by the light pond

~~~ and yet dawn and sunset seem to be one, and we seem to live our lives backwards, as it were, shadow upon shadow upon shadow 

and it doesn't matter whether we ask endless questions or none at all 

so let us all play 

play now~~~

being there

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 ?

..

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.

















..

simply amazed

there are gods in everything, i've heard.
i imagine them locked up in their underworlds,
some of them good-natured and big-bellied,
some slumbering away blindly like moles but mostly
vengeful gods, myriads of them, jealous of
everything they cannot see or hear or touch.

jealous of this bed of smooth warm wood
and the rugged carpet on the floor
with something like purple stars on it.

jealous of these sheets with their clean smell
and big, luminous flowers, as a field upon which
death would come like a soft breeze, and smiling.

jealous of this girl's standing naked
and in love in front of the mirror,
oblivious of them and her own beauty,
simply amazed that this can be.

jealous of this small chair,
still wet with the afternoon's rain pouring in
through the open window,
on which a body once sat until dawn,
its shoulders bent, the night like a raven
upon its back, wishing for another body to come
and take it in its arms.

but most of all, jealous of this sudden gust of wind
making the moonlit curtain swirl about the room
like a soul in search of another soul
to flood it with its light.

the quivering apple, split open by the changing light

pondering these days:

There is no nonsense about a still life, a solitary object. You can keep looking at it.
It gives you a chance to really be there to find out how deep you can go.

William Segal


..

... and shatter me with Dawn

At last, to be identified!
At last, the lamps upon thy side
The rest of Life to see!

Past Midnight! Past the Morning Star!
Past Sunrise!
Ah, What leagues there were
Between our feet, and Day!

Behind Me—dips Eternity—
Before Me—Immortality—
Myself—the Term between—
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin—

Not knowing when the Dawn will come,
I open every Door,
Or has it Feathers, like a Bird,
Or Billows, like a Shore—

The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

poems by Emily Dickinson



..

unbearable fullness

that night, before leaving, i stood in front of the window for a long time,
staring into the night, or what should have been the night.

yet life was still there, unbearably full, clinging to me like algae to a dead body.

..

become the lamp

Why be human if being human
is so difficult? Become the lamp
by the roadside that quietly sheds
its light on man.
Be as it is, for as it is
he will always have a human face.
Be good to him, this man,
and impartial like a lamp
that quietly illuminates the faces
of drunkards, vagabonds and students
along the solitary road.

Be a lamp
if you can't be human,
for being human is difficult.
A human has just two hands
but he should help thousands.
So be a lamp by the roadside
shining on a thousand happy faces,
shining for the lonely, the aimless.
Be a lamp with a single light,
man in a magic square
signaling with a green arm.
Be a lamp, a lamp,
a lamp.


Srecko Kosovel

.
.

and if i...

none of the roads i knew led to him.
the doors wouldn't open,
they didn't seem to be closed, either.

one of the old masters said:
'To learn bamboo painting,
take a branch of bamboo
and let its shadow fall upon a white wall
on a moonlit night,
then the true shape of the bamboo will emerge.'

and if i took one of his gestures -
those gestures detached of whatever
they were supposed to hold,
for which i was unable to find a name -
and let its shadow fall upon the white skin
of my moonlit night,
would then, oh master Kuo Hsi,
the true shape of his absence emerge?

chrysopoeia