a thing of beauty is a joy for ever

O I do think that I have been alone
In chastity: yes, Pallas has been sighing,
While every eve saw me my hair uptying
With fingers cool as aspen leaves. Sweet love,
I was as vague as solitary dove,
Nor knew that nests were built. Now a soft kiss—
Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss,
An immortality of passion’s thine:
Ere long I will exalt thee to the shine
Of heaven ambrosial; and we will shade
Ourselves whole summers by a river glade;
And I will tell thee stories of the sky,
And breathe thee whispers of its minstrelsy.
My happy love will overwing all bounds!
O let me melt into thee; let the sounds
Of our close voices marry at their birth;
Let us entwine hoveringly — O dearth
Of human words! roughness of mortal speech!
Lispings empyrean will I sometime teach
Thine honied tongue — lute-breathings, which I gasp
To have thee understand, now while I clasp
Thee thus, and weep for fondness — I am pain’d,
Endymion: woe! woe! is grief contain’d
In the very deeps of pleasure, my sole life?

-- John Keats Endymion

the little worlds

Uncle Isak says we are surrounded by realities, one outside the other. He says that there are swarms of ghosts, spirits, phantoms, souls, poltergeists, angels, and devils. He says that even the smallest pebble has a life of its own.

-- Ingmar Bergman Fanny and Alexander

intelletto d'amore

Within the gentle heart Love shelters him
As birds within the green shade of the grove.
Before the gentle heart, in nature's scheme,
Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love.
For with the sun, at once,
So sprang the light immediately; nor was
Its birth before the sun's.

-- Guido Guinicelli
Translated by D.G. Rossetti Dante and His Circle

brink

"What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?"

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best ---" and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you begin to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

-- A.A. Milne The House At Pooh Corner

fish love

Already while building [the nest], the male radiates the most gorgeous colours, which gain in depth and iridescence when a female approaches. Like lightening, he shoots towards her and glowing, halts. If the female is prepared to accept him, she demonstrates it by investing herself with a characteristic, if modest colouring consisting of light grey vertical stripes on a brown background. With fins closely folded, she swims towards the male who, trembling with excitement, expands all his fins to breaking point and holds himself in such a position that the dazzling brilliance of his full broadside is presented to his bride. Next moment he swims off with a sweeping, gracefully sinuous movement, in the direction of the nest. The beckoning nature of this gesture is at once apparent even when seen for the first time ... The movement says: "I am swimming away from you, hurry up and follow me!" At the same time, the fish swims neither too fast nor far and turns back immediately to the female who is following but timidly and shyly in his wake.

In this way the female is enticed under the bubble nest and now follows the wonderful love- play which resembles, in delicate grace, a minuet, but in general style, the trance dance of a Balinese temple dancer. In this love dance, by age- old law, the male must always exhibit his magnificent broadside to his partner, but the female must remain constantly at right angles to him ... he moves in circles round the female and she follows his every movement by keeping her head always turned towards him; the love- dance is thus executed in a small circle, exactly under the middle of the nest. Now the colours become more glowing, more frantic the movements, ever smaller the circles, until the bodies touch. Then, suddenly, the male slings his body tightly round the female, gently turns her on her back and quivering, both fulfil the great act of reproduction. Ova and semen are discharged simultaneously.

-- Konrad Z. Lorenz King Solomon's Ring

mirror image

Then silence happened,
the silence that is born of water, foaming,
Suddenly, it curdles into a looking- glass.
So we grow quiet.
We do the same as lakes to see the sky.

-- Rosario Castellanos

Dame Barbara Hepworth

... the cliffs divide as they touch the sea facing west. At this point, facing the setting sun across the Atlantic, where sky and sea blend with hills and rocks, the forms seem to enfold the watcher and lift him towards the sky.

-- Barbara Hepworth on Trevalgan (above)

exacting

I have now had it before me a couple of weeks, living with it in all shades of light, both physically and mentally, and this is the report: it is a strong and exacting companion, but at the same time one of deep quiet and timeless perspective in inner space. You may react at the word exacting, but a work of great art sets its own standard of integrity and remains a continuous reminder of what should be achieved in everything.

-- Dag Hammarskjöld Letter to Barbara Hepworth 3 June 1961

beginning of dreams

In her sleep Bright- Shining- Woman thought she was in a big open empty place, and something long, hard and round came floating up. She reached out and took hold of it and started walking away carrying it with her, though she couldn't think what it was nor what it could be for. But the more she walked the more she could feel her dream telling her what it was, and finally it began to form in her mind that this was an ear of corn, and that it was something to eat, and you had to call it holy besides. Now she could hear a voice telling her that as long as men lived on earth they'd live by corn. But if they ever failed to keep it holy, the corn would fail too, and life would end.

So she woke up and there was Come- And- Carry- Light. Now they had corn to plant and animals to hunt, and they had both dreamed the same dream about them.

The next thing they did was to climb a hill to look at the world under the sun. They got up high enough so they could see away off yonder east, and if they turned right around, away off yonder west. They could see where the hills and the timber quit, in the east and in the west too, and the prairie that started from there. They noticed many places to plant corn, and animals all over the glades. Then that night they both had the same dream again. Their dream told them that this timber country laid out between prairie on the east and prairie on the west was their own. This was the center of the world, the dream said, and it would always belong to Come- And- Carry- Light and Bright- Shining- Woman and all the people coming after.

