"That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful." ~Edgar Allan Poe / "Understood in its metaphysical sense, Beauty is one of the manifestations of the Absolute Being. Emanating from the harmonious rays of the Divine plan, it crosses the intellectual plane to shine once again across the natural plane, where it darkens into matter." ~Jean Delville
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
~G. Bachelard
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
Stay, little ounce, here in/ Fleece and leaf with me, in the evermore/ Where swans trembled in the lake around our bed of hay and morning/ Came each morning like a felt cloak billowing/ Across the most pale day. It was the color of a steeple disappearing/ In an old Venetian sky. (...)
Would they take/ You now from me, like Leonardo's sleeve disappearing in/ The air. And when I woke I could not wake/ You, little sphinx, I could not keep you here with me./ Anywhere, I could not bear to let you go. Stay here/ In our clouded bed of wind and timothy with me./ Lie here with me in snow.
~For a Snow Leopard in October, Lucie Brock-Broido
One communicates and exchanges in poetry, as in music, as in silence...
Though It Be Thy Will
by Abdias DeMarin
(Special thanks to Graceful-Jen for providing the lament
that served as its humourous counterpointe)
Though it be thy will to wrest thy breast from mine,
Though no Roman heart can make Sabian claim,
My pate is parched from excess prate and pine,
Such showes bring shame and diminish my fame.
At first light found a golden garden gave to me,
Lillie nymphs umteen litt'ring shade of tree,
The dewy petals rolled with fond embrace,
their kisses painting the tears on my face.
When bored with the bevy the breeze answered all,
Did a hundred more nymphs from the branches fall,
In beauty's bower, thus burdened with bliss,
I nearly forgave thy deeds gone amiss.
My love for thee is like a sorrowe blinde,
Obscur'ng the garden within my minde,
Though beauty is thine, 'tis a hair of the world's,
Nor canst thou wrest me, 'tis a flame unfurled.
+++
*Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, —(Keats, To Autumn)*
The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, oil on canvas, 132.1 x 213.7 cm, private collection. As it was painted during the winter, Tadema arranged to have roses sent weekly from the French Riviera for four months to ensure the accuracy of each petal.
Self-embrace on Silk Prayer
by Ting-Jen Hwang, on 8th January 2012
(With thanks to Hamlet-at-Sea of this incarnation,
for being the final catalyst of my poem.)
"Is it a blessing for a poet to be a natural poet-magnet?"
The romantic thinker wonders to herself.
'Oh you Little Fool,' she whispered,
A foolish thinker I am.
All these men, coming
in and out of me. All this pleasure and pain,
flickering like dying blue flames.
An instant garden trampled upon for hundreds of years
by those he loves with his Life－ah, such blasphemous
Beauty. An instant paradise turned
into the most exquisite ice ablaze.
A bruised garden amidst the flames.
The love and devotion that it takes to create
－such Beauty－
I can never fully comprehend.
Threads of a thousand hues are weaving themselves
in and out of each other; breathing esoteric,
breathing erotic, into
the weakest Bird of the most powerful strength－
A Bird without a name－
Can I be spared－Can I be
abstract like your patterns of this mesmerising nature, again?
I plead with my heart to be
as romantic and as abstract, like
your Little Brother, again.
Tears from the eyes of his heart are still rolling,
shining on my quill
like dews on those pink Oleander flowers－
falling, falling, fallen.
(And in case you were wondering, I was not speaking of
your little brother, I was speaking of
Mine. Like all these quests for Beauty and pleasure－I was
speaking, and thinking, of Mine.)
Breathing erotic. Breathing esoteric.
All these fiery blossoms burning way below sub-zero,
I have always loved hearing the sounds of poetry: reciting quietly to myself, listening to poetry recordings, and those lovely songs set to poems as well as lyrics composed for music. Being particularly drawn to, and as a firm believer in, the "poetic essence" in written words (and in all artistic mediums), I love reciting and hearing the sounds of many different literary genres, not restricted to poetry－this awakens in me the beautiful psychological state of "flow"...
Here is a recording I made the other day reciting my recent poem Self-embrace on Silk Prayer. It was my first attempt at recording my poetry. :-)
宋徽宗，欲借風霜二詩帖。
Huizong's poem and exquisite Dancing Crane/ Slender Gold calligraphy,
Fallen leaves from the maple tree slowly consumed
like a melody, into meticulous scales scattered on soft earth.
Blushing petals floating whirling dancing twisting in welkin,
delicately weaving heaven.
What is bound by faded rose gold are memories sealed
in the arms of wood;
What mesmerises from underneath that silken surface
pliably embraces the tree－
in soft compliance, nibbling ancient bark.
