Phaedrus

"All this talk so far about classic and romantic understanding must seem a strangely oblique way of describing him, but to get at Phaedrus, this oblique route is the only one to take. To describe his physical appearance or the statistics of his life would be to dwell on misleading superficialities. And to come at him directly would be to invite disaster.

He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way. There is only one access to him that I can see as passable and we still have a long way to go."

Page 87, 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', Robert M Pirsig

Circuit breakers

"All beings on the planet are far more interconnected than we, for the most part, recognise. Technology did not initiate our linked-ness but has greatly intensified it.

Telecommunications and mass media connect us not merely informationally, but also energetically and psychically. As a consequence, we can now instantaneously and exponentially multiply one another's agitation. In an era where sorrow and disquiet so frequently overload global communication grids, those who cultivate equanimity and stillness can act as circuit breakers.

Practising peace in this way is one contribution toward ensuring that our contact with each other serves to cool and not inflame our individual and collective mindstates."

Page 141, 'Sacred Secular, Contemplative Cultural Critique' by Lata Mani

Floating

For Albors Pascal Askari, who brings me music that floats in and out of my day, unobtrusive, light, gliding, a reminder that you should not try to possess anything that is truly beautiful, you must just let it wash over you, and be grateful for finding yourself in its path.

http://soundcloud.com/dreimalbla/tracks

Look up!

Rain trees in winter. Their branches open up like a flower, a bouquet. They flow into the sky. Like water released into the open, suddenly frozen.

Below the earth do their roots mimic the same spread, do they reach out with the same longing, tremulous, quiet?

Looking at these, you feel you've overshot your quota of beauty in life, now everything else is a bonus:

https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/LookUp

A vision of another way

Ben
by David Budbill

You can see him in the village almost anytime.
He's always on the street.
At noon he ambles down to Jerry's
in case a trucker who's stopped by for lunch
might feel like buying him a sandwich.
Don't misunderstand, Ben's not starving;
he's there each noon because he's sociable,
not because he's hungry.
He is a friend to everyone except the haughty.

There are at least half a dozen families in the village
who make sure he always has enough to eat
and there are places
where he's welcome to come in and spend the night.

Ben is a cynic in the Greek and philosophic sense,
one who gives his life to simplicity
seeking only the necessities
so he can spend his days
in the presence of his dreams.

Ben is a vision of another way,
the vessel in this place for
ancient Christian mystic, Buddhist recluse, Taoist hermit.
Chuang Tzu, The Abbot Moses, Meister Eckhart,
Khamtul Rimpoche, Thomas Merton—
all these and all the others live in Ben, because

in America only a dog
can spend his days
on the street or by the river
in quiet contemplation
and be fed.

"Ben" by David Budbill, from Judevine.

Closer

 "A loved one is also singular, distinct, separate. The more closely one defines, regardless of any given values, the more intimately one loves. The finite outline is a proof of its opposite, the infinity of emotion provoked by what the outline contains. This is the deepest reason for the frequent elongation of Modigliani's figures and faces. The elongation is the result of the closest possible definition, of wanting to be closer."

Page 105, 'Modigliani's Alphabet of Love'. From 'The Sense of Sight', John Berger

And he had so many friends...

The Suicide's Room

I'll bet you think the room was empty.
Wrong. There were three chairs with sturdy backs.
A lamp, good for fighting the dark.
A desk, and on the desk a wallet, some newspapers.
A carefree Buddha and a worried Christ.
Seven lucky elephants, a notebook in a drawer.
You think our addresses weren't in it?

No books, no pictures, no records, you guess?
Wrong. A comforting trumpet poised in black hands.
Saskia and her cordial little flower.
Joy the spark of gods.
Odysseus stretched on the shelf in life-giving sleep
after the labors of Book Five.
The moralists
with the golden syllables of their names
inscribed on finely tanned spines.
Next to them, the politicians braced their backs.

No way out? But what about the door?
No prospects? The window had other views.
His glasses
lay on the windowsill.
And one fly buzzed---that is, was still alive.

You think at least the note tell us something.
But what if I say there was no note---
and he had so many friends, but all of us fit neatly
inside the empty envelope propped up against a cup.

Wisława Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh   

Astonishing

 Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet, passed away on Feb 1. I cannot think of a better definition of poetry:

“In a way, Szymborska supplied her own best epitaph, and obituary, in the text of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which she took on the “astonishment” of normal life:

“Astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events.” …But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world."
 
From: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/02/wislawa-szymborska-the-happiness-of-wisdom-felt.html

No whiteness is so white as the memory of whiteness...

The Descent
William Carlos Williams

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment,
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
since their movements
are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned).

