2012

Januar

A good sword is the one left in its scabbard.
-Japanese proverb

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Sword fighting in film is not about how good the fighter is, but how good the actor receiving the blows is.
-Takeshi Kitano

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Beware of turning into the enemy you most fear. All it takes is to lash out violently at someone who has done you some grievous harm, proclaiming that only your pain matters in this world. More than against that person's body, you will then, at that moment, be committing a crime against your own imagination.
-Ariel Dorfman

Februar

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
-Sigmund Freud

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The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
-Sigmund Freud

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On Death, without Exaggeration
It can't take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

It can't even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn't strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won't help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies' skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.

There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.
-Wislawa Szymborska
From "The People on the Bridge", 1986
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

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The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
-Arthur Miller

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If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
-Henry David Thoreau

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There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.
-Niels Bohr

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All government, of course, is against liberty.
-H. L. Mencken

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Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
-Noam Chomsky

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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
–W. Somerset Maugham, 'Of Human Bondage', 1915

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I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts.
-Guillaume Apollinaire

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Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.
-Guillaume Apollinaire

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A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
-Jonathan Swift

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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
-Jonathan Swift

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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
-Jonathan Swift

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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
-Jonathan Swift

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Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
-Jonathan Swift


März


There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.
-Mahatma Gandhi

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In an era when all societies must come together to respond to the common challenges facing humankind, such as poverty and environmental destruction, military spending has absorbed far too much of the world's limited human and economic resources. Nuclear weapons, in particular, are a fundamental evil that cannot resolve in any way the complex of global issues, but only exacerbate them.
-Daisaku Ikeda

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Italians have not been able to protect Renaissance art treasures for even as long as one thousand years. Egyptians have not been able to protect the tombs of the Pharaohs for even as long as four thousand years, and some of the graves were looted within centuries. Yet, we in this generation have an obligation to protect our nuclear wastes for more than ten thousand years—a period longer than recorded history.
-K. S. Shrader-Frechette, from 'Burying Uncertainty: Risk and the Case Against Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste'

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You can never reach the promised land. You can march towards it.
-James Callaghan

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After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.
-Walt Whitman

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Patriotism is nationalism, and always leads to war.
-Helen Caldicott

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Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything
-Publilius Syrus

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As political theorist Michael Parenti points out, historians often overlook Fascism's economic agenda--the partnership between Big Capital and Big Government--in their analysis of its authoritarian social program. Indeed, according to Bertram Gross in his startlingly prescient Friendly Fascism (1980), it is possible to achieve fascist goals within an ostensibly democratic society.
-Richard Heinberg

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That This
Day is a type when visible
objects change then put

on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed

The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually

concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth

Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace

copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery

A secular arietta variation
Grass angels perish in this

harmonic collision because
non-being cannot be 'this'

Not spirit not space finite
Not infinite to those fixed—

That this millstone as such
Quiet which side on which—

Is one mind put into another
in us unknown to ourselves
by going about among trees
and fields in moonlight or in
a garden to ease distance to
fetch home spiritual things

That a solitary person bears
witness to law in the ark to

an altar of snow and every
age or century for a day is
-Susan Howe

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No Regrets
just wrap it up in plain paper, please.
nothing fancy.
Regrets should never be fanciful.
just ordinary clothes hanging from a barely alive line.
No Regrets, the paychecks sing in unison.
Learn to adapt, said the boulder rolling downhill,
nobody judges anybody tonight.
The hotel lobby is long and wide.
You could disappear in it.
Maybe it's not a hotel, but a heart.
Growing larger every second with
the pain of loving life.
if you truly love being alive, the pain
doesn't hurt that much, eventually, it
becomes something that connects you up
to yourself.
just give me a few more seconds to hear the end
of this tune.I am trying to remember it's name.
It does have a name, I think. It's not one of those
untitled jobs.
just hold off from slamming the door
for another minute.
don't cut me off, or yourself.
leave us both open, somehow.
leave us both able to feel.
don't try to disappear in me,
and i will always try to find you.
-Scott Wannberg

