ten little spells to conjure my colours back

*from the Chinese Garden in Berlin

my little fish called Bashō

To be a fish !

So utterly without misgiving
To be a fish
In the waters.

Loveless, and so lively!
Born before God was love,
Or life knew loving.
Beautifully beforehand with it all.

And I said to my heart, there are limits
To you, my heart;
And to the one God.
Fish are beyond me.

Fishes,
With their gold, red eyes, and green-pure gleam, and
under-gold.
And their pre-world loneliness,
And more-than-lovelessness.


from: D.H. Lawrence (Fish)

some say that i am unaware
that i possess no more than
the limited attention span
necessary for the restricted
round of my world

i concede this may be true
yet the walls of my domain
are no less transparent than yours
and the confines of mine
are more visible
inhabitants of strictured spheres

but i whose dominion
is a mere fin span -
with each turn of the bowl
katsū!
and there the world renewed


swiss (bashō as a fish)





..

i want this music and this dawn

I don't get tired of you. Don't grow weary
of being compassionate toward me!

All this thirst equipment
must surely be tired of me,
the waterjar, the water carrier.

I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough
of what it's thirsty for!

Show me the way to the ocean!
Break these half-measures,
these small containers.

All this fantasy
and grief.

Let my house be drowned in the wave
that rose last night in the courtyard
hidden in the center of my chest.

I don't want learning, or dignity,
or respectability.

I want this music and this dawn
and the warmth of your cheek against mine.

The grief-armies assemble,
but I'm not going with them.

This is how it always is
when I finish a poem.

A great silence comes over me,
and I wonder why I ever thought
to use language.


Rumi, A Thirsty Fish
(tr. by Coleman Barks)

one small fish swimming alone, then next to one big fish, then they become three, later four and in the end many colourful stories

—
‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿  ‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿  ‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿  ‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿  ‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿
—

Christian Morgenstern (Fisches Nachtgesang)

—
‿ ‿
— — —
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
— — —
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
[sorry, I seem to be floundering for words. -The translator]
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
— — —
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
— — —
‿ ‿

—

Fish's Night Song
(English translation from Fish Language,
by Emily Ezust)

Das Vollkommene zu kommentieren ist eine unfruchtbare Übung. Jeder unbefangene Leser wird diesem Satz zustimmen. Aber gibt es das: einen unbefangenen Leser? Goethes wohlgemeinter Ratschlag, das Unerforschliche ruhig zu verehren, ist bei Philologen und Kritikern stets auf taube Ohren gestoßen. Also meinetwegen! [...]
Lakonischer als "Fisches Nachtgesang" kann ein Gedicht nicht sein; das Wort einsilbig wäre bereits eine Übertreibung. [...]
Das Gedicht, soviel steht fest, hat keine Silbe zuviel und keine Silbe zuwenig.
Es ist das außerdem einzige Gedicht, das ich auswendig rezitieren kann.

Hans-Magnus Enzensberger



To analyse perfection is a sterile exercise. Every unprejudiced reader cannot but agree. But is there such a thing as an unprejudiced reader? Goethe's well-meant advice, that one should adore the inscrutable silently, has always fallen on deaf ears when it comes to philologists and literary scholars. Well then... [...]
A poem can hardly be more laconic than 'Fish's Night Song'; the word 'monosyllabic' would already be an exageration. [...]
The poem, so much is clear, has no syllable too many or too few. Furthermore, it is the only poem that I can recite by heart.


Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, when asked to write about this poem

green leaf falling upon a little red fish

I have just found out that the Sanskrit term varna (cast) has two literal meanings: firstly colour and secondly veil. In the Vedas, it was also used to depict the light of gods and the glowing colours of dawn. Are colours then nothing but a veil simultaneously hiding and revealing the world to us? And what about the veiling and the unveiling of the soul? Could colours be the essence of such an act, of a deed creating the world? There is also Goethe with his mysterious words: colours are Taten des Lichts, Taten und Leiden - acts of light, acts and sufferings of light. Why must there be pain between the veiling and the unveiling? And could this veil be used to bind the lover, to bind the self to the object, the soul to its longing, to its act?

It is written in the Bhagavad Gita: These works never bind me, for I have no desire for their fruit. He who knows me as Truth is never bound by actions.

Note to the picture:
the red fish are carp, koi (鯉), the colourful, ornamental kind which one can find swimming in all the ponds of Japanese temples. Because of its homophony with koi (恋）, love, the carp has been used as a symbol for passionate love throughout the ages. I once read a short story bearing this title, koi, in which the main character receives a carp as a gift and takes care of it in his garden pond. Nothing actually happens. It is considered to be one of the most erotic stories in Japanese literature.