Tuesday 26 April 2011

Rappel/Reminder

 

Moires/Moirae (Grec/Greek) Parques/Parcae/The Fates (Latin) Nornes/Norns (Nordique/Norse)
Naissance/Birth Clotho Nona Urd/Urðr/Wyrd
Vie/Life Lachésis/Lachesis Decima Veldandi/Verðandi
Mort/Death Atropos Morta Skuld












Les Érynies/Les Furies/Les Euménides The Furies/The Erinnýes/The Eumenides Alecto (Implacable/Unceasing)


Mégère/Megaera (Haine/Grudging)


Tisiphoné/Tisiphone (Vengance/Avenging murder)













Péchés/Sin Vertus/Virtues

Orgueil/Pride Humilité/Humility

Envie/Envy Miséricorde/Kindness

Colère/Wrath Patience

Paresse/Sloth Sollicitude/Diligence

Avarice/Greed Prodigalité/Charity

Gourmandise/Gluttony Tempérance/Temperance

Luxure/Lust Chasteté/Chastity

Un vieux fil perdu


 
Il avait beau y mettre toute la meilleure volonté du monde, le liquide se répandait à terre en longs filets sirupeux, s’agglutinait à ses doigts, souillait le bas de son pantalon, les pans de sa chemise. Il essayait tant bien que mal de se concentrer mais ses oreilles, son nez et sa bouche coulaient abondamment. Il n’arrivait pas à se focaliser sur quoi que ce soit, non seulement parce que l’impression était désagréable, mais parce que des images défilaient devant ses yeux comme une pellicule mal montée. Flashaient devant ses yeux ébahis et vitreux de vieux visages oubliés, de macabres arrêts sur images. Il perdait la mémoire.
 

A passing thought

 
Spitting in the desert is a delicacy relinquished by either the fool-hardy, the God-challenging or the Bedouin.

Saturday 23 April 2011

The Cackling Hen

 
Old Jim O'Donnell was no mean farmer. Back in Sligo, County Sligo, Ireland, he was – o' course – one of the most prominent landowners, sheep and cow herder around. None of us would disagree 'bout that. Some people said that he had a whole pot o' gold hidden in the trough of a river, guarded by a fierce leprechaun. Not only that, he had fields goin' way further that the eye could see, barns aplenty, rabbits and chicken by the thousands. Indeed, it would ha' been hard ta find a family who hadn't a lad or two warkin' fer him.

Old Jim O'Donnell was rooted ta the land. He was born on the farm he was now warkin' and livin' in, inherited from his ma and pa. His ma deliver'd standin' not three feet away from the pig-sty. Couldna go any further, what with her arms full of chopp'd wood, and the pain. His pa was built like the door ta the house: stocky and knotty. Sometimes, the sottish folks jok'd that he could ha' been carv'd outa this door. A two pound, hefty pat on the back would suddenly sober 'em up. His pa lik'd his joke too.

Even as an urchin Old Jim O'Donnell was big and burly. He lik'd ta hunt the boar in the wild all right. Rain or shine, in the corn or in the brine, he always walk'd barelegg'd, the long, curly red bristle on his legs wavin' under the breeze. He reminded us of those Vikings of yore, with their big, briary beard and their colossal, gnarl'd arms. Specially when he wielded that double-edge axe of his ta chop down some yew ta build a shed.

Old Jim O'Donnell, when he heard early one mornin' from one the laddies that there was some commotion in the hen house, he made one of 'em gestures that none of us in their right mind would care ta contradick, even though we saw in the lad's eyes somethin' akin ta fear. But the ol' farmer couldn't be ars'd, he had other fish ta fry, like a farrowing sow squealin' like someone was slittin' her throat. We remember it took the best o' the mornin' to get 'em all piglets out.

