Longing (1)

Tell me, men of learning, what is Longing made from? What cloth was put in it, that it does not wear out with use?

Gold wears out, silver wears out, velvet wears out, silk wears out, every ample garment wears out -- yet Longing does not wear out.

Great Longing, cruel Longing is breaking my heart every day; when I sleep most sound at night Longing comes and wakes me.

Longing, Longing, back, back! do not weigh on me so heavily; move over a little to the bedside and let me sleep a while.

On the sea-shore is a smooth rock, where I talked with my love; around it grows the lily and a few sprigs of rosemary.

May the mountain which covers Merioneth be under the sea! Would that I had never seen it before my gentle heart broke.

Longing has seized on me, between my two breasts and my two brows; it weighs on my breast as if I were its nurse.

--from the Welsh; traditional folk verse; seventeenth century?, in A Celtic Miscellany, Sel. and Trans. by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 261-62.

surfaces and beyond

Looking, and writing about looking: looking at surfaces and beyond them, at what is depicted and what is hidden in shadow, at how a transient chemistry of light may be fixed in colour and words.

*       *       *

The passage is from a poetry newsletter to which I subscribe and refers to a recently published book of poems. Yet I wonder if it couldn't be taken as a definition of all poetry - or art at large - and of the craft of those who look at things with a poetic eye.

Deep-sea fish that I am though, my interest is always in that beyond, in what is hidden in the shadows, there where the eyes become redundant and the other senses prevail.

What's inside counts indeed.

a manifesto for sanity

In a culture where derrangement and disequilibrium are the constant and inescapable climate of a politics of bewilderment, the militant tactic is not intoxication and excess but to come to our senses and to learn to live in the space they open up.

[...]

Within the present order, new models of order can be conceived, realised, maintained and dissolved, to leave a world that will seem less intractable.

The issue is not transcendence or escape but to realise that we do not confront an objective and final reality, that the means are available, that in any situation there may be intelligence, movement, sufficient light.

Imaginative transformation should be considered as preliminary to a corresponding transformation at the level of materials and events.

--Thomas A. Clark, 'On Imaginative Space'.

Source: http://www.cairneditions.co.uk/On_Imaginative_Space.pdf

songs of exile (3)

Estranged as I've always been from my homeland, I must confess that I have a difficult relationship with the 'national' song (or with anything 'national', for that matter), the Fado.

Yet, Amélia Muge's music, and in particular her reinventions of Fado, defy any categories, genres, styles, traditions, and passionately combine her love of poetry in the Portuguese language with a boundless musical imagination that travels along the most unexpected and unconventional routes, all over the world, from Portugal to Africa and Brazil - and beyond.

Tempestuous, frank, fiery, fierce, Muge is not for the faint-hearted and the indifferent. As she puts it in the dedication in her wonderful album A Monte (2002), she sings for 'the friends and dear enemies. Let the indifferent go in peace. This kingdom is not theirs'.

Were I to single out a song that has stayed with me over the years, it would be this O Fado da Sereia / The Mermaid's Fado, which I leave here with no further explanation - the music and the poetry speak for themselves.

Oh, and I've taken the liberty of adding a (very) rough translation of Hélia Correia's stunning poem below, with implicit dedication.



O Fado da Sereia / The Mermaid's Fado (click to listen)

Lyrics: Hélia Correia
Vocals, Music: Amélia Muge
Piano arrangement: Jorge Palma


Serei, serei a sereia
a do pescoço doirado
que no fio da sua voz
te arrastava para o largo?
Serei, serei a donzela
que em teu desejo aparecia
sempre que à noite acordavas
contra uma cama vazia?

Ai, ai, marujo, mareante
porque te foste encerrar
num barco à prova de encanto
num barco à prova de mar?
Já das rotas me apagaste
E já o teu olhar não vê
minha garganta nas rendas
que me vestia a maré

Quem me tivera avisado
que o amor de um marinheiro
é como os vícios do mar
é como o mar traiçoeiro
Que me deixavas trocada
por mulheres que a terra dá
mulheres de pernas cobertas
por balões de tafetá
Ai tem, cautela, marinheiro
que o mar é coisa ruim
e o amor de uma sereia
não vai acabar-se assim
Que hás-de vir de novo à rede
de um amor que engana e mata
que, à vista deste, outro amor
é cinza à vista da prata

Ai quem me dera que em vez
de filha do mar, me achasse
rapariguinha solteira
que nesse mar se afogasse
Ai quem me dera que em vez
de cantadeira do mar
fosse eu mulher de viela
para ainda me ouvires cantar.

