香奈兒

Here is another new short poem written for 小草 Xiao-Tsao (Young Grass) Academy...


＜香奈兒＞

她的愛，一位遠見卓識家的前瞻夢想
是夜間飛舞的蝴蝶　幻化自白晝舒坦的毛蟲　
皆合一：似色彩、似樂音
純白光線藉由菱鏡反射出無限絢爛輝澤，那孕育著一切的潔白明光
如聖心堂的玻璃　夏卡爾筆下五彩的穹蒼　
巴黎歌劇院流溢出的細碎舞步與音符
皆源起與終止於無盡的黑與白　純粹絕對之美
黑與白　最完美的和諧

「自由， 一件華美莊嚴的禮物。」
 “Freedom, a magnificent gift.” ～Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel in 1910

Words, Poems, Reveries, Muse

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)

***

且也相與吾之耳矣，庸詎知吾所謂吾之乎？且汝夢為鳥而厲乎天，夢為魚而沒於淵。不識今之言者，其覺者乎，其夢者乎？造適不及笑，獻笑不及排，安排而去化，乃入於寥天一。
（況且人們交往總借助形骸而稱述自我，又怎麼知道我所稱述的軀體一定就是我呢？而且你夢中變成鳥便振翅直飛藍天，你夢中變成魚便搖尾潛入深淵。不知道今天我們說話的人，算是醒悟的人呢，還是做夢的人呢？心境快適卻來不及笑出聲音，表露快意發出笑聲卻來不及排解和消洩，安於自然的推移而且忘卻死亡的變化，於是就進入到寂寥空虛的自然而渾然成為一體。）

~莊子內篇<大宗師>；張耿光釋義

***

荀子性惡篇：「人之性惡，其善者偽也。今人之性，生而有好利焉，順是，故爭奪生而辭讓亡焉；生而有疾惡焉，順是，故殘賊生而忠信亡焉；生而有耳目之欲，有好聲色焉，順是，故淫亂生而禮義文理亡焉。然則從人之性，順人之情，必出於爭奪，合於犯分亂理，而歸於暴，故必將有師法之化，禮義之道，然後出於辭讓，合於文理，而歸於治。用此觀之，然則，人之性惡，明矣。其善者偽也。」

***

金剛經：「一切有為法，如夢幻泡影，如露亦如電，應作如是觀。」

"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.)

～The Body of Beatrice, by Robert P. Harrison

Poetry Feature: Disbelief, Women, Minority, Periphery

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.”

~Mishima Yukio

*See also Peripheral Surveys' archive of past issues.

*

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

眩暈 Vertigo (from the poetic-oneiric archive)

*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. 

(Written on 28/June/2001.)

+++

Arthur Rimbaud, “Anguish”

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.

(Translated by Louise Varese)

Agon without a Name

You pierced me

with a repeated force that was lighter
than what was bearable,
that felt less than paradise;
more than an imagined perception ―
sundered wholeness,
emoted affliction.

Inside my orchid flower was your truth,
your heaven that would not open.
I could not.

Those sounds of love, those sighs of love,
endless breaths of love, cascading noises of love,
resigning, removing, rising, falling...
upon the pressure of a finger
and the touch of a palm.

Words extend, they press their lips
on the pain
of an ever-growing tree branch,
curve of my neck,
and yet the leaves would not tremble,
sunlight could not devote.

I loved, and I vibrated;
I inhaled, and I exhaled,
in a way your intensification of my head
did not reveal
the flesh surrounding my heart,
and would not enter
the sculpture of me,
I could not.
A sculpture I was not.

Your fingers glided
like a starving butterfly
over my ribcage,
brushing against vertebrae of my spine,
penetrating the insides of my mind.
With the strength of ephemeral gunpowder,
like quicksilver carefully preserved
and dangerously sealed
in a glass tube.

Whose sorrowful pretence?

The subtleties and vagueness
of my self for you,
sadly it was not.
Fleeting, and yet not,
never fast.
Will never last.

Since it must be so,
no one remembered more
than what they could hope
to forget.
And what would have been my wound
when I was closest to the sun,
closest
to the reflection
of the palest moon?

