are we so made

Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? 

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

...

Oh God, Oh God! that it were possible
To undo things done; to call back yesterday!
That time could turn up her swift and sandy glass,
To untell days, and to redeem these hours.

Thomas Heywood

.

the threshold on which

they had led me to believe
there existed so-called soul-revealing gestures
(ah the delightful lullabies passed on
from one mouth to another)
i don't remember when i started to suspect
- it must have been later on, after you had already left -
(see, how wise i am now, you would be proud)
that nothing was mirrored there except
the threshold on which
each self attempting to become
was quickly butchered and made
into a luxurious memory

(it was then that i started to learn
how to move through greys
with apparent easiness)

those words

As I work to sharpen my knife,
kindly stop fidgeting and listen to
how much you'll enjoy being carved up.

You'll also rejoice in the knowledge
of the house your bones will make sturdy
and the bountiful lush garden
we'll be able to grow with your blood.

I know, you cannot picture it now,
but I've helped colleagues who have done it
and I'm pretty sure you can trust me
to get it right from the very first try.

I've observed and carefully noted
how we must start with the tongue -
we wouldn't want those words you don't mean
to hang about the house like mad rats.


Lecture, by Manuela

the kiss

Diana Krall - Do It Again (live)

(you can listen to a better quality version here)

I am so drunk

I am so drunk
I have lost the way in
and the way out.
I have lost the earth, the moon, and the sky.
Don't put another cup of wine in my hand,
pour it in my mouth,
for I have lost the way to my mouth.


Rumi
(tr. Shahram Shiva)














for noura, thanking her for her warm message
from one spirit to another
from one heart to another

Can thinking take this gift into his hands, that is, take it to heart?

from Heidegger

Kindness in words creates confidence.

Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.

Kindness in giving creates love.

Lao Tzu

answering a double call from beyond

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Rossetti (Remember)

revenge of a mortal hand

Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

Wislawa Szymborska (from The Joy of Writing)

Note: I chose this quote in response to Kubla's comment on my previous post, in which he argues that writing doesn't get us anywhere and wonders why we keep on writing anyway. I have mixed feelings about this poem, I like the first part but not the ending, I don't know about the revenge of a mortal hand, even if I understand that this can be a motivation for many. I don't think there is a time we can bind with chains of signs. No time can be bound, there is no 'next time', we can never begin again. Still, it is a poet's answer and maybe when the words desert us, we should always turn to those voices which resound in our hearts.
and I don't believe in the joy of writing either, but then I am not a writer. nevertheless, I believe in the joy of photographing. no, maybe I am wrong: when the words desert us, we should turn to images and sounds and most of all, to gestures. the tenderness and yet ambiguity of a mortal hand.

das unmögliche Warten auf die Versicherung in einem Satz, die nicht von dieser Welt ist

... [ich] höre nicht auf, Ivan, der noch eine Viertelstunde schlafen darf, im Halbdunkel anzusehen, zu hoffen, zu betteln und zu meinen, einen Satz gehört zu haben, der nicht nur von der Müdigkeit gekommen ist, einen Satz, der mich versichert in der Welt ... aber da Ivan mich nicht liebt, mich auch nicht braucht, warum sollte er mich eines Tages lieben oder brauchen? Er sieht nur mein glatter werdendes Gesicht und freut sich, wenn er mich zum Lachen bringt, und er wird mir wieder erklären, dass wir gegen alles versichert sind, wie unsere Autos, gegen die Erdbeben und die Hurrikane, gegen die Diebstähle und die Unfälle, gegen die Feuerbrünste und gegen den Hagel, aber ich bin versichert in einem Satz und in sonst nichts. Die Welt kennt keine Versicherung fuer mich.

