her flesh opened up, her mutiny futile.

the rose is not.

what are you doing to me, she says.

don't.

the floating. the dark thorns of dreams.

The rose that shouldn't be 

longs to become.

And the night flowed back into the rose.

And she flowed back into the soft curve of her death. 

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.

Mit wechselndem Schlüssel

Mit wechselndem Schlüssel
schliesst du das Haus auf, darin
der Schnee des Verschwiegenen treibt.
Je nach dem Blut, das dir quillt
aus Aug oder Mund oder Ohr,
wechselt dein Schlüssel.

Wechselt dein Schlüssel, wechselt das Wort,
das treiben darf mit den Flocken.
Je nach dem Wind, der dich fortstösst,
ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee.

Paul Celan

With a changing key
you unlock the house, where
the snow of what’s silenced drifts.
Tuned to the blood that wells
from your eye or mouth or ear,
it changes, your key.

Changes your key, changes the word
that may drift with the flakes.
Tuned to the wind that pushes you back,
it gloms onto the word, that snow.

With a changing key,
trans. James Owen

[thanking James for giving me what I had asked for and ffflaneur for first quoting these lines on my blog :-)]

speaking a strange language

What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that -- we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we are completely alone.

Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe

The paradoxical character of the truth is its objective uncertainty. This uncertainty is the expression for passionate inwardness, and this passion is precisely the truth.

Kierkegaard

Mount Zao covered with snow

The Chinese poet, Su Shih (Su Tung-po, 1036-1101) wrote:

Tu Fu's poems are figureless paintings, Han Kan's paintings are wordless poems.

oh Princess Bird, are you there ?

What do we know about life? Even if you think hard about it. Who told it to be? Life, that is. Why does the sun roll across the sky, why does the mouse scuttle and scurry, the tree stretch upward, the mermaid splash in the river, the wind smell of flowers? Why do people hit each other over the head with sticks? Why is it that sometimes you don't feel like hitting, but want to go off somewhere in the summer, without roads, without paths, toward the sunrise, where the greengrass grows all around, shoulder high, where the blue rivers play, and above the rivers the golden flies swarm, the branches of unknown trees hang down to the water, and on those branches, white as white can be, sits the Princess Bird.

And her eyes take up half her face, and her mouth is human, red. And she's so beautiful, that fancy Princess Bird, that she can't get over herself. Her body is covered with lavish, delicate white feathers, and she's got a tale seven yards wide that hangs like a braided net, like lacy goosefoot. The Princess Bird turns her head this way and that, admiring herself, kissing her lovely self all over. And no one in his life has ever been harmed by that white bird. And no one ever will be. Amen.

Tatyana Tolstaya
(The Slynx)

it is in vain that...

Wir nennen das eine Krankheit zum Tode, wodurch die Natur so angegriffen wird, daß teils ihre Kräfte verzehrt, teils so außer Wirkung gesetzt werden, daß sie sich nicht wieder aufzuhelfen, durch keine glückliche Revolution den gewöhnlichen Umlauf des Lebens wieder herzustellen fähig ist.

Nun, mein Lieber, laß uns das auf den Geist anwenden. Sieh den Menschen an in seiner Eingeschränktheit, wie Eindrücke auf ihn wirken, Ideen sich bei ihm festsetzen, bis endlich eine wachsende Leidenschaft ihn aller ruhigen Sinneskraft beraubt und ihn zugrunde richtet.

Vergebens, daß der gelassene, vernünftige Mensch den Zustand Unglücklichen übersieht, vergebens, daß er ihm zuredet! Ebenso wie ein Gesunder, der am Bette des Kranken steht, ihm von seinen Kräften nicht das geringste einflößen kann.

Goethe (Die Leiden des jungen Werther)

You allow that we designate a disease as mortal when nature is so severely attacked, and her strength so far exhausted, that she cannot possibly recover her former condition under any change that may take place.

Now, my good friend, apply this to the mind; observe a man in his natural, isolated condition; consider how ideas work, and how impressions fasten on him, till at length a violent passion seizes him, destroying all his powers of calm reflection, and utterly ruining him.

It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being, in vain he counsels him. He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instil his strength into the invalid, by whose bedside he is seated.

(The Sorrows of Werther)

in our thirst-haunted dreams...

You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. In the afterlight, too, the images stand out more enticing than before...

And constantly in our thirst-haunted dreams we grope for the past in its every detail, in its every line and fold. Then it cannot but seem to us as if we had not had our fill of love and life; yet no regret brings back what has been let slip. Would that this mood might be a lesson to us for each moment of our happiness.


Ernst Jünger (On the Marble Cliffs)

yet what happens

Lasă-mă să-ţi amintesc de gândul filozofului antic ce se întreba:

când aduni pe unu cu unu, care unu se adună cu celălalt?

Care unu devine doi?

Au stat muţi matematicienii în faţa unei asemenea întrebări

căci ei nu ştiu decât de mărimi comutative.

Dar când prietenul întâlneşte prietenul?

Constantin Noica, Trei poeme filozofice pentru S. (Poemul I)

let me remind you of the ancient philosopher’s thought

who used to ask himself: when one is added to one

which one is added to which one?

which one becomes two?

silent remained the mathematicians before such a question

because they only knew of commutative elements.

yet what happens when the friend meets the friend?

Constantin Noica, Three Philosophical Poems for S.