The Persian Prince Humay Meeting the Chinese Princess Humayun in a Garden, circa 1450, by Junayd, Persian miniature painting on silk. © Bridgeman Art Library / Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France / Giraudon

丘壑，頸項，島嶼：metaphoric hills & vales, symbolic napes & islands

Wherever I look you are islands
a constellation of flowers breathing on the sea
deep-forested islands mountainous and fragrant
fires on a bright ocean
at the root one fire
all my life I have wanted to touch your ankle
running down to its shore
I beach myself on you
I listen
I see you among still leaves
regard of rock pool
by sun and moon and stars
island waterfalls and their echoes
are your voice your shoulders the whole of you standing
and you turn to me as though your feet were in mist
flowers birds same colors
as your breath
the flowers deliberately smell of you
and the birds make their feathers
not to fly but to
feel of you

~W. S. Merwin, 'Islands'

Polygon of Love

This inverted triangle begins
with luminosity
the pearl from Avalon.
Breaths of breathless love ceaselessly flirting,
seducing your Utopian stars,
extending thighs of sighs on the sides.
They die
in morning sunlight;
half awake, half asleep.
Over the stretched dome of skies,
a transparent line closes her air
atop
with the unseen, the unfelt:
a non-collinear,
unique plane
of pearlescent shadows.
Watercolours of a forgotten equinox
in Shambhala.

As the darkened tunnel leading to Utopian vertex
narrows and narrows
and narrows, to almost a disappearance
An Atlantis made of sea rocks with iridescent silver lights
glistening, shimmering, a little gloworm,
whence a flow of Klimt's golden liquid
releases,
vertigo ensues, pleasure remains,
tear stains and a ballet of smiles,
emeralds of burning Absinthe intensified with refined sugar.
(...hallucinations of two hearts...)

They crave ecstasy, distilled
and stilled with Orpheus' music.
I wish I knew the melodies,
what it felt like,
the tryst inside of me.

8' Sep' 2012

This new short poem of mine was inspired partially by the beautifully imaginative creations of jewellery artist Janet Theresa Miller -- her "Whispers of Atlantis" series. I think I must be obsessed with the collection as I cannot seem to get the exquisite imageries and forms out of my mind...

Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, by John William Waterhouse

An early poem of mine, and Georges Bataille's words...

*About that lone rose flowering in snow, in the deep of winter, flushed and intoxicated with foolishly drunken ecstasy... Those flickering, dying flames setting her ablaze...*

The frozen time, stagnated, you are
the language, flowing for ever. You are
blinded by the black mists. There is a dim light, tinkling.
But seeing through your eyes,
the world is swooning and blurred.
A flower dies in the blink of an eye, and
a flower blooms in the withered twilight.

...... 流光

*     *     *

"And I think that in literature we can see the human perspective in its entirety, because literature doesn't permit us to live without seeing human nature under its most violent aspect. [...] And finally, it's literature that makes it possible for us to perceive the worst and learn how to confront it, how to overcome. In short, a man who plays finds in the game the force to overcome what the game contains of horror."


The night is my nudity
the stars are my teeth
I throw myself among the dead
dressed in white sunlight

~Georges Bataille, "I throw myself among the dead," from The Impossible

Mongolia 16/7

*Dated 16/July/2000 (also some 12 years ago...)

I love the unbounded green fields in Mongolia in particular. Everything was so still, and yet everything was moving and flowing. I could feel the minute, or even delicate, vibration of life within the strong peacefulness. I could feel the rhythm within that silent music. The cattle and horses were beautiful. Their black and brown skin was shining under the sunlight as if it were velvet. The fragrance of grass and the smell of animals; everything came to the smell of stillness in the air. The mountains in a great distance were covered with the greyish-blue silken touch. You can really swim in the vast greenness, swim in the Golden Lotus blossoms and swim in the clean and light sky. So there was this serene beauty in every touch, in the sensuous world belonging both to celestials and human beings. The sunset here began with purely golden shines and then smeared over and dyed the sky and the earth with melancholic pink. Everything was melting together into a pure spark. The sky in Mongolia was not as blue as it sometimes is in London, so blue that it is piercing. The Mongolian sky was light, clean and limpid. Like music. Like a song.


"The poignant song is echoed through all the sky in many-coloured tears and smiles, alarms and hopes; waves rise up and sink again, dreams break, and form. In me is thy own defeat of self."

"It is this overspreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into sufferings and joy in human homes; and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet's heart."

"He it is who puts his enchantment upon these eyes and joyfully plays on the chords of my heart in varied cadence of pleasure and pain.
He it is who weaves the web of this maya in evanescent hues of gold and silver, blue and green, and lets peep out through the folds of his feet, at whose touch I forget myself.
Days come and ages pass, and it is ever he who moves my heart in many a name, in many a guise, in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow."

"Keeping steps with that restless, rapid music, seasons come dancing and pass away---colours, tunes, and perfumes pour in endless cascades in the abounding joy that scatters and gives up and dies every moment."