-- Towakoni Jim as told to George Dorsey
Retold by L.D. Clark

recognition

The world is changing. The landscape begins to respond as a current upwells. It is starting to clack with itself, though nothing moves in space and there's no wind. It is starting to utter its infinite particulars, each overlapping and lone, like a hundred hills of hounds all giving tongue. The hedgerows are blackberry brambles, white snowberries, red rose hips, gaunt and clattering broom. Their leafless stems are starting to live visibly deep in their centers, as hidden as banked fires live, and as clearly as recognition, mute, shines forth from eyes. Above me the mountains are raw nerves, sensible and exultant; the trees, the grass, and the asphalt below me are living petals of mind, each sharp and invisible, held in a greeting or glance full perfectly formed. There is something stretched or jostling about the sky which, when I study it, vanishes. Why are there all these apples in the world, and why so wet and transparent?

-- Annie Dillard Holy the Firm

bas bleu

I think he is the first poet of the age; but, if he comes to my fireside, I will teach him not only to speak prose, but to talk nonsense, if occasion be ... I would not have a poet always sit on the proud summit of the forked hill.

-- Elizabeth Montagu (on Thomas Gray) Memoirs

correspondence

The predominant colors of the aurora are a pale green and a soft rose. I turned over a weathered antler once on the tundra and found these same two colors staining its white surface. Such correspondence, like that between a surfacing guillemot and an Eskimo man rolling upright in his kayak, hold a landscape together.

-- Barry Lopez Arctic Dreams

The Last Picture Show

INTERIOR JACY'S CAR (OKLAHOMA ROAD #3) -- NIGHT

Lois frowns at the sky as SONNY sips; she turns on radio.

LOIS: That'll be a big help if you mean to live your life in Anarene.

SONNY: I don't.

LOIS: (shakes her head) Strange to have a daughter who wouldn't go through with her wedding night. When I was her age I'd go through with just 'bout any old night.

SONNY: (sips bourbon) I guess I can't get in the Army now -- not with this eye.

[EXTERIOR RED RIVER BRIDGE -- NIGHT

Moonlight on the water; they drive into Texas again.

EXTERIOR POOLHALL -- NIGHT

The car pulls up in front]

SONNY: Sure wasn't outta Texas very long.

LOIS: Well, Oklahoma's not much of an improvement.

SONNY: (sips bourbon, pauses) 'S not the same now. Nothing's really been right since Sam the Lion died.

LOIS: (starts; sadly) No it hasn't. (eyes water slightly) I get sad when I think of Sam for long. Did you know he had beautiful hands?

SONNY: I guess you liked him, didn't you? I guess everybody did.

LOIS: No, it was more than that with me, honey -- I loved him. He loved me.

Surprised, SONNY looks at her and it dawns on him.

SONNY: Are you the one he used to take swimming? Out to the tank?

LOIS: (looks at him; smiles) He told you about that, huh? Oh yeah, I was the one. (pauses) If it hadn'ta been for him, you know, I'd have missed it -- whatever it is. I'd have been one of those Amity types that think bridge is the best thing life has to offer. He's the only man I ever met who knew what I was worth. Sam the Lion. (smiles) Sam the Lion. Nobody knows where he got that name. I gave it to him -- one night. Just came to me. He was so pleased. I was twenty- two then -- can you imagine?

Looks at SONNY briefly, holding back her tears; a few spill over.

LOIS: You know something, Sonny? It's terrible only to find one man your whole life that knows what you're worth. It's just terrible -- I wouldn't be tellin' you if it wasn't. I've looked, too -- you wouldn't believe how I've looked. When Sam ... was sixty- five years old he could jus' walk into a room where I was and do more for me ... (pause) Nobody was like him. (falls silent)

SONNY: (hesitantly) Now I know why Sam liked you.

LOIS: Loved me!

SONNY: Loved you, I mean.

LOIS: Aw, do you? (looks at him, gently puts hand on his cheek) I can kinda see what he saw in you too.

She looks forward again, then back at him a moment, with a reckless smile. He looks back, curiously. Finally:

LOIS: Nope. I'll just go on home.

SONNY: Think I could learn to drink?

Throws back his head and swallows, then coughs and sputters. LOIS is amused. He hands her back the flask.

LOIS: You might. Keep practicing.

She drives away. He goes into the poolhall.

-- Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich

enigma

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well- beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

-- James Agee A Death in the Family

Como una sangre lenta (Like slow blood)

Es luz de estío (is it to summer light)
o es tu mirar (or is it your gaze)
sin tiempo (timeless)
el que me precipita (precipitating me)
hacia las gárgolas (toward gargoyles)
los arquitrabes góticos (Gothic architraves)
la espera (Is it expectancy)
o es delirio sin (or to bottomless)
fondo (delirium)
este fulgor (this glow)
de espaldas (of swords)
que me atraviesa (that pierces me)
tibio (warm)
sin rumbo (wayward)
sin memoria (without memory)
hay anhelo (There is yearning)
en la tarde (in the afternoon)
y en mi sangre (and in my blood)

-- Albalucia Angel

Translated by Agueda Pizarro

wabi

The figure of the Real Man
standing there
one glimpse of him
and we are in love.

-- Ikkyu

vision

Love brings the real, and not just the ideal, vision of what others are because it is a glimpse of what we are bodily. For what is ordinarily called the body is an abstraction. It is the conventional fiction of an object seen apart from its relation to the universe, without which it has no reality whatsoever. But the mysterious and unsought uprising of love is the experience of complete relationship with another, transforming our vision not only of the beloved but of the whole world.

