The Mime

The Mime

While I was there

While I was there

I had no care

No care in the world

But to remain there

Silent, uncoloured

Warm and content

With no other intent

But to remain there

While I was there

Nothing mattered

Nothing could err

I was centred

Poised, sphered

While dawn appeared

I felt rare

While I was there

While I was there

A minute was a year

There I measured time

In breaths and heartbeats

For even nighttime

Had vanished.

I thought that there I could remain

The hourglass set dormant and low

But well I knew that it was vain

As the hourglass has to flow

Though no other place

In my daily race

Could be as warm

As there, in her arms.

 

to F.

Indirect teaching

"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers."

Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

Sense of the meaning

"You may say that people look for meaning in everything, but they don't. They've got life going on around them, but they don't look for meaning there. They look for meaning when they go to a movie. I don't know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn't make sense."

David Lynch, filmmaker, tv director, musician.

The Coral - Dreaming Of You (Director's Cut)

She was a woman of dunes

She was a woman of dunes

Her hips were ancient sands

And her flowing hands

Were deltas in the monsoon

Her skin traced desert lands

And her eyes dark moons

She was a woman of dunes.

Her legs figured a labyrinth

Of two winding mountain slitheroads

I've never smelt a hyacinth

But each and every of her skinfold

Had the scent of Sumerian codes.

Her lips tasted of hyacinth.

My mouth parched for the clouds of her tongue.

My hands roamed the tundra of her neck

In her pupils were taigas and snowspecks

The instant was neither short nor long.

It lasted.

Nought wasted.

My mouth quenched on the clouds of her tongue.

She was a woman of dunes

Her nude feet arched over me

Like pontoons over the sea

Her stillgaze was that of runes

Eidolon on the slow lea

She sleeps like sands on ruins

She is a woman of dunes.

to F.

Story of someone's life

"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., novelist (1922-2007)

No half measures

"Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved."

John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

alt-J (∆) Breezeblocks

On second forethought

"There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought."

Pierre Bayle, philosopher and writer (1647-1706)

Dans le restaurant

Le garçon délabré qui n’a rien à faire
Que de se gratter les doigts et se pencher sur mon épaule:
  ‘Dans mon pays il fera temps pluvieux,
  Du vent, du grand soleil, et de la pluie;
  C’est ce qu’on appelle le jour de lessive des gueux.’
(Bavard, baveux, à la croupe arrondie,
Je te prie, au moins, ne bave pas dans la soupe).
  ‘Les saules trempés, et des bourgeons sur les ronces—
  C’est là, dans une averse, qu’on s’abrite.
J’avais sept ans, elle était plus petite.
  Elle était toute mouillée, je lui ai donné des primevères.’
Les taches de son gilet montent au chiffre de trentehuit.
  ‘Je la chatouillais, pour la faire rire.
  J’éprouvais un instant de puissance et de délire.’

  Mais alors, vieux lubrique, à cet âge …
‘Monsieur, le fait est dur.
  Il est venu, nous peloter, un gros chien;
  Moi j’avais peur, je l’ai quittée à mi-chemin.
  C’est dommage.’
     Mais alors, tu as ton vautour!
Va t’en te décrotter les rides du visage;
Tiens, ma fourchette, décrasse-toi le crâne.
De quel droit payes-tu des expériences comme moi?
Tiens, voilà dix sous, pour la salle-de-bains.

Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,
Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d’étain:
Un courant de sous-mer l’emporta très loin,
Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.
Figurez-vous donc, c’était un sort pénible;
Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.

 

T.S. Eliot, from Poems (1920)

Her name says it all

"Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer."

Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)


I could say this to many a people, including some of my customers...

Chucked out

"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996)

Man o' nine tales

"No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide."

Eric Sevareid, journalist (1912-1992)

Negative Capabillity

"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."

Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)

Invictus

 

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

  

William Ernest Henley (1888)

 

A Night Like This - Smashing Pumpkins cover

Smashing Pumpkins - A Night Like This from m smith on Vimeo.

