How to Meditate

— lights out —
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
I hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance -- Healing
all my sicknesses — erasing all — not
even the shred of a "I-hope-you" or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it off, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes — and
with joy you realize for the first time
"Thinking's just like not thinking —
So I dont have to think
any
more"

-- Jack Kerouac, b. 12 March 1922

"Come back and tell me in a hundred years," Kerouac commanded — his koan.

"What was the face you had before you were born?"

— that question was always at the heart of Beat poetry. It could be called the "Golden Ash" school, as Kerouac qualified existence. Thus Beat: "a dream already ended ... " Thus beatific, "the Golden Ash" of dream.

-- Allen Ginsberg, Introduction Pomes All Sizes

brilliance

What land, what Eldorado, what Eden flames with this wild brilliance, these floods of light refracted by milky clouds, flecked with fiery red and slashed with violet, like the precious depths of opal?

-- Joris-Karl Huysmans (1889), "Turner and Goya" in Certains

study

Once caught, a human male is studied by the huntress as thoroughly as if he were a diamond. She looks at his ear lobes and his fingernails after he has eaten of rare beef, and if the former are plump and ruddy, and the latter rosy pink, she knows his glands to be both satisfied and active. She analyzes his motor reflexes after he has downed a fair portion of jugged venison, and if instead of showing a pleasurable skittishness he yawns and puffs and blinks, she nevermore serves that gamy dish. She notes coldly, calculatingly, his reactions to wine and ale and heady spirits, as well as to fruits, eggs, cucumbers, and such; she learns his dietetic tolerance, in short, and his rate of metabolism, and his tendencies toward gastric as well as emotional indigestion. And all this happens whether she be a designing farm girl in Arkansas or a slim worldly beauty on the Cap d'Antibes.

-- M.F.K. Fisher An Alphabet for Gourmets

songlines

He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as "ways" of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

"A song," he said, "was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country."

"And would a man on 'Walkabout' always be travelling down one of the Songlines?"

"In the old days, yes," he agreed. "Nowadays, they go by train or car."

"Suppose the man strayed from his Songline?"

"He was trespassing. He might get speared for it."

"But as long as he stuck to the track, he'd always find people who shared his Dreaming? Who were, in fact, his brothers?"

"Yes."

"From whom he could expect hospitality?"

"And vice versa."

In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung.

-- Bruce Chatwin The Songlines

Peter Lindberg discusses The Songlines

hyperbolic

For God's sake, please give it up. Fear it no less than the sensual passions, because it, too, may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life.

-- Wolfgang Bolyai (1775-1856) to his son Janos Bolyai regarding the study of hyperbolic geometry, quoted in Cabinet

the same

Love lays siege to each being and seeks to discover an opening, a path leading into the heart, by means of which Love can permeate everywhere. The difference between the sinner and the saint is that the sinner closes his heart to Love while the saint opens himself to this same Love. In both cases the Love is the same and the pressure is the same.

-- Lev Gillet The Burning Bush

mystery

I believe that people need and want more than fashion and titillation. We will always have the need to recognize mystery, to take time to experience and express it, to discover ideas of beauty. Mystery involves an element of "not knowing," and may be frightening, but not only in the old expressionist way, Beauty, in art and life, is not necessarily pretty.

-- Bruce Adolphe Of Mozart, Parrots and Cherry Blossoms in the Wind

beyond

If you should ask me why I dwell among green mountains,
I should laugh silently; my soul is serene.
The peach blossom follows the moving water;
There is another heaven and earth beyond the world of men.

-- Li Po
Translated by Robert Payne

dinner for two

INT. THE APARTMENT – EVENING

Buddy-boy is bending over a hot stove, preparing an Italian dinner. He takes a saucepan of spaghetti off the fire, and picking up the tennis racquet with the other hand, pours the spaghetti on top of the racquet strings. Then he turns on the faucet, runs water over the spaghetti. With the combined technique of Brillat-Savarin and Pancho Gonzales, he gently agitates the racquet, letting the water drain off the spaghetti. As he works, he hums a theme from Tchaikovsky's Italian Capriccio.

Fran walks in, still in her robe.

FRAN
Are we dressing for dinner?

BUD
No – just come as you are.

FRAN
(watching him)
Say, you're pretty good with that racquet.

BUD
You ought to see my backhand.
(dumping spaghetti into platter)
And wait till I serve the meatballs.
(demonstrates)

FRAN
Shall I light the candles?

BUD
It's a must – gracious-living-wise.

As Fran starts into the living room, Bud begins to ladle meat sauce onto the spaghetti, humming operatically.

In the living room, the small table has been set for two, and prominent on it is the champagne bottle that Mr Kirkeby left behind, still in its cardboard bucket, but freshly iced. As Fran lights the candles, she notices the napkins on the table, peels a price tag off the corner of one of them.

FRAN
I see you bought some napkins.

BUD
Might as well go all the way.

He carries the platter of spaghetti and meat sauce in from the kitchen, sets it on the table, sprinkles some cheese on it. Then he crosses to the coffee table, where a full martini pitcher stands in readiness, fills a couple of glasses. Fran seats herself at the table.

You know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe – shipwrecked among eight million people. Then one day I saw a footprint in the sand – and there you were –
(hands her martini)
It's a wonderful thing – dinner for two.

FRAN
You usually eat alone?

BUD
Oh, no. Sometimes I have dinner with Ed Sullivan, sometimes with Dinah Shore or Perry Como – the other night I had dinner with Mae West – of course, she was much younger then.
(toasting)
Cheers.

-- Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond The Apartment

space

Even as a boy I liked to wander along deep paths in the fields, especially along those which — carved into the terrain — followed its rolling waves. Once, unobserved, I stood at the edge of a small cherry orchard in which my uncle was cultivating trees. The image of a solitary orchard keeper, whose hands lovingly touch small branches as if they're conversing together, the image of an individual and nature at the moment they're mutually sharing secrets, has always stayed with me, as has the image of fields of rye and sugar beets, and childish curiosity about what might be happening in the middle of a hidden world with its little paths and animal burrows. Perhaps it was this curiosity that later kept urging me to think about a plan for suspended walkways in the crowns of trees ... In other words, I was fascinated by any defined space, its beautiful sensuousness.

And then I came to the realization that space could be captured on drawing paper; not only the space that I could see but also space that I imagined. And the hardest lesson of all: it's possible to calculate how to make a bridge that won't collapse, but it's impossible to calculate how to make a thing beautiful.

-- Josef Svoboda The Secret of Theatrical Space
Translated by J.M. Burian

technique

At the moment, I am busy with blossoming fruit trees; pink peach blossom, white and yellow pear blossom. I don't keep to any one technique. I dab the colour irregularly on the canvas and leave it at that. Here lumps of thick paint, there bits of canvas left uncovered, elsewhere portions left quite unfinished, new beginnings, coarsenesses: but anyway the result, it seems to me, is alarming and provocative enough to disturb those people who have fixed preconceived ideas about technique ... While working directly on the spot all the time, I try to secure the essential in the drawing -- then I go for the spaces, bounded by contours, either expressed or not, but felt at all events: these I fill with tones equally simplified, so that all that is going to be soil partakes of the same purplish tone, the whole of the sky has a blueish hue and the greens are either definitely blue-greens or yellow-greens, purposely exaggerating in this case the yellow or blue qualities.

Anyway, my dear old friend, there's no attempt at perspective.

-- Vincent Van Gogh Letter to Emile Bernard Early April 1888
Translated by Douglas Lord

clarity

I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock, and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures ... I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination ... It says everything; it needs nothing.