-- Alan Watts

ineffable as it is

There is too much that can neither be written nor kept silent.

-- Tomas Transtomer

reverie

The day before yesterday, in the evening, Dinu Tatarescu came to pick us up. It was raining. We ate and slept at their apartment in Parly II. The next day we drove to Honfleur. The rain had stopped, but the sky was overcast. We visited Honfleur, then drove on. All those famous towns and beaches which I hadn't seen .... As usual, I find myself living in another time. Impossible to be more precise. The villas we pass remind me .... No, they don't remind me, but they "press" me more and more into that time which I can't identify ....

In the evening, on the highway to Paris, the rain begins again, falling harder and more stubbornly. Fortunately, I could continue my dream ....

-- Mircea Eliade Journal 26 August 1979

Enchanted Isles (The Encantadas)

"I once landed on its western side," says a sentimental voyager long ago, "where it faces the black buttress of Albemarle. I walked beneath groves of trees -- not very lofty, and not palm trees, or orange trees, or peach trees, to be sure -- but, for all that, after long seafaring, very beautiful to walk under, even though they supplied no fruit. And here, in calm spaces at the heads of glades, and on the shaded tops of slopes commanding the most quiet scenery -- what do you think I saw? Seats which might have served Brahmins and presidents of peace societies. Fine old ruins of what had once been symmetric lounges of stone and turf, they bore every mark both of artificialness and age, and were, undoubtedly, made by the Buccaneers. One had been a long sofa with back and arms, just such a sofa as the poet Gray might have loved to throw himself upon, his Crebillon in hand."

-- Salvator R. Tarnmoor (Herman Melville's pseudonym) The Piazza Tales

Life Is a Dream

Segismund is shackled in a prison tower and has just awakened:

SEGISMUND.
A dream!
That seem'd as swearable reality
As what I wake in now.

CLOTALDO.
Ay -- wondrous how
Imagination in a sleeping brain
Out of the uncontingent senses draws
Sensations strong as from the real touch;
That we not only laugh aloud, and drench
With tears our pillow; but in the agony
Of some imaginary conflict, fight
And struggle -- ev'n as you did; some, 'tis thought,
Under the dreamt-of stroke of death have died.

SEGISMUND
And what so very strange too -- In that world
Where place as well as people all was strange,
Ev'n I almost as strange unto myself,
You only, you, Clotaldo -- you, as much
And palpably yourself as now you are,
Came in this very garb you ever wore,
By such a token of the past, you said,
To assure me of that seeming present.

CLOTALDO
Ay?

SEGISMUND
Ay; and even told me of the very stars
You tell me here of -- how in spite of them,
I was enlarged to all that glory.

CLOTALDO
Ay, By the false spirits' nice contrivance thus
A little truth oft leavens all the false,
The better to delude us.

SEGISMUND
For you know
'Tis nothing but a dream?

CLOTALDO
Nay, you yourself
Know best how lately you awoke from that
You know you went to sleep on? --
Why, have you never dreamt the like before?

SEGISMUND
Never, to such reality.

CLOTALDO
Such dreams
Are oftentimes the sleeping exhalations
Of that ambition that lies smouldering
Under the ashes of the lowest fortune;
By which, when reason slumbers, or has lost
The reins of sensible comparison,
We fly at something higher than we are --
Scarce ever dive to lower -- to be kings,
Or conquerors, crown'd with laurel or with gold,
Nay, mounting heaven itself on eagle wings.
Which, by the way, now that I think of it,
May furnish us the key to this high flight
That royal Eagle we were watching, and
Talking of as you went to sleep last night.

SEGISMUND
Last night? Last night?

CLOTALDO
Ay, do you not remember
Envying his immunity of flight,
As, rising from his throne of rock, he sail'd
Above the mountains far into the West,
That burn'd about him, while with poising wings
He darkled in it as a burning brand
Is seen to smoulder in the fire it feeds?

-- Pedro Calderón de la Barca La Vida es Sueño (Life Is a Dream)

Translated by Edward Fitzgerald

grace

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.
We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity, unless there is supernatural intervention.

-- Simone Weil

bond

In the life of man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion ...

Look beneath the surface, never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you ... Think often of the bond that unites all things in the universe, and their dependence upon one another. All are, as it were, interwoven ...

-- Marcus Aurelius Meditations
Translated by Maxwell Staniforth

Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron

Out of their loneliness for each other
two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch
forward and become suddenly a life
lifted from dawn or the rain. It is
the wilderness come back again, a lagoon
with our city reflected in its eye.
We live by faith in such presences.

It is a test for us, that thin
but real, undulating figure that promises,
"If you keep faith I will exist
at the edge, where your vision joins
the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light,
feet that go down in the mud where the truth is."

-- William Stafford

encounter

We went some where in space I dont know where -- I was conscious of starlight & of hearing the sea below us. You had taken the form I think of a great serpent, but I am not quite sure ... & your lips touched mine. We melted into one another till we formed only one being, a being greater than ourselves who felt all & knew all with double intensity -- the clock striking 11 broke the spell & as we separated it felt as if life was being drawn away from me through my chest with almost physical pain ... Material union is but a pale shadow compared to it.

-- Maud Gonne Letter to William Butler Yeats

chamber music

You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you now find so enchanting. She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imagination) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her, the woman for whom I wrote poems like "Gentle Lady" or "Thou leanest to the shell of night."

