Of a Friday evening:
“All that’s left is mending what was torn” (Paul Simon, in album Seven Psalms, 2023)
Friday, June 30, 2023
prelude to conversation
Thursday, June 29, 2023
unbeabsichtigt
Q: Are you happy?
A: You asking me?
Q: Yes, are you?
A: Am happy you asked.
Q: That means...what?
A: Inadvertently so.
in·ad·ver·tent
(ĭn′əd-vûr′tnt)
adj.1. Marked by or resulting from carelessness; negligent: an inadvertent error; an inadvertent omission.2. Not deliberate or considered; unintentional: an inadvertent remark; inadvertent humor. See Synonyms at careless.3. Not intending to be so; unwitting: "Physicians have already begun to take on the role of gatekeepers, inadvertent agents of selection ... deciding on the relative value of different human lives" (Robert Pollack).
Comment:
Dr. Steven Greer says that beneficent intentional conscious invitation is sufficient to vector in extraterrestrial visitors for beneficial contact. Good for him and his Disclosure Project.
As a recluse, you might say I have no intention other than the mere observation and experience of nothing else.
Q: What is nothing else?
A: Yes -- That's it!
hoffnungslosigkeit
Nonagenarian elder, D, sends her response. Billy Collins.
Just in time:
Despair
So much gloom and doubt in our poetry -
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.
Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.
I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
the shadows and empty cupboards?
Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrators of experience,
Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces,
Ye-Hah.
~ Billy Collins ~
She added picture of chubby Buddha statue under tree with two birds alighted. Couldn't transfer it here. So, I add these:
no stone nor ocean-
drop is mine -- I survey each
as one thought, one cell
transporting nothingfrom one field to another --no task is complete
hic haec hoc
This
Is what it is like to
Disappear
This
Where nothing else
Matters
There’s
No stepping away from
This
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
it changes
The social fabric is thin. Amenities stretch only so far. People want what they want and fear what they fear.
People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time — but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.” (Gloria, to herself, walking away from Claire’s apartment on 5th avenue, in Let The Great World Spin, novel by Colum McCann, p.301)
Inch by inch drop by drop the inclinations of others dig a trench in rain wider and wider longer and longer.
Until, just there, there is nothing underfoot that holds up where once you walked and you fall through some quantum emptiness into no return possible.
spooky action at a distance
Rummaging through old
Names — this one, that one, past gone —
Impulse to pray, do
fabulism
Perhaps it doesn't
matter how two Kennedys
or Monroe died in
the sixties, or any lie
told us we have to live with
merde
wall to wall whining
political rectitudes
finger paint feces
across media stalls -- as
anthropologists make notes
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Monday, June 26, 2023
then the dry twig blossoms
In prison this morning we speak to each other through William Stafford’s poem Your Life.
We speak of mirrors. About AA Meetings. About fear of philosophy, fear of poetry, unwillingness to reflect, and uncertainty about disappearing.
“Good luck,” one of the men said. It’s a good phrase.
American life storms about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue. This contemporary insight is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest symbols; and every man would be a poet if his intellectual digestion were perfect. The test of the poet is the power to take the passing day, with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to be related to astronomy and history and the eternal order of the world. Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. He is calmed and elevated.
(—Ralph Waldo Emerson, in essay Poetry and Imagination [1872])
Conversation is poetry.
In that library room, across the road from horses and cows, down from tucked building where license plates are made, smell of fresh coffee brewing behind desk, we sit in conversation.
Holding twigs.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
to be utterly there
Marie Howe was asked:
Interviewer: Do you think of writing as a spiritual act at its core?
Marie Howe: I do, because it involves a wonderful contradiction, which is in order for it to happen you have to be there and you have to disappear. Both. You know, nothing feels as good as that… Something happening through you, but you’re attending it. There are few things in the world like that, but writing is pretty much a relief from the self—and yet the self has to be utterly there. —From an interview at The Millions
In his essay in Image Robert Cording wrote:
I think the best art always involves such loving attention to what is before us. I would argue that art is not about the will; that making art should push aside the ego and desires of the artist and that this pushing aside can only take place in the absorption of the artist by what is actual. To maintain the integrity of the work itself is the artist’s form of love since, as soon as the artist tries to please, the good of the thing that is being made will be compromised. Great art, then, isn’t a statement of truth, nor is it aimed at the good of humanity, because it does not try to tell us anything; rather, if the artist fixes his or her attention on something real, what is made will be beautiful “because it will be transparent to what is always present in the real, that is the overflow of presence which generates joy.” This last statement is from a wonderful book-length meditation called Grace and Necessity by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, which informs much of what I have just said here.
Williams’s book is a reflection on the aesthetic theory of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. What I love about this little book is the way it revolves around two phrases of Maritain’s about “things being more than they are” or “not only what they are.” I want to end by briefly exploring these phrases. The artist in Williams’s book is one who “perceives the material of the world—visible things, patterns of sound, texture, as offering more than can appear in one moment of encounter.” Think of how artists have tried to solve that dilemma—Monet’s many views of the same haystacks in different light and seasons; or the multiple perspectives of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; or the montage of voices in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Everyone who has ever painted or written a word wants his or her work to embrace everything at once—Walmart and a bluebird, grocery shopping and ecstasy. And everyone fails.
But, while that kind of failure is inevitable, what matters for Williams and Maritain is the degree to which an artist is attentive or obedient to what is being encountered. To Rowan Williams that attention is made manifest in a work of art by the degree to which, as Williams says, it has “dimension” outside of its relation to the artist. He writes, “There is the sense that the world ‘gives’ itself to be understood in the very moment when we realize that describing it simply in terms of how it relates to me, let alone serves my interest, is an inadequate or actively untruthful perspective.”
( Acts of Attention: On Poetry and Spirituality, Robert Cording | Issue 101)
The article, too long for Sunday Evening Practice, occupies my afternoon.
I am cheered to learn of this view of “'dimension' outside of its relation to the artist."
My "inadequate or actively untruthful perspective."
The joy of "[s]omething happening through you, but you’re attending it."
Being occupied -- but nevertheless -- disappearing within "a wonderful contradiction."
Hearing
the words
You
don't say.
そしてまだ — and yet
露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
Tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara
The world of dew
is the world of dew
……and yet, and yet –
—by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), Translated by Robert Hass
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