Progress is not the aim, but circulation

Approach to the poem must be from afar off, even generations off. A reader should close in on it on converging lines from many directions like the divisions of an army upon a battlefield. A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do. - Robert Frost

Georg Büchner - the action of his art

     Büchner’s theme may indeed be the hopelessness of social and political life and, even further – as we shall see in Woyzeck – the degradation of the self in a world of outrage, but the action of his art has nothing to with categories like pessimism and optimism. His art is in fact a testament to an indestructible, if “impractical” and non-utilitarian, confidence.

     The point is that to make imagination speak like this in the face of despair about life is to perform an action that is as much a part of life as any other, and is therefore, in the most paradoxical-seeming way, an act of faith. More than that, Büchner’s alternative to history – which is what imaginative art might be thought of – constitutes his triumph over the very forces that on the level of sheer physical experience cause him to despair. In writing Danton’s Death Büchner added to life a new fact which is both a recognition of disaster and a cure for thinking it all there is. Like the classic writers of tragedy, he leaves us not in despair but in possession of a means for confronting what would otherwise have killed us behind our backs. - Richard Gilman

The gaze we knew as a child

“People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images,” writes René Magritte, and I could not agree more. Nevertheless, this requires some clarification. There are really three kinds of images. First, there are those seen with eyes open in the manner of realists in both art and literature. Then there are images we see with eyes closed. Romantic poets, surrealists, expressionists, and everyday dreamers know them. The images [Joseph] Cornell has in his boxes are, however, of the third kind. They partake of both dream and reality, and of something else that doesn’t have a name. They tempt the viewer in two opposite directions. One is to look and admire the elegance and other visual properties of the composition, and the other is to make up stories about what one sees. In Cornell’s art, the eye and the tongue are at cross purposes. Neither one by itself is sufficient. It’s that mingling of the two that makes up the third image. - Charles Simic

The phenomenon of stickiness

An infant, plunging its hands into a jar of honey, is instantly involved in contemplating the formal properties of solids and liquids and the essential relations between the subjective experiencing self and the experienced world. The viscous is a state half-way between solid and liquid. It is like a cross section in a process of change. It is unstable...soft, yielding...the boundary between myself and it. Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness. Plunging into the water gives a different impression. I remain solid, but to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Art & Spiritual Practice

Human beings fall rather easily into the consciousness of purposeful action: "I want this, so I will go get it." "I need this." "I have to do that." "If I don't do this, something bad will happen and I will die." Such is the basic murmur of mammalian consciousness. Spiritual practices (along with other basic lineaments of human culture, of course) are in part a set of techniques to free a person from unquestioning enslavement to that imperative mind. They allow us to look around, to step back and see things as they are, to apprehend thoughts, impulses, concepts as part of the larger whole. Art does this as well, and art plays a role in a human life that is probably not unrelated to spiritual ritual. Both stop you in your mammalian tracks and let you see and know your life through larger eyes and ears.

- Jane Hirshfield

Rhythm as so much of art (and life)

Ex. the first stanza of The Second Coming by Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

vs it rewritten in regular iambic pentameter:

The falcon turns and turns in a wider gyre.

He cannot hear the cry of the falconer.

The center of the cosmos cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is let loose on the world.

The tide that's dimmed by blood is loosed.

The ritual of innocence is drowned.

The best have lost their firm convictions.

The worst are full of fierce intensity.

- via Carl Dennis

Three by Reverdy

The Book

The white paper leaf new-grown on the fence. One climbs up and climbs down.

     The mountain is a book whose heroes travel the wind. The pages turn. Words often fall.

     The sound of thunder rolls over the paving stones. That’s where the accident happens. The book is done. Men climb up, one section of it under each arm.

     Leaning against the wall, the anxious author watches the world live and does not follow.

Fruit Bowl

A hand reaches toward the arrangement of fruit and, like a bee, hovers over it. The circle where the fingers glide is drawn tight as a trap – then they resume their flight, leaving at the bottom of the dish a bright red scar. A drop of blood, of honey, on the fingertips.

     Between light and teeth, the web of desire weaves the bowlful of lips.

Bottle

The bottle in the middle of the fire, at arm’s length or on the table. In the shape of hands, in the source of pockets – there is silver and gold – there’s a spirit up the sleeve. When color runs freely, when air is tangled in branches. The heart goes farther than the eyes, flame is reborn from ash. Between the flowing thread and the stroke of light, words stop making sense.

     No more need of words to make ourselves understood.

- Pierre Reverdy
Translated by Dan Bellm

Two by Borges

Borges and I

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

- Jorge Luis Borges

~

Everything and Nothing

There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once -the last verse had been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn from the stage, the hated flavor of unreality returned to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamberlane and became no one again. Thus hounded, he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so, while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur's admonition, and Juliet. who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with the witches who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this man who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words "I am not what I am". The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspired famous passages of his.

For twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge and melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his theatre. Within.. a week he had returned to his native village, where he recovered the trees and rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to the others his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin terms. He had to be 'someone: he was a retired impresario who had made his fortune and concerned himself with loans, lawsuits and petty usury. It was in this character that he dictated the arid will and testament known to us, from which he deliberately excluded all traces of pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his retreat and for them he would take up again his role as poet.

History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: "I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself." The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one."

- Jorge Luis Borges 

Amoral poetry vs moral prose

Prose is all about accumulation (a morality of work), while poetry as it is practiced today is about the isolation of feelings (an aesthetics of omission). Among other things, prose is principally an ethical project, while poetry is amoral, a tampering with truths which the world of prose (and its naturalistic approach to mimesis) takes for granted. Poetry creates its own truth, which at times is the same truth as the world’s, and sometimes not. Whatever the case, its mimesis is always a rearrangement, at a molecular level, of that axis between the “seen” and the “felt” (that coal chute which connects the childish eye to the Socratic heart), which, were it not for poetry, with its misguided elenchus, would remain obscured.

- via Martin Earl and the Poetry Foundation

In a Chinese Encyclopedia

Animals are divided into:

(a) belonging to the Emperor

(b) embalmed

(c) tame

(d) sucking pigs

(e) sirens

(f) fabulous

(g) stray dogs

(h) included in the present classification

(i) frenzied

(j) innumerable

(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush

(l) et cetera

(m) having just broken the water pitcher

(n) that from a long way off look like flies

- via Michel Foucault via Jorge Luis Borges

A Different Schooling

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.
- Walter Benjamin

Our idealizing power that beautifies

Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours and this is what will happen: At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit's claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens to new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. - Stendhal

Our mixed-up condition

Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? - with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I? - Virginia Woolf, The Waves

"Introduction" by Anne Carson

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called "audacity," which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

An entranceway into a more complex and vertiginous scope of being‏

It's in my nature to question, to look at the opposite side of a story, a theory, a leaf. Whatever is present, its opposite is almost always present as well. I believe that good writing also does this. Great literature does not take sides. It is not partisan, small minded, or narrow. Art tells us that where there is sorrow, there will be joy, and where there is joy, there will be sorrow. A uni-dimensional poem would be unbelievably dull and boring. Sometimes the other side is so deeply buried, you really have to part the grasses of the poem to find it, but in good poetry, that second dimension is always there. The poems we remember hold in themselves something startling and unexpected, some undertow, some magnetic pull toward a fuller, subtler truth. This offered entranceway into a more complex and vertiginous scope of being is why good art thrills. - Jane Hirshfield