... But then I saw that the beauty of your soul outshone that of my verses. There was something in you higher than anything I had put into them. And so for this reason the book of verses is for you. It holds the desire of my youth, and you, darling, were the fulfillment of that desire.

-- James Joyce Letter to Nora Joyce

resonance

As a theorist, Freud is obviously a great thinker, but I keep going back to him again and again because of the beautiful quality of his writing. He is always rooting things back in the world, back into family relationships, back into object relationships -- a concern that becomes more and more distant in the subsequent work of Lacan, or Deleuze and Guattari. Their theories are so abstract, so disconnected, that I find as an artist there's very little there for me. As a person who works with materials, I appreciate how Freud, even when he gets way out there with his ideas about the "primal horde," creates an elaborate mythology that he still attempts to link to daily life. And beyond that, I find so much of his work resonates with my own experience.

-- Mike Kelley

joy

There are seconds, they only come five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it's heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. This... this is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy.

-- Fyodor Dostoevsky Demons

the portrait

She speaks always in her own voice
Even to strangers; but those other women
Exercise their borrowed, or false voices
Even on sons and daughters.

She can walk invisibly at noon
Along the high road; but those other women
Gleam phosphorescent -- broad hips and gross fingers --
Down every lampless alley.

She is wild and innocent, pledged to love
Through all disaster; but those other women
Decry her for a witch or a common drab
And glare back when she greets them.

Here is her portrait, gazing sidelong at me,
The hair in disarray, the young eyes pleading:
'And you, love? As unlike those other men
As I those other women?'

-- R. Graves

uncertainty

Life is not long, and too much of it should not be spent in idle deliberation how it shall be spent: deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtilty, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another, upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us.

-- Samuel Johnson

interpretation

People bring to a poem what they want. And probably not just with a poem. With anything in the world, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we used to say. And sorrow is in the eye of the beholder, probably. People always interpret a poem in terms of their own experience, which is unavoidable, and I don't think it necessarily presents a difficulty. But it's a fact. I get reactions to my poems ... because somebody has applied his or her past and judgment and imagination to a poem. And it's not the same as mine; how could it be?

-- Hayden Carruth

language

I wish I could take language
And fold it like cool, moist rags.
I would lay words on your forehead.
I would wrap words on your wrists.
'There, there,' my words would say —
Or something better.
I would ask them to murmur,
'Hush' and 'Shh, shhh, it's all right.'
I would ask them to hold you all night.
I wish I could take language
And daub and soothe and cool
Where fever blisters and burns,
Where fever turns yourself against you.
I wish I could take language
And heal the words that were the wounds
You have no names for.

-- Julia Margaret Cameron

wisdom

Search out and seek, and wisdom will become known to you; and when you get hold of her, do not let her go. For in the end you will find the rest she gives, and she will be changed into joy for you ...

Her yoke is a golden ornament, and her bonds are a cord of blue. You will wear her like a glorious robe, you will put her on like a crown of gladness.

-- Book of Sirach

passage (Love)

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
for you are only one thing among many,
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills --
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

-- Czeslaw Milosz

judgment

I care only for the judgment of men who are wise, and of women who have loved.

-- Kathleen Raine The Lion's Mouth

Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary

-- Margaret Atwood

realism

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not happen to give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time. And, if you accept my proposition that reality is altogether different from our stale view of it, we can say that poetry is the language of reality ...

... The facts of reality are the same in the theater of poetry as they are in the theater of prose. What is different is their implication. What I am trying to say is what I have said elsewhere, that a spade is never so merely a spade as the word spade would imply. I am asking for the sudden dramatic appearance of a spade in time and space, but I am equally asking for a spade which I can dig with. I am asking --- now I come to think of it --- I am asking for both kinds of realism at once.

-- Christopher Fry BBC broadcast 1950

Love must be reinvented.

-- Arthur Rimbaud

passage

O Julia, Julia, Cook and nifty wench,
Whose unsurpassed quenelles and hot soufflés,
Whose English, Norse and German, and whose French,
Are all beyond my piteous powers to praise-
Whose sweetly-rounded bottom and whose legs,
Whose gracious face, whose nature temperate,
Are only equaled by her scrambled eggs:
Accept from me, your ever-loving mate,
This acclamation shaped in fourteen lines
Whose inner truth belies its outer sight;
For never were there foods, nor were there wines,
Whose flavor equals yours for sheer delight.
O luscious dish! O gustatory pleasure!
You satisfy my taste-buds beyond measure.

-- Paul Child Julia's birthday 1961

It's so beautifully arranged on the plate — you know someone's fingers have been all over it.

-- Julia Child

God does not dwell in bodies that are whole.

-- Hildegard of Bingen

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-- e.e. cummings

wings of desire

Angels wish they had beards
To enjoy the pleasure of the sound
of scraping the passage of time from faces
worn with sorrows, lighted with joys.
They wish too to sense the clarity of lemons
and to smell the scent of someone in love.
They want to hear a lover say,
"I will always tease your flesh."
In their airy kingdoms beyond this world,
In their beautiful indifference,
In their silent stillness,
They dream, always, their own betrayals:
To grow old and ill, even to die,
And to hear a lover say,
even once, if only once,
"I would rather lose you to another lover than to God."

-- Wim Wenders and Peter Handke

when the violin

When
The violin
Can forgive the past

It starts singing.

When the violin can stop
worrying
About the future

You will become
Such a drunk laughing nuisance

That God
Will then lean down
And start combing you into
His
Hair.

