A Found Doodle*
"Walking out
into that cold and brutal
Mid-Western morning with
the smell of her shampoo melon and lime
in my hair, I didn't taste hope
in the air puffing out of my mouth",
such is the tenor of conversations I have
with this morning's rain as I wander up and down the avenues.
* On the back of a restaurant bill
My Poems
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Matthew 25:30 – Jorge Luis Borges
And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The first bridge on Constitution. At my feet the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths. Steam hisses up and up into the night which becomes, at a stroke, the Night of the Last Judgment. From the unseen horizon, and from the very center of my being, an infinite voice pronounced these things– things, not words. This is my feeble translation, time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word:
"Stars, bread, libraries of East and West, playing cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars, a human body to walk with on the earth, fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death, shadows for forgetting, mirrors which endlessly multiply, falls in music, gentlest of all time’s shapes, borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and morning, a bronze weight, a copy of Grettir Saga, algebra and fire, the charge at Junin in your blood, days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle, love, and the imminence of love, and intolerable remembering, dreams like buried treasure, generous luck, and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy–
all this was given to you and, with it, the ancient nourishment of heroes– treachery, defeat, humiliation. In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem."
–Translated by Alastair Reid
Big Book Of Poetry
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Birkets On Reading
I previously mentioned in passing of acquiring Sven Birkets's collection of essays on reading, "The Gutenberg Elegies". Over the past few nights, I have read quite a few of them, and I have felt that the high praise this book was greeted with when it came out in 1994-1995 is very well deserved. While I am yet to synthesize all the multiple strands of thought that Mr. Birkets laid out in this book, I thought I should make note of the some of the predictions he had made ten years ago in one of the final essays titled "The Death of Literature" that I thought were shockingly prescient.
After surveying the scene of reading and writing, in academia and in the larger populace, and finding it approaching an Eliot-ish wasteland, Mr. Birkets writes:
"We are, I believe, in typical American fashion, approaching another crisis. A crisis of meaning....slowly, steadily, we may see the pressure build, and with in the awareness in individuals of a vacany at the subjective core, a gnawing sense of need....and when the crisis does come, no chip or screen will have a solution for it. It will flash forth as an insistent need, a soul craving, and nothing binary will suffice.I predict three possible outcomes, or collective reactions to this crisis. One, a return to religion - to churches, temples, ashrams - to all the places that have traditionally served as repositories of the sacred. Whatever else they may be, our religions are grand stories that make a place for us. Two, I would expect to see a rush to therapy, the resort of choice for those who are experiencing a sense of emergency in secular terms. People will pay and pay to counter the distracted drift of the perpetual present with some explanatory narrative that has a purchase on time, on history. The fragmented self will be brought to trained professionals for reconstitution.
And three, I see the possibility of a genuine resurgence of the arts, of literature in particular. This may be wishful thinking - our electronic age may leave us unfit for the rigors of stationary words on a page - but grant me the wish. For literature remains unexcelled means of interior exploration and connection-making. The whole art - fiction, poetry, and drama - is fundamentally pledged to coherence, not just in terms of contents, but in forms as well. The structures of language represent a doorway back into duration..."
From an overview of the general scene, I think it is fair to conclude that it is the first two outcomes - a turn to messanic religiosity, and a dependance of mood altering drugs and therapy - that have come to pass with the exception of a few cavemen and luddites holding out in their booklined fastnesses.Still, still I have hope for reading and its resurgence, if for no other reason, it keeps things from falling apart while holding the somewhat cracked center of my life intact.
Book Posts
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