-- Thomas Merton The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton

The Knight of the Leopard

But as a second time, in surrounding the chapel, they passed the spot on which he kneeled, one of the white-stoled maidens, as she glided by him, detached from the chaplet which she carried a rosebud, which dropped from her fingers, perhaps unconsciously, on the foot of Sir Kenneth. The knight started as if a dart had suddenly struck his person; for, when the mind is wound up to a high pitch of feeling and expectation, the slightest incident, if unexpected, gives fire to the train which imagination has already laid. But he suppressed his emotion, recollecting how easily an incident so indifferent might have happened, and that it was only the uniform monotony of the movement of the choristers which made the incident in the slightest degree remarkable.

... Short as the space was during which the procession again completed a third perambulation of the chapel, it seemed an eternity to Kenneth. At length the form which he had watched with such devoted attention drew nigh. There was no difference betwixt that shrouded figure and the others, with whom it moved in concert and in unison, until, just as she passed for the third time the kneeling Crusader, a part of a little and well-proportioned hand, so beautifully formed as to give the highest idea of the perfect proportions of the form to which it belonged, stole through the folds of the gauze, like a moonbeam through the fleecy cloud of a summer night, and again a rosebud lay at the feet of the Knight of the Leopard.

-- Sir Walter Scott The Talisman

Like Angels Stopped Upon the Wing by Sound

There I beheld the emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power,
In sense conducting to ideal form,
In soul of more than mortal privilege.
One function, above all, of such a mind
Had Nature shadowed there, by putting forth,
'Mid circumstances awful and sublime,
That mutual domination which she loves
To exert upon the face of outward things,
So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed
With interchangeable supremacy,
That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive,
And cannot choose but feel. The power, which all
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus
To bodily sense exhibits, is the express
Resemblance of that glorious faculty
That higher minds bear with them as their own.
This is the very spirit in which they deal
With the whole compass of the universe:
They from their native selves can send abroad
Kindred mutations; for themselves create
A like existence; and, whene'er it dawns
Created for them, catch it, or are caught
By its inevitable mastery,
Like angels stopped upon the wing by sound
Of harmony from Heaven's remotest spheres.
Them the enduring and the transient both
Serve to exalt; they build up greatest things
From least suggestions; ever on the watch,
Willing to work and to be wrought upon,
They need not extraordinary calls
To rouse them; in a world of life they live ...

-- William Wordsworth The Prelude

starry night

Those who have never seen them cannot believe what the stars are like in the desert; the complete absence of artificial light, the vastness of the horizon only seem to increase their number and brightness. It is certainly an unforgettable experience. Only the camp fire with the tea water boiling on top and the bread for supper baking underneath, glows with a mellow light against the sparkling heaven.

-- Carlo Carretto Letters from the Desert

we all wear many hats

"These hats are driving me mad!" The king's voice rang out through all the palace. "Why waste time with a child's bow and arrow. Fetch me the mightiest bow and arrow in all my realm -- fetch the yeoman of the bowmen!"

"Yeoman of the bowman," echoed all the lords and noblemen of the court.

A gigantic man strode out across the terrace. His bow was as big as the branch of a tree. The arrow was twice as long as Bartholomew, and thicker than his wrist.

"Yeoman of the bowmen," said the king, "shoot off this boy's hat... and make it stay off!"

Bartholomew was trembling so hard that he could scarcely stand straight. The yeoman bent back his mighty bow.

G-r-r-zibb!... Like a mad giant hornet the arrow tore through the air toward Bartholomew Cubbins.

G-r-r-zapp!... The sharp arrowhead bit through his hat and carried it off -- on and on for a full half mile.

G-r-r-zopp!... It plunked to a stop in the heart of an oak tree. Yet there on Bartholomew's head sat another hat.

The face of the yeoman of the bowmen went white as the palace walls. "It's black magic!" he shrieked.

-- Doctor Seuss The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins

resplendence

No other member in the whole class of mammals is coloured in so extraordinary a manner as the adult male mandrill (C. mormon). The face at this age becomes of a fine blue, with the ridge and tip of the nose of the most brilliant red. According to some authors, the face is also marked with whitish stripes, and is shaded in parts with black, but the colours appear to be variable. On the forehead there is a crest of hair, and on the chin a yellow beard. "Toutes les parties superiéures de leurs cuisses et le grand espace nu de leurs fesses sont également colorés du rouge le plus vif, avec un mélange de bleu qui ne manque réellement pas d'élégance." When the animal is excited all the naked parts become much more vividly tinted. Several authors have used the strongest expressions in describing these resplendent colours, which they compare with those of the most brilliant birds.

-- Charles Darwin Descent of Man

image

We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under this last one, right down to the true image of that reality, absolute, mysterious, which no one will ever see or perhaps right down to the decomposition of any image, of any reality.

-- Michelangelo Antonioni

joy

I threw my brushes aside; they were too small for the work at hand. I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color and taking my palette knife I laid on blue, green, white and brown in great sweeping strokes. As I worked I saw that it was good and clean and strong. I saw nature springing into life upon my canvas. It was better than nature, for it was vibrating with the thrill of a new creation. Exultantly I painted until the sun sank below the horizon, then I raced around the field like a colt let loose, and literally bellowed for joy.

-- Albert Pinkham Ryder The Spiritual in Art

what is real

Strictly speaking, time does not exist (except within the limit of the present), yet we have to submit to it. Such is our condition. We are subject to that which does not exist. Whether it is a question of passively borne duration — physical pain, waiting, regret, remorse, fear — or of organized time — order, method, necessity — in both cases, that to which we are subject does not exist. But our submission exists. We are really bound by unreal chains. Time, which is unreal, casts over all things, including ourselves, a veil of unreality ...

What is real in perception and distinguishes it from dreams is not sensations, but the necessity enshrined in these sensations ...

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

-- Simone Weil Gravity and Grace
Translated by Arthur Wills

The Starred Coverlet

A difficult achievement for true lovers
Is to lie mute, without embrace or kiss,
Without a rustle or a smothered sigh,
Basking each in the other's glory.

Let us not undervalue lips or arms
As reassurances of constancy,
Or speech as necessary communication
When troubled hearts go groping through the dusk;

Yet lovers who have learned this last refinement --
To lie apart, yet sleep and dream together
Motionless under their starred coverlet --
Crown love with wreaths of myrtle.

-- Robert Graves

awakening

He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at him, and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on [knitting] her stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.

Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. He did not sleep long and suddenly awoke with a start and in a cold perspiration.

As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now always occupied his mind—about life and death, and chiefly about death. He felt himself nearer to it.

"Love? What is love?" he thought.

"Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun And there was the former agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep.

He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and discussed something trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere. Prince Andrew dimly realized that all this was trivial and that he had more important cares, but he continued to speak, surprising them by empty witticisms. Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. Something not human—death—was breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back—to lock it was no longer possible—but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.

Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrew died.

But at the instant he died, Prince Andrew remembered that he was asleep, and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.

"Yes, it was death! I died—and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!" And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as if powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that strange lightness did not again leave him.

-- Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men passe mildly away,
And whisper to their soules, to goe,
Whilst some of their sad friends doe say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No teare-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
T'were prophanation of our joyes
To tell the layetie our love.

Moving of th'earth brings harmes and feares,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater farre, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love, so much refin'd,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse.

Our two soules therefore, which are one,
Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the'other doe.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th'other foot, obliquely runne;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.

-- John Donne

the space between

I discovered that there is an aspect of my nature that is neither spiritual nor worldly, and to be situated in that part of myself meant to experience a sort of suffering that simultaneously was new to me and had a flavor of familiarity, a distinct "my-own-ness." Also, and most important, I had constantly to choose it.