When the violin can forgive
Every wound caused by
Others

The heart starts
Singing.

-- Hafiz

Like Most Revelations

It is the movement that incites the form,
discovered as a downward rapture--yes,
it is the movement that delights the form,
sustained by its own velocity.And yet

it is the movement that delays the form
while darkness slows and encumbers; in fact
it is the movement that betrays the form,
baffled in such toils of ease, until

it is the movement that deceives the form,
beguiling our attention -- we supposed
it is the movement that achieves the form.
Were we mistaken?What does it matter if

it is the movement that negates the form?
Even though we give (give up) ourselves
to this mortal process of continuing,
it is the movement that creates the form.

-- Richard Howard

bonagiunta's answer

And I told him, "I am one who, when Love
Inspires me, takes note, and in the manner
That he dictates to me, I set it down."

-- Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy
Translated by James Finn Cotter

the revelation

An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling's jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme
And most forget; but, either way,
That and the Child's unheeded dream
Is all the light of all their day.

-- Coventry Patmore

relax

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

-- Guillaume Apollinaire

art

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw a moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the 'forms more real than living man,' and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the almond tree blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield. At her word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning month of June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them. She has hawk- faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.

-- Oscar Wilde The Decay of Lying

lux

Henri Cartier-Bresson

encouragement

... so late the night waxes & so still, huddled on its hilltop under the winter stars, the little old black town sleeps. I snatch the small backwater of an hour -- of a quarter of an hour, from complications & preoccupations ... No one, at any rate, I firmly believe, squeezes more of the whole fragrance out of your exquisite work than I do. The sense & the sound, the colour & the taste, the meaning of every stroke & the felicity of every -- felicity: these things I am at home in as in the very lap of the Muse ... Don't intermit -- don't languish -- don't not do anything that ever occurs to you: for I desire & require you with the revolving season ...

-- Henry James Letter to Sarah Orne Jewett 24 December 1899

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.
I've never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by.
The moon just went behind a cloud
To hide its face and cry.

Did you ever see a robin weep,
When leaves began to die?
That means he's lost the will to live,
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky.
And as I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could cry.

-- Hank Williams

process

... sometimes in doing a painting I find myself struggling, covering it up and beginning again. One part begins to be what I want, but it's not balanced with the other parts. So I begin to work with the other parts which become better than the first, and the first one has to be destroyed. All this. And then comes the time when it is finished. In spite of my uncertainty, suddenly there is a kind of satisfaction. So there is the meeting of this suffering felt when doing the work and satisfaction at the same time. That's a good moment.

-- Paul Reynard

grounding

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.

-- William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet

Eva Gonzalès

reality

... We whisper with caution any reference to ‘authentic Reality’, for the linguistic philosophers might tell us that ‘reality’ is nothing more than conformity to established genres and expectations. But in T. S. Eliot’s sense of reality, of that which human kind cannot bear very much, the shift from artificiality to reality is less about straight paths, more about waking up, learning to bear the beams of Love ...

-- William Shannon Thomas Merton's Dark Path

such beauty

Such beauty as hurts to behold
and so gentle as salves the wound:
I am shivering though it is not cold
and dark as in a swoon.

-- Paul Goodman

via About Last Night

I can accept anything in the theatre provided it amuses me or moves me. But if it does neither, I want to go home.

-- Noel Coward

Jules et Jim

In 1955, Francois Truffaut discovered Jules and Jim among a stall's used books, and noticed that it was the first novel of a seventy-year-old. He understood that the lightness and grace of that burning story could have come only after a very long decanting, one that went on for half a century, and from the magic of the "telegraphic style of a poet who forgot his culture and lined up the words like a laconic, stolid peasant," from whence the serial, limpid rhythm of the film. But at times Truffaut stopped a frame, transforming it into a photograph, to show that for all that vitality and spicy dash, we're seeing memories. As happens to Truffaut at other times, he begins a film believing that it will be amusing, "and along the way I notice that only sadness can save it."

-- Daria Galateria
Translated by A. K. Bierman

Juxtaposition

... If an emotion is a collection of changes in body state connected to particular mental images ... the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle. In other words, a feeling depends on the juxtaposition of an image of the body proper to an image of something else, such as the visual image of a face or the auditory image of a melody ...

-- Antonio Damasio Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

Prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may seek

not so much to be consoled as to console;
not so much to be understood as to understand;
not so much to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Heavenly Father, for the times I have failed you or others or failed myself -- I am sorry and ask your forgiveness and healing love.

Amen

door in the wall

But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self- satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

-- Aldous Huxley The Doors of Perception

the wild duck

GREGERS. Roughly, when do you think the invention will be ready?

HJALMAR. Good Lord, you mustn't ask me about details like dates. An invention is something you can never be completely master of. It's largely a matter of inspiration . . . of intuition . . . and it's pretty nearly impossible to predict when that will come.

GREGERS. But it's making good progress?

HJALMAR. Certainly it's making good progress. Not a day goes by but what I do something on the invention; I'm absorbed in it. Every day after dinner I shut myself up in the living room, where I can concentrate in peace. But it's no good people trying to rush me, that's no good. Relling says the same.

GREGERS. And you don't feel all these things going on in the loft take you away from your work . . . distract you too much?

HJALMAR. No, no. On the contrary. You mustn't get that idea at all. I can't always go on poring over the same old exhausting problems. I've got to have something else as well to keep me occupied. Inspiration, revelation, you know --- when it comes, it comes, that's all.