Ingeborg Bachmann (Malina)

for a, who humbled me by saying that my writing reminds her of Ingeborg's.

the lost grace of my hands

She wants to throw herself into the river. From a stone bridge. Or maybe iron, I can't remember. He doesn't let that happen and takes her with him. He teaches her another kind of throwing: knives. At her. In the circus. When they are alone, in a forlorn barn, where she unfolds in pleasure and becomes a veil of light. They never touch. Their eyes meet. Their eyes close, they don't need to see each other to know the only love and the only truth: that they inhabit together a land of pure trust. Inhuman trust, concentration of being reaching that centre of the centre, where the world ceases to spin. Self-abandon, the kind that only grass knows when kneeling to become the sickle.

And I remember your words: 'You've already plunged so many knives into me by making me see all my flaws, my faults, my pitiful frailties'. In the silence that followed, I contemplated my hands. My hands had failed me. The glowing knives of love and song that I used to throw at you had missed. Your transparent mind, the shape of your heart, that my knives knew how to draw again and again, your dark body which I had taught a pale shade of white, a burning shade of gold, they were suddenly out of my reach.

But your devotion for me had also failed. Your longing for the soft bow of my hands in the air, your hunger for my sacred knives of mystery had faded away. Oh how I wished you to resist, to fight the growing loss of grace in my fingers, to lure me back into the spiral of throwing, that perfect act of abolition - death and rebirth of time - the only one possible between us. It would have been so easy. But you just stood there, blinking gently, as if through a haze, smiling in defeat, and I knew then that you hadn't even grasped what had happened. As the meaning dawned upon us, we had already forgotten the face of each other.

absence of a woman's hands

For the tiny white butterflies
that tumble like pale coins
through shade, some would say,
the flowers are not here as things,
rather experience, process,
unceasing, unfinished
unfolding-to-be, a conversation in the one
moment they've known, while things
weigh in the slippage of time. An instance:
the absence of a woman's hands
that removed a glove finger by finger
and touched a glass to her lips is a thing.

James Owens

cooking, love, repetition and ritual

cooking for somebody, as making tea for somebody, is a gesture of love. kneading the dough, baking the fish, smelling the fresh herbs, laying the table, bringing the plate and carefully, gently placing it in front of the other. peeling the apple, if the beloved likes it this way, cutting it in half, perhaps taking out the bitter seeds which taste like almonds, looking at him while he bites the tender flesh and you, smiling, open up the black seed between your young teeth, slicing the melon heavy with sun on a summer day, offering the blood orange with your both hands. hands that offer round bread and salt to the stranger, as it was the ancient custom in these plains of the danube, welcoming him as a friend to the center of your heart.

cooking for the beloved, for the stranger soon to become your guest, soon to become your friend, soon to become your mirror, cooking for the stranger soon to take his leave, soon to forget you but to remember, maybe, the smell of your fresh bread in one summer afternoon. the hand opening in the simple, the simplest and oldest of all gestures of mankind: offering food to the other. I look at the kanjis and see their stories and hear their voices. I show Olga the old drawings from which the kanjis originated. soon, she wants me to stop: 'it is too strange, I feel like I am in those ten-thousand-year old caves right now, I am afraid'. but I am not afraid. my hand, my hand now, holding the brush and hesitantly retracing the lines which compose the image of 'ai', love:

愛

my hand feels the wave of ancient blood raising through it, brushing centuries aways, my hand repeats, re-lives, re-enacts the trembling of the first hand carving the strokes in the darkness. consciousness emerges, for the first time, in the naming of the world, at the fusion point between I and object. in the drawing, the nascent self and the other are one. and the drawing tells me what I already know: it shows 'heart/feelings' and 'a person kneeling at a table with head turned', indicating that they are unable to eat any more. thus the feeling of giving food to a person till they become satiated. that was the essence of love in the ten-thousand-year-old eyes, that was the song of love as carved in stone by the ten-thousand-year-old hand.

If you survey the years / from Ur to El Alamein / say where the truth appears, the poet asks in his search for the Cabbala, the Black Stone. By sun and water told / but what hour is meant? the poet asks in his search for the time before time, the time beyond time. but the answer is here. every time a hand carefully dips the brush in ink and draws the first stroke of ai on the blank paper, every time a hand offers food, the world is born again and its being glows with love. the ritual of love celebrated, all over again.

the poet mourns the loss of that first time. he mourns the loss of the first hand trembling, the loss of the fresh being of the world emerging in the first drawing, he mourns the I becoming forsaken, the bread which once feeded all men :

World thought to bits. Space and the ages,
And what mankind groped for as guide,
Infinities are now their gauges ―
The myth has lied.