-- Jacob Needleman Lost Christianity

inspiration

Inspiration is a moment of contact with another reality, the moment when everything at once falls into its proper place, when as it were, the entire structure appears, and every part is seen to be related to the whole. So we cannot deny it exists, nor can we remain indifferent to the experience of this momentary, magical change in our insight. Having had the taste of this other reality (for surely it is not our everyday fare), we yet wait passively for its unpredictable reappearance. We also know that without it we are cut off from the source of our true nourishment, and everything we make is empty, without life, belongs to no organic whole.

-- Ilonka Karasz Design Forecast Vol. I

Clair de lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmants masques et bergamasques,
Jouant du luth, et dansant, et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Your soul is a chosen landscape
To which maskers and bergamasks bring delight,
Playing the lute and dancing, and almost
Sad beneath their fanciful disguises.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur,
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune.

While singing in the minor key
Of victorious love and the propitious life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

With the calm moonlight, sad and beautiful,
Which brings dreams to the birds in the trees
And makes the fountains sob with ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among the marble statues.

Paul Verlaine
Translated by Winifred Radford

mutatis mutandis

In a letter to André Caplet, Debussy says he has "vacillated for three days between two chords." ... And when he answers Proust's questionnaire (yes, Proust's), he declares that his "favourite activity" is: "dreaming while smoking complicated tobaccos." Dreaming, yes, no surprise there: no need to go and hear La mer or Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest, it's enough to listen to C'est l'extase langoureuse to have proof of that ... Following Verlaine, Debussy devised new relationships: especially between poetry and music ... His music is never, or hardly ever, wedded to the text. His harmony is not imitative. Debussy asserts himself ... and superimposes his thoughts on the poet's – his atmosphere, his memories, his world ... and Verlaine was not the worst practitioner of rhythm in French literature ... They were made to understand one another, to go together. Even so, in his songs with piano Debussy crosses swords with the text ... The more regular the verse, the more he maltreats it – instinctively.

-- Jacques Drillon "Mozart, Debussy and the law"
Translated by Roger Nichols

a love story

He was no sooner in the garden but he discovered where
Madam de Cleves was; he saw a great light in the bower, all the
windows of it were open; upon this, slipping along by the side of
the palisades, he came up close to it, and one may easily judge
what were the emotions of his heart at that instant: he took his
station behind one of the windows, which served him conveniently
to see what Madam de Cleves was doing. He saw she was alone; he
saw her so inimitably beautiful, that he could scarce govern the
transports which that sight gave him: the weather was hot, her
head and neck were uncovered, and her hair hung carelessly about
her. She lay on a couch with a table before her, on which were
several baskets full of ribbons, out of which she chose some, and
he observed she chose those colours which he wore at the
tournament; he saw her make them up into knots for an Indian
cane, which had been his, and which he had given to his sister;
Madam de Cleves took it from her, without seeming to know it had
belonged to the Duke. After she had finished her work with the
sweetest grace imaginable, the sentiments of her heart showing
themselves in her countenance, she took a wax candle and came to
a great table over against the picture of the Siege of Mets, in
which was the portrait of the Duke de Nemours; she sat down and
set herself to look upon that portrait, with an attention and
thoughtfulness which love only can give.

It is impossible to express what Monsieur de Nemours felt at this
moment; to see, at midnight, in the finest place in the world, a
lady he adored, to see her without her knowing that he saw her,
and to find her wholly taken up with things that related to him,
and to the passion which she concealed from him; this is what was
never tasted nor imagined by any other lover. [...]

Never was passion so tender and so violent as that of Monsieur de
Nemours; he walked under the willows, along a little brook which
ran behind the house, where he lay concealed; he kept himself as
much out of the way as possible, that he might not be seen by
anybody; he abandoned himself to the transports of his love, and
his heart was so full of tenderness, that he was forced to let
fall some tears, but those tears were such as grief alone could
not shed; they had a mixture of sweetness and pleasure in them
which is to be found only in love.

-- Madame de Lafayette The Princess of Cleves

communion

But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty -- the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life -- thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?

These things, O Phaedrus and all of you, did Diotima say to me, and I was convinced by them. And being thus convinced, I also tried to convince the others that, regarding the attainment of this end, human nature will not easily find a better helper than love.

-- Plato Symposium
Translated by Benjamin Jowett

ex nihilo

Reality is a perpetual growth, a creation pursued without end. Our will already performs this miracle. Every human work in which there is invention, every voluntary act in which there is freedom, every movement of an organism that manifests spontaneity, brings something new into the world.

-- Henri Bergson Creative Evolution

thinking

When I think of you,
fireflies in the marsh rise
like the soul's jewels,
lost to eternal longing
abandoning my body

-- Izumi Shikibu

iridées

À quoi bon la merveille de transposer un fait de nature en sa presque disparition vibratoire, cependant; si ce n'est pour qu'en émane, sans le gêne d'un proche ou concret rappel, la notion pure.

Je dis: une fleur ! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous les bouquets.

What good is the marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its almost complete and vibratory disappearance with the play of the word, however, unless there comes forth from it, without the bother of a nearby or concrete reminder, the pure notion.

I say: a flower ! and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.

-- Stéphane Mallarmé "Crise de vers [Crisis in Poetry]" Divagations
Translated by Mary Ann Caws

wonder

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes. This faculty of wonder ... is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary. His special attribute is the wonder of the eyes. Hence it was that the ancients gave Minerva [the Goddess of Wisdom] her owl, the bird with ever-dazzled eyes.

-- José Ortega y Gasset The Revolt of the Masses

Great Law of Peace

The Lords of the Confederacy of the Five Nations shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skin shall be seven spans -- which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will and their minds filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the Confederacy. With endless patience they shall carry out their duty and their firmness shall be tempered with a tenderness for their people. Neither anger nor fury shall find lodgement in their minds and all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.

-- The Iroquois Constitution (Fifteenth Century)

the dance

The afternoon sun leans its rays into the repose of the marshes, when suddenly one of these tremendous floods of life surges over them, sweeping down in the distance like a cloud detached from the sky, an invasion of Valkyrie with all the wild discipline and exultation of speed and none of the menace or terror. The little birds approach over the water in a dense column of perfect order, in a humming volume of a sea-like monotone, accompanied by a soft purr from thousands of throats ... Changing pattern, direction, color and formation with every turn, each individual yet keeps the same distance from his neighbor, the same momentum, and the same angle of the body, as though pulled hither and thither with lightning rapidity from the ends of an infinite number of visible and equidistant threads, all radiating from a common point. Thus they cut one design after another out of the fabric of space -- three thousand leaderless birds, executing intricate movements with the single cohesion of one body, supported upon one pair of wings ...

-- Edward Howe Forbush Game Birds, Wildfowl, and Shorebirds

Discourse

With thee conversing, I forget all time,
All seasons, and their change; all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the Sun,
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glist'ring with dew; fragrant the fertile Earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming-on
Of grateful Evening mild; then silent Night,
With this her solemn bird, and this fair Moon,
And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of Morn, when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds; not rising Sun
On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glist'ring with dew; nor fragrance after showers:
Nor grateful Evening mild; nor silent Night,
With this her solemn bird; nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starling, without thee is sweet.