(Poem I)

Note:

Constantin Noica: Romanian philosopher, close friend of Cioran and Ionesco, who chose to refuse the exile because he believed in resisting history through culture. He tried to set up the example of a Romanian paideia but there are many voices who accuse him now of having made a pact with the regime in order to be able to pursue his dream. As an anecdote, he used to select his disciples after a several hours’ discussion in German. Oh yes, and they were asked to learn ancient Greek, of course – and if possibly, Latin too. I think this makes A very happy :-).

instead of 'ars poetica' 2

The Glimpse.
The waves, as I drove back this afternoon, and the high foam, how it was suspended in the air before it fell... What is it that happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment (what do I mean) the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up - out of life - one is 'held', and then, - down, bright, broken, glittering on to the rocks, tossed back, part of the ebb and flow.
I don't want to be sentimental. But while one hangs, suspended in the air, held - while I watched the spray, I was conscious for life of the white sky with a web of torn grey over it; of the slipping, sliding, slithering sea; of the dark woods blotted against the cape; of the flowers on the tree I was passing; and more - of a huge cavern where my selves (who were like ancient sea-weed gatherers) mumbled, indifferent and intimate...

Katherine Mansfield, who doesn't write about pictures here, but for me this is what photography is about: the glimpse.

instead of 'ars poetica' 1

this marvellous Calvino story about photography (a gift from swiss):

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/calvino/calphotographer.html

I cleansed the mirror
of my heart...
now it reflects
the moon.

Renseki

I won't even stop
at the valley's brook
for fear that
my shadow
may flow into the world.

Dogen

Through one word, or seven words, or three times five, even if you investigate thoroughly myriad forms, nothing can be depended upon. Night advances, the moon glows and falls into the ocean. The black dragon jewel you have been searching for, is everywhere.

Dogen

note: these pictures were taken at a tea ceremony in Sendai, Japan, 2006.

a matter of principle

Ce nenorocire să ştiu
Că nu exişti decât în mine,
Să nu te simt în nici un fel
Și totuşi să nu mă îndoiesc
Că eşti acolo!
Dar dacă, totuşi, m-ai părăsit
Și eu îngrijesc cu supunere
Și ridicol devotament
Frumosii pereti ai statuii
Goale pe dinlăuntru -
Fără nici o fisură
Prin care să se poată zări ceva -
Întrebând încet, cu spaimă, din când in când,
'Ești acolo?',
Deşi ştiu că tu nu răspunzi
Din principiu...

Ana Blandiana

What a distress to know
That you only exist inside me,
To be unable to feel you
And yet to have no doubt
That you are there!
But what if you, nevertheless, have left me
And, compliantly, and with ridiculous devotion,
I keep looking after
The beautiful walls
Of a hollow statue -
Without a crack
To see through -
Asking quietly, fearfully, from time to time,
'Are you there?',
Although I know you don't answer
On principle...

trans. by alina

on forgetting

I thought to pick
the flower of forgetting
for myself,
but I found it
already growing in his heart.

Ono no Komachi

on not forgetting

When longing for him
Tortures me beyond endurance,
I reverse my robe --
Garb of night, black as leopard-flower berries --
And wear it inside out.

Ono no Komachi

ways of parting

When we walked out I saw the sky again after all the day's blindness -
little clouds and big clouds.
We said good-bye at Vinden's.
That is all.

I. They meet and just touch.
II. They come together and part.
III. They are separated and meet again.
IV. They realize their tie.

'you merely find yourself in the old position of trying to change me. And I refuse to be changed. I won't change. If I don't feel these things - I don't feel them, and there's an end of it.'
For a moment he stood there, cold, frigid, grasping the door-handle, staring not at her but over her head. He looked like a stranger who had opened her door by accident, and felt it necessary, for some reason or other, to explain the accident before he closed it again and went out of her life for ever.

'It's curious - my absolute confidence that I'll come back. I feel it's as certain as this pear'.
'I feel that too.'
'I couldn't not come back. You know that feeling. It's awfully mysterious.'

The shadows on the grass are long and strange; a puff of strange wind whispers in the ivy and the old moon touched them with silver. She shivers.

'You're cold'.
'Dreadfully cold'.
He puts his arm around her. Suddenly he kisses her - 'Good-bye, darling.'
'Ah, why do you say that?'
'Darling, good-bye... good-bye!'



(excerpts from Katherine Mansfield's Journal. The last one records one of her conversations with her brother, a week before his going to the front, where he was killed almost immediately.)

note: I had been pondering over this quotes for some time now, but reading Kubla's entry When they met last made me wish to make this post.

with Gloom, my squire

I was the moony knight, the moony scion,
all golden thread, all iron,
with a Golden Snail inlaid in my arms.
My device, "Easy does it",
and below, the saw, "Quod licet".
My squire, Gloom, on my right,
ever loyal. And night
would follow with its nightingales.
The forest would endite
my lays.
Oh leaf, little leaf, what do you know
of my woe -
sing on, sing away
the old lay,
"It's of forests, of fields,
of a soul that was slain
among trees, in a dream,
of the lamp of the moon
that lights up scenes in Paradise,
it's of a solitary place".
I was the moony knight,
moonier than the moon at night,
with Gloom, my squire, on a rare night -

Emil Botta (The Knight of the Golden Snail)
trans. by Dan Dutescu

the black roads of the soul