That very same day, for lunch, Old Jim O'Donnell had smok'd herring, mutton stew and bread and butter. He didna touch the boil'd egg his wife never fail'd to cook for him. Didn't ha' time ta, poor old farmer, for he was call'd by his best mate Patrick: the brand new combine harvester he'd purchas'd not two days ago was stuck in that field yonder. None of us could make it wark. So he trudg'd toward the field, grumblin' that if anyone had marr'd it, he'd crease the ears of the culprit. And we knew he meant it, literally.

Old Jim O'Donnell lik'd his swearin'. Gosh he did. The priest us'd ta say that the ol' farmer could set your ears a-bleeding just by swearin'. Some would make us chuckle, some others would make us cringe. But none of us could outswear him, that's for sure. His imagination was runnin' wild, we tell ye. Anyway, he did manage ta fix the monster of metal, just in time ta hurl one last swear that the day was almost done while the field wasn't even half-way. None had his ears creas'd, that we can remember.

Old Jim O'Donnell hadn't pass'd the gate that the carpenter's apprentice was runnin' ta him, all sweaty and shaky in his boots: the roof of the barn was collapsin'.

'Twas a bad day indeed for the ol' farmer o' Sligo, even though they shor'd up the barn in time with the bustlin' help of all the farm hands. Even though they could re-pen all the sheep that had gone through a great gap in the fence. Even though only one of 'em hay balls got burnt in a roarin' fire. So when Old Jim O'Donnell trugd'd the path back ta his cottage, as the sun set behind him, he knew that the day couldna end like this. Somethin' was gnawin' at him, since early in the mornin'.

Because Old Jim O'Donnell could smell a rat a mile away. Literally. He hated the blighters so much he'd skewer 'em with his pitchfork which he'd throw like a spear, sometimes fifty yards distant. That was Old Jim O'Donnell for ye. So a rat he smell'd, right before dinner time. Nothin' was stirrin', not even the mistletoe. Somethin' brewin' in the air. And then he heard it. 'Twasn't like somethin' rappin', more like...someone talkin'...or like...cacklin'. The hen house.

Old Jim O'Donnell ran. That was a sight to see. Like a fast-moving stone wall pounding on the ground. We all follow'd him but he was too quick, even though he was by far the bulkiest of all. Not even Bréanainn could wear the farmer's shirt without lookin' like an idiot outa the circus. When we finally caught up with him he was comin' out of the hen house, his face all white and sweatin' like a swine on a summer day. None of us dar'd speak. Finally, Patrick ask'd him whatever was the matter. We could see his hands were shakin'.

“One of the hens just laid an asteroid.”
 

Friday 22 April 2011

Requote

 
Almost a dedicated post - to Marilyn - as a follow-up on our latest discussion.

"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all."

Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect, and poet (1475-1564)

Appropriate, innit?

 

Wednesday 20 April 2011

I was asked to post more cheerful quotes, hope this one fits the bill.

"Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid."

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
 

Monday 18 April 2011

Nice quote

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

Scott Adams (1957 - )

Thursday 14 April 2011

Wise, or pessimistic.


"Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody."

Benjamin Franklin, again.

Monday 11 April 2011

Quote for the Randy One(s)

"It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it." Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
 

Saturday 9 April 2011

27 Scenes viewed from a 361° angle - PDF

27 Scenes viewed from a 361° angle

27 Scenes viewed from a 361° angle

 
*
Umpteen years to the day since the first mention of time,
Man is still crippled, bed-ridden with punctual rheumatisms,
Struggling to come to terms with the bleakness of his existence –
The one which he himself tailor-made for himself.

Sartorial adjustments left uncared for by the Maid.
She went unexpectedly. The Mat Salleh opines
She couldn't have walked away.

*
The darkest season of the year falls like a fiery curtain –
None alive was there to listen but the unborn son.
Folks were expecting much more on his account.

Church-goers had huddled in for the last of the last sermons –
The long-awaited Apocalypse had finally come.

*
The most insane act of man has yet to be witnessed.

*
Halfway between the gutter and the stars
We glare at our pathless feet pointing inwards,
Unbeknownst and unacknowledged travellers –
Our passport to Reality has just expired,
And there remains the only world available to us:
Technicoloured and photoshoped on glossy, inkwashed paper.