-- John Milton Paradise Lost

casting

The second object was even stranger. When Grifalconi extracted it from its padded case, Valène thought at first that it was a large cluster of coral. Grifalconi shook his head. In one of the attics in Château de la Muette he had found the remains of a table. Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle-shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten. The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverized wood. No sign of this insidious labour showed on the surface. Grifalconi saw that the only way of preserving the original base -- hollowed out as it was, it could no longer support the weight of the top -- was to reinforce it from within; so once he had completely emptied the canals of their wood dust by suction, he set about injecting them with an almost liquid mixture of lead, alum, and asbestos fibre. The operation was successful; but it quickly became apparent that, even thus strengthened, the base was too weak, and Grifalconi had to resign himself to replacing it. It was after he had done this that he thought of dissolving what was left of the original wood so as to disclose the fabulous arborescence within, this exact record of the worms' life inside the wooden mass: a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence, their undeviating single-mindedness, their obstinate itineraries; the faithful materialisation of all they had eaten and digested as they forced from their dense surroundings the invisible elements needed for their survival, the explicit, visible, immeasurably disturbing image of the endless progressions that had reduced the hardest of woods to an impalpable network of crumbling galleries.

-- Georges Perec Life: A User's Manual
Translated by David Bellos

description of Louis Daguerre's diorama

"A Midnight Mass at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont"

At first it was daylight, the nave full of [empty] chairs; little by little the light waned; at the same time, candles were lit at the back of the choir; then the entire church was illuminated, and the chairs were occupied by the congregation who had arrived, not suddenly as if by scene-shifting, but gradually -- quickly enough to surprise one, yet slowly enough for one not to be too astonished. The midnight mass started, and in the midst of a devotion impossible to describe, organ music was heard echoing from the vaulted roof. Slowly dawn broke, the congregation dispersed, the candles were extinguished, the church and the empty chairs appeared as at the beginning. This was magic.

-- Alison Gernsheim and Helmut Gernsheim L.J.M. Daguerre

Daguerre, a 19th century stage designer and entrepreneur, invented the diorama, a spectacle theater with no actors. This one ran for three years in Paris.

He would go on to invent photography, thereby becoming one of history's most influential figures in the development of the visual arts, creating a popular awareness, appetite and demand for images, and leading to the invention of the cinema and Marshall McLuhan's famous words, "the medium is the message."

Qui verra Ve'ra l'ai- mera

Ah, Ideas are living beings! The Count had hollowed out in the air the shape of his love, and necessity demanded that into this void should pour the only being that was homogeneous to it, for otherwise the Universe would have crashed into chaos. And at that instant the impression came, final, simple, absolute, that She must be there, there in the room! Of this he was as calmly certain as of his own existence, and all the objects about him were saturated with this conviction. One saw it there! And now, since nothing was lacking save only Vera herself, outwardly and tangibly there, it was inevitably ordained that there she should be, and that for an instant the great Dream of Life and Death should set its infinite gates ajar! By faith the pathway of resurrection had been driven right to her! Joyfully a clear burst of musical laughter lit up the nuptial bed. The Count turned round. And there, before his eyes, creature of memory and of will, ethereal, an elbow leaning on the lace of the pillow, one hand buried in her thick black hair, her lips deliciously parted in a smile that held a paradise of rare delights, lovely with the beauty that breaks the heart, there at last the Countess Vera was gazing on him, and sleep still lingering within her eyes.

-- Villiers de l'Isle-Adam "Vera"
Translated by Hamish Miles

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.

-- Louise Glück

presenting memory

We are all writers of our own stories, which are in a constant state of revision. The composer Maurice Ravel's thoughts about inspiration and originality are particularly interesting in this context. Ravel commented that if a composer has nothing to say, he would "do well to repeat what has been well said." He added that if a composer does have something to say, it will emerge from his "unwitting infidelity to the model." In other words, "originality" in music (or any art) is like the fiction of memory that results when we attempt to reconstruct an exact replica. We can't help being creative: that is how our minds work. The challenge is to recognize our particular fictions, to capture them as best we can and to present them clearly, like dreams told well.

-- Bruce Adolphe Of Mozart, Parrots and Cherry Blossoms in the Wind


relativity

Themes don't come to me when I'm not thinking about composing, but rhythms do. Sometimes I get a funny rhythmic idea because of trying to walk down the street in New York; the traffic patterns have given me ideas. And I've gotten ideas for many pieces from looking outside a train window and seeing things rush by, and then looking inside the train -- the relativity of things. I have a lot of pieces where there are two simultaneous tempos.

-- Bruce Adolphe

play

[Will-o'-the wisps appear.]

ARKADINA [in a low voice]: There's something decadent about this.

TREPLEV [reproachfully imploring her]: Mother!

NINA: I am all alone. Once in a hundred years I open my mouth to speak, my voice echoes dolefully in this void, and no one hears it .... And you, pale lights, you do not hear me .... The stagnant marsh begets you before dawn, you drift till daybreak without thought, without will, without the throb of life. Fearing lest life should spring up in you, the devil, father of eternal matter, at every instant produces in you a continual interchange of atoms, as in stones and in water, and you are ceaselessly being changed. Within the universe, spirit alone remains constant and unaltered, [Pause] Like a prisoner cast into a deep and empty well, I know not where I am or what awaits me. One thing only is not hidden from me: in the cruel, persistent struggle with the devil, the principle of the forces of matter, I am destined to be victorious, then matter and spirit shall merge in glorious harmony, and the kingdom of universal will shall be at hand. But this will come only little by little, after a long, long succession of millennia, when the moon, bright Sirius, and the earth have turned to dust .... Until then .... horror, horror .... [Pause; in the background two red spots appear over the lake.] Behold, my powerful enemy, the devil, approaches. I see his awful, blood-red eyes ....

ARKADINA: There's a smell of sulfur. Is that necessary?

TREPLEV: Yes.

ARKADINA [laughs]: Oh, it's a stage effect!

TREPLEV: Mother!

NINA: He yearns for man ....

POLINA ANDREYEVNA [to DORN]: You've taken off your hat. Put it on or you'll catch cold.

ARKADINA: The doctor has taken off his hat to the devil, the father of eternal matter.

TREPLEV [flaring up, loudly]: The play is over! That's enough! Curtain!

ARKADINA: Why are you angry?

TREPLEV: Enough! Curtain! Bring down the curtain! [Stamping his foot] Curtain! [The curtain falls.] You must forgive me. I overlooked the fact that only the chosen few can write plays and act in them. I have infringed on a monopoly! To me .... I .... [Tries to continue, then, with a gesture of resignation, goes out left.]

ARKADINA: What's the matter with him?

SORIN: Irina, my dear, you shouldn't wound a young man's pride like that.

ARKADINA: But what have I said to him?

SORIN: You've hurt his feelings.

ARKADINA: He told us himself it was going to be a joke, so I treated it as a joke.

SORIN: All the same ....

-- Anton Chekhov The Sea Gull
Translated by Ann Dunnigan

East of Broken Top

Sunset reaches out, earth rolls free
yet clings hard to what passes.
Light pours unstinting, though darkness
cuts the horizon and leaps for the sky.
Beyond, in a shadow vast as the world,
a silent upland springs blue where it stands
morning and evening. Its own being,
it never changes while the light plays over it.

We could go there and live, have a place,
a shoulder of earth, watch days
find their way onward in their serious march
where nothing happens but each one is gone.
Some people build cities and live there;
they hurry and shout. We lie on the earth;
to keep from falling into the stars we reach
as wide as we can and hold onto the grass.

-- William Stafford

the wind

The night was velvety and liquid. It lapped gently against the cheeks like cloth, then it receded with a sigh and could be heard swaying in the trees. Stars filled the sky. They were no longer the stars of winter, separate, brilliant. They were like fish spawn. There was no longer any form in the world, not even of adolescent things. Nothing but milk: milky buds, milky seeds in the earth, the sowing of creatures, and star milk in the sky. The trees had the strong odour of the time when they are in love ... The wind was speaking. It was a milky wind like the rest. It was full of shapes, full of images, of gleams, of lights, of flames that did not illumine a centimeter of the earth but lit up the whole interior of one's being.

