...

the Bridge will be silent for a while.




..

in the end...

in the end it is only colours that matter. they remind me of you at sunset, when light turns upon itself and autumn comes to die upon your skin, lingers for a while in your eyes then suddenly sinks into you to make your bones glow from within, for just a while longer.


in the end it is only the bird's flight that matters. it reminds me of nothing but itself. this and...


the promise of the sky at dawn?


no, just its emptiness. this and the emptiness of the sky.

..

of sumptuous reveries and demon-lovers (in the Oriental Garden)

The air in the café was thick with shadows and smoke. His face half-turned away, his eyes half-closed, at times only the cigarette seemed alive in his fingers. There is something unsettling about every effigy, i thought, and the moon, the moon in the window frame bathing him in silver, for some unknown reason i kept thinking about the moon. Then, he turned to me all of a sudden, leaned forward and i thought he would finally reach for my hand. I was pale, i think. Those who say that a body cannot wait should have lived those few seconds of waiting inside my hand, the blue veins running helplessly under the skin. The skin too was paler than the moon. I wanted to give him my wrists.

Instead, he said, "Ah, late antiquity is when we should have lived. The times were romantic, the air was pure, lilacs never died, minarets were flexible, dates, musk and myrrh were like gold dust." The coffee spoon seemed a moon ray bent by some strange magic, at times a glittery snake between his fingers and oh, how i wished for my hair to be that silvery snake, that ray of the moon bent by his dark fingers. The air between him and me, that hollow space which didn't reflect any light back.

He spoke again, and this time he looked into my eyes, and i knew i had to say something but his voice seemed to reach me from such a distance, like the moon through layers of black water. I have to say something, i thought, and became really nervous about it, as if my life itself depended upon my answer, which was rather silly actually, since he was talking of myrrh and horses and oases, none of which really existed, i mean existing in this world of mine, of ours, where the air was heavy with muffled whispers and the moon a tight seal upon my lips.

"Would you have loved to travel with me then," he asked, "on horse or camel, searching for an oasis? But why should we have traveled then, we could have just walked, or, even better, we could have just stood there and the oasis would have sprung forth around us, like a poem. Tell me."

The moon disappeared behind a cloud and the shadows on the walls suddenly faded away. When i turned my face to him, such paleness on my tongue, such hunger for one word, just one word, he was gone too, the last shadow.

Later at home, while waiting for dawn and who says that waiting cannot tear through one's blood and bones like a whip, i opened the book and read:

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

This post continues the series dedicated to the amazing Gardens of the World, which i visited in the Recreational Park Marzahn, in Berlin. You can read more here.

..

these autumn fields

between my withering body
and these autumn fields -
the blue.

..

yellow

despair is yellow - said the blue peacock -
you poets live off metaphors, i laughed.
with sweet disdain forsythia bloomed everywhere,
my dress glimmered with little yellow butterflies
which made you smile.

despair is yellow. i ask you to come to my throat
like a knife, i sweep through you recklessly,
once more, before the last.

time spreads in us both its peacock tail.
we fumble for the fall of leaves, for the thinned blood,
we live off metaphors, once more, before the last.

..

on a bridge, groping

(perhaps their vision)

..

the everyday mind, the shadow and the photograph

Everyday opinion sees in the shadow merely the absence of light, if not its complete denial. But, in truth, the shadow is the manifest, though impenetrable, testimony of hidden illumination. Conceiving of the shadow this way, we experience the incalculable as that which escapes representation, yet it is manifest in beings and points to the hidden being.

Heidegger

we've known for a long time that the photograph is not that copy of the real some would have liked us to believe. but what if one could conceive of it as a kind of - heideggerian - shadow ?

..

another kind of sleep

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest.
The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being.
Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.

In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.









from The Poetics of Reverie (Gaston Bachelard)



..

first poem for Miriam

you used to read poems to me

while the summer heat lingered

on our skin, like honey.

sometimes, you would fall asleep

and i would come to your body like a thief,
like that thief of roses whose bones,
bleached and glittering, are still
to be found in the garden
long after the unspeakable struck.

in b&w and more
here



..

the mirror and beyond

If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique.
The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life, newly assimilated and imparted by the artist, in fidelity to his personal vision.


