HMR

Cast Hexagram:

26 - Twenty-Six
Ta Ch'u / Recharging Power

Heaven's motherlode waits within the Mountain:
The Superior Person mines deep into history's wealth of wisdom and deeds, charging his character with timeless strength.

Persevere.
Drawing sustenance from these sources creates good fortune.
Then you may cross to the far shore.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:

There are important precedents in this situation.
Others have trodden this Path before you, overcoming the same obstacles facing you now, and making crucial decisions at the same crossroads.
Study their journals, watch for their trail markings.
Gain inspiration and wisdom from the heroes and learn from the mistakes of those who chose a sidepath.
All were Seekers, explorers whose daring mapped a course you can follow.
The words and deeds of the finest can imbue you with the courage necessary to face what lies before you.

golden thread

The golden thread is a symbol of the inspiration, intuition, and guiding light that graces us throughout our lives. It is that which we follow, knowing that it will, in some mysterious way, guide us on our true paths in life. It is most colorfully portrayed in Greek mythology as the magical thread that Ariadne gave to Theseus, assisting him in his heroic journey into and out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. As we travel through literal and figurative labyrinths in our lives, the golden thread may easily go unnoticed, yet when it is recognized and followed, we may find that this archetypal strand of gold connects us to our true selves, to our beloveds, and to that which we discover to be home.

How to Like It by Stephen Dobyn

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

Pier Paolo Pasolini on La Dolce Vita

Observe. There is not a sad character who moves us to compassion. For everyone, everything is going fine, even if it is going terribly. Everyone is full of energy in managing to survive, even if burdened by death and insensitivity. I have never seen a film in which all the characters are so full of the joy of being. Even the sorrowful events, the tragedies, take shape as phenomena charged with vitality, like spectacles.

by Carl Sandburg

I will be the word of the people.
Mine will be the bleeding mouth
from which the gag is snatched.
I will say everything.

Tomorrow by David Budbill

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.

Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.

Drunk on music,
who needs wine?

Come on,
Sweetheart,
let’s go dancing
while we’ve
still got feet.

by Ikkyu

Writing something
To leave behind
Is yet another kind of dream.
When I awake I know that
There will be no one to read it.

by Ikkyu

My real dwelling
Has no pillars
And no roof either
So rain cannot soak it
And wind cannot blow it down

by Ko Un

Two people are eating
sitting facing each other

An ordinary everyday thing
and at the same time
the best thing

Like they say, it’s love

from Flowers of a Moment by Ko Un

Rowing with just one oar
I lost that oar

For the first time I looked round at the wide stretch of water

Empty Path by Thich Nhat Hanh

“A single leaf, blown from a lakka-tree,

whispers autumn through the world.”

Sung Yü (Chou Dynasty)

In the shiver
of cold dew
the lake’s mirror ripples
On the untrodden grass
your footprints leave their mark
in the cold dawn
Not one lakka leaf has fallen here
yet after a barbaric cycle
the warm soul of autumn has returned
The skiff sails back to the old wharf
carrying moonlight in its hood

haiku consciousness

Reading is re-minding. Bringing us back to our secret selves.
A word, an image, a story, an idea. And we are “there” again.

I’ve never preached the gospel according to Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, or anyone else, though I read into them all, still.

I am reminded this moment of an old Zen saying that has been with me since my first days before a class: “When the student is ready, the teacher arrives.”

That is a moment of transcendence. For writers and artists especially.

This is just another note on Basho’s way to haiku-mind.

Something I read last night reminded me.

The word glowing in the center of it all is “meditation.” Yes, we’ve all been there before. We’ve made mush of the concept, ‘marketing’ it to death. Yet—it comes to all of us without knowing, whether we beckon it or not.

If the poet, writer is to pay attention to the world, give the meaning it deserves, he must quietly pursue this pathway—or never meet the teacher waiting for him there. -norbert blei

Autumn by Ogata Kenzan

However gorgeous the painted leaves
Autumn is not mine to say.
How I begrudge the wind in the pines
That too soon scatters the crimson.

attention by saadi youssef

Those who come by me passing,
I will remember them,
and those who come heavy and overbearing,
I will forget.

This is why
when air gushes between mountains
we describe the wind
and forget the rocks.

the crows letter by saijo yaso

I opened and read
The small red envelope
The mountain crow had brought:
‘On the night of the moon
The hills will blaze
Savage and red.”

