"Here I am" - the turning point of Martin Buber's life and philosophy

     Martin Buber's I and Thou philosophy is based on a moment when Buber failed to say “Here I am” to one of his students.  Buber, the towering giant of modern Jewish philosophy, had just finished his morning studies and was still absorbed in his own thoughts when a young man knocked on the door of his study.  Buber was known as a wise counselor to many young, seeking souls.  Buber did not know Mehe, the young man at the door; nonetheless, he invited Mehe to come in.  Buber was far from rude to the man.  He listened politely to Mehe, but Buber’s mind and heart were very far from the conversation.  Buber failed to discern the urgency of Mehe’s visit.

     Two months later, one of Mehe’s friends came to see Buber and told him of Mehe’s death and what the young man had hoped his talk with Buber would be.  Mehe had come to Buber not casually, not for a chat but for a decision.  The decision was one of life and death.

     Buber was devastated by this revelation.  This young man had come to him out of burning need, but Buber was too absorbed in his own thoughts and in his own world to truly notice.  Buber’s life was changed forever by this encounter.  Buber’s life and philosophy were permanently redirected because of how he had failed to respond.  He wrote his new philosophy of religious living in a book called I and Thou. - Richard Jacobs

Refreshing the Beautiful with the Grotesque

The modern muse . . . will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime. . . In the idea of men of modern times . . . the grotesque plays an enormous part. It is found everywhere; on the one hand it creates the abnormal and the horrible, on the other the comic and the burlesque. It fastens upon religion a thousand original superstitions, upon poetry a thousand picturesque fancies. . . How boldly it brings into relief all the strange forms which the preceding age had timidly wrapped in swaddling clothes! . . . We need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful. . . The grotesque seems to be a . . . starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a fresher and keener perception. 
- Victor Hugo 

Yeats's Recipe for Timelessness

If the real world is not altogether rejected, it is but touched here and there, and into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm, balance, pattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance; and if we are painters, we shall express personal emotion through ideal form, a symbolism handled by the generations, a mask from whose eyes the disembodied looks, a style that remembers many masters, that it may escape contemporary suggestion; or we shall leave out some element of reality as in Byzantine painting, where there is no mass, nothing in relief, and so it is that in the supreme moment of tragic art there comes upon one that strange sensation as though the hair of one's head stood up.

Nor have we chosen illusion in choosing the outward sign of that moral genius that lives among the subtlety of the passions...

David Lynch on Eraserhead

Henry is very sure that something is happening, but he doesn't understand it at all. He watches things very, very carefully, because he's trying to figure them out. He might study the corner of a pie container, just because it's in his line of sight, and he might wonder why he sat where he did to have that be there like that. Everything is new. It might not be frightening to him, but it could be a key to something. Everything should be looked at. There could be clues in it.

"Time Pieces" by Rachel Wetzsteon

Eden time

They spent every day,

blissfully ignorant, in

amorous delay.

Temp time

Will I be alive

when the twelve-headed jailer

announces it’s five?

In a parched time

Clouds make this appeal:

the more you wait, the wetter

the water will feel.

Intermission time

Guilty admission:

this plunge from art to life’s a

painful transition.

Sleep time

Quick nap—but it seemed

an ocean of joys, a sea

of griefs that I dreamed.

Reunion time

Days passed like drugged snails.

I met you at the station,

laughed at their faint trails.

Just give it time

Though I frankly feel

better, there's nothing sadder

than starting to heal.

Retronym time

Cheering: it was done.

But soon the Great War would be

renamed World War One.

Lately I haven't had the easiest time

Overcathexis

has me asking clouds if they

know where my ex is.

The Marshallin returns for the third and final time

Ja, ja, so it goes:

I've got memories, but she's

got the silver rose.

Ahab time

Though I do not thrive,

I confess I've never felt

so purely alive.

You get lucky from time to time

Once, in a mad rush,

I painted a blizzard that

blew away my brush.

Baroque Sandwich

Roast beef on whole wheat, please,

With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice

Of beefsteak tomato.

The lettuce splayed, if you will,

In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,

And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded

In a multi-foil arrangement

That eschews Bragdonian pretensions

Or any idea of divine geometric projection

For that matter, but simply provides

A setting for the tomato

To form a medallion with a dab

Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.

And — as eclectic as this may sound —

If the mayonnaise can also be applied

Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll

And as a festoon below the medallion,

That would be swell.

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette

At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

You got it.

Next.