GREGERS. My dear Hjalmar, I almost believe you've a bit of the wild duck about you.

HJALMAR. The wild duck? How do you make that out?

GREGERS. You have gone plunging down and bitten fast to the weeds.

-- Henrik Ibsen The Wild Duck

good and evil

... Then there came a great light which dazzled and yet did not dazzle, a giant light sun of ravishing sweetness and enamouring virtue -- purifying by a fire that did not burn; and in this moment or moments, for it may have been seconds or hours, the "struggle between good and evil" became an absolutely meaningless phrase -- there was only goodness, and of such irresistible attraction that even the slightest resistance or temptation to resistance was inconceivable ...

-- Victor White Good and Evil

presentation

Dancers work with movement the way poets work with words or a sculptor works with clay: They have to learn the basic vocabulary first. But once they learn the language, the whole secret is in the way they present the words. Most dancers try to give the movement language a kind of accent, an affectation, turning the words into a particular jargon, something idiosyncratic or solipsistic.

The word itself is impersonal but a person can infuse it with almost anything.

-- Lincoln Kirstein

returning

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

-- T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding"

Artur Pizarro talks about Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110 on BBC Radio 3

Listen to the interview and the performance here on Real Player.

BBC: So on now to Beethoven's penultimate piano sonata Opus 110 in A Flat Major. Like the work we've just heard it's in three movements and once more there are certain surprises in terms of overall design with the last movement giving the impression of a slow movement and fugueal finale combined. Another surprise is the expression mark that Beethoven gives to the first movement, con amabilità, "with love." I spoke to Artur Pizarro during the break in his rehearsal today and asked him to explain his response to that unusual music direction.

Pizarro: It very much puts the key signature into perspective with that A flat major, it's wonderful ... It brings out the incredibly lyrical element of this movement and you know sort of blows the theory that a lot of people have that Beethoven wasn't very good at melodies ... ha ha blows that theory sky high. It's such a human sonata, it's so much about human condition, it's so much about love and struggle and death and rebirth that to have "with love" from the beginning really to me very importantly puts me in the right mood.

It is a very very loving, very nurturing, very generous piece musically, technically, actually, believe it or not, everything feels very good in the hands and above all I think, philosophically, it's very motherly in the sense of love and tenderness and worrying about what happens, in this case, to Man with a capital M.

BBC: So would you say this is one sonata that does take quite a lot of maturity to approach successfully?

Pizarro: Yeah, maturity not so much in the sense of chronological age, but in the sense of you have to have lived and loved and sometimes lost rather badly to get this sonata.

BBC: Well the scherzo also seems very characteristic of Beethoven with this rather brusque question and answer type of theme. Is that quite exciting to play?

Pizarro: Very. Very. Because it's very much not a ha- ha scherzo, it's scherzo with a bite even when you get to the second or third page and you have the slightly more playful side of it. It's still very pointy. And it's still very driven. It's an "I'm gonna scherzo if it kills me" kind of scherzo, ha ha yeah, and it reinvigorates you after the first movement. It sort of brings the blood to a slight boil so you can handle the scope of what's going to come next

BBC: And it's what happens next when things become quite structurally interesting because the finale feels like two movements rolled into one. Can you just guide us through what happens?

Pizarro: Well, you have the first arioso which is very interesting, being a very tearful melody which seems to come to a conclusion, and it's very much a lament all the way from the gut of the human being, and you think you've gotten to the end of it and this amazing, mind boggling, fugue begins.

When you get to the place where the fugue would invert, back comes this arioso, which ... if you make up your own story, if you have your own program, basically you confront death. What's interesting about the arioso the second time, is where the first time you had long phrases, and you have long slurs, the second time everything is broken up ...

And he puts "with pain and dying," so to me, having saying "pain and dying" and mentioning death, and having little rests everywhere, and the slurs are never more than 2 or 3 notes long, and it feels, literally, physically, like last gasps, then you have this amazing fugue coming back inverted, which to me, implies this path of physical decay has now come to an end, with the fugue and the arioso where you die, and you are then slowly being taken towards rebirth ...

And that happens towards the end of that fugue where you're back in the key of A flat major, and you're growing, and you're moving forward, and you end in the apotheosis of the big huge coda after the big huge arpeggio ... So it's about the most sort of cosmic, spiritual, religious, philosophical sonata that's readily graspable. I mean, it's so powerful at all levels ...

situationists in song

This is why the most fruitful source so far has been what the singers call country and western, actually city-billy, derived from the traditional melodies of the ancient English and Scottish ballads and Irish folk song. This is as true of Leonard Cohen as it is of Johnny Cash. It’s not a question of copying. The rhythms of a people’s folk song are so permanent you might almost believe they came with the DNA.

-- Kenneth Rexroth 1969 Subversive Aspects of Popular Songs

The Two Trees

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

-- William Butler Yeats

Bread stays on the table for the next course of a hand-count of cheeses on a board:  buttery Gorgonzola, Camembert 'more running than standing,' impeccable Gruyeres, Cheddar with a bite and crumbling to it, and double-cream as soothing as a baby's fingertip.

