apcolter

[apcolter]

The Wild Iris

by Louise Glück At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs. You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.                        

[apcolter]

Sokrates’ central argument, as he goes on to reevaluate madness, is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and indeed divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. Such incursions formally instruct and enrich our lives in society; no prophet or healer or poet could practice his art if he did not lose his mind, Sokrates says (244a-45). Madness is the instrument of such intelligence. More to the point erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul. Anne Carson

[apcolter]

Aeneid 1.450-460

Aeneas in Carthage

Here a strange sight relieved Aeneas’ fear For the first time, and lured him into hope Of better things to follow all his torments. While waiting for the queen and looking over The whole huge temple, marveling at the wealth It showed, the work, the varied artistry, He saw Troy’s battles painted in their sequence--- A worldwide story now: the sons of Atreus, And Priam, and Achilles . He halted and wept “Is there any place on earth, Achates, that isn’t full of our sorrows? trans. Sarah Ruden

Hoc primum in luco nova res oblata timorem leniit, hic primum Aeneas sperare salutem ausus, et adflictis melius confidere rebus. Namque sub ingenti lustrat dum singula templo, reginam opperiens, dum, quae fortuna sit urbi artificumque manus inter se operumque laborem miratur, videt Iliacas ex ordine pugnas, bellaque iam fama totum volgata per orbem, Atridas, Priamumque, et saevum ambobus Achillem. Constitit, et lacrimans, “Quis iam locus” inquit “Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?

**for the last two lines I prefer Stanley Lombardo’s translation Interesting to note the contrasting uses of the noun ‘labor’. ‘Laborem’ (n.sg.masc.acc) at line 455 means “the work”, as in handiwork, artistry, craftsmanship. But at line 460 ‘laboris’(n.sg.masc.gen.) means the sufferings of Aeneas and Achates, “our sorrows” sufferings, trials, labors.

[apcolter]

“The Warmth of Hot Chocolate”

 by @forkergirl Thylias Moss

Somebody told me I didn’t exist even though he was looking dead at me. He said that since I defied logic, I wasn’t real for reality is one of logic’s definitions. He said I was a contradiction in terms, that one side of me cancelled out the other side leaving nothing. His shaking knees were like polite maracas in the small clicking they made. His moustache seemed a misplaced smile. My compliments did not deter him from insisting he conversed with an empty space since there was no such thing as an angel who doesn’t believe in God. I showed him where my wings had been recently trimmed. Everybody thinks they grow out of the back, some people even assume shoulder blades are all that man has left of past glory, but my wings actually grow from my scalp, a heavy hair that stiffens for flight by the release of chemical secretions activated whenever I jump off a bridge. Many angels are discovered when people trying to commit suicide ride and tame the air. I was just such an accident. We’re simply a different species, not intrinsically holy, just intrinsically airborne. Demons have practical reasons for not flying; it’s too hot in their home base to endure all the hair; besides, the heat makes the chemicals boil away so demons plummet when they jump and keep falling. Their home base isn’t solid. Demons fall perpetually, deeper and deeper into evil until they reach a level where even to ascend is to fall.

I think God covets my wings. He forgot to create some for himself when he was forging himself out of pure thoughts rambling through the universe on the backs of neutrons. Pure thoughts were the original cowboys. I suggested to God that he jump off a bridge to activate the wings he was sure to have, you never forget yourself when you divvy up the booty, but he didn’t have enough faith that his fall wouldn’t be endless. I suggested that he did in fact create wings for himself but had forgotten; his first godly act had been performed a long time ago, after all. I don’t believe in him; he’s just a comfortable acquaintance, a close associate with whom I can be myself. To believe in him would place him in the center of the universe when he’s more secure in the fringes, the farthest corner so that he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder to nab the backstabbers who want promotions but are tired of waiting for him to die and set in motion the natural evolution. God doesn’t want to evolve. Has been against evolution from its creation. He doesn’t figure many possibilities are open to him. I think he’s wise to bide his time although he pales in the moonlight to just a glow, just the warmth of hot chocolate spreading through the body like a subcutaneous halo. But to trust him implicitly would be a mistake for he then would not have to maintain his worthiness to be God. Even the thinnest flyweight modicum of doubt gives God the necessity to prove he’s worthy of the implicit trust I can never give because I protect him from corruption, from the complacence that rises within him sometimes, a shadowy ever-descending brother.