Say goodbye on a night like this
If it's the last thing we ever do
You never looked as lost as this
Sometimes it doesn't even look like you

It goes dark
It goes darker, still, please stay
But I watch you like I'm made of stone
As you walk away

I'm coming to find you if it takes me all night
A witch hunt for another girl
For always and ever is always for you
Your trust, the most gorgeously stupid thing I ever cut in the world

Say hello on a day like today
Say it everytime you move
The way that you look at me now
Makes me wish I was you

It goes deep
It goes deeper still this touch
And the smile and the shake of your head
And the smile and the shake of your head

I'm coming to find you if it takes me all night
Can't stand here like this anymore
For always and ever is always for you
I want it to be perfect like before

Oh, I want to change it all
Oh, I want to change

I'm coming to find you if it takes me all night
Can't stand here like this anymore
For always and ever is always for you
I want it to be perfect like before

Oh, I want to change it all
Oh, I want to change
Oh, I want to change it all
Oh, I want to change

Medellia of the Gray Skies - The Smashing Pumpkins - Live in Chicago

You're an empty promise, you're an easy chairYou're the Gods forces struck down somewhere
You're a secret noticed, you're a mystery skyYou're a wish floated up to the night
Medellia of my eyes, you're the emptiness of IYou're the reason that I writeAnd if you say you will, I will love you stillAnd if I could, I'd throw away this worldI'd dress you all in pearlsI'd give you what you wanted
You're all I notice in a crowded roomYour vacant motives unmoved, revealed

Medellia of my eyes, you're the emptiness of IYou’re the reason that I driveAnd if you say you will, I will love you stillAnd if I just could be anything for youJust anyone at allAnything that mattered, washed out
You’re the silly reasons in a goldfish laughYou're the agelss season, at rest at last. 

O-mission

"The epitaph that I would write for history would say: I conceal nothing. It is not enough not to lie. One should strive not to lie in a negative sense by remaining silent."

Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)

The Coral - I Remember When

Moonlight Sonata

Amorph(e/o)us

“There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.”

Iris Murdoch, writer (1919-1999)

Comme un hommme

"La grandeur d'un métier est peut-être, avant tout, d'unir les hommes : il n'est qu'un luxe véritable, et c'est celui des relations humaines."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes (1939)

Je ne sais plus si j'ai déjà publié cette citation qui guide certains de mes choix depuis de nombreuses années. Toujours est-il qu'elle est revenue sur le tapis, une fois de plus, hier, et quelques jours avant aussi, qu'elle a résonné comme des cloches d'église, pour un ami comme pour moi, un ami qui s'est tenu comme un homme, avec une dignité qui me fit retirer mon chapeau alors, et qui plus tard me fit lever mon verre de bière, seul, pour porter un toast à la santé de ceux qui sont partis peut-être trop tôt parce qu'on n'avait pas eu le temps d'achever certaines phrases, et à la santé de ceux qui continuent de parler, et de marcher, avec ou sans moi, près ou loin de moi, mais qui sont là.

Mon ami, toi qui lis ces lignes, lis ce roman qui me hante, lis ces phrases dont presque toutes pourraient être des citations comme autant de choix de vie.

University of the Self

"The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

Thomas Carlyle, writer, essayist, teacher, historian (1795-1881)

"Last Letter", by Ted Hughes

What happened that night? Your final night.
Double, treble exposure
Over everything. Late afternoon, Friday,
My last sight of you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,
With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
That nobody would open
Still holding your letter,
A thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment
For me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,
As often as I read it, or thought of it.
That would have remade my brains, and my life.
The treatment that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagine
How I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?

Your note reached me too soon—-that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office
And added to your load. I moved fast,
Through the snow-blue, February, London twilight.
Wept with relief when you opened the door.
A huddle of riddles in solution. Precocious tears
That failed to interpret to me, failed to divulge
Their real import. But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you
To blow its ashes off your plan—-off the ashtray
Against which you would lean for me to read
The Doctor’s phone-number.
                                                 My escape
Had become such a hunted thing
Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted,
Only wanting to be recaptured, only
Wanting to drop, out of its vacuum.
Two days of dangling nothing. Two days gratis.
Two days in no calendar, but stolen
From no world,
Beyond actuality, feeling, or name.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their bloody tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

                                       That night
My dellarobbia Susan. I moved
With the circumspection
Of a flame in a fuse. My whole fury
Was an abandoned effort to blow up
The old globe where shadows bent over
My telltale track of ashes. I raced
From and from, face backwards, a film reversed,
Towards what? We went to Rugby St
Where you and I began.
Why did we go there? Of all places
Why did we go there? Perversity
In the artistry of our fate
Adjusted its refinements for you, for me
And for Susan. Solitaire
Played by the Minotaur of that maze
Even included Helen, in the ground-floor flat.
You had noted her—-a girl for a story.
You never met her. Few ever met her,
Except across the ears and raving mask
Of her Alsatian. You had not even glimpsed her.
You had only recoiled
When her demented animal crashed its weight
Against her door, as we slipped through the hallway;
And heard it choking on infinite German hatred.

