Gadamer, by Dora Mittenzwei
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
While discussing katajjait (Inuit throat-song), Robert Bringhurst says the following:
"I also hope to meet the thinker from Pond Inlet (quoted but, alas, not named by Saladin d'Anglure) who said that humans learned the sounds of these songs from wild geese but learned the meanings of the sounds from the aurora."
(from Singing with the Frogs, in Canadian Literature 155)
"I also hope to meet the thinker from Pond Inlet (quoted but, alas, not named by Saladin d'Anglure) who said that humans learned the sounds of these songs from wild geese but learned the meanings of the sounds from the aurora."
(from Singing with the Frogs, in Canadian Literature 155)
Friday, May 6, 2011
Saturday, April 30, 2011
From "Meditation on Summer and Shapelessness"
in Black Zodiac, by Charles Wright:
I never quite got it, what they meant,
but now I do,
Waking each morning at dawn,
Or before, some shapeless, unfingerprintable dread
On me like cold-crossed humidity,
Extinction shouldering, like a season, in from my dreamscape.
Without my glasses, the light around the window shade
Throbs like an aura, so faint
At first, then luminous with its broken promises--
Feckless icon, dark reliquary.
Mortality hunches, like fine furniture, crowding the room.
in Black Zodiac, by Charles Wright:
I never quite got it, what they meant,
but now I do,
Waking each morning at dawn,
Or before, some shapeless, unfingerprintable dread
On me like cold-crossed humidity,
Extinction shouldering, like a season, in from my dreamscape.
Without my glasses, the light around the window shade
Throbs like an aura, so faint
At first, then luminous with its broken promises--
Feckless icon, dark reliquary.
Mortality hunches, like fine furniture, crowding the room.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
I'm Explaining a Few Things
by Pablo Neruda:
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.
I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.
From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dog and children.
Remember, Raúl?
Eh, Rafael?
Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandise,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Argüelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down to the sea.
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!
by Pablo Neruda:
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.
I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.
From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dog and children.
Remember, Raúl?
Eh, Rafael?
Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandise,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Argüelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down to the sea.
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Archaic Torso of Apollo:
We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his gazing, turned down low,
holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile
run through the slight twist of the loins
toward that center where procreation thrived.
Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt
under the shoulders' invisible plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts' fur;
and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his gazing, turned down low,
holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile
run through the slight twist of the loins
toward that center where procreation thrived.
Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt
under the shoulders' invisible plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts' fur;
and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
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