*       *       *

Am I, am I the mermaid
the one with the golden neck
who would in the thread of her voice
lure you into the open sea?
Am I, am I the maiden
who would in your desire appear
whenever you woke up at night
against an empty bed?

O sailor, seafarer
why have you shut yourself off
in a spell-proof boat
in a sea-proof boat?
You have already erased me from the sea routes
And your gaze no longer sees
my throat in the lace
in which the tide clad me

Had someone warned me
that a sailor’s love
is like the vices of the sea
it is like the treacherous sea
and that you would leave me
for women who the land offers
women with their legs covered
in taffeta balloons
O sailor, beware
the sea is an evil thing
and a mermaid’s love
won’t just end like this
You will be netted again
by a love that deceives and kills
another love that, in comparison to this one,
is as ash to silver

O I wish that instead
of daughter of the sea I were
a little maiden
who drowned in that sea
O I wish that instead of
songstress of the sea
I were a woman of the streets
so that you could still hear me sing.


[Translated from the Portuguese by DK.]

for A., in memoriam

How uncanny it is to remember, all of a sudden, a writer-friend from whom you had been estranged for years and to learn, from his own website, that he has recently died. There is something ghostly indeed in personal diaries on the web. The boundaries you used to take for granted no longer seem to exist: distance/proximity, past/present, truth/fiction, life/death.

In the same way he had done with life, he fictionalised, poeticised his own death - to the very last words. Painstakingly, obsessively. Words almost unbearable to read now, yet so spellbinding, so desperately clinging to the last remains of life.

Despite the distance, I'm overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and regret, of having been way too unforgiving and harsh in my judgement, of not having listened enough - of having so heartlessly bitten the hand that reached out to me then.

The memory of the last time we saw each other, years ago, has haunted me ever since. Not so much the unanswered calls and messages, the unread books disdainfully kept in a plastic bag, but that pathetic, shrivelled little flower I trampled on and threw away. I would rescue and hold it close forever keenly, weren't it too late now.

In a sense, it was always too late for us, even then - and you knew it.

Stubborn as you are though, I'm sure you will be waiting for me there, in that impossible place, as you once promised.


See you there, some day.


(And yes, in the meantime I shall try myself to be those words you were unable to write, because it all ended too soon.)

Llansol

Tonight, re-reading Clarice Lispector, I suddenly remembered Maria Gabriela Llansol, and couldn't help regretting having resisted her writing for so long, perhaps because I intuitively felt it was too close to the bone for safety (that is, when safety was something I treasured, alas. Not anymore.)

It's no surprise that Llansol's amazing work has remained accessible only to a small, very small readership and to a coterie of academics, who haven't as yet seemed to have found the time nor the will to make her texts more widely available in English, as she deserves - in the same way that Llansol herself beautifully and generously translated - or trans-figured - into her native Portuguese language texts by Rimbaud, Verlaine, Rilke, Apollinaire, Eluard, Emily Dickinson, and many, many others.

Here's a tiny contribution, from a book I read on my last trip to Portugal. I only wish I had the desire to translate more on the trip this summer. Portuguese is such a painful language to me, though...


VIII. under her veil

I very intimately think to those who read __________ the legentes, I desire.

I expose ourselves.

Yet, if you who think do not offer your body,

what will you think?

XLII. nothing

if I don't listen to the leaves' oxygen,
music is blind to me.

[...]

«it is between hammers that our heart survives.»


(translated from Maria Gabriela Llansol, Amigo e Amiga: Curso de silêncio de 2004. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2005).

difficult beauty

Why do we flee from feeling? Why do we celebrate those who lower us in the mire of their own making while we hound those who come to us with hands full of difficult beauty?

If we could imagine ourselves out of despair?

If we could imagine ourselves out of helplessness?

What would happen if we could imagine in ourselves authentic desire?


What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself? The world would split open.

Muriel Rukeyser

from Jeanette Winterson, 'The Semiotics of Sex' in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 116-17.

subdued to blinding music

Woman and Music

This is a tall woman walking through a square
thinking what is a woman at midnight in a park
under bells, in the trivial and lovely hours
with images, violins, dancers approaching?

This is a woman sitting at a mirror
her back to the glass and all the dancers advancing,
or in a chair laughing at a bone
sitting upright in a chair
talking of ballet, flesh's impermanence.

This is a woman looking at a stage --
dancer receiving the floral blue and white,
balanced against a tallest blue decor,
dancing -- and all the parks, walks, hours
descend in brilliant water past the eyes
pursuing and forgotten and subdued
to blinding music, the deliberate strings.


Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1 (New York: Covici Friede, 1938), p. 112.

gut symmetries (3)

Walk with me. Walk time in its skeleton. Walk the white curve of Adam's rib. White, that absorbs the minimum, reflects the maximum of light rays, ecstasy of light at the dead of the year.

Walk with me. Walk the ancient history of his body, recorded in quasars, erupted in light. Kiss him and I kiss the full of him and the dust of him. Touch him where he is firm and my hand passes through into empty space. Love him and I love this man, this body. Love him and I love star-dust and light.

Walk with me. Walk the 6,000,000,000,000 miles of travelled light, single year's journey of illumination, ship miles under the glowing keel. In the long frost the sky brightens and the rim of the earth is pierced by sharp stars. After the leaf-fall the star fall, the winter shedding of too much light. Walk the seen and unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot.


from Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries (London: Granta, 1997), pp. 101-02.

gut symmetries (2)

Defect of vision. Do I mean affect of vision? At the beginning of the twentieth century when Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne were turning their faces towards a new manner of light, there was a theory spawned by science and tadpoled by certain art critics that frog-marched the picture towards the view that this new art was an optical confusion. Nothing but a defect of vision. The painters were astigmatic; an abnormality of the retina that unfocuses rays of light. That was why they could not paint realistically. They could not see a cat is a cat is a cat.

Recently I heard the same argument advanced against El Greco. His elongations and foreshortenings had nothing to do with genius, they were an eye problem.

Perhaps art is an eye problem; world apparent, world perceived.

Signs, shadows, wonders.

What you see is not what you think you see.

[. . .]

Defect of vision. Do I mean affect of vision?

'Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve.' (Max Planck)

'It appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. The material point can hardly be conceived anymore.' (Albert Einstein)

'If we ask whether the position of the electron remains the same we must say no. If we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say no. If we ask whether the electron is at rest we must say no. If we ask whether it is in motion we must say no.' (Robert Oppenheimer)

Is truth what we do not know?

What we know does not satisfy us. What we know constantly reveals itself as partial. What we know, generation by generation, is discarded into new knowings which in turn slowly cease to interest us.

In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge. A release of energy from one site to another. Instead of a hoard of certainties, bug-collected, to make me feel secure, I can give up taxonomy and invite myself to the dance: the patterns, rhythms, multiplicities, paradoxes, shifts, currents, cross-currents, irregularities, irrationalities, geniuses, joints, pivots, worked over time, and through time, to find the lines of thought that still transmit.

The facts cut me off. The clean boxes of history, geography, science, art. What is the separateness of things when the current that flows each to each is live? It is the livingness I want. Not mummification. Livingness. I suppose that is why I fell in love with Jove. Or to be accurate, why I knew I would fall in love with Jove, when I first saw him, on the day that I was born.

Energy precedes matter.


from Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries (London: Granta, 1997), pp. 81-83.

gut symmetries (1)

[I just love these moments when, flicking through an old book you read a long, long time ago, you are all of a sudden shaken by a passage that reawakens some unspecific memory, a feeling, a longing... I don't know. All I know is that everything changes and you find yourself beginning it anew, as if each and every word had been written for you, about you, your thoughts, your life.

Here it goes (but there are more):]

Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if we pull away the panelling, then what? Without the surface, what hope of contact, of conversation? How will I come to read the rawness inside?

The story of my day, the story of my life, the story of how we met, of what happened before we met. And every story I begin to tell talks across a story I cannot tell. And if I were not telling this story to you but to someone else, would it be the same story?

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.


from Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries (London: Granta, 1997), pp. 24-25.

when all other lines of communication are overloaded (2)

The poet in our times does what poets have always done, given a tongue to dumbness, celebrated wonderments, complained of the government, told tales, found sense where none was to be perceived, found nonsense where we thought there was sense; in short, made a world for the mind (and occasionally the body too) to inhabit. Beauty, poets have taught us, is the king's daughter and the milkmaid, the nightingale and the rose, the wind, a Greek urn, the autumn moon, the sea when it looks like wine. None of which appear often in the confusion of our world.


from Guy Davenport, "Introduction" to Jonathan Williams, A Ear in Bartram's Tree, n.p.

when all other lines of communication are overloaded (1)

... Anything worth knowing passes from one man to one man. The book is still a viable way of communicating, provided one has taught oneself to find the book one needs to read. It isn't easy. All the electronic media are a flood of noise. And no medium can replace what may be an essential need in the poet: an audience. Homer recited his poems to people who cheered and even gave prizes; at least they passed around wine. Chaucer read his poems in warm firelit rooms. Every line of Shakespeare was written to move a paying audience. The next time you read a slack, obscure, convoluted poem, reflect that it was written in an age when printing has replaced recitation, and that the poet cannot tell his good poems from his bad except by fortuituous criticism.


