Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils---all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams---these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. For the largest part of our species' existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied---whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood. The color of the sky, the rush of waves---every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting---with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.
-- from The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
Friday, December 21, 2012
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Out Walking, Thinking About the Sound of the Viol:
It's a blue sky today, ice
on the step. In the woods,
the beech tree is turning: two branches,
the rest still green. Its leaves
are stiff and supple, a fine
starched leather, more burnt
than tanned. What amazes most,
though, is the colour: its evenness
uncanny; shy, sinewy, a shade
our mothers might deem
serviceable in a shirt or coat, in isolation
unremarkable. Yet leaf against leaf,
branch on branch, that spare bronze
flares: voiceless
and articulate, clean
spoken through.
- Jan Zwicky
It's a blue sky today, ice
on the step. In the woods,
the beech tree is turning: two branches,
the rest still green. Its leaves
are stiff and supple, a fine
starched leather, more burnt
than tanned. What amazes most,
though, is the colour: its evenness
uncanny; shy, sinewy, a shade
our mothers might deem
serviceable in a shirt or coat, in isolation
unremarkable. Yet leaf against leaf,
branch on branch, that spare bronze
flares: voiceless
and articulate, clean
spoken through.
- Jan Zwicky
Initial:
Out of infinite desires rises
finite deeds like weak fountains
that fall back in early trembling arcs.
But those, which otherwise in us
keep hidden, our happy strengths---
they come forth in these dancing tears.
- Rilke
Oh shit.
Yo La Tengo - Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind
"Yo La Tengo"'s name:
The name came from a baseball anecdote. During the 1962 season, New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn and Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacón found themselves colliding in the outfield. When Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, "I got it! I got it!" only to run into Chacón, who spoke only Spanish. Ashburn learned to yell, "¡Yo la tengo! ¡Yo la tengo!" instead. In a later game, Ashburn happily saw Chacón backing off. He relaxed, positioned himself to catch the ball, and was instead run over by left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish and had missed a team meeting that proposed using the words "¡Yo la tengo!" as a way to avoid outfield collisions. After getting up, Thomas asked Ashburn, "What the heck is a Yellow Tango?".
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_La_Tengo
Out of infinite desires rises
finite deeds like weak fountains
that fall back in early trembling arcs.
But those, which otherwise in us
keep hidden, our happy strengths---
they come forth in these dancing tears.
- Rilke
Oh shit.
Yo La Tengo - Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind
"Yo La Tengo"'s name:
The name came from a baseball anecdote. During the 1962 season, New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn and Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacón found themselves colliding in the outfield. When Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, "I got it! I got it!" only to run into Chacón, who spoke only Spanish. Ashburn learned to yell, "¡Yo la tengo! ¡Yo la tengo!" instead. In a later game, Ashburn happily saw Chacón backing off. He relaxed, positioned himself to catch the ball, and was instead run over by left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish and had missed a team meeting that proposed using the words "¡Yo la tengo!" as a way to avoid outfield collisions. After getting up, Thomas asked Ashburn, "What the heck is a Yellow Tango?".
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_La_Tengo
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Entrance:
Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go...
- Rilke
Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go...
- Rilke
Closing the Cabin:
You can see how it will be:
the stillness in the light,
the vacant squares it makes on the kitchen floor
now the leaves are gone.
The way it gathers the room
into itself: the cups, the empty cuphooks,
the dent in the breadbox --- an eloquence
we'll never manage, language
without tense.
Not ours: we speak
and then our lungs fill up with air again.
We're only passing through.
- Jan Zwicky
Light:
Light's on
now
in three
sided balcony
window mid-
building, a floor
up from street.
Wait.
Watch it.
What light
on drab earth,
place on earth---
Continue?
Where to go so
far away
from here?
Friends?
Forgotten?
Movement?
A hand just
flesh, fingers?
White---
Who threads fantastic tapestry
just for me, for me?
- Robert Creeley
Sound of raindrops falling from eaves
I
and a spider are speechless half the day
- Ko Un
You can see how it will be:
the stillness in the light,
the vacant squares it makes on the kitchen floor
now the leaves are gone.
The way it gathers the room
into itself: the cups, the empty cuphooks,
the dent in the breadbox --- an eloquence
we'll never manage, language
without tense.
Not ours: we speak
and then our lungs fill up with air again.
We're only passing through.
- Jan Zwicky
Light:
Light's on
now
in three
sided balcony
window mid-
building, a floor
up from street.
Wait.
Watch it.
What light
on drab earth,
place on earth---
Continue?
Where to go so
far away
from here?
Friends?
Forgotten?
Movement?
A hand just
flesh, fingers?
White---
Who threads fantastic tapestry
just for me, for me?
- Robert Creeley
Sound of raindrops falling from eaves
I
and a spider are speechless half the day
- Ko Un
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
History
-- after J.S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor, BMV 1052
Someone is running
fingers through their hair.
The fingers
are like fish, they flicker
upstream while the current
purls around their backs
and falls away.
The fish
resemble wind inside a field
of wheat, resemble
solar flares, the fish
are water
that is trying to flow
up itself, the gravity
that hauls and tumbles it
deaf as the grief
inside perfection.
Do not ask.
You are running fingers
through your hair. This
is what you do sometimes
because you cannot put your hands
around your heart.
- Jan Zwicky
-- after J.S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor, BMV 1052
Someone is running
fingers through their hair.
The fingers
are like fish, they flicker
upstream while the current
purls around their backs
and falls away.
The fish
resemble wind inside a field
of wheat, resemble
solar flares, the fish
are water
that is trying to flow
up itself, the gravity
that hauls and tumbles it
deaf as the grief
inside perfection.
Do not ask.
You are running fingers
through your hair. This
is what you do sometimes
because you cannot put your hands
around your heart.
- Jan Zwicky
Monday, December 3, 2012
People
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Saturday, December 1, 2012
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