Andrei Tarkovsky, from Sculpting in Time

There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. Will, feeling, emotion — these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door. . . The frames of the screen move out, and the world which used to be partitioned off comes into us, becomes something real.


from a letter of a young girl to her mother, in which she writes about Tarkovsky's films, as quoted in Sculpting in Time




..

early september

returning home, and returning home in early autumn - impossible not to fall prey to the sweetness of melancholia, i don't even try not to, supposing that i were someone investing such struggle with meaning (which i am not, i don't know whether fortunately or less so).

back then, in the days of childhood, autumn used to mean diving into a world of distinct tastes and fragrances, a world of jubilation untouched by what i would later learn to call nostalgia: grape juice and fresh walnuts. grape juice from the small vine adorning the front wall of our house, facing the street, and fresh walnuts from the big tree, pivotal like an axis mundi in the middle of our garden. i was not aware then that we were blessed to be allowed to have this small piece of land around the house, even to have a house, when everywhere around us houses fell under the madness of the communist regime, eager to replace them with the grey blocks of flats, the ugliest buildings ever. i would also find out later that our house had finally been included on the black list, the erased area had spread around us like a death wave, at last reaching the point of swallowing us when the revolution came, only months before the fatal blow.

i don't know the name of these grapes in english, for whatever mysterious reason they are called 'ananas' in Romania (meaning 'pineapple', though everybody had yet to see a real pineapple back then). i was fascinated by their dark-bluish colour and by something like fog on their skin, the way breath stains a glass in winter or haze seems to remain attached on the hair of the beloved, on a frosty day. as everybody else privileged enough to have a garden, my father used to make wine in a big barrel which would be brought out of the cave weeks before the wine ritual and left in the yard, filled with water, to our delight (among other games, we could bathe in it, on really hot days). it is a custom still alive now, when good wine is widely available.

i bought these from the market the other day. coming home, i had found the grapevine gone, it had gone dry, my mother said, there are blooming oleanders now in its place, their beauty as sweet and poisonous as every memory is, i said, oh why are you upset, my mother asked, don't you like the new look of the garden and the new light green paint on the walls of the house, and for no reason at all i remembered these lines:

see the world ripple beyond this current.

(I look at you with eyes of oleander)

& in this ocean

a single harp plays a taunting homage.

but i didn't say anything.

upon my tongue of now, this taste of then, forever - a taste of fog and, beyond that, the fragrance of the unspeakable, the silent tune of a single harp.

..

of butterflies and orchids (in the Balinese Garden)

I stopped at a teashop. A woman named Cho, or Butterfly, asked me to compose a verse alluding to her name and brought out a piece of white silk. I wrote the following hokku on it:

fragrant orchid -
into a butterfly's wings
it breathes its incense.


Matsuo Bashō, Journal of Bleached Bones in a Field (1685, travelogue)
tr. Makoto Ueda




















Note:

This the first post dedicated to the amazing Gardens of the World, which i visited in the Recreational Park Marzahn, in Berlin. You can read more here.

..

beyond thirst (tentative answer to Michaux's Ma vie)

they say they can take everything away from me,
even that which makes me see the world
coming together in a bowl of tea.
so be it. they may be right.
it is not for me to prove them wrong,
those who can only fulfil themselves
by taking away.
my voice is hardly a whisper, my truths are scarce
(and even those vanish quickly beyond the horizon,
ashamed to glow brighter than the stars).
so be it, then. they are surely right.

when they have taken everything
away from me, even that which
makes me see the world
fading within a bowl of tea,
i will still be the moment
when a sky forms beyond
the line of the heart,
and the moment
when a sky meets a mirror
to empty itself of its blue.