~ from Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore, extracts of verses 71, 84, 72 & 70

Mongolia 15/7

(*Written when I first travelled to Inner Mongolia on an art and archaeological journey, with a group led by a painter/sculptor/ceramicist and erudite art historian and his wife, around the summer of 2000. It was during moments like this, as described in my journal entries, that I realised that which is the most beautiful, poignant and the most miraculous one can imagine and experience is the nature. How it moves us. How it thrills us. How it compels us to be transported and lifted above our ordinary sense of self-focus and consciousness, whilst our heart is ever so still and our gaze is ever transfixed upon what is all around us, with such tender depths of intimacy and immediacy, such an embrace.)


One day I was looking out from the window of the bus. There were some lilac clouds mingled with the light blue sky, as if a soft piece of lilac silk were being stretched over in an intense nerve. The sky reminded me of Magritte's "The Raw Nerve," though the clouds might be more dimensional through the game played by light and sky. That vast gauzy violet cloud was dripping down to the green earth like waterfalls made of silk. A drip of lilac watercolour got into the pure and white clouds, and then it took over all the beauty and life which formerly belonged to the sky. It was the limpid vibration in a false sense of the ominous. Standing on a plain of the mountain top, my world then was uncharted; another large cloud with amazingly graceful golden embroidery, symbolising an infiltrative omen of glimmerings, was anticipating a miracle that was to come down to earth from heaven.

The lines of the mountains were so tender yet so strong that they resembled the lines of human shoulders. And there was this green mist covering the earth, soft and blurred and silky. Have you ever had this painful feeling when looking at the sunset? It sometimes looks like an enormous wound, a swollen gall, swelling and swelling, spreading all over until it painfully chokes the sky. The world then is only the sky, only the painfully scarlet wound.

René Magritte, The Raw Nerve, 1960

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world)

What a voice. What a heart. The soul transported and transcended in the most beautiful melodies of lyric baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who left us in May this year. I will always miss his music.
"I am dead to the world's tumult, and I rest in a quiet realm. I live alone in my heaven, in my love and in my song..."


Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,
Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!

Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,
Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet!
Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!

{ English translation below by Emily Ezust }

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!

(*Text for 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,' by Friedrich Rückert, set to music by Gustav Mahler. One of Mahler's five Rückert-Lieder.)


《我被這個世界遺棄》

詩句和音樂看似頹廢灰色的厭世表象之下，卻隱含深刻動人的真情。馬勒認為這首歌曲有一種「眼見情感已經滿溢到舌尖，卻發不出任何聲音」的感覺，甚至認為這首歌曲表達的就是他自己。樂曲裡蘊含的情感內斂醇厚，以極緩慢的速度推進；在豎琴、雙簧管和法國號的主導下，彷彿勾勒出藝術超越俗世之後達到孤絕境界的淒清美感。這對日後馬勒譜寫第五號交響曲第四樂章有明顯影響。

*上述文字取自臺灣國家交響樂團 National Symphony Orchestra 於9/26/2011晚間音樂會節目單之樂曲闡述


‎("...Mahler thought this song conveyed a certain feeling of 'sensing the emotion is already filled to the brim, right at the tip of your tongue, and yet you're not able to make a single sound.' He even thought this song was an expression of himself..." His love, emotions and feelings are so deep and intense that, instead of an avalanching outpour, it was quiet, solitude, even silence -- art and aesthetics unveiling the maya of this world and lifting it into a realm of pure beauty.)


It was a beautiful late September night, immersed in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and Rückert-Lieder (as well as Wagner's Lohengrin prelude). Mahler's music and love, to me, are like Rilke's poetry -- one of my favourite poets whose words always move and teach me tremendously, my hero-poet who has transcended it all and yet looks back at you like a Bodhisattva, takes your hand to walk on the path together.


Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with Daniel Barenboim on piano


an equally heartrending rendition of Dietrich Fishcer-Dieskau with Leonard Bernstein on piano

Lhasa's Story

She reminds me so much of a friend of mine, the way she speaks, the way she always smiles when she speaks... I love the story Lhasa's father told her, and in particular the way she tells it -- with her soft, husky, almost mystic voice. What a beautiful soul she was.



When my lifetime had just ended
And my death had just begun
I told you I’d never leave you
But I knew this day would come

Give me blood for my blood wedding
I am ready to be born
I feel new
As if this body were the first I’d ever worn

I need straw for the straw fire
I need hard earth for the plow
Don't ask me to reconsider
I am ready to go now

I'm going in I’m going in
This is how it starts
I can see in so far
But afterwards we always forget
Who we are

I'm going in I’m going in
I can stand the pain
And the blinding heat
'Cause I won't remember you
The next time we meet

You'll be making the arrangements
You'll be trying to set me free
Not a moment for the meeting
I'll be busy as a bee

You'll be talking to me
But I just won't understand
I'll be falling by the wayside
You'll be holding out your hand

Don't you tempt me with perfection
I have other things to do
I didn't burrow this far in
Just to come right back to you

I'm going in I’m going in
I have never been so ugly
I have never been so slow
These prison walls get closer now
The further in I go

I'm going in I’m going in
I like to see you from a distance
And just barely believe
And think that
Even lost and blind
I still invented love

I'm going in
I’m going in
I’m going in

*          *          *

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart

And give to this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all remain

Too
Frightened.

