Friday 18 April 2008

cancelled meeting



I hide behind simple things so you'll find me;
If you don't find me, you'll find the things,
you'll touch what my hand has touched,
our hand-prints will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way
because of what I'm saying to you),
it lights up the empty house and
the house's kneeling silence-
always the silence remains kneeling.

Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,
and that's when a word is true:
when it insists on the meeting.


Yannis Ritsos, The Meaning of Simplicity




And I have to quote the Black Sun again. Our thoughts don't always take the same road, yet the beauty of the voyage lies in the small intertwining paths. At those crossroads the floating bridge grasps its reflection in the evening waters. And it is true that our search for the mirror of the Other sometimes ends in a solipsistic infinity of self-reflections - Romanticism had warned about this too, Jean-Paul's infinite mirrors blindly repeating their reflection and the reflection of the reflection and so on -, but I prefer to think of Novalis and his Umarmung, loving embrace, which I truly believe possible, that discovery of oneself in the Other and the integration of the Other - be it a shell or a cloud, a lover or a sword, a stranger in the corn field - in oneself as an "inner you". There, in this free-floating in-between, and how much I love this word, emerges the sparkling tissue of Life.


Every word is a doorway to a meeting. But only one word takes us there, only one unlocks the door. Then, and only then, do we unfasten our hair, loosen up our being, unfold our hands. And then there is no door, no inner or outer. Then, when everything silently falls away, how shall we speak face to face? (Black Sun)

5 comments:

  1. not sure, R.
    isn't a word also true when it laments the door closing?

    anyways...

    take care,

    K.

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  2. especially then, if you ask me, and you know that. but the poem asks us to consider the word insisting on the openness exactly when it faces the closure, so the truth (of course the truth as Kierkaards's "passionate inwardness") would emerge when one insists (still: humbly insists) to seek the presence out of absence, the hand out of the handprint.

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  3. Très belle photo !!!!!
    Je viens me ressourcer chez toi de temps en temps, tes photographies m'apaisent et me font entrer dans le monde des rêves..... j'en ai bien besoin en ce moment :-)

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  4. i just like the colours of this one...

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  5. kahlan: comme je suis heureuse que tu aimes mes photos! je te remercie encore une fois d'avoir montre mon brouillard sur ton blog et je te souhaite une semaine active et creative :-)

    aa: maybe the colours are "taten des leids", but sometimes they can also comfort us, isn't it so? I hope they can, at least those in my soft images, the ones that I know you like.

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