*
However numerous and enticing the parallel universes may be,
None is accessible – we have yet to realise this:
– Schrödinger's cat like a jack-in-the-box –
No main or least universe, just this mean one.
What shall become of us when all tracks lead somewhere?
Lost shall be in us the singular, innate capability
Which differentiate upright beings from the rest:
The nomadic freedom of the walker.
No migratory instinct may ever compete with this.
Neither the act of speech, or that of dreaming,
Are exclusive to man and testimony to his supremacy.
– But we are gradually losing the ability to stand erect –
That fight was undergone at dawn by apes in which we lost interest.
Why should we care for something we take for granted?
The dos and the don'ts of a generation of horizontal individuals
Are all as one iterated in the assumed right not to vote.
The lives of others carry no weight whatsoever
On the scales of the en vogue priorities.

*
We have to admit it: we are lost.
Fumbling for clothes in the dark,
On the lookout for a Man with enough leadership
To be revealed as our trans-generational spokesperson,
Sentinelled for a credo, a tangible self in hardships,
Expecting the outbreak of war – our own appointed time to prove ourselves,
Our fathers and our children that we can crusade for something,
Let alone our values which we would be hard put to define –
Bidding our time for a happenstance to become an epiphany.
We thus created swarms of pastimes and postiches
To accommodate our fear of tomorrow and tomorrow,
Unmindful that sunrise and sunset are bound to be,
That we ought to abide by Carpe diem,
Quam minimum credula postero.

*
The droves herein gathered hover without aim,
Find symbols and codes and alternatives
In the alignment of the long-muted spheres,
Expect oracles out of red moons and mock-suns,
Scry their laptop screens for news past and to come.
We do not trust religion to bridge the gap,
Yet we do not believe science will untie the knot.
Politics is a business and vice versa.
Where should the truth lie, if not in ourselves?
Yet we are unqualified to dig with our fingernails.

*
Leaves upon leaves gather in the abandoned curtilage where
Children have put aside their childish games and prattle
And play adults when their parents long for those bygone days.

*
Man is a born paradox.
Why should he, of all creatures, harness the earth?
He who is the least responsible for his actions?
He puts blinkers on the horse yet the horse leads him.
He puts fetters of iron on nought and none else but himself.
Man is a born paradox.

*
All the ducks leave when Winter waxes,
While follow eyes the steady flight
Grounded in the smog of the everyday,
While elephantine clouds occlude the rainbow.
The infallible smell of rust in the blood for a time congealed
As the ponds freeze and thaw and solidify again.
You never savoured this smell anyway,
Seeking refuge in the sanitised eight times a day handrails,
Cringing at the flush-your-own-toilet radio advertisement.
There is something rotten in the state of things that are.
Summer always had your preference though, like a favoured child.
Unwilling to hurt yet unable to repress your scathing remarks
Which are liquid pain transfused clogging arteries:
Mortal sap to the sane tree.

*
Your skin yesterday tasted of lodestone,
When as a child I would tip the tip of my tongue
On one of the fridge's magnets, fearing
An electric shock which never came. It tasted of salt.
Of course love is out of the question.

*
Flipping sandal by the meridian pool.
Irritation in your voice masticating diamonds.
Where have the children gone, you ask.
They are floating quietly on the surface of the waters,
Face downwards, forever holding their breaths.
Patiently waiting for you to turn around,
And pay attention.
Life is cruel to us sometimes,
Rummaging in the night like hedgehogs in the shrub,
Making a racket that might even send a blade of grass fluttering.
Lilies and fireflies show little concern to the plights beguiling us.
Someone has to die, as tacitly agreed, and preferably the innocent:
The diary of hate must still be written.