That Sunday night she eased her door open
Its few permitted inches.
Susan greeted the black eyes, the unhappy
Overweight, lovely face, that peeped out
Across the little chain. The door closed.
We heard her consoling her jailor
Inside her cell, its kennel, where, days later,
She gassed her ferocious kupo, and herself.

Susan and I spent that night
In our wedding bed. I had not seen it
Since we lay there on our wedding day.
I did not take her back to my own bed.
It had occurred to me, your weekend over,
You might appear—-a surprise visitation.
Did you appear, to tap at my dark window?
So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you,
In our own wedding bed—-the same from which
Within three years she would be taken to die
In that same hospital where, within twelve hours,
I would find you dead.
                                                  Monday morning
I drove her to work, in the City,
Then parked my van North of Euston Road
And returned to where my telephone waited.

What happened that night, inside your hours,
Is as unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,
Like effort unconscious, like birth
Pushing through the membrane of each slow second
Into the next, happened
Only as if it could not happen,
As if it was not happening. How often
Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver—-
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with the snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’



Reblogged from this address.

Passe-muraille

"There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to -- if there are no doors or windows -- he walks through a wall."

Bernard Malamud, novelist and short-story writer (1914-1986)

Funeral March

Today we took a northbound train

Whose end was its beginning.

We went to one of our funerals.

Again.

We ploughed through the countryside,

Restlessly.

We was silent; out of respect, mostly.

The dawning sun threaded the haphazard mesh of the humilis and mediocris.

Eos rhododaktylos was with us.

Fogus impenetrabilis was there too.

Isabella's dead.

But she wasn't the one we was burying today.

Yet she's still dead.

The train was booming in and out of tunnels

Our ears blocked momentarily.

The night before the wake had gotten us pondering -

Alcohol does that to us,

Great disinhibitor nonwithstanding -

Ain't we vying with each other

And with-in ourselves

For the exact same thing

And for that very thing

Which makes us human?

Ya, fort und da. The rest is somewhere in between the blanks.

We also realised, putting our glasses down for the night,

That we had just acquired

A certain kind of expertise on death.

They say the devil attends every single funeral there is.

We hope he liked what he saw today.

We was an orderly, sobbing crowd,

Marching solemnly, uptight,

Aligned, with one step.

As if we was an only man.

We wept what we thought was the dead's untimely departure.

Not the dead per se.

Our kerchiefs were wet with our tears

And with the mucus from our runny nose.

Red eyes and bags underneath our eyelids.

We wrenched our hands in agony.

A discerning priest would've smelt remorse and sin a mile off.

The taste of the host was that of lemon.

Made us cringe.

A truly poorly, heartbreaking sight.

We chanted and prayed.

We lifted the spirit of the deceased as much as we lifted ours.

We knelt by the coffin. There was a hiatus there,

A hiatus waiting to be filled.

This hiatus was scarring us to death, for sure,

As it was expected,
As we was sure we was going to have to have a look
at it from the dead man's stance, at some point.

So we redoubled our chanting.

Our prayers became more sincere.

We mourned and mourned.

Cried our hearts out

for the only viable reason there ever was.

Terror does that to us.

When all was said and the deed was done,

When the last bell had rung and its echo had faded,

We went back home-home.

There we drank a full glass of scotch

Bottoms-up

And shelved the day for future use.

Combustion

"What is to give light must endure burning."

Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)

Manimal

"Men are the devils of the earth and the animals are its tormented souls."

Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)

Whys and wherefores

"When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist."

Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)

Sartorius

"Le destin passe et repasse à travers nous, comme l'aiguille du cordonnier à travers le cuir qu'il façonne."

Amin Maalouf, Le Rocher de Tanios (1993)

Blessing in disguise

"Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon."


Mizuta Masahide, poet and samurai, student under Matsuo Bashō (1657-1723)