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Rückenfigur
Iseult stands at Tintagel
on the mid stairs between
light and dark symbolism
Does she stand for phonic
human overtone for outlaw
love the dread pull lothly
for weariness actual brute
predestined fact for phobic
falling no one talking too
Tintagel ruin of philosophy
here is known change here
is come crude change wave
wave determinist caparison
Your soul your separation

But the counterfeit Iseult
Iseult aux Blanches Mains
stands by the wall to listen
Phobic thought of openness
a soul also has two faces
Iseult's mother and double
Iseult the Queen later in T
Even Tros echoes Tristan's
infirmity through spurious
etymology the Tintagel of Fo
not the dead city of night
Wall in the element of Logic
here is a door and beyond
here is the sail she spies

Tristran Tristan Tristrant
Tristram Trystan Trystram
Tristrem Tristanz Drust
Drystan these names concoct
a little wreathe of victory
dreaming over the landscape
Tintagel font icon twilight
Grove bough dark wind cove
brine testimony Iseult salt
Iseut Isolde Ysolt Essyllt
bride of March Marc Mark in
the old French commentaries
your secret correspondence
Soft Iseut two Iseults one

The third of Tristan's overt
identities is a double one
his disguise as nightingale
in Tros then wild man in Fo
Level and beautiful La Blanche
Lande of disguise episodes
the nocturnal garden of Tros
Fo recalls the scene in Ovid
Orpheus grief stricken over
the loss of Eurydice sits by
the bank of a river seven days
I see Mark's shadow in water
Mark's moral right to Iseult
David's relationship to Saul

Lean on handrail river below
Sense of depth focus motion
of chaos in Schlegel only as
visual progress into depth its
harsh curb estrangement logic
Realism still exists is part
of the realist dual hypothesis
Dual on verso as one who has
obeyed acceleration velocity
killing frost regenerative thaw
you other rowing forward face
backward Hesperides messenger
into the pastness of landscape
inarticulate scrawl awash air

Insufferably pale the icy
limit pulls and pulls no
kindness free against you
Deep quietness never to be
gathered no blind threat
Assuredly I see division
can never be weighed once
pale anguish breathes free
to be unhallowed empty what
in thought or other sign
roof and lintel remember
Searching shall I know is
some sense deepest moment
What is and what appears

The way light is broken
To splinter color blue
the color of day yellow
near night the color of
passion red by morning
His name of grief being
red sound to sense sense
in place of the slaying
Tristram must be caught
Saw the mind otherwise
in thought or other sign
because we are not free
Saw the mind otherwise
Two thoughts in strife

Separation requires an
other quest for union
I use a white thread
half of the same paper
and in the sun's light
I place a lens so that
the sea reflects back
violet and blue making
rays easily more freely
your nativity and you
of light from that of
memory when eyelids close
so in dream sensation
Mind's trajected light

It is precision we have
to deal with we can pre-
scind space from color if
Thomas was only using a
metaphor and metaphysics
professes to be metaphor
There is a way back to the
misinterpretation of her
message TheseusTristan is
on the ship AegeusIseut
is a land watcher she is
a mastermind her frailty
turned to the light her
single vision twin soul half

Dilemma of dead loyalty
Mark's speeches are sham
Gottfried shows Tristan
only hunting for pleasure
Emerald jacinth sapphire
chalcedony lovely Isolt
Topaz sardonyx chrysolite
ruby sir Tristan the Court
sees only the beauty of
their persons that they
appear to be represented
Isolt sings for your eyes
Surveillance is a constant
theme in lyric poetry

Le Page disgracié his attempt
to buy a linnet for his master
from a birdcatcher he hoped
to comfort him with bird song
but gambled the money away
and in desperation bought a
wild linnet that didn't sing
His first words occur in the
linnet episode the young master's
perplexity about the bird's
silence so just the linnet's
silence provokes Tristan's je
hero his shared identity the
remarkable bird list in L'Orphée

