Today

 

Just feeling human the way a cloud’s a cloud tinged with blue.. Human, a kind of element, a fire, an air, today.. a house without doors, open to sun or snowdrifts. --Denise Levertov.

The Tree of Life

 

Rootedness is the precondition for verticality..[for what] leads to reverence,revelation. --R. Zaretsky. When the trees have burned down,their darkness remains. ~W.S.Merwin.

A day in the life of:

Coffee. Silence. Reading. Four minute walk home. Lunch. Prayer. Karak chai. Chat with KP: cats,Islam. Notes, markings. Put things in order before Maghrib. Walk. Dinner. A small but blessed, charmed life. The form, not the substance,is monastic, an old rhythm of life somehow surviving, returning. In-between: birdsong, a few questions,maybe a lecture.

~~

Music, language, architecture,knowledge & places become generic,bland, homogeneous, neutral. A grey & blase age of likes, whatever, meh, androgyny (Spiderman, Manga), boredom, untact, zombification, hikokomori & narcissism.

'My intuitive sense is that it has to do with pessimism and a sense of pointlessness in communication. When a place becomes an airport terminal of totally unconnected individuals with no shared culture or sense of a public, there is no coherent entity to express yourself to and it becomes pointless to signal or communicate something outward from within. Who would you be dressing up for?'

--Angela Nagle.

~~

It is a task to come to see the world as it is -- Iris M Falsehood,illusions are comforting. Academia fosters this smugness, 'knowingness'- which is really ignorance, technique or a shallow, outward knowing (econs, Marxists). To see the world one must see oneself & others in it.

~~

'Inscribed on a Wall' I set out to find you Facing you in the dark, the way home lost..I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat, [drifting, drifting] -- Tu Fu.

~~

The first day of spring carries with it the last day of summer. Started here 25 years ago! And now time curves back on itself. "The strength of a man's spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life." "And the eye that sees refuses to see further, rests on the frail strawness of straw."

--Denise.

~~

Well, for one thing,” he [Don Cherry] replied, “it’s actually not my music, because it’s a culmination of different experiences, different cultures, and different composers that involves the music that we play together.” --A. Shatz.

"Philosophy is not a form of knowledge but a quest for wisdom; what moves us towards it does not come from us. It is not something that can be owned or traded." -- Marcel Henaff.

"He looked no one in the face, as if his relationship with the rest of humanity were at an end, or as if he had been reduced to only a hand..an abstract hand, a mechanism for accepting payment and delivering merchandise in a rigidly calculated and predetermined exchange." --Pasolini

The decline and fall

 

T

Ec-stasy: to stand outside of oneself. The centre doesn't hold; let it go, let it go. This time, right here. Now. 

After the flood

 

The same. The same. then once, in a flash, fresh ground,... black, grey, green, and blue water, stone, grass and sky and each unique set stone! --R.Lowell Not things but a web of connections, "indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence" (on Monet).

~~~

On how silence works:

"I find the here-and-now of vital [but not ultimate] importance. It’s important because it is ephemeral; this moment is here and gone. How I respond to it is the vital question. Do I respond to it from my deepest values? That’s the reality of my faith."

~

On consolation:

Consolation without faith, salvation, grace? İf this is part two of The Needs of Strangers then I'm looking forward to it! Can it, must it, now only come through art, music and texts? Not touching but to be touched. Can there ever be a complete acceptance of pure randomness if we are, in reality, sense-making creatures always searching for meaning?

Perhaps we humans have wanted God most as witness to acts of choice made in solitude. Acts of memory,of sacrifice. --Denise Levertov

Are secular forms of redemption/hope destined to fail- or worse, turn into nightmares? Capitalist modernity's freedom from nature brings forth and perhaps always contained the seeds of climate catastrophe; Marxist utopia results in hopeless architectural brutalism and hell on earth. The structure of redemption narratives (just barely) remains but the substance seems hollowed out.

 

K

We want the mark of time, that streak, wound/gash; the dazzling riddled light held in the loved one's gaze-for a moment, the deep sense of ease at seeing the first step, spring, calendars. The point of intersection, a cross, a turning point, the solstice of the heart. The words not spoken when there was time now recalled, the photograph kept in a deep inner pocket, faith under the left nipple, the worn- down shoes in winter, the clocks in your house all pointing sadly to different hours, the lighting of the fires in the darkness of the morning with darkened hands. The learned skill of forgetting, the amazement that things continue. God in the high, eastern windows, His light reaching us-somehow-marking out time for you, for me.

 

Ich ruf zu Dir Herr, Jesu Christ, BWV 639, J. S. Bach from Lalentituddelosgramófonos on Vimeo.

Time will make you..or it won't. You find yourself in fallen, failing light. All the mystery is in the here and now. This cloth, woven from green and red, gold and green. Each thing has its season. And now is winter. 

Floating Light

 

Promises for C

 

K

We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person.. -- Frost.

When the news arrived you closed the books, collected poems- Irby, Ceravolo. Years pass,mid-morning silence in each room now, the winter mind stalls, all the mirrors cold like a shroud. But amidst the words,a photo & "A picture of everyone i love passes thru me." --Ceravolo.

"Never submit to the flow of time..Deal only with those difficulties that actually confront you." --S.Weil

..scarcely holding yourself up on the bank of the here & now.. connected to fixities subtleties.. January shines now & the glory of January enfolds you in itself-- --Zanzotto.