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

Millefiori

In the last glimmer of late afternoon,
burnished by the sun's oblique farewell,
a mirror shines, across an empty room,

a shimmering patch of light. A subtle fume
of brightness creeps along the dusty shelves
in the last glimmer of late afternoon;

immersed in shadow, rows of books are strewn
with dazzling motes. Like circles in a well,
a mirror shines across an empty room,

reaching from pen to letter knife to spoon
and cup—as though reflection might dispel,
in the last glimmer of late afternoon,

oncoming night. Unhurried, like the moon's
ascent, or honey tipped from gleaming cells,
a mirror shines across an empty room,

a paperweight of myriad flowers blooms,
a softness flares within a whorled shell.
In the last glimmer of late afternoon
a mirror shines across an empty room.

-- Jared Carter

beauty

Whenever Beauty looks,
Love is also there;
Whenever beauty shows a rosy cheek
Love lights Her fire from that flame.
When beauty dwells in the dark folds of night
Love comes and finds a heart
entangled in tresses.
Beauty and Love are as body and soul.
Beauty is the mine, Love is the diamond.

-- Rumi

11 August

In Délia's library I found La Jeune Parque, a critical study by Octave Nadal. I've learned that Paul Valéry kept all the outlines, rough drafts, copies, all the papers or scraps of paper on which he wrote dates, words, ideas, on which he sketched or figured, etc., etc., "about eight hundred pieces of various sizes, the major part in separate sheets and the rest comprised of seventy bound pages of a large notebook" (p. 155). He kept everything. But why? Indifference or, on the contrary, the mania of the collector and archivist? Curiosity about the gestation and maturation of his own work? Or the feeling that, by keeping everything, at least some of the mysterious processes of poetic creation could be understood?

-- Mircea Eliade Journal 1963

Weltanschauung

It is to my grandfather's "stereopticon" that I probably owe my Weltanschauung, my way of perceiving the world. The antique contrivance consisted of twin lenses set in a leather-covered housing lined with red velvet. From this housing a kind of wooden slide rule jutted forward, with a device at its end in which you placed twin photographs. Then, pressing the velvet edge to your face, you saw through the lenses an oak tree, not flat, as in a picture, but all in the round; a living presence. For hours I could sit and watch the miraculous three-dimensionality of cows in a meadow, of lovers dallying under lilac bushes full of white doves, of Princess Julianne of the Netherlands riding her piebald pony.

And so it came about that sometimes, when I got tired, and fields and hedges began to look listlessly flat, two-dimensional, I found I could command my eyes: "Now, look as if thorough the stereopticon!" And suddenly every blade of grass sprang to life again and stood there in a space all its own; clumps of trees broke up into individual living beings, each one rising from its own roots deep in the earth. People, when observed through my virtual stereopticon, underwent an extraordinary metamorphosis: they too became impressively unique, mysterious beings. What looked at as just a waiter, a sumac, or a cow became a poignant living presence when seen stereoptically.

I found this discovery of seeing; a precious secret that I never mentioned it to anyone, but practice it I did, as often as I could -- [I began to understand] that everyone's everyday eye can become an awakened eye, an eye that can do infinitely more than merely look at things, recognize, classify and label them. This awakened eye could see the Ten Thousand Things as they are, in themselves, each in its own truth. When all appears as déjà vu or dull, one has only to command one's eye to see stereoptically to awaken it from its habitual slumber to fully conscious perception.

There are drawbacks to this awakened eye: you can't cut down that sumac that is in the way and that is "only a sumac"; the waiter is waiter no longer once you see the tremor in that hand; the cow is no more "cattle," when you have drawn those eyes. Stereoptic seeing may make you relatively harmless; it also makes you vulnerable.

There is for me no legitimate reason for drawing, painting, sculpting, other than in this intensified awareness of the eye awakened from half-sleep.

-- Frederick Franck

epiphany

Alex Ross explains "musical chill" today: your ears go pinwheeling for a second in the blankness.

El Desdichado

... Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l'Achéron:
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d'Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de là fée.

And twice I prevailed over the crossing of Achéron:
Alternating in turn on the lyre of Orpheus
The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy.

-- Gérard de Nerval

tuesday

Love is the perpetual knot and link of the universe.

-- Marsilio Ficino The Hymns of Orpheus

Holy books will disappear, and then only the mystic formula will remain.
When the mystic formula departed, naught but mind was left.
When the mind disappeared naught was left anywhere,
And a voice became merged within the Void.

-- Lal Ded

air and angels

Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

-- John Donne

...
Ma femme aux yeux d'eau pour boire en prison
Ma femme aux yeux de bois toujours sous la hache
Aux yeux de niveau d'eau de niveau d'air de terre et de feu.

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.
-- André Breton

One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.

-- Wallace Stevens Esthétique du Mal

via Alex Ross

on the road

Hold on, hold on, my brother.
My sister, hold on tight.
I finally got my orders.
I’ll be marching through the morning,
Marching through the night,
Moving cross the borders
Of My Secret Life.
-- Leonard Cohen In My Secret Life

works

Many who liked my earlier works dislike my current ones. They simply have not understood the earlier ones properly.

-- Arnold Schoenberg

via Alex Ross

summer solstice

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

-- Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

It is said that whatever is dreamed this night will come to pass

tassels

I don't care
Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to
Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride
Or what would look at me
If the shutters were not shut

Red a warm colour on the battlefield
Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
Count counter
I counted the fringe of the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away

-- Mina Loy Love Songs 17

finger-nails

And I love my own nails too, that shine at the tips
of these musical hands of a poet :
tiny, tough, diaphanous flames
flickering in an eccentric Candlemas,
fingers always alight for the Feast.
When I write
You form a lamp, my finger-nails,
and shine most brightly at the dark tip of my pen!