- Paul Violi, from Counterman

Beethoven on how he wrote his music

     Then from the focus of enthusiasm I must discharge melody in all directions; I pursue it, capture it again passionately; I see it flying away and disappearing in the mass of varied agitation; now I seize upon it again with renewed passion; I cannot tear myself from it; I am impelled with hurried modulations to multiply it, and, at length I conquer it: behold, a symphony!  Music, verily, is the mediator between the life of the mind and the senses...
     The mind wants to expand into the limitless and universal where everything flows into a stream of feelings which spring from simple musical thoughts and which otherwise would die away unheeded. This is harmony, this is what speaks from my symphonies, the sweet blend of manifold forms flows along in a stream to its destination. There indeed one feels something eternal, infinite, something never wholly comprehensible is in all that is of the mind, and although in my works I always feel that I have succeeded, yet at the last kettle-drum with which I have driven home to my audience my pleasure, my musical conviction, like a child I feel starving once again in me an eternal hunger that but a moment before seemed to have been assuaged...

Structural Polyphony

In lyrical poetry, to be sure, we find numerous examples of a development suggesting a simple figure, a perceptible curve.  But the types are always very elementary.  When I speak of composition, I have in mind poems in which an attempt is made to equal the masterly complexity of music by introducing "harmonic" relationships, symmetries, contrasts, correspondences, etc., between their parts. - Paul Valéry

Dylan Thomas's love for the lives of words

I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to heat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever. There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. Out of them came the gusts and grunts and hiccups and heehaws of the common fun of the earth; and though what the words meant was, in its own way, often deliciously funny enough, so much funnier seemed to me, at that almost forgotten time, the shape and shade and size and noise of the words as they hummed, strummed, jugged, and galloped along.

That was the time of innocence; words burst upon me, unencumbered by trivial or portentous association; words were their springlike selves, fresh with Eden's dew, as they flew out of the air. They made their own original associations as they sprang and shone. The words "Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross," were as haunting to me, who did not know then what a cock-horse was nor cared a damn where Banbury Cross might be, as, much later, were such lines as John Donne's, "Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root," which also I could not understand when I first read them.

And as I read more and more, and it was not all verse, by any means, my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them always. - Dylan Thomas

Possibility as the Great Good

If life were merely a habit, I should commit suicide; but even now, more or less desperate, I cannot but think, "Something wonderful may happen."  It is not optimism, it is a rejection of self-pity (I hope) which leaves a loophole for life. . .I merely choose to remain living out of respect for possibility.  And possibility is the great good. - Frank O'Hara

On Therapy

Marx believed that revolution would change social relations. Instead we prefer a status quo that widens the opportunity for entry into it, but cannot be challenged except at the edges. The challenge of a developing self is to be prepared to change. We can tinker with our own edges and make ourselves more inclusive, more open, and all that is good. But we made need more than that. The purpose of therapy as Freud knew, is to find a safe place for a revolution. That’s a contradiction in terms, but it is accurate. I never used to understand therapy. I thought everything could be done by effort and an act of will and on your own. Very stupid. - Jeanette Winterson

The eternally present & fleeting fugitive prey of poetry

     [It is not] by absence of mind and dreaming that one can impose on speech such precious and rare arrangements.  The true condition of a true poet is as distinct as possible from the state of dreaming.  I see in it only willed inquiry, suppleness of thought, the soul's assent to exquisite constraints, and the perpetual triumph of sacrifice.
     It is the very one who wants to write down his dream who is obliged to be extremely wide awake. . .
     Whoever says exactness and style invokes the opposite of a dream; whoever meets these in a work must presuppose in its author all the labor and time he needed to resist the permanent dissipation of his thoughts. . . And the more restless and fugitive the prey one covets, the more presence of mind and power of will one needs to make it eternally present in its eternally fleeting aspect. - Paul Valéry

Frank O'Hara on Avoiding Monotony

If de Kooning says that what he really is interested in is Poussin; that's his way of not being bored with Kandinsky when all the world is looking at Kandinsky.  That attitude may only work for two years, but that doesn't matter in the life of the artist as long as it energizes him to produce more works that are beautiful. . .[the painting of Larry Rivers] has taught me to be more keenly interested while I'm still alive.  And perhaps this is the most important thing art can say.

Art vs Habit

Habit devours everything, objects, clothes, furniture, your wife and the fear of war. . . That which we call "art" exists in order to remedy our perception of life, to make things felt, to make the stone stony.  The purpose of art is to evoke in man a sensation of things, to make him perceive things rather than merely recognize them.  In order to do so art uses two devices: making things strange and complicating the form, so as to increase the duration and the difficulty of perception. - Victor Shklovsky

The tectonic shift of visiting Paris

I come here to live another life, connected to but not identical to my own. I read different books. I speak (not well) a different language. I eat different food and change my usual habits. Consequently I think about things differently, and when that happens, I remember things differently too. This is striking and surprising, as though the layers and layers of time and mind and experience and capacity will re-order themselves if given the opportunity to do so. I felt relief this morning walking over the Pont Neuf with the dog. The relief was not just the happiness of a short break, though it was that too, but it was also a tectonic shift in my social relations with myself and my life. We are in relation to ourselves, and that can change, stretch, recolour, recode. - Jeanette Winterson