-- Jean Giono Joy of Man's Desiring
Translated by Katherine Allen Clarke

substance

The purpose of art is not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed.

-- Max Scheler The Nature of Sympathy
Translated by Peter Heath

flame

As for the adoration of Rossini, which had recently become the latest thing for fashionable Parisians, it made me furious. My anger was increased by the entire manner of the new movement, which was totally in opposition to that of Gluck and Spontini. I could imagine nothing more exquisitely beautiful and genuine than the compositions of these great masters. In contrast, Rossini's cynical approach to melody, his contempt for dramatic expression and good sense, his interminable repetition of one kind of cadence, his endless childish crescendo and crude bass drum, irritated me so much that I was blinded to the brilliant aspects of his genius, even in his exquisitely scored masterpiece, The Barber of Seville. I frequently agonized over the possibility of putting a mine under the Théâtre-Italien and blowing it up, together with its assembly of Rossinians ... I entirely agree with Ingres when he describes certain of Rossini's works as "the music of a charlatan."

-- Hector Belioz Memoirs

attention

Chiamavi 'l cielo e 'ntorno vi si gira,
mostrandovi le sue bellezze etterne,
e l'occhio vostro pur a terra mira.

Heaven calls you and revolves around you, showing you its timeless beauties, and your eye looks only at the earth.

-- Dante Purgatorio

Passage to India

O my brave soul!
O farther farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

-- Walt Whitman

late

... I run to it fast as I can go and dodge people à la Columbia halfback and cut into track fast as off-tackle where you carry the ball with you to the left and feint with neck and head and push of ball as tho you're gonna throw yourself all out to fly around that left end and everybody psychologically chuffs with you that way and suddenly you contract and you like whiff of smoke are buried in the hole in tackle, cutback play, you're flying into the hole almost before you yourself know it, flying into the track I am and there's the train about 30 yards away even as I look picking up tremendously momentum the kind of momentum I would have been able to catch if I'd a looked a second earlier — but I run, I know I can catch it ... But suddenly I get embarrassed thinking what are all the people of the world gonna say to see a man running so devilishly fast with all his might sprinting thru life like Jesse Owens just to just to catch a goddam train and all of them with their hysteria wondering if I'll get killed when I catch the back platform and Blam, I fall down and go boom and lay supine across the crossing, so the old flagman when the train has flowed by will see that everything lies on the earth in the same stew, all of us angels will die and we dont ever know how or our own diamond, O heaven will enlighten us and open our eyes — open our eyes, open our eyes. — I know I wont get hurt, I trust my shoes, hand grip, feet, solidity of yipe and cripe of gripe and grip and strength and need no mystic strength to measure the musculature in my rib back -- but damn it all it's a social embarrassment to be caught sprinting like a maniac after a train especially with two men gaping at me from rear of train and shaking their heads and yelling I cant make it even as I half-heartedly sprint after them with open eyes trying to communicate that I can and not for them to get hysterical or laugh, but I realize it's all too much for me, not the run, not the speed of the train which anyway two seconds after I gave up the complicated chase did indeed slow down at the crossing in the airtest before chugging up again for good and Bayshore. So I was late for work, and old Sherman hated me and was about to hate me more.

-- Jack Kerouac The Railroad Earth

transom.org

This online resource is the recipient of the first Peabody awarded exclusively to a Web site. TRANSOM.ORG provides clear guidance – both technical and conceptual – on how to create original radio productions. The site also makes those productions available to audiences through webcasts, bringing new voices into the media mix.

-- 63rd Annual Peabody Awards

perception

We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson Experience

beginning

My cynicism had peaked, but later that summer something happened that changed me -- not instantly but decisively. A month before I was scheduled to fly to England and resume my career as a facile ignoramus, I came down with a mild summer cold that lingered, festered, and turned into pneumonia, forcing me to spend two weeks in bed. One feverish night I found myself standing in front of a bookcase ...

And so, belatedly, haltingly, and almost accidentally, it began: the education I'd put off while learning to pass as someone in the know. I wasn't sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete, but for once those weren't my first concerns. Alone in my room, exhausted and apprehensive, I no longer cared about self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. I wanted to find out what others thought.

-- Walter Kirn "Lost in the Meritocracy" The Atlantic 295:1

arriving

I remember as one moment of joy the arrival of the 100,000th displaced person in New York. He struck me as a kind of Everyman, a Pole with maybe a seventh-grade education. In 1939 he'd been called out for what he thought would just be military maneuvers, and he found himself in an actual shooting war. He was captured and made a slave laborer in Germany. After the war he was in a displaced persons camp and applied for an American visa. But he kept being turned down, seven or eight times, because the X-rays showed a shadow on his lungs, a sign of TB. Finally the shadows disappeared, and they gave him a visa. In New York, they'd arranged a big reception ... He was holding onto his last X-ray sheets and as he was getting ready to come through, before the band began to play, he wanted to hand the X-ray sheets to the officials as proof that the shadows were gone. But they wouldn't take them. Instead, the officials confiscated the half-dozen oranges someone had given him as a present ... he smiled and walked on through and the band struck up with the music.

-- Eileen Egan For Whom There Is No Room: Scenes from the Refugee World

mirrors

Now he glimpsed the flash of the pool through the aperture of a natural vault, a masterpiece of erosion. The vault was low and he bent his head to step down toward the water. In its limpid tintarron he saw his scarlet reflection but, oddly enough, owing to what seemed to be at first blush an optical illusion, this reflection was not at his feet but much further; moreover, it was accompanied by the ripple-warped reflection of a ledge that jutted high above his present position. And finally, the strain on the magic of the image caused it to snap as his red-sweatered, red-capped doubleganger turned and vanished, whereas he, the observer, remained immobile. He now advanced to the very lip of the water and was met there by a genuine reflection, much larger and clearer than the one that had deceived him. He skirted the pool. High up in the deep-blue sky jutted the empty ledge whereon a counterfeit king had just stood. A shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) ran between his shoulder-blades. He murmured a familiar prayer, crossed himself, and resolutely proceeded toward the pass. At a high point upon an adjacent ridge a steinmann (a heap of stones erected as a memento of an ascent) had donned a cap of red wool in his honor. He trudged on.

-- Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire

the negative epiphany

One's first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen — in photographs or in real life — ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.

-- Susan Sontag On Photography

My childhood was partially spent in Germany, where my father was stationed in the U.S. Army base at Pirmasens. For several reasons I spent a lot of time alone in the library there. My parents were in the habit of dropping me off whenever they needed a babysitter and, being a precocious and voracious reader, I finished off the contents of the children's room and started hanging out in the periodicals, where I quickly discovered The New Yorker and its anthologized cartoons. This was my favorite place to be, dooming me to a lifetime of nerdy pursuits. I can honestly say that I have been a faithful reader of The New Yorker since I was six years old, although at first it was just for the pictures (there were no photographs at all in those days, just illustrations and cartoons and small ads).

Curiously, there was never any mention of the holocaust, either at school or at home, or in society at large, as far as was directed to me. I knew nothing about it. One day I was in the empty base library and I saw there was a commemorative photographic exhibit, all done up in basic drab, quite perfunctory in appearance, in a small room with a glass door that led off from the main room where I sat with what I had come to think of as "my" magazines (they were never touched by anyone else). I could see through the glass but the door was locked, and I kept returning to see if the room was open yet as my curiosity grew. I had never seen photographs before displayed in this way and what I could glimpse intrigued me in a way I could not define.

Finally one day I tried the doorknob and it turned. I went in and quickly walked the room, as if I had to hurry for fear I would be mysteriously locked in with the somber pictures I did not understand. My heart pounding, I left the room as quickly and as quietly as I could, hoping that no one had seen me. There was a forbidding aura around the whole thing, and the eyes of the people in the images followed me as I turned to make sure the door was latched. That night I thought of the photos and what they could mean.