L'Orphée--the lanner falcon
takes pigeons the sparrow-
hawk sparrows the goshawk
partridge when Tristan was
young he would have watched
hawks being flown his own
little hunting falcon his
observation of the way in
which other birds refrain
from their characteristic
habit of "mobbing the owl"
Vignette of the birdcatcher
in the street that day the
linnet's mimic reputation

Parasite and liar of genius
even emptiness is something
not nothingness of negation
having been born Not born
wrapped in protective long
cloak power of the woodland
No burrowing deep for warmth
The eagle of Prometheus is a
vulture the vulture passions
go to a predator tricked up
forever unexpressed in half-
effaced ambiguous butterfly
disguises authentic regional
avifauna an arsenal of stories

Ysolt that for naught might
carry them as they coasting
past strange land past haven
ruin garland effigy figment
sensible nature blue silver
orange yellow different lake
effect of the death-rebirth
eternal rush-return fragment
I cannot separate in thought
You cannot be separate from
perception everything draws
toward autumn distant tumult
See that long row of folios
Surely Ysolt remembers Itylus

Antigone bears her secret in
her heart like an arrow she is
sent twice over into our dark
social as if real life as if real
person proceeding into self-
knowledge as if there were no
proof just blind right reason
to assuage our violent earth
Ysolt's single vision of union
Precursor shadow self by self
in open place or on an acting
platform two personae meeting
Strophe antistrophe which is
which dual unspeakable cohesion

Day binds the wide Sound
Bitter sound as truth is
silent as silent tomorrow
Motif of retreating figure
arrayed beyond expression
huddled unintelligible air
Theomimesis divinity message
I have loved come veiling
Lyrist come veil come lure
echo remnant sentence spar
never never form wherefor
Wait some recognition you
Lyric over us love unclothe
Never forever whoso move
-Susan Howe


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I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
-Oscar Wilde

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We have the best government that money can buy.
-Mark Twain

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Toute secte, en quelque genre que ce puisse être, est le ralliement du douteet de l'erreur.
-Voltaire

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Il faut toujours que ce qui est grand soit attaqué par les petits esprits.
-Voltaire

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To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
-Howard Zinn

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If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

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As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
-Voltaire

April

Lines For A Prologue
These alternate nights and days, these seasons
Somehow fail to convince me. It seems
I have the sense of infinity!

(In your dreams, O crew of Columbus,
O listeners over the sea
For the surf that breaks upon Nothing—)

Once I was waked by the nightingales in the garden.
I thought, What time is it? I thought,
Time—Is it Time still?—Now is it Time?

(Tell me your dreams, O sailors:
Tell me, in sleep did you climb
The tall masts, and before you—)

At night the stillness of old trees
Is a leaning over and the inertness
Of hills is a kind of waiting.

(In sleep, in a dream, did you see
The world's end? Did the water
Break—and no shore—Did you see?)

Strange faces come through the streets to me
Like messengers: and I have been warned
By the moving slowly of hands at a window.

Oh, I have the sense of infinity—
But the world, sailors, is round.
They say there is no end to it.
-Archibald MacLeish


Mai

Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire
-Abbie Hoffman

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Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
-Noam Chomsky

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The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
-Emile Zola

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The thoughts we choose to act upon define us to others, the ones we do not define us to ourselves.
-Yahia Lababidi

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Words
Words are like days:
coloring books or pickpockets,
signposts or scratching posts,
fakirs over hot coals.

Certain words must be earned
just as emotions are suffered
before they can be uttered
- clean as a kept promise.

Words as witnesses
testifying their truths
squalid or rarefied
inevitable, irrefutable.

But, words must not carry
more than they can
it's not good for their backs
or their reputations.

For, whether they dance alone
or with an invisible partner,
every word is a cosmos
dissolving the inarticulate
-Yahia Lababidi

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Freedom
And an orator said, "Speak to us of Freedom."
And he answered:
At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,
But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour?
In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle the eyes.
And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?
If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead.
You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them.
And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.
For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their won pride?
And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you.
And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.
Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.
These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.
And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light.
And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.
-Khalil Gibran


Juni


The Snakes Of September
All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
-Stanley Kunitz

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A un naranjo y a un limonero
Naranjo en maceta, ¡qué triste es tu suerte!
Medrosas tiritan tus hojas menguadas.
Naranjo en la corte, ¡qué pena da verte
con tus naranjitas secas y arrugadas!.