*
The horror, the horror, is never complete without a couple of rivets
To hold the complete picture on the wall of Gethsemane.
Men have died erecting these walls,
And the mortar thereof was juiced from swollen leeches.
The flesh is weak, once be proof the Dutch's ear.
The spirit is weak, thrice be proof the Galilean's will.
Faith in retrospect, once cleared from doubt, only is powerful.
In this garden blossomed a redefined boundary to love,
Breast-fed, as behovely as breathing, thus
As necessary as the song of the thrush –
Though it was a stage in falsetto.

*
Somnolence descending upon us with drooping head,
Heavy eyelids and hypnic jerks.
Only in sleep could they serve Jesus.
Only in that in-between state could He serve Him.
Wakefulness is left to the cornered mendicant.
Restlessness and the lust for sex
Spreading outside the walls of burning Babylon.
Nurtured gals have been reported sprawling in the prairies,
Legs wide opened and with febrile fingers stroking their gorge.
Nothing unusual in the ruttish dreamer's dream,
But any hermit would frown and growl and scowl,
Tutting and shaking his shaved head at this waste of energy.

*
“This marred and clumsy world
Will remain marred and clumsy,
However hard we try to change it.
The day is lost. Why should we toil
And grunt and sweat for this weary life?”
Cried ye in the cold, crucial night,
Spellbound by the raging bonfire of solitudes
Crackling before your bewildered eyes.
Yet vulnerable daffodils still prosper:
Why shouldn't we dear, why shouldn't we.
The hellbent Erynies of the day
Quench their divine vendettas
On the unhappy masses of mundane heretics,
Lighting pyres with their fat and bones,
Blazing knolls licking the flat clouds.

*
“You fake it as you make it,”
Could have been said by both.
Only I could have replied that
The scherzo backed me up.

*
I know you never wanted to hurt me, but you did, darling, but you did.
I know you never wanted to scorch me, but you did darling, but you did.
I know you wanted me whole, wanted my soul too, you did darling you did.
Yet you murdered me darling, you did.

In the empty streets of the French capital city, dull with rain and grime,
You and I roam unhindered, losing our sanity in the cafés and the opéras and Montmartre,
Moving more and more to the South as the clouds grow wilder, purple with anger.
We might never have met, as you suggested one evening,
But we have, darling, we have, and that was all that mattered then.
Now I watch you watching my coffin,
I hate you, Darling, I hate you.

*
The Willing Suspension of Disbelief coiled in the fold of the navel,
Authorising the boldest moves, including sahara-trekking
With only a half-empty, gargling gourd of water at the side.
Some would even go as far as obliterating Iago themselves on stage,
As snogging the movie away at the back of a cinema.
Planting the seed of the apricot they have just eaten in their backyard.
Sieving gold in the Euphrates.
Paring their fingernails.
Hanging themselves.

*
Dawn fell harshly on the idols which failed to pass the test of time,
Now resting and rusting full fathoms within the oceans,
Or displayed as testimonies to our lack of insight, to our gullibility,
Blind guesses to make out a reason, to give shape to the truth
Because so much beauty and mire couldn't but spring from the Gods.
Yet we are left here, on this ball of magma, to figure it out on our own.
No wonder we stumble over pitfalls and graves,
Even though words like fissure, or crevice
Are undefinable with or without matter.
Nothing good will ever come out of such emptiness.
Intestine wars have been fought for the sake of the Zero,
That nonsensical loop in the history of thought,
Which brought nations to less than nothing.
Man's pragmatism brings him more comfort
Than his capacity for abstraction.
Now we must never forget that words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Too often the current wind
Bend them to a slant. Halt them to a standstill.
Words cannot be trusted.
Yet they are the longest-standing bulwark,
And door to, the corporeal.
Live by the word, die by the word.

*
Expectation is the key to the discernment
Of the last five hundred thousand years of this era,
Or rather the absence of it.
Erwartungshorizont funnelled
Paving the way to insanity
Obliging the traveller
To walk all the way down,
Without a single glance back,
Without a sospiro to attract pathos.
The trapper in the tundra keeping away from satiety to stay alert –
Packs of Wolves roaming the frozen wilderness.
Lichen-covered permafrost and glacial forests,
Nature at its most basic, Nature at its deadliest.