The next day I was back, and went to the little glass door immediately. It was open and I stepped inside. A soldier greeted me, he was in the process of sorting and affixing labels to the walls. I had seen him before and I knew he was nice. He asked me if I wanted to help him and I said yes, without hesitating.

For the next week I went to the library every day and affixed labels to the walls and display tables, labels that the soldier or someone had hand typed, labels with corrections and some with punctuation added in blue ink. The pictures had an alphabet-number code and I matched the codes with the labels. As I tacked up or glued down each one, I read it, sometimes aloud (the little room was closed off from the library and I felt free to speak in a normal voice although probably it carried). The captions were chilling, matter of fact, and poetic. Some of them were just dates and locations, some of them had a whole story with a beginning, middle and end. A couple had emotional overtones, such as the one that explained the picture was half blurry because the subject collapsed just as it was being taken and there was not a possibility of reshooting it.

These were uncensored pictures of the liberation of death camps: snapshots taken by U.S. soldiers with personal recollections of those days. The images burned into my nascent awareness and provided an early lesson in the truth that not all eloquence comes packaged in sanitized forms of prettiness or wit or safety. The power of this exhibit came from revelations of ugliness, from candid understatement, from inklings of raw brutality. But most of all, to a little girl's mind, the power came from the unblinking human eyes that looked out from within each photograph.

RB 27 January 2005

routine

George Gershwin and his brother Ira are a harmonious team. They play a happy duet in composition, although George plays his part on the piano and Ira performs his on the typewriter. Between shows the two write but little. Once they receive the outline of a plot, they really get down to work. They go over this carefully and decide which situations are best suited for tunes, and what type of tune. George Gershwin has no regular routine. Sometimes he is at the piano early in the afternoon, sometimes at three o'clock in the morning. When he gets eight bars that he likes, he can finish a chorus in a few minutes. He has been known to write four songs in a single afternoon. He composes very fluently. Once when returning from the tryout tour of Funny Face, he discovered that he had left two notebooks containing at least forty tunes at Wilmington, Delaware. When the hotel there informed him that the books could not be located, he neither raved nor stormed. He simply sat down and wrote forty more.

-- New York Times 27 December 1931

push ahead

The boundaries of our world shift under our feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order.

-- Rollo May


like this

Go slowly, breathe and smile.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

reality

I don't want to persuade the reader that it's a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I'm telling those readers that it's just a story; it's fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It's not easy to explain ...

I'm not pretending it's the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same: We are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment; it's a true relationship. That's what I want to write about.

-- Haruki Murakami, in Paris Review No. 170


either way

"We're not metaphors."

"I know," I say. "But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me."

A faint smile comes to her as she looks up at me. "That's the oddest pickup line I've ever heard."

"There're a lot of odd things going on -- but I feel like I'm slowly getting closer to the truth."

"Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?"

"Either way, I don't think I can stand the sadness I feel right now," I tell her.

"I feel the same way."

-- Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore
Translated by Philip Gabriel


discovering the truth

INT. 7½ FLOOR -- NIGHT

The elevator doors are pried open. It's packed with sad people. Maxine and the sad people climb out. The last to emerge is Malkovich. He is astounded by the squat dimensions of the floor. He turns the corner and sees a long line of crouching depressed-looking people. Maxine goes into the office and closes the door. Malkovich sees 'J.M. Inc.' taped to the door. He turns to the first man in line.

MALKOVICH
Excuse me, what type of service does this company provide?

SAD MAN
You get to be John Malkovich for fifteen minutes. Two hundred clams.

MALKOVICH
(quietly flipped)
I see.

SAD MAN
No cutting, by the way.

Malkovich pounds on the door.

No cutting!

Several people jump on Malkovich, and start beating him. Craig steps out of the office.

CRAIG
Hey! Break it up! Break it up! Everybody gets a chance to be ...

The people climb off Malkovich. His glasses and cap have been knocked off and everyone recognizes him.

SAD MAN
It's him! Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Malkovich! I hope we didn't hurt you too terribly. It's such a thrill to meet you.

MALKOVICH
(to Craig)
Inside.

-- Charlie Kaufman Being John Malkovich

it is at moments after i have dreamed

it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when(being fool to fancy)i have deemed

with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds

the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always)and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;

moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination,when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:

one pierced moment whiter than the rest

—turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

-- e. e. cummings

Set to music by John Cage

art

10th August: Philip got me talking about art today. I told him about how I fell in love with Gaugain's red only when I saw it in person, and how I could see that same red in Matisse, for instance, or how important it is to see Van Gogh's paintings in person, maybe more than all the rest, because you can put your nose against the canvas and see how his swirling intermixed oils create valleys and crevices of color that rise off the canvas into bright peaks and dark valleys, & how important Vermeer was for both of us, and Gregory [Corso] too, but neither of us could really articulate why.

-- Randy Roark A Month with Philip Whalen 10 August 1993

letter from school

We all have our troubles (!), and very few of us want to increase them. Even that third-former, who is running along the corridor now, has probably an inherent cancer, or a mind full of lechery. The child grows from the cradle, soaked in a morbidity and restlessness he cannot understand, does a little painful loving, fails to make money, builds his life on sand, and is struck down before he can accomplish anything. Is it worth me lifting up my pen to write? Is anything worth anything? It is in moments like this that I emphatically reply "no." Very striking and all that. I can hear you in your suburban lodgings laughing at my theatrical gestures ...

-- Dylan Thomas (age 16) Letter to Percy Smart December 1930

revelation

The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.

-- Mark Rothko, in Painters on Painting by Eric Protter

symbols

Civilization, comprising all the achievements of art and science, technology and industry, is the result of man's invention and manipulation of symbols -- of words, letters, numbers, formulas and concepts, and of such social institutions as universally accepted clocks and rulers, scales and timetables, schedules and laws. By these means, we measure, predict, and control the behavior of the human and natural worlds -- and with such startling apparent success that the trick goes to our heads. All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is.

-- Alan Watts Does It Matter?

adrift

No one must see the ghost
Of me that wanders
Over the field and wood
Above this thin rain,
Filled with an ache
And a crazy refrain.

Margaret Newlin "Rain"

twilight

The evening light. Purple coves and holes of shadow in the breasts of hills and the white gable of Newton's house smiling so peacefully amid the trees in the middle of the valley. This is the peace and luminosity William Blake loved. Today after dinner, a hawk, circling the novitiate and the church steeple, designed a free flight unutterably more pure than skating or music. How he flung himself down from on high and swooped up to touch lightly on the pinnacle of the steeple and sit there, then fell off to cut lovely curves all around the cedars, then off like an arrow into the south.

-- Thomas Merton Journal 10 March 1963

one

"Do you understand," the [archery] Master asked me one day after a particularly good shot, "what I mean by 'It shoots,' 'It hits'?"

"I'm afraid I don't understand anything more at all," I answered, "even the simplest things have got me in a muddle. Is it 'I' who draw the bow, or is it the bow that draws me into the state of highest tension? Do 'I' hit the goal, or does the goal hit me? Is 'It' spiritual when seen by the eyes of the body, and corporeal when seen by the eyes of the spirit -- or both or neither? Bow, arrow, goal and ego, all melt into one another, so that I can no longer separate them. And even the need to separate has gone. For as soon as I take the bow and shoot, everything becomes so clear and straightforward and so ridiculously simple ..."

"Now at last," the Master broke in, "the bowstring has cut right through you."

