Food for thought

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself.

I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. Like the world-evolution, it is endless. It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. It is this quality about all art which gives it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or integrates it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which is ‘therapeutic’: significance, purposelessness, infinitude.

From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware there is no goal. … With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as man.

- Henry Miller

On Love

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us
within us and against us, against us and within us.

- Adrienne Rich

812

A Light exists in Spring

Not present on the Year

At any other period —

When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad

On Solitary Fields

That Science cannot overtake

But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,

It shows the furthest Tree

Upon the furthest Slope you know

It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step

Or Noons report away

Without the Formula of sound

It passes and we stay —

A quality of loss

Affecting our Content

As Trade had suddenly encroached

Upon a Sacrament.

- Emily Dickinson

Waking

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

- Muriel Rukeyser, Speed of Darkness

More fleeting than wind

What is more fleeting than the wind? asked the Yaksha
and do tell me, what is more numerous than grass

Think only of a monster with a thousand eyes,
of festering refuse in the dark,
fodder for a million feeding flies,
seemingly somnolent, yet nurturing life's spark.

And of dancing flame, congealing as ice,
or a garden of solace, weeded with strife,
the fission of thought, imploding, imprecise,
myriad reflections in the barrenness of night.

Look, Yudhishtar, up into the empty sky
To the shadows of clouds, racing along.
Iridescent bubbles brilliant to the eye,
Blown apart by a cyclone, vicious and strong.

The mind, O Yaksha, is more fleeting than the wind.
Thoughts are like grass, fecund, undetermined.

************************************
And say, O Yudhishtar, who is the best friend
Of one whom death has just beckoned? 

When the moment comes, an end to life
And man takes hold of death's cold hand
Nothing matters then, not wealth nor wife
Just man, along in an unfamiliar land.

Come, be the leaf, a little above the earth,
fluttering lightly to its final rest.
A candle when it dies is at its widest girth.
Before it droops, a flower looks it best.

Saffron, O gods, is the burden of the pyre.
A life, like wood, floats on ripple of desire.
finds release only by merging with fire
Let it, at last, transcend the reflex to acquire.

A prayer beyond want, reaching the open sky.
Charity is the best friend of one about to die.

*************************************
O Kaunteya, I'd like you to tell me now,
what is that which sojourns alone? 

A memory rose, of a bird at dusk.
indifferently watching a column of light,
The day, empty, except for its visible husk,
swept easily away by the swirl of night.

A temple in the morning caressed by the sun;
shadowless at noon; then to darkness resigned.
Things of this earth are so easily undone.
And arc remains above, to its path aligned/

O Yaksha, often on the busiest trail,
silence persists, quietly, almost on the sly.
To be aloe is to burn inside a veil,
like fireflies against an opaque sky.

Shadows suspended from a glow that has grown.
The sun, O Yaksha, is that which sojourns alone.

****************************************
And what, Yudhishtar, is the highest refuge
of virtue, and then of exalted heaven?

Good and bad, and such like themes
are, in themselves, diffult to decree:
Like passing shadows reflected on streams
uncertain of their path to the sea.

Virtue, O Yaksha, is always exalted
When it can accept several points of view.
If unbending it will always be faulted
liberality is the highest refuge of virtue.

As to the heavens, this is my insight
A man, his destiny, death and release.
And along this path, the divine light,
dispelling gloom, guided only by caprice.

The illusion of choice is a deceptiove subterfuge
To be true to oneself is the only refuge

*****************************************

Like oars to a boat
seeking the bank across the river
a skill, not learnt by rote,
is the most laudable endeavor ..

Raindrops at rest after a storm is spent
The best kind of happiness is to be content

- From Yaksha Prashna, Yudhishtar & Draupadi by Pavan Varma

Thodee Lali Aur Kari

Branch of Almond Tree in Blossom Red - Vincent Van Gogh

Lali mere lal ki, jit dekhu titt lal.
Lali dekhan main gayi, main bhi ho gayi lal.