Oh, when all wholely to one center tended
And all mankind from that one wound seemed welling,
Breaking the bread that each one might partake―
Oh distant hour, fulfilling and compelling,
That even the forsaken did not forsake.

(The Forsaken I)

but you stand here silent, smiling, the black melon seeds sparkling between your young teeth. you stand here still and thin, smelling of freshly baked bread, the table laid whitely and neatly before you. you hold the bread in your both hands. you break the bread for the stranger, welcoming him to the centre of your heart. and suddenly the hour is not distant any more, the forsaken finds home again.

[Gottfried Benn's quotes in original, and I should add that I am not happy at all with the translation, but then again, it is almost impossible to translate this:

Überblickt man die Jahre
von Ur bis El Alamein,
wo lag denn nun das Wahre ...

Wasser- und Sonnenuhren -
welche Stunde gemeint?

Die Welt zerdacht. Und Raum und Zeiten
und was die Menschheit wob und wog,
Funktion nur von Unendlichkeiten ―
die Mythe log.

Ach, als sich alle einer Mitte neigten
Und alle rannen aus der einen Wunde,
brachen das Brot, das jeglicher genoβ―
o ferne zwingende erfüllte Stunde,
die einst auch das verlorne Ich umschloβ]

her whole life

My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable.

Proust

where I am

I imagine a white room, stark, bare, utterly simple, hidden from the world. At eleven o'clock people in the city are busy, making phone calls, preparing, getting and spending... blind to it, unaware of it's hushed silence. It is like an attic flooded with light or a white boat on the white sea. It doesn't exist. Or perhaps it does.

A white hand floating weightlessly in a white field.

The face of lost things, the face of last things. Lace curtains flapping, then curving softly outwards towards her, and then breathing in. Patterns of light and shade dance on the floor. The un-created world, the pre-world, a white paradise of all possibilities, where sleep is the beautiful dream of a dying man.







C'est entre la hanche et les côtes, sur l'endroit que l'on nomme le flanc que c'est arrivé. Sur cet endroit caché, très tendre, qui ne recouvre ni des os ni des muscles, mais des organes délicats. Une fleur y a poussé. Qui me tue.

Marguerite Duras


It is between the hip and the ribs, on the spot known as the flank, that it happened. In this hidden place, so soft, covering but delicate organs, no bones or muscles. A flower has blossomed. Killing me.








La vida es sueño
you would like to murmur, perhaps to shout out,
while through your clenched mouth
there gushes the redeeming blood of an unknown flower.
In a Spanish plaza, in a dream, once,
the soul face to face with the body.
Set free.

Daniela Crasnaru
(transl. from Romanian by Dan Dutescu)







Intre noi doi
Această oglindă moale, nesigură
Astfel înclinată încât
Eu nu mă văd
Şi tu nu te vezi,
Dar te văd
Şi mă vezi,
Ochii ni se întâlnesc
Şi se încleştează
În zarea ei argintie.
Cât timp această oglindă
Va continua să fie
Şi să ne găzduiască
În visul ei afund,
Viaţa şi moartea
În care eşti, în care sunt,
Rămân doar poveşti
În care sunt, în care eşti.

Ana Blandiana

Between you and me
this soft mirror, unsure,
reclined in a way
that obscures me
and obscures you
yet I see you
and you see me
our eyes meet
and lock one another
in its silver dawn
as long as this mirror
continues to be
and to shelter us
in its deep dream
this life and this death
in which you are
in which I am
will be nothing but words
in which I am
in which you are.

wings of desire

It's bedtime, and my long hair plaiting tightly -
As though it mattered!- out the window I,
No longer sad, my heart a little lighter,
Stare at the sea, the sandy slopes, the sky.