-- Paolo Buzzi

le monde

Le vrai sens de la fête : pénétration d'un niveau de Réalité par un autre niveau de Réalité. Le monde est rempli de miracles. Ce sont eux qui constituent la dimension poétique de l'existence.

The true feeling of the celebration: penetration of a level of Reality by another level of Reality. The world is filled with miracles. They make up the poetic dimension of existence.

-- Basarab Nicolescu Theoremes Poetiques

knowledge

"I'm afraid," he said at last, "that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe."

-- Douglas Adams Life, the Universe and Everything

point

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.

-- Hermann Hesse

vision

And one that shall know this vision -- with what passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight! If he that has never seen this Being must hunger for it as for all his welfare, he that has known must love and reverence It as the very Beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror; he loves with a veritable love, with sharp desire...

-- Plotinus

distracted

Polyphonie de voix entrecoupées par celles du quotidien : fouillis de préoccupations matérielles et fulgurance de pensées éphémères. Incessant bouillonnement de la pensée. Chacun suit sa trajectoire de petite planète solitaire. Peut-être voyage-t-on entre différents niveaux de conscience.

Polyphony of voices interrupted by those of everyday life: a jumble of material concerns, a flashing of ephemeral thoughts. Incessant effervescence of thought. Everyone follows the trajectory of a little solitary planet. We are traveling between different levels of consciousness, perhaps.

-- Claire Bartoli

center

The center of the vortex is not neutral. The center of the vortex is the presence of the "I AM" in the matrix of possibilities.

-- Anthony Damiani

the earth's sharp edge

She felt a strange intensity being born within her. As she looked about the quiet garden she had the impression that for the first time since her childhood she was seeing objects clearly. Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it. The dignity that came from feeling a part of its power and grandeur, that was a familiar sensation, but it was years ago that she had last known it.

-- Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

-- Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland

Miracle Fair

Cud pospolity:
to, ze dzieje sie wiele cudow pospolitych.

The commonplace miracle:
that so many common miracles take place.

Cud jeden z wielu:
chmurka zwiewna i mala,
a potrafi zaslonic duzy ciezki ksiezyc.

One of many miracles:
a small and airy cloud
is able to upstage the massive moon.

Cud pierwszy lepszy:
krowy sa krowami

A miracle in the first place:
cows will be cows.

Cud bez czarnego fraka i cylindra:
rozfruwajace sie biale golebie.

A miracle minus top hat and tails:
fluttering white doves.

Cud, tylko sie rozejrzec:
wszechobecny swiat.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the inescapable earth.

Cud dodatkowy, jak dodatkowe jest wszystko:
co nie do pomyslenia
jest do pomyslenia.

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:

the unthinkable
can be thought

-- Wislawa Szymborska

walking at night

I open the top
of my door & stand
in the dark
blue rush of air.
Hold my breath
to know what breathing is.
Air will move through me
as it moves through the trees.
I push open the bottom.
The path has not yet
been mined in the melt.
There is time.
In the hemlocks I can still
hear the silence owls
made, though the stream
clashes about. I am
walking. Snow reflects
blank sky. I feel my eyes wide
as shoulders. Now I am young.

-- Brian Swann

the moment

We passed the ice of pain
And came to a dark ravine,
And there we sang with the sea:
The wide, the bleak abyss
Shifted with our slow kiss.
Space struggled with time;
The gong of midnight struck
The naked absolute.
Sound, silence sang as one.
All flowed: without, within;
Body met body, we
Created what's to be.
What else to say?
We end in joy.

-- Theodore Roethke

You're the song that the trees sing when the wind blows
You're a flower, you're a river, you're a rainbow
-- Randy Newman "Marie"

neither here nor there

There are places in this world that are neither here nor there, neither up nor down, neither real nor imaginary. These are the in-between places, difficult to find and even more challenging to sustain. Yet they are the most fruitful places of all. For in these liminal narrows a kind of life takes place that is out of the ordinary, creative, and once in a while genuinely magical. We tend to divide life between mind and matter and to assume that we must be in one or the other or both. But religion and folklore tell of another place that is often found by accident, where strange events take place, and where we learn things that can't be discovered in any other way.

-- Thomas Moore

poetry

POET. I know what dreams are. What is poetry?

DAUGHTER. Not reality, but more than reality. Not dreams, but waking dreams.

POET. Yet the children of men believe that poets merely play-- invent and fabricate.

DAUGHTER. It is just as well, my friend, or else the world would be laid waste from lack of endeavour. All men would lie upon their backs, gazing at the heavens; no hand would be lifted to plough or spade, or plane or axe.

-- August Strindberg A Dream Play

the shape of a song

The other day I saw and heard a bird singing on the branch of a tree, and suddenly realized that the tree was the shape of a bird's song, they were one.

-- Cecil Collins The Vision of the Fool

Little Trip to Heaven

Little trip to heaven on the wings of your love
Banana moon is shining in the sky,
Feel like I'm in heaven when you're with me
Know that I'm in heaven when you smile,
Though we're stuck here on the ground, I got something that I've found
And it's you.

And I don't have to take no trip to outer space
All I have to do is look at your face,
And before I know it, I'm in orbit around you
Thanking my lucky stars that I've found you,
When I see your constellation, honey, you're my inspiration, and it's you.

And it's you, and it's you, and it's you, and it's you, and it's you
And it's you, and it's you, shoo-be-doo, ba-da-da.

-- Tom Waits