Paradise, featherlight, touches his earth,
gazing upon the heaviness of her kiss standing lifted
by branches of ethereality.
*With thanks to Hamlet-at-Sea of this incarnation, for being the final catalyst of my poem.
"Is it a blessing for a poet to be a natural poet-magnet?"
The romantic thinker wonders to herself. 'Oh you Little Fool,' she whispered,
A foolish thinker I am.
All these men, coming
in and out of me. All this pleasure and pain,
flickering like dying blue flames.
An instant garden trampled upon for hundreds of years
by those he loves with his Life－ah, such blasphemous
Beauty. An instant paradise turned
into the most exquisite ice ablaze.
A bruised garden amidst the flames.
The love and devotion that it takes to create
－such Beauty－
I can never fully comprehend.
Threads of a thousand hues are weaving themselves
in and out of each other; breathing esoteric,
breathing erotic, into
the weakest Bird of the most powerful strength－
A Bird without a name－
Can I be spared－Can I be
abstract like your patterns of this mesmerising nature, again?
I plead with my heart to be
as romantic and as abstract, like
your Little Brother, again.
Tears from the eyes of his heart are still rolling,
shining on my quill
like dews on those pink Oleander flowers－
falling, falling, fallen.
(And in case you were wondering, I was not speaking of
your little brother, I was speaking of
Mine. Like all these quests for Beauty and pleasure－I was
speaking, and thinking, of Mine.)
Breathing erotic. Breathing esoteric.
All these fiery blossoms burning way below sub-zero,
I could faint,
just listening to them.
I have no refuge in the world other than thy threshold. There is no protection for my head other than this door. ~Hafiz (inscription on the Ardabil Carpet)
I think of you waking while I sit up all night stiff with desire. Your eyes blinking open while mine blinking to shut. I pray for insomnia so that I may think more of your day through my night. You are sitting in your garden, the sun on your face. I am that sun as I curse my moon. Your bare feet, grass twisting in your toes. Both of us now with coffee, but for opposing reasons. Mine dark as this night. I turn to poets of old and search for that line that will bring me to your light. As your day stretches out I hear birds outside my window. Morning ascends! I am in the light. I am renewed. I am sharing the sun with my love. Oh, but with an ascent comes a down. I think of you undressing for bed. Your skin, your hair, your eyes! I cursed a moon that I now beg to share.
In the wavering balance of my feelings,
set against each other,
lascivious love and modesty.
But I choose what I see,
and submit my neck to the yoke;
I yield to the sweet yoke.
~The Court of Love, In Trutina from Carmina Burana
Yamanoue no Okura, “A Lament on the Evanescence of Life”
What we must accept as we journey through the world Is that time will pass like the waters of a stream; in countless numbers, in relentless succession, it will besiege us with assaults we must endure. They would not detain the period of their bloom when, as maidens will, they who were then maidens encircled their wrists with gemmed bracelets from Cathay, and took their pleasure frolicking hand in hand with their youthful friends. So the months and years went by, and when did it fall – that sprinkling of wintry frost on glistening hair as black as leopard flower seeds? And whence did they come – those wrinkles that settled in, marring the smoothness of blushing pink faces? Was it forever, the kind of life those others led – those stalwart men, who, as fine young men will do, girded at their waists sharp swords, keen-bladed weapons, took up hunting bows, clasped them tight in their clenched fists, placed on red horses saddles fashioned of striped hemp, climbed onto their steeds, and rode gaily here and there? they were not many, those nights when the fine young men pushed open the doors, the plank doors of the chamber where the maidens slept, groped their way close to their loves, and slept with their arms intertwined with gemlike arms. Yet already now those who were maidens and youths must use walking sticks, and when they walk over there, others avoid them, and when they walk over here, others show distaste. Such is life, it seems, for the old. Precious though life is, it is beyond our power to stay the passing of time.
(Translated by Steven D. Carter)
***
*A poem I read back in July, which instantly drew me in with its mysterious strength and powerful imagery. (Re-reading it after a discussion with David about Monet's artistic treatment of water and the place Giverny, and yes, I still love it － it glistens with a sense of transience in beauty and anguished sadness for Eternal Recurrence.)
“The Rose-Way in Giverny,” by Virginia Konchan
And in the reticulate distance the cued inertia of Lucifer astounds. Our feet bleed: buoyant, the body at its task. What you wanted was what I wanted－slant of sun to the left, twinkling of civilization elsewise; and the moon (whelp of history) to our backs, all come-hither and dream. Motion understood is philosophy deferred: peace; the felt pathos of space and time. Look, darling, at the establishing shot. It's downright Biblical, this thrown-together vista, world upon world without end.
***
“Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the centre vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief — the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.”