What power has he, one who will refrain
From asking for so much as tenderness!
I cannot lift my eyelids when my name
He speaks, and am all pain and weariness.

Anna Akhmatova

Soneto XXVII

Desnuda eres tan simple como una de tus manos,
lisa, terrestre, mínima, redonda, transparente,
tienes líneas de luna, caminos de manzana,
desnuda eres delgada como el trigo desnudo.

Desnuda eres azul como la noche en Cuba,
tienes enredaderas y estrellas en el pelo,
desnuda eres enorme y amarilla
como el verano en una iglesia de oro.

Desnuda eres pequeña como una de tus uñas,
curva, sutil, rosada hasta que nace el día
y te metes en el subterráneo del mundo

como en un largo túnel de trajes y trabajos:
tu claridad se apaga, se viste, se deshoja
y otra vez vuelve a ser una mano desnuda.

Pablo Neruda

Morning
(Love Sonnet XXVII)

Naked you are simple as one of your hands;
Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.
You've moon-lines, apple pathways
Naked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked you are blue as a night in Cuba;
You've vines and stars in your hair.
Naked you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.

Naked you are tiny as one of your nails;
Curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
And you withdraw to the underground world.

As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;
Your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again.

the rose for him, the perfect one maybe, because it was the only one tamed. tell me nothing of the changeless and the eternal, sings the poet, and her body is a running flame, emerging and flowing off. in the misty mirror, her most precious gift, she tries to see the invisible. her beauty contemplates itself, her being faces the non-being. gold glimmer on her white skin. in the ageless mirror, time is lurking on its knees.

"I'll never make it tonight.
no trapeze in full moon nights.
once again, night falls in my head. Fear. Fear of death.
Why not death?
The only important thing sometimes is just being beautiful"

already there is a flutter of wings on the other side of the world.

she doesn't know yet. his gaze, from behind the glass.

oh tell me, why have you changed in the space of a night? what are fifteen seconds when we dance in the space of the mirror, when our time is the time of the world before the world? take the rose, it's for you. hold my hand. I am afraid. the dark reflection. is it you?

the shadow moves, the wings open up, the snow glows, he becomes her mirror.

she thinks that if she wishes hard enough for something it might come true. a child, after all. she lifts her hand, unfolding the rose into the waters of the invisible world. will the hand reach back to her?

on the other side of the mirror, his tired wings, covered with ashes. she holds her breath and tries to listen, to listen hard enough to all the whispers of the earth. before even knowing it, she listens to his silence, flooding her from the backside of the mirror, flowing into her thoughts like a river in dim moonlight. she listens to the death within life, to the life within death. soon enough, the last circus show. where are the clowns, she wonders. where are you? am I alive? is this real? she talks to herself:

"You're not blind yet. Your heart is still beating. And now you're crying".

her fear of nights which are not the sun, of wounds, of frozen cristals, of dying roses, of re-vision, of lances quivering there still today, thousands years after being thrown against the tree. her desire for nights which are not the sun, for skies remembered, for broken shells and praying flesh, for lances quivering there still today, in the thousand-year-old heart of the tree.

what she doesn't know yet, is that on the other side of the mirror:

he is already
falling
out of grace,
darkening
heavier and heavier
falling into her
deep down
falling away
from her
a dead star




in her sleep, she moves like a golden ocean. in her dream the longing - only human, after all - for words that have never been spoken before, floating between the moon and the earth:

"Something happened

It is still going on

It binds me

It was true at night, and it's true in the day

Even more so now

Who was who?

Who in the world can claim that he was ever together with another being?

I am together

It happened once

Only once, and therefore forever.

The picture that we have created will be with me when I die.

I will have lived within it."

In her dream, her lips open to a ripe death: is it really you?

In his sleep, he awakes. He sees her hair waving beyond the blue horizon, into the black of the gold, he sees the face that spoke the words. He sees her first and last kiss on the angel's mouth.

my mind is dazzled

The Ise Shrine Priestess writes:

My mind is dazzled --
Did you come to visit me?
Did I go to you?
Was our night a dream? Reality?
Was I sleeping? Or was I awake?