..

thirst

Tu t'en vas sans moi, ma vie.
Tu roules.
Et moi j'attends encore de faire un pas.
Tu portes ailleurs la bataille.
Tu me désertes ainsi.
Je ne t'ai jamais suivie.
Je ne vois pas clair dans tes offres.
Le petit peu que je veux,
jamais tu ne l'apportes.
A cause de ce manque, j'aspire à tant.
A tant de choses, à presque l'infini...
A cause de ce peu qui manque,
que jamais tu n'apportes.


Henri Michaux, Ma vie

You're going some place without me, my life.
You're rolling away.
And I'm still waiting to make my move.
You've taken the battle somewhere
Abandoning me on the way.
I never followed, I stay.
Where you are leading me,
I can't plainly see.
The very little that I want,
you never bring to me.
Because of this emptiness, I want
So many things, almost the infinite ...
Because of this emptiness,
that you never fill.

My life

..

rain in the summer garden

..

dawn, as viewed from my Berlin attic window on the 24th of july, at about 6 o'clock in the morning, more precisely 5.39, after a long sleepless night

as an exception, two personal notes:

1. i couldn't sleep and at about 5 in the morning i decided to stand up and go make some tea and read. i sat on the sofa, the tea bowl was hot and soothing, as it always is. the book was about memory and history, and it was everything but soothing. i thought of Benjamin's angel of history: This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.

then at some point, as if summoned by an unheard voice, i looked up to the window and saw the sun rising through the blue curtain. with the suddenness of that which others might call "revelation"

[if only i knew the meaning of such words and how they are supposed to be used - yet they are useless anyway, since grace only dwells in the living fabric of being]

the world fell off me: the terror of history, my long sleepless nights, my past, my life, time itself. myself, too. i simply was, then, light and whole, until nothing was, any longer.

[some of you might argue that i wasn't whole until i reached toward the camera and took this photograph, and they might have a point there :-)]


2. while discussing with Michael about the possibility of publishing our collaborative project, The Beautiful Foolishness of Things, i said at some point, inspired by the long and challenging comments i had received on my post with the curtain flowing in the wind, which some of you might remember: i wish i would write a book about just that, the wind in the curtains, in literature and arts, instead of writing the one i have to write now (accidentally, and very much against my nature, about the Angel of History).

Michael was enthusiastic about the idea and soon set up a blog which was intended as an archive where we would gather all the related information we would come across, in time, for this future (very improbable) book that i might write someday. while i am only interested in curtains&windows, more precisely in this particular moment of the wind blowing in the curtains, Michael's interest is wider and he intends to document everything related to windows in both European and Asian cultures, particularly Japan. i thought i would let you know about this archive-blog, Towards a Future Tome, so that you may give it a thought, whenever you find something of interest, please let us now. who knows, i _might_ even write that book someday, though this would mean to bring to a stop the endless movement of unfolding-into-an-open-future which lies in that toward, and that would be such a pity, wouldn't it ? ...



..

romantic palimpsest, revisited

you said:

"one may ask all the questions, but one should not"

i don't even think you knew then
about my love for grammar, the awe-struck trembling
in front of the countless doors hidden in modal verbs,
opened and slammed in my face
every minute.

now, when the summer light has lost its gentleness,
when it cuts through the curve of my thigh as ruthlessly
as an indicative,
i ask:

why did you say i was beautiful?

why did you say my hair smelled like red moss
under cedar trees?

why did you say you wanted us to look at each other
the same way as then, as long as we lived?
(i smiled, amused at this image,
coming from one like you, with your deep disdain for romantic
pose and sentimentalism, we were both, damn it, too old
for rose and myrrh -
but too young to know how to look at a face hiding a face
and another face and yet another face,
an endless labyrinth of deception.
i believed it, though, there was something hard and warm
and true in there
like the heaviness of your touch upon me,
beyond modal verbs,
a kiss like a bird in a mouth
who hadn't yet learned to tell the poem
about kiss and mouth).

why did you say you wanted me to have all the books
you had ever read?

























now, inside the walls of this living library
i, the captive, am free to run from modal verb to modal verb
waiting in vain for a flutter of page to hurt my blood,
for light to break your absence
like bread upon my skin, yet again.

















..