPortal.com

— Above version based on the following translations:
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
translated by Bertrand Mathieu
Boa Editions, Brockport, NY, 1979, pp. 32-33
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
translated by Daniel Sloate
Guernica, Montreal, Canada, 1990, pp. 78-79
— Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and Illuminations
translated by Mark Treharne
J.M. Dent, London, 1998 (no page #)

Night

I turn to you to find the light
and like a tree that grasps the earth
these arms embrace the wind
like you my heart

as earth through darkness sweeps
around the sun I turn
and turn to you
and kiss the night.

I know the dying

I know the dying
And the dying
sigh

Like the light these eyes
Like these eyes
the night

So still the rhythm
of a heart
that's torn

Forlorn forgotten
Longed for
adored.

Introducing Nikei and Ono

We have two cats, Nikei and Ono. Ono is a clown, and Nikei we call the Furrer because he demands obedience and is a killer. Ono sometimes wears a yamaka just to tease him, kind of like the jester in Lear, and Nikei sometimes wears lipstick, just because he can. No one laughs. When Nikei dies, he will most likely go to hell and run things there. Ono is already an angel here on earth. We love them both.

Man's Disproportion (Pascal) French/English

For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared
to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle
point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from
an understanding of the extremes; and the end of things
and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in
impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which
he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. . .

Because they failed to contemplate these infinites, men
have rashly undertaken to probe into nature as if there were
some proportion between themselves and her.
Strangely enough they wanted to know the principles of
things and go on from there to know everything, inspired
by a presumption as infinite as their object (p. 199).

Car enfin qu’est-ce que l’homme dans la nature? Un néant `a
l’égard de l’infini, un tout `a l’égard du néant, un milieu entre rien et
tout. Infiniment eloigné de comprendre les extrêmes, la fin des choses
et leur principe sont pour lui invinciblement cachés dans un secret
impénétrable, également incapable de voir le néant d’o`u il est tiré, et
l’infini o`u il englouti. . .

Manque d’avoir contemplé ces infinis, les hommes ne sont portés
témérairement `a la recherche de la nature, comme s’ils avaient quelque
proportion avec elle. C’est une chose étrange qu’ils ont voulu comprendre
les principes des choses, et de l`a arriver jusqu’`a connaître tout, par
une présomption aussi infinie que leur objet. Car il est sans doute qu’on
ne peut dormer ce dessein sans une presomption ou sans une capacité
infinie, comme la nature. Blaise Pascal, Pensees (72)

Jesus, Joseph and Mary

Of course
he had known her
before. Now
when they met
black on black
he blessed her
and she
she did not blush
to be remembered
in his prayers.

Swordplay

In the evening, all the cats who had participated in the rat-catching had a grand session at the Swordsman's house, and respectfully asked the great Cat to take the seat of honor. They made profound bows before her and said: "We all wish you to divulge your secrets for our benefit." The grand old cat answered: "Teaching is not difficult, listening is not difficult either, but what is truly difficult is to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own."

From a 17th century master's book on swordplay, The Swordsman and the Cat

For more, see http://www.rubinghscience.org/zen/cat1.html

Socrates and Tiresias

Plato inverts the world as we know it. This world is an Erebus, wherein Socrates is a Tiresian character, alone among the souls of the dead possessing that activity of mind that makes us akin to the gods. For Plato, this world is a kind of dream and philosophy a way of waking up to this reality that culminates under Socratic questioning in an “I don’t know” revelation. Such a revelation entails a dying to oneself and to this world and provides an intimation, if not knowledge, of another, truer way of being. Persephone by this Platonic inversion is the queen of our world and requires of us a payment if we are to be released from the cycle of births and deaths that is but a play of shadows from beginning to end. Socrates made that payment; he paid with his life.

Kierkegaard: Aphorism 1

The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes -- but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.

Lacrimae Rerum

Here where every sound
is a lama lama sabachthani
echoing in the brain

Where even silence
is a fairy tale
like that girl
who pulls my beard
and laughs
to make these gray hairs
roll on like waves

Here are the tears
of things that yet
break like thunder
on the shore.

In the wild

in the wild
there is a strange
silence yet
there is music

Listen

there is wind
tumbling through
trees water
flowing over
rock then rush
of wing you

hear yourself
singing

Questions with no answers

Why do we ask questions for which there are no answers? There is a mystery to this. The mystery is that in searching out questions about the meaning of life our own lives become thereby meaningful. It comes upon us as a shadow at straightup noon and is experienced as a deepening of our sense of self.

Ἅιδης

Persephone
demands you

Love all
Suffer all
Die to all

See yourself
in a flower
she tells you

you are beautiful
and you too
will die

over and over
and over

until you know
what she knows:

She is your bride.

Ber: Richard