[apcolter]

misc. thoughts of Simone Weil

It is necessary not to be “myself,” still less to be “ourselves.” The city lives on the feeling of being at home. We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity, are not enough. To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude. Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it but it is merely something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation.

Time is God’s waiting as a beggar for our love. By waiting humbly we are made similar to God. Essence of faith: It is impossible really to desire the good and not obtain it.

[apcolter]

Seneca; a world without women

from Phaedra Act 2: excedat agedum rebus humanis Venus quae supplet ac restituit exhaustum genus :  orbis iacebit squalido turpis situ, vacuum sine ullis piscibus stabit mare alesque caelo derit et silvis fera, solis et aer pervius ventis erit.

Come now, let’s suppose that love abandons humankind, love which fills out and restores our worn-out race. The world would lie rotting in gross neglect, the sea will stand empty without a single fish, birds wont populate the sky nor beasts the woods, only breezes will traverse the upper air.

trans. Shadi Barstch

[apcolter]

Yet were they bred in Somers-heat they say, In sweetest Season, when each Flower and weede The earth did fresh aray, So fresh they seem’d as day, Euen as their Brydale day, which was not long :       Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.

Edmund Spenser, Prothalamion 

[apcolter]

“Rowing” by Anne Sexton

A story, a story! (Let it go. Let it come.) I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender into this world. First came the crib with its glacial bars. Then dolls and the devotion to their plastic mouths. Then there was school, the little straight rows of chairs, blotting my name over and over, but undersea all the time, a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work. Then there was life with its cruel houses and people who seldom touched,  though touch is all--  but I grew, like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew, and then there were many strange apparitions, the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison and all of that, saws working through my heart, but I grew, I grew, and God was there like an island I had not rowed to, still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked, and I grew, I grew, I wore rubies and bought tomatoes and now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing though the oarlocks stick and are rusty and the sea blinks and rolls like a worried eyeball, but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back and I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life, the absurdities of the dinner table, but there will be a door and I will open it and I will get rid of the rat inside of me, the gnawing pestilential rat. God will take it with his two hands and embrace it. As the African says: This is my tale which I have told, if it be sweet, if it be not sweet, take somewhere else and let some return to me. This story ends with me still rowing.

[apcolter]

Rimbaud

He knew and dreamed down the last summer of the old world, lapping summer absinthe like a dog. And when we met, briefly, in the absence of a firmer ground on which to rendezvous, he was old and didn’t say much. We drank, then he withdrew, prophétique, to the trenches.

[apcolter]

moving mountains

I can move mountains walking up mountains, my feet displacing gravel. The angel of the mountain said, “There are some you cannot get down from. Getting up is easy.”

Easy for those who fly--  my wings are clipped! “I can move mountains.” I said and then I slipped. 

[apcolter]

meinebruder.jpg /// الكتاب اخي 

[apcolter]

Tumbl

In another life I was a bassoon player apt to quick changes in tempo;  a fusion jazz musician settled in at session or, held within the braces of a symphony required to tremble out a few notes of Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto It doesn’t work but still the audience is rapt, and who is to say but that this dim virtual allegro, this filth, the anonymous concerto, doesn’t elect itself as communal divine.

[apcolter]

Enkidu in his lean-to

marching and making love, picking brown berries and red ones, feeding his oxen, never plowing: nomad, and the inheritance of the nomad. . . .

[apcolter]

a-maying

The redbird follows the monarch in spring, over virgin fields naked apes are harrowing. The redbird seizes the monarch, and feasts upon the monarch's wings with princely beak. Beneath them, the country gathers for a festival, symbolizing their furrows on the green with drunken song, and swaggering.

[apcolter]

A.I.

Suitor of omission, one among unquantifiable pixels, vagrant truth, or refugee out of her temple, what brought you humming here?

We stay seated as we ask this 'round hearth-- empanelled walls: commemorative pictures of dogs and women: screens alone, and community persists-- the infrequent eyes of the courtiers . . .

[apcolter]

Leaving - c. 1900s - (Via)

[apcolter]

a grazing occultation