Guy Davenport, in "Introduction" to Jonathan Williams, An Ear in Bartram's Tree (New York: New Directions, 1969), n.p.

====================

Davenport further suggests that the clarity of poems to the ear and the inner eye is to be tested in the classical weather of poetry - listening faces - and that the reading public is but a "charming fiction".

Couldn't agree more and it is from here that I derive my sense of responsibility as audience to poetry, to music: to be a totally responsive listening face, body and soul, accepting the invitation extended to me as well as my active part in the making of the work of art.

Now, more than ever, when all other channels of communication are blasted away, cluttered with unbearable noise.

the truth of fact and the truth of art (5)

Exchange is creation.

In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions.

But the manner of exchange, the gift that is offered and received - these must be seen according to their own nature.

Fenollosa, writing of the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry, says this: "All truth is the transference of power. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth."

This is the threshold, now the symbols are themselves in motion. Now we have the charge, flaming along the path from its reservoir to the receptive target. Even that is not enough to describe the movement of reaching a work of art.

One of our difficulties is that, accepting a science that was static and seeing the world about us according to the vision it afforded, we have tried to freeze everything, including living functions, and the motions of the imaginative arts.

We have used the term "mind" and allowed ourselves to be trapped into believing there was such a thing, such a place, such a locus of forces. We have used the word "poem" and now the people who live by division quarrel about "the poem as object". They pull it away from their own lives, from the life of the poet, and they attempt to pull it away from its meaning, from itself; finally, in a trance of shattering, they deny qualities and forms all significance. Then, cut off from its life, they see the dead Beauty: they know what remorse is, they begin to look for some single cause of their self-hatred and contempt. There is, of course, no single cause. We are not so mechanical as that. But there was a symptom: these specialists in dying, they were prepared to believe there was such a thing as Still Life. For all things change in time; some are made of change itself, and the poem is one of these. It is not an object; the poem is a process.


Charles Peirce takes Fenollosa's lightning flash, sets it away from the giving. Peirce writes: "All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects. . . or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs." It is important here to understand what Peirce means by semiosis. By semiosis I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant; this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs. . . ."

The giving and taking of a poem is, then, a triadic relation. It can never be reduced to a pair: we are always confronted by the poet, the poem, and the audience.

The poet, at the moment of his life at which he finished the poem.

The poem, as it is available, heard once, or in a book always at hand.

The audience, the individual reader or listener, with all his life, and whatever capacity he has to summon up his life appropriately to receive more life. At this point, I should like to use another word: "audience" or "reader" or "listener" seems inadequate. I suggest the old word "witness," which includes the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence. The overtone of responsibility in this word is not present in the others; and the tension of the law makes a climate here which is that climate of excitement and revelation giving air to the work of art, announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self.

These three terms of relationship - poet, poem, and witness - are none of them static. We are changing, living beings, experiencing the inner change of poetry.


from Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, pp. 173-75.

the truth of fact and the truth of art (4)

Exchange is creation; and the human energy involved is consciousness, the capacity to produce change from the existing conditions.

Into the present is flung naked life. Life is flung into the present language. The new forms emerge, with their intensive properties, or potentials - their words and images; and their extensive properties, existing in time: sound, forms, subjects, content, and that last includes all the relations between the words and images of the poem.

When the poem arrives with the impact of crucial experience, when it becomes one of the turnings which we living may at any moment approach and enter, then we become more of our age and more primitive. Not primitive as the aesthetes have used the term, but complicated, fresh, full of dark meaning, insisting on discovery, as the experience of a woman giving birth to a child is primitive.

I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world - so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal - are all here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.


from Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, p. 172.

the truth of fact and the truth of art (3)

The one difference between the artist and the audience is that the artist has performed upon his experience that work of acknowledging, shaping, and offering which is the creative process. The audience, in receiving the work of art, acknowledges not only its form, but their own experience and the experience of the artist.

Both artist and audience create, and both do work on themselves in creating.

The audience, in fact, does work only on itself in creating; the artist makes himself and his picture, himself and his poem. The artwork is set to one side with a word, then, as we look at the common ground, the consciousnessa and imagination of artist and audience.