-- Eugen Herrigel Zen in the Art of Archery
Translated by R.F.C. Hull

tracks

The first track is the end of a string. At the far end, a being is moving; a mystery, dropping a hint about itself every so many feet, telling you more about itself until you can almost see it, even before you come to it. The mystery reveals itself slowly, track by track, giving its genealogy early to coax you in. Further on, it will tell you the intimate details of its life and work, until you know the maker of the track like a lifelong friend.

The mystery leaves itself like a trail of breadcumbs, and by the time your mind has eaten its way to the maker of the tracks, the mystery is inside you, part of you forever. The tracks of every mystery you have ever swallowed move inside your own tracks, shading them slightly or skewing them with nuances that show how much more you have become than what you were ...

Birds are always mysteries. They leave their track in the air most of the time ...

-- Tom Brown The Tracker

tír na sorcha

In the hollows of quiet places we may meet,
the quiet places where is neither moon nor sun,
but only the light as of amber and pale gold
that comes from the Hills of the Heart.
There, listen at times: there
you will call, and I hear: there
will I whisper, and that whisper will come to you
as dew is gathered into the grass, at the rising of the moon.

-- Fiona MacLeod The Silence of Amor

La Courbe de Tes Yeux

The Curve of Your Eyes

La courbe de tes yeux fait le tour de mon coeur,
The curve of your eyes circles my heart,
Un rond de danse et de douceur,
A round of dance and gentleness,
Auréole du temps, berceau nocturne et sûr,
Time's aureole, safe nocturnal cradle,
Et si je ne sais plus tout ce que j'ai vécu
And if I don't remember all that I have lived
C'est que tes yeux ne m'ont pas toujours vu.
Blame your eyes that haven't always seen me.

Feuilles de jour et mousse de rosée,
Leaves of day and moss of dew,
Roseaux du vent, sourires parfumés,
Reeds of the wind, perfumed smiles,
Ailes couvrant le monde de lumière,
Wings spreading light over the world,
Bateaux chargés du ciel et de la mer,
Boats laden with the sky and the sea,
Chasseurs des bruits et sources des couleurs
Hunters of noises and springs of colors

Parfums éclos d'une couvée d'aurores
Perfumes bursting from a myriad dawns
Qui gît toujours sur la paille des astres,
Always lying on a pallet of stars,
Comme le jour dépend de l'innocence
As the day depends on innocence
Le monde entier dépend de tes yeux purs
The whole world depends upon your clear eyes
Et tout mon sang coule dans leurs regards.
And all my blood flows within their gaze.

-- Paul Eluard
Translated by Richard A. Branyon

light and space

To Vence -- small, on a sun-warmed hill, uncommercial, slow, peaceful. Walked to Matisse cathedral [sic] -- small, pure, clean-cut. White, with blue-tile roof sparkling in the sun. But shut! Only open to public two days a week. A kindly talkative peasant told me stories of how rich people came daily in large cars from Italy, Germany, Sweden, etc., and were not admitted, even for large sums of money. I was desolate and wandered to the back of the walled nunnery, where I could see a corner of the chapel and sketched it, feeling like Alice outside the garden, watching the white doves and orange trees. Then I went back to the front and stared with my face through the barred gate. I began to cry. I knew it was so lovely inside, pure white with the sun through blue, yellow and green stained windows.

Then I heard a voice. 'Ne pleurez plus, entrez,' and the Mother Superior let me in, after denying all the wealthy people in cars.

I just knelt in the heart of the sun and the colours of sky, sea and sun, in the pure white heart of the chapel. 'Vous êtes si gentille,' I stammered. The nun smiled. 'C'est la miséricorde de Dieu.' It was.

-- Sylvia Plath postcard to Aurelia Plath 7 January 1956

transcript: the aim of Oscar Wilde

Carson: You are of opinion, I believe, that there is no such thing as an immoral book?

Wilde: Yes.

Carson: Am I right in saying that you do not consider the effect in creating morality or immorality?

Wilde: Certainly I do not.

Carson: So far as your works are concerned, you pose as not being concerned about morality or immorality?

Wilde: I do not know whether you use the word 'pose' in any particular sense.

Carson: It is a favourite word of your own.

Wilde: Is it? I have no pose in this matter. In writing a play or book I am concerned entirely with literature; that is, with art. I aim not at doing good or evil, but in trying to make a thing that will have some quality or form of beauty or wit.

Carson: This is in your introduction to Dorian Gray: 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.' That expresses your view?

Wilde: My view on art, yes.

Carson: Then I take it that no matter how immoral a book may be, if it is well written it is, in your opinion, a good book?

Wilde: Yes: if it were well written so as to produce a sense of beauty, which is the highest sense of which a human being can be capable. If it were badly written it would produce a sense of disgust.

-- Regina v. Queensberry in Trials of Oscar Wilde by H. Montgomery Hyde

maze of mazes

Under the trees of England I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth. I imagined it untouched and perfect on the secret summit of some mountain; I imagined it drowned under rice paddies or beneath the sea; I imagined it infinite, made not only of eight-sided pavilions and of twisting paths but also of rivers, provinces and kingdoms. I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.

-- Jorge Luis Borges The Garden of Forking Paths

atmosphere

The atmosphere into which genius leads us, and indeed all art, is the atmosphere of the world of dreams.


communion

Dreaming is thus one of our roads into the infinite ... It is only by emphasizing our finiteness that we ever become conscious of the infinite. The infinite can only be that which stretches far beyond the boundaries of our own personality. It is the charm of dreams that they introduce us into a new infinity. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were in the arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature.

-- Havelock Ellis The World of Dreams

blessing

I want to be where
your bare foot walks,

because maybe before you step,
you'll look at the ground.
I want that blessing.

-- Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks

other world

There's a William Carlos Williams poem in which a man stops his car, lets his children off at school, then drives to where the road ends and from there walks down to the edge of the river. Even in the city there still is some mud, and there still are some flowers growing in the mud, and some weeds are still down by the river. He knows the names of the flowers by heart, and for him to see those flowers growing in the mud takes him outside of what he normally calls himself. There are no windows down by the river, he doesn't look through any window, but there is a membrane there, stretched between his ordinary world which is known, and another world. When he crouches down and touches the white petal of a flower with his fingertip, he enters that other world.

Then, like a curtain pulled aside, a sound -- say a honking -- wakes him and he turns around, walks back to his car and drives away from the river. But not away from the other world. He thinks he's left the other world but the other world has come with him, and in fact if he would look in the passenger seat he would see it. But he's driving now.

-- John Haskell "Marguerite's Cat" in Ninth Letter 1:2

recipe

... a little bit of failure can be a good thing. In India, when they weave marriage blankets, they make them perfect until they get to the end, then they put in this little screwed-up thing. They say that little mistake is what lets you in. That's what the Holy Grail myth is about -- somebody with a wound or "mistake" in him. I think you just have to accept that wound because it might contain its own healing factor. Accepting that wound might be the first ingredient in some kind of recipe.

-- Tom Verlaine

Mouvance

Hilarity and sour scorn typify my reactions to
passions of the moment: I mean, seeing people

expend themselves into fugitive extremes, it
speaks poorly of the power of the mind to

govern any kind of distances: until you
consider that passions, except in intense

subduals too long range to bear, only come in
moments, so if you are to get any passion out

of life, you'll have to dig it out of narrow
spaces or squeeze all you have into slender,

if deep, circumstance: I myself have never
known what to do about anything: as I look

back, I see not even a clown but a clown's
clothes flapping on the clothesline of some

tizzy: is it really wise so to anticipate
and prepare for the storm, so to gauge it in

terms of other storms, that when the fierce
lightning breaks and high wind falls blunt

against you you just look away with a numb
nonchalance: what about the splintering free

of the green branches, the bubbly pelt and
spray of windy rain on sudden pools, what

about the vigorous runaway of rivulets finding
themselves: what, what, did not the vibrance

of the ground in that thud click your teeth:
think of the tranquility, all passion spent,

when the passion passes and you lie back in
a relief of sweet feeling; whereas, unspent,

you would just growl your way into the next
worry of the next storm: hark, the bells are

ringing, the announcements are in preparation,
it is time for singing. . . .