~Hafiz Sherazi

My poems featured in Deathly Romantic's (now Dark Eye Glances) "Mad Poetry"

It is a great joy and wonderful privilege for me that Deathly Romantic Magazine (now Dark Eye Glances) has selected two of my poems (Snow Leopard and Black Panther, for H. & The First Poem: for David) to be featured in the "Mad Poetry" section of its summer issue. I discovered this gem via its editor/publisher Garth von Buchholz's beautifully sensual and swooningly emotional poem Anaïs and Henry, where one can truly feel the poet's passionate heart. I recited the poem out loud after my first reading, as for me, it is almost like a play in itself, in addition to being complete and utter poetry. The poem is written as a dialogue, and according to the poet, partially inspired by The Song of Songs of Solomon. Garth is currently working on a collection of "darkly romantic" love poems for an upcoming book, which I am eagerly anticipating...

Many thanks to Garth and Deathly Romantic, once again, for featuring my poetry. This is like my birthday celebration coming early, and I feel I am closer to the realm of my idol and heroine Morticia Addams (oh, the "goth chick" in me will forever be fascinated and mesmerised by the darkly elegant and impossibly romantic Morticia and Gomez...)! More importantly, it has been a real pleasure getting to know works of other like-minded poets and artists, and I look forward to many more collaborations with Deathly Romantic in the future.


On other surety none; freely we serve
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall:
And Som are fall'n, to disobedience fall'n,
And so from Heav'n to deepest Hell; O fall
From what high state of bliss into what woe!

~John Milton: Paradise Lost, Book V

‎"Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet;
But a Pebble of the brook,
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

 ~William Blake: The Clod and the Pebble, from Songs of Experience

La Confession (by Lhasa de Sela)

Je n'ai pas peur

De dire que je t'ai trahi

Par pure paresse

Par pure mélancolie

Qu'entre toi

Et le Diable

J'ai choisi le plus

Confortable

Mais tout cela

N'est pas pourquoi

Je me sens coupable

Mon cher ami

Je n'ai pas peur de dire

Que tu me fais peur

Avec ton espoir

Et ton grand sens

De l'honneur

Tu me donnes envie

De tout détruire

De t'arracher

Le beau sourire

Et meme ca

N'est pas pourquoi

Je me sens coupable

C'est ca le pire

Je me sens coupable

Parce que j'ai l'habitude

C'est la seule chose

Que je peux faire

Avec une certaine

Certitude

C'est rassurant

De penser

Que je suis sûre

Se ne pas me tromper

Quand il s'agit

De la question

De ma grande culpabilité

Je n'ai pas peur

De dire que j'ai triché

j'ai mis les plus pures

De mes pensées

Sur le marché

J'ai envie de laisser tomber

Toute cette idée

De "vérité"

Je garderais

Pour me guider

Plaisir et culpabilité

Two poems written for me...!

By my very dear friend, the poet-philosopher-musician Alain Minod. Thank you sincerely Alain for these beautiful creations and for allowing me to share them in my little space.
Read more of Alain's writing and poetry here, and listen to his music and poetry reading here.


Name and Sun

My name is a small shadow
He stays along
A half broken wall
The holes are stars

My name is a little iced
But he is a  stone
Thrown away
To the beats of eternity

But he is in love
With the sun

Each time that he meets him
Early
On the morning
Or
On the evening
He gathers the flowers
Of the life

During the nights
He brings several flowers
And tries
To make others names
Than the well-known

Then he is – in one’s turn –
Glittering
In the holes of the present
Then he touches the love
And – so – he breaks
A little more the wall

Every flower
That he keeps with him
Is dayfully enlightening
Amongst his shadow

Is he really looking
For my ecstasy
At any rate
He is not falling down
And – standing up –
He calls  me
In order to
Make
A little less
Shadow

And – each time –
I keep more memory !


*          *          *


For You : I would like to send : A real kiss that I lend - after all the
distance - the best of my thought - For your sound of music caught -
You the lightning presence - Dream of flower- taken on the late hour
Freedom in the air - Something in your ear - Is still falling in my mind - Something very kind - Something new from you - ( in my country happyfew ) dance like a fountain - With wind amongst men-
Here in the deepth of winter - Is that spring water ?...