It may be said here in objection that the corruption of consciousness effects an impoversishment upon the artwork, and that there is good art and bad art. Of course there is an effect, a direct effect, for better or for worse. But I cannot acknowledge the way of thought that has given us so many double definitions of "good art" and "bad art".

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.


from Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, p. 50.

the truth of fact and the truth of art (2)

. . . And what moves me and gives meaning to life is this. Muriel Rukeyser wrote it in 1949, within the context of her reflections about the resistances to art, to poetry, and their sources, but it remains as perceptive as ever. Life-giving, the truth of art.


[Poetry] is art: it imagines and makes, and gives you the imaginings. Because you have imagined love, you have not loved; merely because you have imagined brotherhood, you have not made brotherhood. You may feel as though you had, but you have not. You are going to have to use that imagining as you best can, by building it into yourself, or you will be left with nothing but illusion.

Art is action, but it does not cause action: rather, it prepares us for thought.

Art is intellectual, but it does not cause thought: it prepares us for thought.

Art is not a world, but a knowing of the world. Art prepares us.

Art is practiced by the artist and the audience. It is not a means to an end, unless that end is the total imaginative experience.

That experience will have meaning. It will apply to your life; and it is more than likely to lead you to thought or action, that is, you are likely to go further into the world, further into yourself, toward future experience.

Art and nature are imitations, not of each other, but of the same third thing - both images of the real, the spectral and vivid reality that employs all means. If we fear it in art, we fear it in nature, and our fear brings it on ourselves in the most unanswerable ways.

The implications for society and for the individual are far reaching.

People want this speech, this immediacy. They need it. The fear of poetry is a complicated and civilized repression of that need. We wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along.

This is a ritual moment, a moment of proof.

We need all our implements, and there is strength in these moments.

All the equipment of tradition and invention offers us access to this door, and they work against the totalitarian hardening of modern life as it expresses itself in the state. There is an entire life for us to choose: there is no poetic science, but there are pillars, there are clues. . . .

[The usable truth]: the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do the worst to him. . .

That pride is deep in our meaning, and in our truth.

But what use is here? What is the use of truth? Is not truth the end? Or has it no human use, does it lead to nothing?

The use of truth is its communication.


from Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry [1949] (Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press, 1996), pp. 25-27.

the taste of twilight (2)

Speaking of twilight, I can hardly think of another writer who has inhabited it so painfully and passionately throughout his life, aware as he was that identity - personal, cultural, linguistic, national - entails, not an elusive sense of security, but endless multiplicities, irresolutions, inner conflicts and divisions.

As he acknowledged in one of his final poems, long after the disappearance of the Celtic faery world of his early work and the shattering of his hopes for Ireland:

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul.

W. B. Yeats, 'Under Ben Bulben' [1939], in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990). p. 373.


For Yeats, the 'race' was the Anglo-Irish, and the 'soul' was that of 'ancient Ireland [that] knew it all', as well as that of the English language through which he expressed this knowledge. And has there ever been a poem which so movingly embodies the inevitable pain and, at the same time, the productivity of such inner exile and dissociation?

There are many, many more, of course. In a less poetic tone, and still in an Irish context, another unforgetful expression of the same dissociation, from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In a conversation between the young Stephen Dedalus, aspiring craftsman of the English language despite his Irish Catholic background, and his English Dean of Studies, Stephen ruminates:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; London: Penguin, 1992), p. 205.

=================================================

But, reverting to the 'taste of twilight', I can't resist getting back to the first Yeats and his nostalgic longings, which gave birth to all sorts of eerie twilight worlds, including this one:


Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey,
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.


W. B Yeats, 'Into the Twilight', in The Celtic Twilight [1893], Mythologies (1934; London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 141.

the most beautiful experiment

... is this. This way of seeing things is what I would like my students to learn, by un-learning all the rest.


Salts work their way
to the outside of a plant pot
and dry white.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . This encrustation
is the only image.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The rest -
the entire winter, if there's winter -
comes as a variable that shifts
in any part, or vanishes.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I can
compare what I like to the salts,
to the pot, if there's a pot,
to the winter if there's a winter.

The salts I can compare
to anything there is.
Anything.


Roy Fisher, 'The Only Image', in The Thing About Joe Sullivan: Poems 1971-1977 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978), p. 25.

a new and strange direction of the mind (2)

We live in an age so completely self-absorbed that the ability to simply look, to pour out the intelligence through the eyes, is an accomplishment.

Thomas A. Clark, from 'Riasg Buidhe' in Distance & Proximity (Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2000), p. 98.