Palpitating hearts as the wolf's howl is heard booming,
Close-up shot of the lupus' head, icy locks and exhaled breath.
The darkness of the room helps feel the fear of the trapper.

The trapper remains cool-headed, for even though he doesn't dread death,
He values it at the wolf's fang.

*
I enjoyed all those moments of humanity I shared with them,
The parties, the clubs, the whores, the dinners
Now I leave all those for the others.
Too many expectations at stake.
Too many seduction games going on.
Human relationships indeed are a luxury,
And it seems I cannot afford them,
Being too poor in that currency
Most people seem to have in abundance:
A keen lust for the flirtatious,
Toying with it as we do with ersatz
– Still less important and fragile than the original,
Which we hoard until we deem the day has come.
This is pure blindness – we are fooling ourselves.
Perhaps with growing impotency grows intolerance.
Times are a-changing at too fast a pace,
Keeping up is ridiculous to the old
And sacrilegious to the young.

Eremitic lives forever await the cantankerous.

*
If the teacher had said: “Memento mori, boys.”,
Their lives would have been tainted blacker than soot,
And the lad would have precipitated his suicide.
Molly wouldn't have been stoned to death for adultery.
The face of this earth would be quite different.

For here be ghosts, ghouls and monsters, and corpses by the billions,
Recorded souls since Dawn first set eyes on the Grim Reaper.
Bleak prospects.

*
The gnomon on the South-facing sundial refracts perspective:
It was bought for three dollars at the church's car-boot fair.
Being defective, it'll be sold at next week's bric-a-brac sale.
Only the choicest may see the dust of our homes.

*
Daydreaming my death the other day,
I found out no one would cry,
No one would be disfigured by a heartbroken rictus,
No one would attend the church service,
No one would attend to my mortal coil,
All would leave the city officials to dispose of it accordingly:
Atop a heap of sun-dried, foul garbage, circled by winged scavengers.
Nothing is more certain than my imminent death.

*
The sea was black with fish and on the boiling surface
Silver coins scaled up to the horizon.
Fishermen were bedazzled, net in hand and mouth agape.
Boats were rocking unnaturally, hardly wet. One got sea-sick.

*
The Absentee has been sought everywhere.
The summits of the Himalayas have been scrutinised
And their snow sprinkled on golf courses.
The sands of the Taklamakan have been sieved
And poured into concrete megalopoli.
The Seas and the Oceans have been dried up
And their bottom raked and exposed thoroughly.
The Amazon has been razed to the ground
And its timber erected into rostrums.
The sun has been dismantled
And its fire stored in gargantuan ovens.
The ices of the Poles carefully pickaxed
And melted into drinking water.
The stomach of the whales has been ripped open.
Nothing more than the incredible has been found.

But he, or she, has chosen exile.

*
Res in medias for a purpose.
Reading in-between the lines
Is no longer sufficient.
Before and After must be ascertained,
Imagined, put into eye-perspective.

Without this educated guess in our lives
Maps will forever be unreadable.
 

Friday 1 April 2011

Quote (thanks to Marilyn)

"The mystery of Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."

Usually attributed to Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), but untraceable. Found in Conquest of Illusion (1928) by J.J. Van Der Leeuw, pp. 11 and 89.

Funny thing is, Kierkegaard was a Protestant theologian and writer, Van Der Leeuw was a Liberal Catholic Church priest and writer. To attribute the quote to the former while it is the latter who in all probability wrote it is one of those delicacies Irony sends us sometimes. The main problem lies in the exegesis, whichever Church one belongs to.

So long as they are just bandying words at each other and not brandishing swords, I'm fine.

All things considered, Kierkegaard may well have said it.

Lichen

The blind woman next to me fidgeting in her seat visibly uneasy brushed my arm as if in need of help with her train ticket but she tricked ...