“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
—Vladimir Nabakov, Speak, Memory
***
While under the bridges Of embrace expire Eternal tired tidal eyes The night is a clock chiming The days go by not I Love elapses like the river Love goes by Poor life is indolent And expectation always violent The night is a clock chiming The days go by not I The days and equally the weeks elapse The past remains the past Love remains lost Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away The night is a clock chiming The days go by not I
－Guillaume Apollinaire
Julien Dillens, Marbre, Figura tombale － Femme au bouquet (1885-1889), Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique
***
my love for you makes you ancient to me. my greatest wish would be that I were to you, ancient, too. that looking upon each other, the waters of old rome would be seen trickling beneath our feet, not that we would live forever, but that we already have.
—from a poem by Ricky Garni
***
"He seeks life where it is to be found: in all that is most delicate, in the folds of things."
...
－Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 1932
***
As Distant Music, Obscurely, or But Half Revealed...
During this state of repose, he took his station winter and summer by the stove, looking through the window at the old tower of Lobenicht, not that he could be said properly to see it, but the tower rested upon his eye as distant music on the ear - obscurely, or but half revealed to the consciousness. No words seem forcible enough to express his sense of the gratification which he derived from his old tower, when seen under the circumstances of twilight and quiet reverie... At length some poplars in a neighboring garden shot up to such a height as to obscure the tower, upon which Kant became very uneasy and restless, and at length found himself positively unable to pursue his evening meditiations. Fortunately, the proprietor of the garden was a very considerate and obliging person, who had, besides, a high regard for Kant, and accordingly, upon a presentation of the case being made to him, he gave orders that the poplar should be cropped. Kant recovered his equanimity, and once more found himself able to pursue his twilight meditations in peace.
Thomas de Quincey — The Last Days of Immanuel Kant — via the liner notes for Gavin Bryars' After the Requiem.
***
My sky interchanges with yours, so does my dove now it flies over yours, I see two shadows falling in the oatfield We look with each other’s eyes, we find a place: rain we say like a story the half-sentence green, I hear: Your mouth with the speech of birds carries twigs and feathers up to my brow
—Johannes Bobrowski
Sappho
***
Part One...
"Any great realization is only half completed in the brain's pool of light; the other half is formed in the dark soil of our innermost being, and above all it is a state of the soul on whose furthest tip the thought sits perched, like a flower..."
~ Robert Musil, Young Torless
***
Suddenly, softly, as if a breath breathed On the pale wall, a magical apparition, The shadow of the jasmine, branch and blossom! It was not there, it is there, in a perfect image; And all is changed. It is like a memory lost Returning without a reason into the mind... And it seems to me that the beauty of the shadow Is more beautiful than the flower; a strange beauty, Pencilled and silently deepening to distinctness. As a memory stealing out of the mind's slumber, A memory floating up from a dark water, Can be more beautiful than the thing remembered.
~ Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)
***
On almost the incendiary eve When at your lips and keys, Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave…….. On almost the incendiary eve Of deaths and entrances, When near and strange wounded on London’s waves Have sought your single grave, One enemy, of many, who knows well Your heart is luminous In the watched dark, quivering ….
— From Deaths & Entrances: Dylan Thomas
***
EN:TRANCES
What is the allure and attraction which so invites the photographer to capture entrances?
I feel it strongly and I cannot adequately explain it- through the last two decades as a semi-serious photographer I am drawn to capture the magic of what may lay beyond. The other, the secret, the forbidden—perhaps even the sexual or inticingly erotic?
Closed doors represent a world where we need use our imagination to its fullest. We see the promise of new colour and new experience—a closed glimpse of the exotic ‘other’ life we wish to inhabit. (via Lushlight)
"How should he explain it? As in the sky: Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, dew, a bubble. A dream, a flash of lightning, and a cloud－thus we should look upon the world (all that was made). Thus he should explain; therefore it is said: He should explain."
~Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, or Diamond-Cutter (from Prajnaparamita/ Perfection of Wisdom genre), English translations by E.B. Cowell, F. Max Mulller, and J. Takakusu.
***
One of my very favourite performances of Svetlana Zakharova: her mystery, her sensuality, her musicality and the suspenseful poetry... This personal love affair of mine is ongoing, and only growing stronger (I am led－in hands and heart－and "possessed" by such passion for this poetic muse). She takes my breath away.
"...[a beauty which] is a consummate example of poetic inspiration, eliciting from the poet's soul a sigh which is at once the poem itself－Dante's response to Beatrice's presence－and a resigned acknowledgement of her transcendent otherness."(Many thanks to Leanne & Cassandra for this.)