I was going to reply
When my eyes opened.
Ah, yes, there it was:
A single red leaf.

Poor Sparrows Almanac

Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can put off for three days.
There will be plenty of time to work when you’re dead.
Jesus quit his job.
The unexamined life is not worth examining.
Even God worked for only six days, then took a vacation.
Smart people save their pennies; fools give lavish banquets. But who has more friends?
If at first you don’t succeed, stop trying so hard.
No man is self-sufficient (though some women are).
Sisyphus was a highly productive worker.
We have free-range chickens, but where are the free-range people?
How sad that so many hammocks are empty!
What looks like inefficiency is often happiness.
The rich chuckle; the poor laugh.
The concept of “stress” has made the world more stressful.
Tap your potential — but tap it lightly!

Ducks by Stephen Dobyns

Warm in my truck by the lighthouse at Watch Hill
on a sunny morning in midwinter, I observe
the ducks bobbing among ice-covered rocks
and think of Bashō and what his position might
have been on the subject of the demand-side
economics of poetry, a term I have just learned,
which argues that the smaller a poet’s number
of readers, the less reason the poet has to write
and why bother if not a single line will stick
in the mind a nanosecond past the poet’s death?
And I also wonder about these ducks and why
their feet don’t get frozen down there among
the chunks of ice, or maybe they only seem not
to get frozen and instead the ducks are very brave
as they seek out sweet things to eat, or sweet
for a duck. Bashō wrote; I feel when I sit with
Kikaku at a party that he is anxious to compose
a verse that will delight the entire company,
while I have no such wish. Bashō of course said
this in Japanese, which I know as much about
as I know about the feel of ducks. As for Kikaku,
he is recalled only tor once being mentioned
by Bashō, despite his faith in the demand-side
economics of poetry. On ducks, Bashō wrote:
Sea darkening—the wild duck’s cry is dimly white.
This morning the ducks have been joined by terns,
cormorants, and gulls. There’s good eating if you
don’t mind diving for it and don’t mind the cold.
The day is so clear I can almost count the trees
on Block Island eight miles away. I doubt Bashō
when writing a poem ever said: This will knock
their socks off. But he did write. Eat vegetable
soup rather than duck stew. Which wasn’t meant
to keep ducks from being eaten, bur expressed
his belief in simplicity— plainness and oddness
being qualities he liked. Across the narrow strip
of land to the lighthouse the wind blows so hard
that a seagull by my truck has to beat its wings
like crazy just to stay in one spot. Many times
my life feels like that, Iots of work just to stay put.
Bashō said that within him was something like
a windswept spirit that when he was young took
to writing poetry merely to amuse itself at first,
but then at last becoming its lifelong occupation.
At times it grew so dejected that it nearly quit,
at other times it grew so swollen with pride that
it rejoiced in vain victories over others, Barthes
in an essay claimed that writers are driven only
by vanity, which is why they must appear in print,
and maybe this fuels the demand-side economics
of poetry, the wish for a kiss-me-kiss-me response.
Like most lighthouses, this one is a white pillar
of stone with a beacon on top, but surely it’s no
longer needed, since ships don’t come this close
and all have radar—even small boats would be
warned away by the buoys. In the fog, its horn
makes a moan like a cow mourning for her calf
and its light slowly rotates like an exploratory eye,
but the whole business could be knocked down
and sold to developers, which makes good sense
if you buy into the demand-side theory of life.
Bashō said that ever since his windswept spirit
began to write poetry it never felt at peace with itself
but was prey to all sorts of doubts. Once it wanted
the security of a job at court and once it wanted
to measure the depths of its ignorance by becoming
a scholar. I know I haven’t read as much as I might,
but it seems the demand-side folks and Barthes
are leaving out a big part of the argument. A poet
has a complicated emotion and produces a poem;
a duck has a complicated emotion and produces
an egg. The demand-side case says they differ
just in the nature of their product, poem versus egg,
and both could fetch the same price at the market.
Off to my left float two brightly colored milliards;
to my right are three brown ducks, clearly females.
They appear to be ignoring one another, but perhaps
I’m wrong, perhaps they shoot quick sexual glances
in each other’s direction and soon they will head
back to the marsh and create an egg. And good
for them, I say, the world could use more ducks.
What other creature so aptly describes a doctor?
Bashō also wrote: Cold night—the wild duck, sick,
falls from the sky and sleeps a awhile. And he said
he didn’t become a courtier or scholar because
his unquenchable love of poetry held him back.
In fact, this. windswept spirit knew no other art
than the art of writing poetry, and consequently,
it clung to it, he said. more or less blindly At times
I repeat those last words to myself: more or less
blindly. Maybe many people would consider this
a bleak picture of the poet’s work, but in me
it awakens a sense of excitement, as when you love
to eat turkey bladders and then one day you meet somebody
else who loves to eat turkey bladders
and you feel you could talk to this person forever
and never grow bored. And I’m glad that Bashō
didn’t say the product or purpose was the poem’s
future life, but instead the product was the writing,
that Bashō was writing the poem for itself alone—
as reckless as that seems—and not for any future
profit. Doesn’t this put Bashō into the category
of nutcase, just as a person with an intense passion
for turkey bladders might be called a nutcase?
Sitting in my truck, locking out past the ducks,
out past Block Island and into the Atlantic, perhaps
in the direction of France, I see the water is a much
darker blue than in summer, as if the cold added
an extra layer of color The white tips of the waves
look more like ice or snow than flecks of froth.
How long could I watch without growing bored?
Maybe until I got hungry or needed to pee. As for
why ducks don’t get cold feet, to me it’s a mystery,
though I’ll wager books arc written on the subject,
just as books get written on the motivation of poets
and why they bother. A little ways from shore, light
reflects off the water as if from the sun’s hand mirror,
and I like to believe that shortly there will emerge
from the iridescence, more or less blindly, a small
boat carrying an aged Japanese poet, at which point
I’ll jump from my truck into the wind’s whirling
ambiguity and shout and wave my hat over my head.
Nothing is rational about this and it’s something
about which I should maybe keep my mouth shut,
but it’s an event the ducks and f hope to see happen,
not for profit, mind you, just for the thing itself.

–Mike Montreuil

a morning
empty of words-
a shadow
begins to form
on my desk

t. kilgore splake

wait not yet
charters cathedral choir
singing bach’s “jesu”
young girl pushing
strand of blond hair
away from her cheek

tachibana akemi | poems of solitary delights

What a delight it is
When, skimming through the pages
Of a book, I discover
A man written of there
Who is just like me.

Haiku by Takahama Kyoshi

Autumn wind:
Everything I see
Is haiku

Floating on a Marsh by Wang Wei

Autumn
the sky huge and clear
the marsh miles from farms and house

overjoyed by the cranes
standing around the sandbar

the mountains above the clouds in the distance

this water
utterly still
in the dusk

the white moon overhead

I let my boat drift free tonight
I can’t go home.

My Mount Chungnan Cottage by Wang Wei

Since middle age I’ve been
a most enthusiastic Buddhist

now that I’m old I’ve settled
here in the mountain country

sometimes I get so happy
I have to go off by myself

there are marvelous places
I alone know about

I climb
to the source of a stream

and sit
to watch the rising mists

sometimes I come across
an old man of the woods

we talk and laugh
and forget to go home.

haiku by yosano akiko

Left on the beach
Full of water,
A worn out boat
Reflects the white sky
Of early autumn.

Three Haiku by Yu Chang

deepening dusk
a canoe comes in
with the fog

fallen leaves
do I have to
go home?

blinding snow
there is no need
to understand everything

triumph of the sparrow by shinkichi takahashi

The wind blows hard among the pines
toward the beginning
of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.

In the Suburbs by Louis Simpson

There’s no way out.
You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life

As others before you
Were born to walk in procession
To the temple, singing.

Shooting Whales by Mark Strand

When the shoals of plankton
swarmed into St. Margaret’s Bay,
turning the beaches pink,
we saw from our place on the hill
the sperm whales feeding,
fouling the nets
in their play,
and breaching clean
so the humps of their backs
rose over the wide sea meadows.

Day after day
we waited inside
for the rotting plankton to disappear.
The smell stilled even the wind,
and the oxen looked stunned,
pulling hay on the slope
of our hill.
But the plankton kept coming in
and the whales would not go.

That’s when the shooting began.
The fishermen got in their boats
and went after the whales,
and my father and uncle
and we children went, too.
The froth of our wake sank fast
in the wind shaken water.

The whales surfaced close by.
Their foreheads were huge,
the doors of their faces were closed.
Before sounding, they lifted
their flukes into the air
and brought them down hard.
They beat the sea into foam,
and the path that they made
shone after them.

Thought I did not see their eyes,
I imagined they were
like the eyes of mourning,
glazed with rheum,
watching us, sweeping along
under the darkening sheen of salt.

When we cut our engine and waited
for the whales to surface again,
the sun was setting,
turning the rock strewn barrens a gaudy salmon.
A cold wind flailed at our skin.
When finally the sun went down
and it seemed like the whales had gone,
my uncle, no longer afraid,
shot aimlessly into the sky.

Three miles out
in the rolling dark
under the moon’s astonished eyes,
our engine would not start
and we headed home in the dinghy.
And my father, hunched over the oars,
brought us in.  I watched him,
rapt in his effort, rowing against the tide,
his blond hair glistening with salt.
I saw the slick spillage of moonlight
being blown over his shoulders,
and the sea and spindrift
suddenly silver.

He did not speak the entire way.
At midnight
when I went to bed,
I imagined the whales
moving beneath me,
sliding over the weed-covered hills of the deep;
they knew where I was;
they were luring me
downward and downward
into the murmurous
waters of sleep.

Elegy 1969 by Mark Strand

You slave away into your old age
and nothing you do adds up to much.
Day after day you go through the same motions,
you shiver in bed, you get hungry, you want a woman.

Heroes standing for lives of sacrifice and obedience
fill the parks through which you walk.
At night in the fog they open their bronze umbrellas
or else withdraw to the empty lobbies of movie houses.

You love the night for its power of annihilating,
but while you sleep, your problems will not let you die.
Waking only proves the existence of The Great Machine
and the hard light falls on your shoulders.

You walk among the dead and talk
about times to come and matters of the spirit.
Literature wasted your best hours of love-making.
Weekends were lost, cleaning your apartment.

You are quick to confess your failure and to postpone
collective joy to the next century.  You accept
rain, war, unemployment and the unjust distribution of wealth
because you can’t, all by yourself, blow up Manhattan Island.

The Coming of Light by Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

Our Masterpiece is the Private Life by Mark Strand

I

Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?

Why should we care? Doesn’t desire cast its
rainbows over the coarse porcelain
Of the world’s skin and with its measures fill the
air? Why look for more?

II

And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow
Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat
Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune.

True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak,

In that low voice, our late night disclosures . . . why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.

III

Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling

Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed

Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road

Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day’s rewards waiting at the doors of sleep . . .

A Private Singularity by John Koethe

I used to like being young, and I still do,
Because I think I still am. There are physical
Objections to that thought, and yet what
Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five
With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart
And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much
On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels.
And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all:
A little warm perhaps, a little cool, but mostly waiting on my
Life to fill it up, and meanwhile living in the light and listening
To the music floating through my living room each night.
It’s something you can only recognize in retrospect, long after
Everything that used to fill those years has disappeared
And they’ve become regrets and images, leaving you alone
In a perpetual present, in a nondescript small room where it began.
You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from
Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore;
The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door
Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart.
Along the way the self that you were born with turns into
The self that you created, but they come together at the end,
United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bell
On a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nail
In a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia — 
Whatever age restores. It isn’t the generalizations that I loved
At thirty-five that move me now, but particular moments
When my life comes into focus, and the feeling of the years
Between them comes alive. Time stops, and then resumes its story,
Like a train to Balbec or a steamer to Brazil. We moved to San Diego,
Then I headed east, then settled in the middle of the country
Where I’ve waited now for almost forty years, going through the
Motions of the moments as they pass from now to nothing,
Reading by their light. I don’t know why I’m reading them again — 
Elizabeth Bishop, Proust. The stories you remember feel like mirrors,
And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,
As though the years were pages. I keep living in the light
Under the door, waiting on those vague sensations floating in
And out of consciousness like odors, like the smell of sperm and lilacs.
In the afternoon I bicycle to a park that overlooks Lake Michigan,
Linger on a bench and read Contre Sainte-Beuve and Time Reborn,
A physics book that argues time is real. And that’s my life — 
It isn’t much, and yet it hangs together: its obsessions dovetail
With each other, as the private world of my experience takes its place
Within a natural order that absorbs it, but for a while lets it live.
It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything,
And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care.
It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it
Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe
That flows around them and dissolves them in the end,
But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one — 
A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark,
A small backyard beneath a boring California sky.
I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means
Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence
Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once — 
A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact
Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang — 
The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood,
Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”

Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

sonoran jazz

A corrosive humor, a very Latin American sort of joke, a love of doom and a sense of incredible beauty in the apocalyptic landscape. Fighting a lost war by not fighting at all, fighting with faith or a burst of savage, directionless defiance at an enemy beyond comprehension, a monolith that rises above the clouds of its own creation and sends out mechanical spiders, invisible agents, invincible tides beyond even its own control to further ends as petty and animal any we can imagine. The sound of warring factions of howler monkeys: humanity.

A Desolation by Allen Ginsberg

Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.

What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.

Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear) .

And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image—shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home

...

s the twentieth century fades out 
the nineteenth begins 
.......................................again 
it is as if nothing happened 
though those who lived it thought 
that everything was happening 
enough to name a world for & a time 
to hold it in your hand 
unlimited.......the last delusion 
like the perfect mask of death

To Make A Dadist Poem by Tristan Tzara

Take a newspaper. 
Take some scissors. 
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. 
Cut out the article. 
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. 
Shake gently. 
Next take out each cutting one after the other. 
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. 
The poem will resemble you. 
And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Proclamation Without Pretension by Tristan Tzara

Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born 
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA, 
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief 

The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the 
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism 
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances 

Hypertrophic painters hyperaes- 
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths 
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins 

CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX- 
ACT CALCULATIONS 

Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is 
no such thing as importance there is no transparence 
or appearance 

MUSICIANS SMASH YOUR INSTRUMENTS 
BLIND MEN take the stage 

THE SYRINGE is only for my understanding. I write because it is 
natural exactly the way I piss the way I'm sick 

ART NEEDS AN OPERATION 

Art is a PRETENSION warmed by the 
TIMIDITY of the urinary basin, the hysteria born 
in THE STUDIO 

We are in search of 
the force that is direct pure sober 
UNIQUE we are in search of NOTHING 
we affirm the VITALITY of every IN- 
STANT 

the anti-philosophy of spontaneous acrobatics 

At this moment I hate the man who whispers 
before the intermission-eau de cologne- 
sour theatre. THE JOYOUS WIND 

If each man says the opposite it is because he is 
right 

Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood 
-submarine formation of transchromatic aero- 
planes, cellular metals numbered in 
the flight of images 

above the rules of the 
and its control 

BEAUTIFUL 

It is not for the sawed-off imps 
who still worship their navel

Sometimes in the Middle Autumn Days by George Orwell

Sometimes in the middle autumn days,
The windless days when the swallows have flown,
And the sere elms brood in the mist,
Each tree a being, rapt, alone,

I know, not as in barren thought,
But wordlessly, as the bones know,
What quenching of my brain, what numbness,
Wait in the dark grave where I go.

And I see the people thronging the street,
The death-marked people, they and I
Goalless, rootless, like leaves drifting,
Blind to the earth and to the sky;

Nothing believing, nothing loving,
Not in joy nor in pain, not heeding the stream
Of precious life that flows within us,
But fighting, toiling as in a dream.

So shall we in the rout of life
Some thought, some faith, some meaning save,
And speak it once before we go
In silence to the silent grave …

mulholland drive

By including past images from the 50’s in the first two-hour segment of the film, Lynch shows us that the bourgeois world people want to believe in is a fantasy created to escape darker realities of American life.  He also borrows a surrealist aesthetic from the past to challenge film viewers’ belief in the “reality” of the worlds created and perpetuated by the Hollywood film industry.  Instead, Lynch wants people to go ahead and enjoy what are very likely necessary fantasies – but not to mistake them for the “Real,” since doing so will lead to the failure of fantasy, just as Diane’s total investment in her fantasy left her with nowhere else to turn but back to the traumatic Real from which she originally tried to flee.  We need to create and enjoy our fantasies, Lynch tells us, but we should not believe they can fulfill our unresolved conflicts and desires from actual life, since doing so will only lead to tragedy.

http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/feature-articles/the-perils-of-fantasy-memory-and-desire-in-david-lynchs-mulholland-drive/