Pobre limonero de fruto amarillo
cual pomo pulido de pálida cera,
¡qué pena mirarte, mísero arbolillo
criado en mezquino tonel de madera!

De los claros bosques de la Andalucía,
¿quién os trajo a esta castellana tierra
que barren los vientos de la adusta sierra,
hijos de los campos de la tierra mía?

¡Gloria de los huertos, árbol limonero,
que enciendes los frutos de pálido oro,
y alumbras del negro cipresal austero
las quietas plegarias erguidas en coro;

y fresco naranjo del patio querido,
del campo risueño y el huerto soñado,
siempre en mi recuerdo maduro o florido
de frondas y aromas y frutos cargado!
-Antonio Machado

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Could I but ride indefinite,
As doth the meadow-bee,
And visit only where I liked,
And no man visit me,

And flirt all day with buttercups,
And marry whom I may,
And dwell a little everywhere,
Or better, run away

With no police to follow,
Or chase me if I do,
Till I should jump peninsulas
To get away from you,—

I said, but just to be a bee
Upon a raft of air,
And row in nowhere all day long,
And anchor off the bar,—
What liberty! So captives deem
Who tight in dungeons are.
-Emily Dickinson

Juli

Not having been given or been able to come up with a satisfactory response to the question I asked on this page on 24 November of 2008, I repost it below. If anyone has a good answer, I'm all ears:

Citizen's Question:
With the numerous individuals that Barack Obama has already brought onboard to be part of his presidential governing team clearly being either directly responsible for or permissive of outrageous financial fraud in banking and other institutions - including his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel - or active supporters of the war in Iraq and an approach no less "hawkish" than that of the current Republican administration with regard to Pakistan, Iran, and foreign policy in general - including his Vice-President Joe Biden and his probable Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - how can we possibly expect anything other than a continuation of the U. S. government's pursuit of ultra-violent imperialism and rapacious, class-warfare capitalism?
Thanks,
-Viggo Mortensen

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Nothing in life is to be feared.
It is only to be understood.
-Marie Curie

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Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer;
nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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I do not study in order to know more, rather to be less ignorant.
-Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

____________________


We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.
-Marcus Aurelius

____________________


Conquered people tend to be witty.
-Saul Bellow

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Words
Words are like days:
coloring books or pickpockets,
signposts or scratching posts
fakirs over hot coals.

Certain words must be earned
just as emotions are suffered
before they can be uttered
- clean as a kept promise.

Words as witnesses
testifying their truths
squalid or rarefied
inevitable, irrefutable.

But, words must not carry
more than they can
it's not good for their backs
or their reputations.

For, whether they dance alone
or with an invisible partner,
every word is a cosmos
dissolving the inarticulate
-Yahia Lababidi

____________________


I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
-Henry David Thoreau

Dezember

La rebelión consiste en mirar una rosa hasta pulverizarse los ojos.
-Alejandra Pizarnik

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Because no one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors
-Alejandra Pizarnik

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Aun si digo sol y luna y estrella me refiero a cosas que me suceden. ¿Y
qué deseaba yo? Deseaba un silencio perfecto. Por eso hablo.
-Alejandra Pizarnik

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Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in
rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous
rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of
water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen
from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes
'the farce we all must play'. But for an instant - because of a wild
music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax - the very
slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the
outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance,
and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energías
-Alejandra Pizarnik

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Recibe este rostro mío, mudo, mendigo. Recibe este amor que te pido. Recibe lo que hay en mí que eres tú.
-Alejandra Pizarnik

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"An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a
space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It
is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from
that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts
fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also
the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself
-Alejandra Pizarnik

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Daughter, I'm not crying now because I'm fed up or regret that the Lord
created me a woman. No, it's not that. It's just that I'm sad about my
life and my youth that have come and gone without my knowing how to live
them really and truly as a woman.
-Alifa Rifaat, from Distant View of a Minaret