*****
Naino ki kari kothari,
putali palang bichhãi;
palako ki chik darike,
piya ko liyã rijhãi.

- Kabir

Lightness

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.

—Saadi Youssef, “Attention.”

Hope spring

"As for me, I'm wakerife and morne, but hope springs eternal. I don't know how she does it, what with those leg irons on, but spring she does."

Ben Tripp; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda; CounterPunch (Petrolia, California); May 30, 2003.

On Writing

       A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. Of course, there are dishonest writers who go on for a little while, but not for long—not for long.

            A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—

            “Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought.”

            Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends. We do have curtains—in a day, morning, noon and night, in a man, birth, growth and death. These are curtain rise and curtain fall, but the story goes on and nothing finishes.

            To finish is sadness to a writer—a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

-------

I hear via a couple of attractive grapevines, that you are having trouble writing. God! I know this feeling so well. I think it is never coming back—but it does—one morning, there it is again.

            About a year ago, Bob Anderson [the playwright] asked me for help in the same problem. I told him to write poetry—not for selling—not even for seeing—poetry to throw away. For poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music. And it is also the best therapy because sometimes the troubles come tumbling out.

            Well, he did. For six months he did. And I have three joyous letters from him saying it worked. Just poetry—anything and not designed for a reader. It's a great and valuable privacy.

            I only offer this if your dryness goes on too long and makes you too miserable. You may come out of it any day. I have. The words are fighting each other to get out.

- John Steinbeck 

Solo for Saturday Night Guitar

Suspended by Neha

Time was. Time is. Time shall be.
Man invented time to be used.
Love was. Love is. Love shall be.
Yet man never invented love
Nor is love to be used like time.
A clock wears numbers one to twelve
And you look and read its face
And tell the time pre-cise-ly ex-act - ly.
Yet who reads the face of love?
Who tells love numbers pre-cise-ly ex-act-ly?
Holding love in a tight hold for keeps,
Fastening love down and saying
“It's here now and here always.”
You don’t do this off hand, careless-like.
Love costs. Love is not so easy
Nor is the shimmering of star dust
Nor the smooth flow of new blossoms
Nor the drag of a heavy hungering for someone.

Love is a white horse you ride
or wheels and hammers leaving you lonely
or a rock in the moonlight for rest
or a sea where phantom ships cross always
or a tall shadow always whispering
or a circle of spray and prisms —
maybe a rainbow round your shoulder.

Heavy heavy is love to carry
and light as one rose petal,
light as a bubble, a blossom,
a remembering bar of music
or a finger or a wisp of hair
never forgotten.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

To Arrive Where You Are

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

 

- T.S.Eliot 

Turning World

Acrobatic Dancer by Henri Matisse

At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
and there is only the dance.

- T. S. Eliot

Why I Am Not a Painter

Sardines by Michael Goldberg

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

- Frank O’Hara

The Storm

The Manneporte by Claude Monet 

‎1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!--
And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy,--
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.

3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
The bulb goes on and off, weakly.
Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping--
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.

- Theodore Roethke

Mad Girl’s Love Song

Seated Odalisque by Henri Matisse 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Love is more thicker than forget

The River Epte by Claude Monet

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky

- e. e. cummings

Boundless

Letter from Henri Matisse to Andre Rouveyre

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.

- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Dangerous Things

The Red Sun by Joan Miro

Said Myrtias (a Syrian student
in Alexandria; in the reign of
Augustus Constans and Augustus Constantius;
in part a pagan, and in part a christian);
"Fortified by theory and study,
I shall not fear my passions like a coward.
I shall give my body to sensual delights,
to enjoyments dreamt-of,
to the most daring amorous desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear, for whenever I want --
and I shall have the will, fortified
as I shall be by theory and study --
at moments of crisis I shall find again
my spirit, as before, ascetic."

- C.P.Cavafy

The Night Has A Thousand Eyes

Starry Night Over the Rhone by Vincent Van Gogh

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying of the sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

- Francis William Bourdillon

Since feeling is first

 Lorette a la tasse de cafe by Henri Matisse

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

- e. e. cummings