Thirteen of my poems, including five pairs originally composed in Chinese and later translated into English (for most with a very long gap of time in between), are featured in Peripheral Surveys' beautiful autumn anniversary edition: Disbelief, Women, Minority, Periphery. Some of my readers (any of you out there...? ;p) might have already come across these poems in my little blog here, but the set is presented in such a visually aesthetic manner and the journal itself is a rich literary and artistic gem to delve into; hence I am linking it here to my poetic-oneiric (barely awake) space. My poetry is here. I have also written some notes on the inspirations behind the poetry and process of my translations, which for me is very much like re-creating again, for a few of the Chinese poems featured in the journal. The notes can be found in my blog post here.
Kenro Izu, Blue series, Still Life 1119b, 2004 (via)
My dear poet-philosopher-musician friend Alain Minod shared this exquisite, musical beauty with me the other day. For me, music is salvation, it is paradise. As Schopenhauer once said, what distinguishes our aesthetic consciousness from the ordinary one is that it lifts, however temporarily, the veil of perception, or maya, and blesses us with glimpses of what is transcendent, what is eternal, what is real and true, the ultimate beauty and truth. In this sense, our aesthetic experience/consciousness is similar in its essence to meditation. How is life possible without music, when life is music...?
“Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.”
I do not love you except because I love you; I go from loving to not loving you, From waiting to not waiting for you My heart moves from cold to fire. I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you Is that I do not see you but love you blindly. Maybe January light will consume My heart with its cruel Ray, stealing my key to true calm. In this part of the story I am the one who Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you, Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
~Pablo Neruda
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Hands and Horse Skull, 1931 *via: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
*Read a poem by Arthur Rimbaud and was reminded of this from the archive -- an old piece written more than eleven years ago. Rimbaud's poem to follow after Vertigo and image.
(Memories from a Subconscious Nightmare...)
It is the most lavish fragrance, the most devitalising. Does it make me want to kill? Or does it make me want to breathe. I could as if smell the flushes of crimson, and then they paled my hearing into avalanching silences. The silence was so poisonous, so decaying, so huge and hopeless; eclipsing all that was morally good or vital to my health - ceaselessly. It was my angel, my angel with waxen wings. "Was ascension such an unreachable dream?" Asked my angel. It was such a dark night, so dark that it blinded me. It blinded everything. The incandescence of the deepest night had burned the last speck of sombre stars with a lurid smile of bitter sarcasm. This humid and luxurious beauty, this lavish and choking fragrance, brought my extreme disgust and happiness into life and married them with the witness of my very own eye. May I shed my tears, which would never again be produced artificially? Or may I burst out laughing hysterically? If only I could cry out with the slightest sadness. Now this fragrance has turned its own veins into the most ecstatic earthly joy that seems so very vague, and yet so very real. Now this fragrance has left the residue in me the deepest grief. Could I have ever tasted an emotion as sharp? Or am I creating my indifferent tears woven so meticulously into my words - a world that can only be sensed visually but blindly, and can only be conceived of with such a harsh sound by an avalanching silence. I was about to woo, to woo this devitalising fragrance. And I was about to kill, to kill my angel after all the pleasure of worldliness has decayed to its core. And now, I hear the river flowing in my body, with liquid so dark and polluted that I can hardly distinguish it from the unbounded night and the deceptively purified dream I am in. I have accumulated all my energy just to feel the retardation and inadequacy in me again, yet again. And now I hear your voice, my dearest pantomimist. Now I hear your voice, singing my song for me. You have given me a qualm, a qualitative change, and I can not even ask you to stay, to see me through the whole process - the whole process of passing. Yesterday we screamed together. I could almost feel your etherealisation, so beauteous you nauseated me. I wish I could cry, and ascend to the heavenly hell you have been presenting to me over and over again. Until I can no longer mumble, will I be led into a perfectly muted world, where I can only see your white sand dune, where I can only feel the flow of your words and murmurs of your voice crawling back into my blood, where I can only touch every single sound of your decaying petals by visualising my own pantomime. Now I see you bleeding, the sweetest nectar. Will I dream on? While you live on. And the next second I woke up soaking wet.
Is it possible that She will have me forgiven for ambitions continually crushed,—that an affluent end will make up for the ages of indigence,—that a day of success will lull us to sleep on the shame of our fatal incompetence? (O palms! diamond!—Love! strength!—higher than all joys and all fame!—in any case, everywhere—demon, god,—Youth of this being: myself!) That the accidents of scientific wonders and the movements of social brotherhood will be cherished as the progressive restitution of our original freedom?… But the Vampire who makes us behave orders us to enjoy ourselves with what she leaves us, or in other words to be more amusing. Rolled in our wounds through the wearing air and the sea; in torments through the silence of the murderous waters and air; in tortures that laugh in the terrible surge of their silence.
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