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost,
a world unsuspected,
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness.

With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining—
grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire.

Love without shadows stirs now
beginning to awaken
as night
advances.

The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
which is a reversal
of despair.
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
what we have lost in the anticipation—
a descent follows,
endless and indestructible.

A twilight-piece...

The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight-piece.

'Andrea Del Sarto', Robert Browning

The far side of the lilac

For Kavya, who sends me these beautiful lines from a cold country, saved by the bright sunshine she revels in:

“To make the most of the sun’s warmth, sparrows flock the bush (lilac colored flowers bloom out of it in Spring) bordering my window. The leaves of the lilac bush have never withered. No, not even in harsh winter. They, just like the sun and the sparrows, want to keep me in high spirits. I often wonder where do the sparrows and the geese hide when it snows. They come back the very next day it stops snowing.” (Indeed, where do they hide?)

My favorite passage on the lilac, from Berger:

“Perhaps lilac is the most abundantly feminine of flowers. It came from Eastern Europe and was imported into the West in the sixteenth century. A Slav flower.

Among the mountains here, the lilac trees flower at the time when the first cuckoos sing. Cuckoos and lilac come as a pair. The cuckoo is pure impudence. Later when he falls silent after mating, he eats grubs and caterpillars-even those which are poisonous for other birds-with impunity.

The scent of the lilac, you once said, is not far from the smell of cows in the stable. Both are smells of peace and procrastination.

The days are becoming long, and in the evening I sit in the kitchen reading without a light. On the windowsill is a jug with a flowering branch of lilac, which I cut in a friend’s garden. It is pale purple, the color of a much-washed ultramarine blue shirt….

….The walls of the house are thick, for the winters are cold. On the window embrasure, close to the windowpanes, hangs a shaving mirror. As I look up now, I see reflected in the mirror a sprig of the lilac branch: each petal of each tiny flower is vivid, distinct, near, so near that the petals look like the pores on skin. At first I do not understand why what I see in the mirror is so much more intense than the rest of the branch which, in fact, is nearer to me. Then I realize that what I am looking at in the mirror is the far side of the lilac, the side fully lit by the last light of the sun.

Every evening my love for you is placed like that mirror."

John Berger
'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos '

Photo by Kavya.

How the river held still...

Oh, such beauty.

Living on the Plains

That winter when this thought came -- how the river
held still every midnight and flowed
backward a minute -- we studied algebra
late in our room fixed up in the barn,
and I would feel the curved relation,
the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life
holding the earth round and ready
to meet itself again when morning came.

At breakfast while my mother stirred the cereal
she said, "You're studying too hard,"
and I would include her face and hands in my glance
and then look past my father's gaze as
he told again our great race through the stars
and how the world can't keep up with our dreams.

William Stafford, 'The Way It Is'

Remembering our wings

At the posh restaurant, families sitting at tables, silently eating their food. You look around. Not many smiles, and no laughter. No visible enjoyment of the food, of togetherness. Couples not looking at each other, but elsewhere, or staring into the plate. An entire family of 20 sitting across a long table, separated from each other, no one talking to each other. Funereal.

Is it only with friends that we truly relax, feel lighter, step out of ourselves, forget the burdens we carry, remember our wings? Does family weigh us down, remind us of all that ties us to the earth, subdue our wild free spirit?

*              *              *              *              *              *              * 

From a heavy metal fan friend, you learn this startling fact you never knew.

Megadeath: one million deaths —usually used as a unit in reference to nuclear warfare.

*              *              *              *              *              *              *

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

Winston Churchill

*              *              *              *              *              *              *

Some people eat their own mattresses. Like cows!

Expressions

The indignant go-away horror of the safely married woman, in front of the garishly-dressed prostitute.

The self-righteous "I would never do such a thing" loathing of the never-challenged morally correct person, in front of the criminal, the addict, the un-wed mother.

The curled-lip smug superior air of the mother and grandmother, in front of the childless woman whose lap has never been filled and celebrated.

And the laughter or embarrassed half-afraid turning-away of the comfortably sane, in front of the mentally-ill reject wandering in strange clothes, muttering, lost, not-fitting-in.

November, 1967

Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount
Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon,
we went into Russia,

and when we came out, the snow
was falling—the same snow
that fell in Moscow.
The sky had turned black velvet.
We'd been through the Revolution
and the frozen winters.

In the Chevy, we waited for the heater
to melt ice on the windshield,
clapping our hands to keep warm.

On the highway, these two things:
a song from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
and that semi-truck careening by.

Now I travel through the dark without you
and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful,
the way you were, no matter what.

Joyce Sutphen