-- Archie Ammons

the ringing of bells

View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer

52. EXT. THE RIVER VIVONNE. COMBRAY. DAY. 1893.

Water lilies on the water.
Boys lowering glass jars to catch minnows.
MARCEL (13) and family walking along the bank.

FATHER
No, no, of course we can't get as far as the château. It's much too far.

MOTHER (to MARCEL, gently)
But you'll be able to see the Duchess on Sunday. She's coming to Combray for the wedding.

GRANDMOTHER
I think Marcel's fascinated by the name as much as anything else. Aren't you?

FATHER
The name stands for something. They're one of the oldest and noblest families in France.

GRANDMOTHER
Yes, but I meant the actual sound. It's golden. Guermantes.

53. INT. MARCEL'S ROOM. NIGHT. 1888.

Marcel (8) alone with a magic lantern.
The image of Geneviève de Brabant (ancestress of the Guermantes family) floats over the walls and ceiling.

MARCEL (V.O., murmuring)
Guermantes.

54. INT. SAINT-HILAIRE CHURCH, COMBRAY. 1893.

Chapel of Gilbert the Bad.
Camera pans down stained-glass window.
The wedding in progress. White hawthorn blossoms over the altar.

55. INT. CHURCH. CONGREGATION.

The DUCHESSE DE GUERMANTES (35) seen from MARCEL's point of view.

56. C.U. MARCEL.

Looking at her.

57. C.U. THE DUCHESSE.

She turns her head, a slight smile on her lips.

58. THE CHÂTEAU OF GUERMANTES (IDEALIZED IMAGE).

Long shot across the lake to the chateau.
In the far distance the figures of the DUCHESSE and MARCEL, walking slowly by the lake. She is holding his hand.
A woman's voice (not the DUCHESSE's) heard over:

VOICE
You are a poet. I can tell. Tell me about your poems. Tell me about the poems you intend to write.

59. EXT. GARDEN. COMBRAY. DAY. 1893. LONG SHOT.

SWANN (45) and MARCEL (13) are sitting together in the garden. Their heads are close.
SWANN is riffling through the pages of a book.
Smiling, he reads a sentence or two to MARCEL.
MARCEL's reaction is animated. He takes the book from SWANN, and studies the page.
Chimes of the church bell.
Bird sounds.

-- Harold Pinter The Proust Screenplay
Based on A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust

perception

Perception of the beautiful is accompanied by that curious feeling of intellectual fullness through which we seem to be swollen with a superior knowledge of the object contemplated, and which nevertheless leaves us powerless to express it and to possess it by our ideas and make it the object of scientific analysis .

-- Jacques Maritain Art and Scholasticism
Translated by J.W. Evans

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,--
Nature's observatory -- whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, it's river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

-- John Keats

evidence

What in common language we call beauty, which is in harmony of lines, colors, sounds, or in grouping of words or thoughts, delights us only because we cannot help admitting a truth in it that is ultimate. "Love is enough," the poet has said; it carried its own explanation, the joy of which can only be expressed in a form of art which also has that finality. Love gives evidence to something which is outside us but which intensely exists and thus stimulates the sense of our own existence.

-- Rabindranath Tagore

medium

The great painter Degas often repeated to me a very true and simple remark by Mallarmé. Degas occasionally wrote verses, and some of those he left were delightful. But he often found great difficulty in this work accessory to his painting ... One day he said to Mallarmé: "Yours is a hellish craft. I can't manage to say what I want, and yet I'm full of ideas ..." And Mallarmé answered: "My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words."

-- Paul Valêry The Art of Poetry
Translated by Denise Folliot

Humming Home Your Shadow

When you get up in the morning, Hoopa Indian children are told, it is very important for you to wait until you get your shadow home. When you go to sleep at night, part of you -- your shadow -- takes off. The part that you've held down all day, the part that you wouldn't let live. When you go to bed, your shadow says, "Now is my chance. I will go out and explore the world that you won't let me touch all day." And off it goes. The shadow has the freedom to go as far away as it wants to, but it has one tie: You have a hum that only your shadow knows. And it can never disobey you. So when you get up in the morning, if you remember to hum, your shadow will come back home. Even though it doesn't want to. So when you get up, before you go out, give your own little hum, and your shadow will say, "Oh! I have to go home," and it will come home. And you are never ready for the day until you have taken time to sing the song of your own shadow. Some people say, "I must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed -- I think I'll go back and start over." They've forgotten to hum! Or some people get up at seven, and at ten o'clock they're still saying, "Don't mind me, I'm not all here." They've forgotten to hum! So there is a land of wisdom in remembering to get yourself all here every day. This is taught to the Hoopa tribal children not by saying, "When you get up in the morning you must do this!" but by saying, "Hum your song, so your heart and your spirit come together."

-- Hoopa, retold by Sister Maria José Hobday

JIMMY MACDONALD

(steps in. In his right hand he carries the sort of brief case preferred by gentlemen who travel in coffee and under his left arm he carries a small, very pink, and very cheap portable phonograph. TULIP doesn't hear him, goes back to the shelf again to get some napkins and some spoons which she polishes on the napkins and he, seizing the opportunity, opens the portable phonograph, starts the disc spinning and blatantly it begins to play the popular air of the moment, whatever that is by the time this play goes into rehearsal if it ever gets written, and if it's ever accepted for production, because God knows I'm through putting money in my own turkeys. So help me.

[no closing parenthesis]

-- Preston Sturges, main character's entrance description in Act I of A Cup of Coffee, the play on which the movie Christmas in July was based

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We have no idea what his fantastic head
was like, where the eyeballs were slowly swelling. But
his body now is glowing like a lamp
whose inner eyes, only turned down a little,

hold their flame, shine. If there weren't light, the curve
of the breast wouldn't blind you, and in the swerve
of the thighs a smile wouldn't keep on going
toward the place where the seeds are.

If there weren't light, this stone would look cut off
where it drops so clearly from the shoulders,
its skin wouldn't gleam like the fur of a wild animal,

and the body wouldn't send out light from every edge
as a star does ... for there is no place at all
that isn't looking at you. You must change your life.

-- R.M. Rilke
Translated by Robert Bly

Artaud on Van Gogh

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. And I prefer, to get out of hell, the landscapes of this quiet convulsionary to the teeming compositions of Breughel the Elder or Hieronymus Bosch, who are, in comparison with him, only artists, whereas Van Gogh is only a poor dunce determined not to deceive himself.

-- Antonin Artaud Watchfriends and Rack Screams
Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Bernard Bador

Mendoza's Dream, or Don Juan in Hell

THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing [yourself and your destination]?

DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

THE DEVIL. On the rocks, most likely.

DON JUAN. Pooh! which ship goes oftenest on the rocks or to the bottom-- the drifting ship or the ship with a pilot on board? ... at least I shall not be bored. The service of the Life Force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Señor Satan.

THE DEVIL. Fare you well, Don Juan. I shall often think of our interesting chats about things in general. I wish you every happiness: Heaven, as I said before, suits some people. But if you should change your mind, do not forget that the gates are always open here to the repentant prodigal ...

DON JUAN. ... Señor Commander: you know the way to the frontier of hell and heaven. Be good enough to direct me.

THE STATUE. Oh, the frontier is only the difference between two ways of looking at things. Any road will take you across it if you really want to get there.

-- George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman