Autumn Song by W.H. Auden

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last,
Nurses to their graves are gone,
But the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbors left and right
Daunt us from our true delight,
Able hands are forced to freeze
Derelict on lonely knees.

Close behind us on our track,
Dead in hundreds cry Alack,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Scrawny through a plundered wood,
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Clear, unscalable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold, cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

Wild Swans at Coole by WB Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Song of Sunset on the River by Bai Juyi

A strip of water's spread in the setting sun,
Half the river's emerald, half is red.
I love the third night of the ninth month,
The dew is like pearl; the moon like a bow.

Thinking of Li Bai at the End of the Sky by Du Fu

Cold wind rises at the end of the sky,
What thoughts occupy the gentleman's mind?
What time will the wild goose come?
The rivers and lakes are full of autumn's waters.
Literature and worldly success are opposed,
Demons exult in human failure.
Talk together with the hated poet,
Throw a poem into Miluo river.

Midnight Song of the Seasons: Autumn Song Southern Dynasties Yuefu

The autumn wind enters through the window,
The gauze curtain starts to flutter and fly.
I raise my head and look at the bright moon,
And send my feelings a thousand miles in its light.

Mid-Autumn Moon by Su Shi

The sunset clouds are gathered far away, it's clear and cold,
The Milky Way is silent, I turn to the jade plate.
The goodness of this life and of this night will not last for long,
Next year where will I watch the bright moon?

Sleeping on a Night of Autumn by Bai Juyi

It's cold this night in autumn's third month,
Peacefully within, a lone old man.
He lies down late, the lamp already gone out,
And beautifully sleeps amid the sound of rain.
The ash inside the vessel still warm from the fire,
Its fragrance increases the warmth of quilt and covers.
When dawn comes, clear and cold, he does not rise,
The red frosted leaves cover the steps.

My Cottage Unroofed by Du Fu

In the eighth moon the autumn gales furiously howl;
They roll up three layers of straw from my thatched bower.
The straw flies across the river and spreads in shower,
Some hanging knotted on the tops of trees that tower,
Some swirling down and sinking into water foul.

Urchins from Southern Village know I'm old and weak;
They rob me to my face without a blush on cheek
And holding armfuls of straw, into bamboos sneak.
In vain I call them till my lips are parched and dry;
Again alone, I lean on my cane and sigh.

Shortly the gale subsides and clouds turn dark as ink;
The autumn skies are shrouded and in darkness sink.
My cotton quilt is cold; for years it has been worn;
My restless children kick in sleep and it is torn.
The roof leaks o'er beds, leaving no corner dry;
Without cease the rain falls thick and fast from the sky.
After the troubled times troubled has been my sleep.
Wet though, how can I pass the night so long, so deep!

Could I get mansions covering ten thousand miles,
I'd house all scholars poor and make them beam with smiles.
In wind and rain these mansions would stand like mountains high,
Alas! Should these house appear before my eye,
Frozen in my unroofed cot, content I'd die.

Ascend by Du Fu

In a sharp gale from the wide sky apes are whimpering
Over the clear lake and white sand birds are flying homeward
Immensity of leaves rustling fell
The never-ending Yangtze river rolling on
I have come thousands of miles miles away, sad now with autumn
And with my hundred years of woe, I climb this height alone.
Ill fortune has laid a bitter frost on my temples，
Heart-ache and weariness are a thick dust in my wine.

From Autumn Thoughts by Du Fu

Jade frost bites the maple trees
and Wu Mountain and Wu Gorge breathe out dark fear

as river waves rise up to the sky
and dark wind-clouds touch ground by a frontier fortress.

The chrysanthemums have twice bloomed tears of other days,
When I moor my lonely boat my heart longs for my old garden.

The need for winter clothes hurries scissors and bamboo rulers.
White Emperor City looms over the rushed sound of clothes beaten at dusk.

A Song of Autumn Midnight by Li Po

A slip of the moon hangs over the capital;
Ten thousand washing-mallets are pounding;
And the autumn wind is blowing my heart
For ever and ever toward the Jade Pass....
Oh, when will the Tartar troops be conquered,
And my husband come back from the long campaign!

Autumn Air by Li Po

The autumn air is clear,
The autumn moon is bright.
Fallen leaves gather and scatter,
The jackdaw perches and starts anew.
We think of each other- when will we meet?
This hour, this night, my feelings are hard.

Autumn River Song by Li Po

The moon shimmers in green water.
White herons fly through the moonlight.

The young man hears a girl gathering water-chestnuts:
into the night, singing, they paddle home together.

Leaving it to You

Self evident, truth mistakes no thing.
But my heart's a long way from there
and nothings very clear.
Yellow gold is almost burned up
by my desire.
White hair grows beside the fire.
Bitter indecision: choose this, or maybe that.
Even the spirits speak in riddles
and make it hard to harvest
the essence of a single day.
Catch the wind whilst you tether shadows.
Faith, or a man who'll stand by his word, is
all there is. There is no disputing.

Autumn Moon

My heart’s like the autumn moon,
Reflecting from the clear pure waters of the pool.
There’s nothing to compare:
What can I say?

Autumnal, by Ernest Dowson

Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time’s deceit.

Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees.

Untitled, by Ernest Dowson

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.

"Real revolutions have the atmosphere of fétes. Contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends and preserves itself, the shadow behind which it maintains its claim to decide what the problems are"

- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

These few drops, these
Tears of autumn on my heart
I dare not let the first one fall
Lest autumns river well
On endlessly

under the hemlock / I sit with your shadow / and drink a toast to my ghost

In the pavilion of separation, the leaves suddenly blew away.
On the road of farewell, the clouds lifted all of a sudden.
Ah! How I regret that men are not like wild geese
Who go on their way together

Virtue

To be able to practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue... [They are] gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.

Wuyi Woods

Zilu, Zengxi, Ran Qiu and Gongxi Hua were sitting together one day and Confucious said, ‘Do not think that I am a little bit older than you and therefore am assuming airs. You often say among yourselves that people don’t know you. Suppose someone should know you, I should like to know how you would appear to that person.’ Zilu immediately replied, ‘I should like to rule over a country with a thousand carriages, situated between two powerful neighbours, involved in war and suffering from famine. I should like to take charge of such a country and in three years, the nation would become strong and orderly.’ Confucious smiled at this remark and said, ‘How about you, A Qiu?’ Ran Qiu replied, ‘Let me have a country sixty or seventy li square or perhaps only fifty or sixty li square. Put it in my charge, and in three years, the people will have enough to eat, but as for teaching them moral order and music, I shall leave that to the superior man.’ [Turning to Gongxi Hua] Confucious said, ‘How about you A Chi?’ Gongxi Hua replied, ‘Not that I say I can do it, but I’m will to learn this. At the ceremonies of religious worship and at the conference of the princes, I should like to wear the ceremonial cap and gown and be a minor official assisting at the ceremony.’ ‘How about you A Dian?’ The latter [Zengxi] was just playing on the se, and with a bang he left the instrument and arose to speak. ‘You know my ambition is different from theirs.’ ‘It doesn’t matter, said Confucious, ‘we are just trying to find out what each would like to do.’ Then he replied, ‘In late spring, when the new spring dress is made, I would like to go with five or six grown-ups and six or seven children to bathe in the River Chi’i, and after the bath go and enjoy the breeze in the Wuyi woods, and then sing on the way home’. Confucious heaved a deep sigh and said, ‘You are the man after my own heart’

Autumn Twilight by Arthur Symons

The long September evening dies
In mist along the fields and lanes;
Only a few faint stars surprise
The lingering twilight as it wanes.

Night creeps across the darkening vale;
On the horizon tree by tree
Fades into shadowy skies as pale
As moonlight on a shadowy sea.

And, down the mist-enfolded lanes,
Grown pensive now with evening,
See, lingering as the twilight wanes,
Lover with lover wandering.

And This I dreamt, and this I dream, by Arseny Tarkovsky

And this I dreamt, and this I dream,
And some time this I will dream again,
And all will be repeated, all be re-embodied,
You will dream everything I have seen in dream.

To one side from ourselves, to one side from the world
Wave follows wave to break on the shore,
On each wave is a star, a person, a bird,
Dreams, reality, death - on wave after wave.

No need for a date: I was, I am, and I will be,
Life is a wonder of wonders, and to wonder
I dedicate myself, on my knees, like an orphan,
Alone - among mirrors - fenced in by reflections:
Cities and seas, iridescent, intensified.
A mother in tears takes a child on her lap.

Discipline & Punishment

Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. It’s like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there’s no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing.

- Roberto Bolano

Soul, my soul

Soul, my soul, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength,
up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault
of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beamlike spears.
Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show,
nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry.
Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree you
give way to sorrow. All our life is up-and-down like this.

- Archilochus

Revolution

Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontian wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.'

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/biography/

In the BBC

What people suffer from is being trapped within themselves – in a world of individualism everyone is trapped in their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations. Our job as public service broadcasters is to take people beyond the limits of their own self, and until we do that we will carry on declining.

The BBC should realize that. I have an idealistic view, but if the BBC could do that, taking people beyond their own selves, it will renew itself in a way that jumps over the competition. The competition is obsessed by serving people in their little selves. And in a way, actually, Murdoch for all his power, is trapped by the self. That’s his job, to feed the self.

In the BBC, it’s the next step forward. It doesn’t mean we go back to the 1950s and tell people how to dress, what we do is say “we can free you from yourself” – and people would love it.

- Adam Curtis

Torrential

The mention of Trakl made Amalfitano think, as he went through the motions of teaching a class, about a drugstore near where he lived in Barcelona, a place he used to go when he needed medicine for Rosa. One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said he was reading Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desparate as those of this distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

- 2666 by Roberto Bolano, p227

Expression & Property

The growing proleterianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

- Epilogue, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

Exercise

There's nothing new, nothing different. The same pattern over and over. The same clouds, the same music, the same insight felt an hour or an eternity ago. There's nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember. This happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult, the rewards will be great.

Exercise your human mind as thoroughly as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe. Savor the input from all the senses. Feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion... and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from and how I became a human. Why I hung around. And now my final departure is scheduled. This way out. Escaping velocity.

Not just eternity, but infinity.

- From Waking Life by Richard Linklater

Sociability

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

• Franz Kafka
  

Beauty never grows old

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

• Franz Kafka
  

Unmasking

"It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet"

• Franz Kafka

Writers

"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. [...] Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like".

• Walter Benjamin - Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting

Flow

Tà pánta rheî kaì oudèn ménei.

"Everything flows, nothing stands still."

Heraclitus

Stage

… And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret or sing it. The stage is really a proscenium and upstage there is an enormous tube, something like a mineshaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoeic noises, syllables of rage or of seduction or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium, and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile, the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads, they can't see anything. They only hear the sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there is only deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they are incapable of an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage they work on is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. The shrinking of the stage doesn't spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall gets smaller to, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching. Next to this stage are others, of course. New stages have sprung up over time. There's the painting stage, which is enormous, and the audience is tiny, though all elegant, for lack of a better word. There's the film stage and the television stage. Here the capacity is huge, the hall is always full, and year after year the proscenium grows by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the performers from the stage where the intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform on the television stage. On this stage, the opening of the mine is the same, the perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and, paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humour, but it still stinks. This humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are finally reduced to two for the public's convenience or for the convenience of the public's collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television proscenium. The roars keep coming up from the opening of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting them. In fact, they, in theory the masters of language can't even enrich themselves. Their best words are borrowings they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row. These spectators are called flagellants. They're sick, and from time to time they invent hideous words and there's a spike in their mortality rate. When the workday ends and the theatres are closed and they cover up the opening of the mines with big sheets of steel. The intellectuals retire for the night.

• From 2666 by Roberto Bolano, p121 – 123

depth

"like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth."

• From The Sound of the Mountain by Yusanari Kawabata

Freedom

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

- V.I. Lenin

Beginning

"Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... like books that are written in a foreign language. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now... Resolve to be always beginning - to be a beginner."

• Rainer Maria Rilke

Light / Darkness

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."

- Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Karl Jung

High Places

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places"

• Ephesians 6:12 KJB

Becoming

"In the beginning I used to imagine that if I were to succeed in describing with any accuracy some thing, this little cone of light with the blurry edges, for instance, or this common pannikin, then I would be expressing all truth. But I could not my whole life has been a failure, lived at the most humiliating level, always purposeless, frequently degrading. Until I became aware of my power. The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming"

• Voss by Patrick White, p271

Amexica: War Along the Borderline

a sentence from page 18 of Amexica. 'La Familia 'came out' with a famous incident on 6 September 2006, when twenty masked men burst into a low-rent discotheque, the Sol Y Sombra in Morelia, the state capital, and bowled five decapitated heads across the floor, accompanied by a message that was bizarre even by the standards of narco communication: 'La Familia does not kill for money. It does not kill for women. It does not kill the innocent. Only those who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice.' 

The Infinite

  This lonely hill to me was ever dear,
  This hedge, which shuts from view so large a part
  Of the remote horizon. As I sit
  And gaze, absorbed, I in my thought conceive
  The boundless spaces that beyond it range,
  The silence supernatural, and rest
  Profound; and for a moment I am calm.
  And as I listen to the wind, that through
  These trees is murmuring, its plaintive voice
  I with that infinite compare;
  And things eternal I recall, and all
  The seasons dead, and this, that round me lives,
  And utters its complaint. Thus wandering
  My thought in this immensity is drowned;
  And sweet to me is shipwreck on this sea

 

• Giacomo Leopardi

There's...

“There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

George Borrow

apprehension of the infinite

"There are," says Plotinus, "different roads by which this end [apprehension of the Infinite] may be reached. The love of beauty, which exalts the poet; that devotion to the One and that ascent of science which makes the ambition of the philosopher; and that love and those prayers by which some devout and ardent soul tends in its moral purity towards perfection. These are the great highways conducting to that height above the actual and the particular, where we stand in the immediate presence of the Infinite, who shines out as from the deeps of the soul." (Plotinus, Letter to Flaccus)

Modern Love

It is summer, and we in a house

That is not ours, sitting at a table

Enjoying minutes of a rented silence,

The upstairs people are gone. The pigeons lull

To sleep the under-tens and invalids,

The tree shakes out its shadows and grass,

The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect

Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better

Happiness than this, not much to show for love

But how we are, or how this evening is,

Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive

In a domestic love, seemingly alone,

All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight,

Looking forward to a visit from the cat

by Douglas Dunn

Evolution

Evolution

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into light again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man's hand;
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was past.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And, oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing side
The shadows broke and soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auruch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o'er the plain
And the moon hung red o'er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west and east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And check by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o'er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Till our brutal tush were gone.

And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico's.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet -

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings to fly;
We sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men make war
And the oxwain creaks o'er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.

by Langdon Smith

Ouroboros

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the Word. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim it to violatethe Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the world can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, p412

Celebration of Markets

Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violences, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. The true war is a celebration of markets.

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p105

Progress

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

- Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History

among the ruins

‘Anyone who cannot cope with life whilst he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others, after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor’

- Franz Kafka, Diaries, entry of October 19^th, 1921

We are overloaded with critiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-depth investigative journalism and TV documentaries expose the companies that are ruthlessly polluting our environment, the corrupt bankers who continue to receive fat bonuses while their banks are rescued by public money, the sweatshops in which children work as slaves, etc. However, there is a catch: what isn’t questioned in these critiques is the democratic-liberal framing of the fight against these excesses. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary enquires, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on. But the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned. This remains sacrosanct to even the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’.

From the article 'Gentlemen of the Left' by Slavoj Zizek, LRB volume 33 number 2

For a Five Year Old, by Fleur Adcock

A Snail is climbing up the window-sill
Into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
That it would be unkind to leave it there:
It might crawl onto the floor; we must take care
That no one squashes it. You understand,
And carry it outside, with careful hand,
To eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of truth prevails:
Your gentleness is moulded still by words
From me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds
From me, who drowned kittens, who betrayed
Your closest reletives, and who purveyed
The harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.

Against Coupling by Fleur Adcock

I write in praise of the solitary act:

of not feeling a trespassing tongue

forced into ones mouth, ones breath

smothered, nipples crushed against the

ribcage, and that metallic tingling

In the chin set off by by a certain odd nerve:

unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help –

such eyes as a young girl draws life from

listening to the vegetal

rustle within her, as his gaze

stirs polypal fronds in the obscure

sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur,

There is much to be said for abandoning

this no longer novel exercise –

for not ‘participating’ in

a total ‘experience’ – when

one feels like the lady in Leeds who

had seen The Sound of Music eighty six times

or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress

producing A Midsummer Nights Dream

for the seventh year running, with

yet another class from 5B.

Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but

the hole in the wall can be troublesome.

I advise you, then, to embrace it without

encumbrance. No need to set the scene,

dress up (or undress), make speeches.

Five minutes of solitude are

Enough – in the bath, or to fill

that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixéd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved

For Desire, by Kim Addonizio

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look

Renouncement

I MUST not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the love that lurks in all delight--
The love of thee--and in the blue heaven's height,
And in the dearest passage of a song.
Oh, just beyond the sweetest thoughts that throng
This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright;
But it must never, never come in sight;
I must stop short of thee the whole day long.
But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away,--
With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gather'd to thy heart.

By Alice Meynell

Down with War Criminals!

"Generic appeals to peace never roused our interest: war, today as four centuries ago, has a very solid raison d'etre, rooted in the criminal decisions of states and supernational powers, the United States as well as Charles V's empire. Ethnic cleanings and retaliations have their reason too, a reason that we reject and oppose, being aware that time won't stop rewarding with victories and defeats those who keep up this struggle, i.e. the only conflict worth enlisting for. These days of bloodbath coincide with our Q promotional tour all over Italy. It would immoral and inconsistent with our long-time political praxis not to seize this opportunity, that's why we're using our paradoxical "fame" to censure both the madness of rulers and the apathy of the ruled ones."

From a press release, by the collective authors of 'Q', the Luther Blissett project, Bologna, April 1st, 1999 (the entire press release found in the link)

Suicide in the Trenches by Siegfrid Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

I SEE by Roque Dalton

I think they’ve lied to us enough.

Now I have the key to the hieroglyph
pain gave me between fits of a drunks laughter
lungers from a jailer and glares from a rabid dog
without a heart

This much I also know: it will be difficult to make men accept
this nakedness someone who possess the light reverts to
hard to convince them that so far all the laughs were turned against
them
and that all the hands held out to them had cruel nails

(its a bit chilly but it’s better that way
now that the mortal fires
the flushed faces in the middle of the orgy
the feverish myth invented by the wine settled in your blood
and spider webs clinging to the tongue have disappeared.)

I’m going to strip some of the last veils off right now.

And I’ll be the one
to take care of the wounds.

Liberal Humanists

“Liberals. Liberal humanists. That would be the enemy, in all positions... [the illusion that] there is a self who exists prior to anything who goes around emoting, experiencing and developing. This is what I hate”

From the review of C by Tom McCarthy, by Jenny Turner in the LRB

the night, the porch

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
what all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
to the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
-- "The Night, The Porch"

Like You

Like you I

love love, life, the sweet smell

of things, the sky-

blue landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up

and I laugh through eyes

that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful

and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me

but in the unanimous blood

of those who struggle for life,

love,

little things,

landscape and bread,

the poetry of everyone.

By Roque Dalton

Enragés

[Jacques] Roux once said that "liberty is no more than an empty shell when one class is allowed to condemn another to starvation and no measures taken against them"

On Poetry

And what of pure poetry? Poetry’s absolute power will purify men, all

men. “Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.” So said Lautréamont. All

the ivory towers will be demolished, all speech will be holy, and, having at

last come into the reality which is his, man will need only to shut his eyes

to see the gates of wonder opening.

—Paul Éluard, “Poetic Evidence”

The Voyage by Charles Baudelaire, from Fleurs du Mal

The Journey

To Maxime du Camp

I

For the child, adoring cards and prints,
The universe fulfils its vast appetite.
Ah, how large is the world in the brightness of lamps,
How small in the eyes of memory!

We leave one morning, brains full of flame,
Hearts full of malice and bitter desires,
And we go and follow the rhythm of the waves,
Rocking our infinite on the finite of the seas:

Some happy to escape a tainted country
Others, the horrors of their cradles; and a few,
Astrologers drowned in the eyes of a woman,
Some tyrannical Circe of dangerous perfumes.

So not to be transformed into animals, they get drunk
On space and light and skies on fire;
The biting ice, the suns that turn them copper,
Slowly blot out the brand of kisses.

But the true travelers are they who depart
For departing's sake; with hearts light as balloons,
They never swerve from their destinies,
Saying continuously, without knowing why: "Let us go on!"

These have passions formed like clouds;
As a recruit of his gun, they dream
Of spacious pleasures, transient, little understood,
Whose name no human spirit knows.

II

It is a terrible thought that we imitate
The top and the ball in their bounding waltzes; even asleep
Curiosity tortures and turns us
Like a cruel angel whipping the sun.

Whimsical fortune, whose end is out of place
And, being nowhere, can be anywhere!
Where Man, in whom Hope is never weary,
Runs ever like a madman searching for repose.

Our soul is a brigantine seeking its Icaria:
A voice resounds on deck: "Open your eyes!"
A hot mad voice from the maintop cries:
"Love. Glory. Fortune!" Hell is a rock.

Each little island sighted by the look-out man
Becomes another Eldorado, the promise of Destiny;
Imagination, setting out its revels,
Finds but a reef in the morning light.

O the poor lover of chimerical lands!
Must one put him in irons, throw him in the water,
This drunken sailor, contriver of those Americas
Whose glimpses make the gulfs more bitter?

Thus the old vagabond, tramping through the mud,
With his nose in the air, dreams of shining Edens;
Bewitched his eye finds a Capua
Wherever a candle glimmers in a hovel.

III

O marvelous travelers! what glorious stories
We read in your eyes as deep as the seas.
Show us the caskets of your rich memories
Those wonderful jewels of stars and stratosphere.

We would travel without wind or sail!
And so, to gladden the cares of our jails,
Pass over our spirits, stretched out like canvas,
Your memories with their frames of horizons.

Tell us, what have you seen?

IV

"We have seen the stars
And the waves; and we have seen the sands also;
And, despite shocks and unforeshadowed disasters,
We have often, as here, grown weary.

The glory of sunlight on the violet sea,
The glory of cities in the setting sun,
Lit in our hearts an uneasy desire
To sink in a sky of enticing reflections.

Never did the richest cities, the grandest countryside,
Hold such mysterious charms
As those chance made amongst the clouds,
And ever passion made as anxious!

— Delight adds power to desire.
O desire, you old tree, your pasture is pleasure,
And whilst your bark grows great and hard
Your branches long to see the sun close to!

Do you ever increase, grand tree, you who live
Longer than the cypress? — Nevertheless, we have carefully
Culled some sketches for your ravenous album,
Brothers finding beauty in all things coming from afar!

We have greeted great horned idols,
Thrones starry with luminous jewels,
Figured palaces whose fairy pomp
Would be a dream of ruin for a banker,

Robes which make the eyes intoxicated;
Women with tinted teeth and nails
And cunning jugglers caressed by serpents."

V

And then, what then?

VI

"O childish minds!

Never to forget the principal matter,
We have everywhere seen, without having sought it,
From top to bottom of the fatal ladder,
The wearisome spectacle of immortal sin:

Woman, base slave of pride and stupidity,
Adores herself without a smile, loves herself with no distaste;
Man, that gluttonous, lewd tyrant, hard and avaricious,
Is a slave of the slave, a trickle in the sewer;

The joyful executioner, the sobbing martyr;
The festival that flavors and perfumes the blood;
The poisonous power that weakens the oppressor
And the people craving the agonizing whip;

Many religions like ours
All scaling the heavens; Sanctity
Like a tender voluptuary wallowing in a feather bed
Seeking sensuality in nails and horse-hair;

Fearing Humanity, besotted with its own genius,
Is as mad today as ever it was,
Crying to God in its furious agony:
"O my fellow and my master, I curse thee!"

And the less senseless, brave lovers of Dementia,
Flee the great herd penned in by Destiny,
And take refuge in a vast opium!
— Such is the eternal report of the whole world."

VII

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

Must we depart? If you can do so, remain;
Depart, if you must. Someone runs, another crouches,
To deceive that vigilant and fatal enemy,
Time! Ah, there are some runners who know no respite,

Like the wandering Jew or like the apostles,
Whom nothing aids, no cart, nor ship,
To flee this ugly gladiator; there are: others
Who even in their cradles know how to kill it.

When at last he shall place his foot upon our spine,
We will be capable of hope, crying: "Forward!"
As in old times we left for China,
Eyes fixed in the distance, halt in the winds,

We shall embark on that sea of Darkness
With the happy heart of a young traveler.
Do you hear these voices, alluring and funereal,
Singing: "This way, those of you who long to eat

The perfumed lotus-leaf! it is here that are gathered
Those miraculous fruits for which your heart hungers;
Do come and get drunk on the strange sweetness
Of this afternoon without end!"

By those familiar accents we discover the phantom
Over there our personal Pylades stretch out their arms to us.
"Swim to your Electra to revive your hearts!"
Says she whose knees we one time kissed.

VIII

O Death, my captain, it is time! let us raise the anchor!
This country wearies us, O Death! Let us make ready!
If sea and sky are both as black as ink,
You know our hearts are full of sunshine.

Pour on us your poison to refresh us!
Oh, this fire so burns our brains, we would
Dive to the depths of the gulf, Heaven or Hell, what matter?
If only to find in the depths of the Unknown the New!

— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)