Gorse Fires - Michael Longley
Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
Five or six men stand gazing at a rusty tractor
Before carrying implements to separate fields.
I am travelling from one April to another. It is the same train between the same embankments. Gorse fires are smoking, but primroses burn And celandines and white may and gorse flowers.
Big Book Of Poetry
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Objects and Apparitions - Octavio Paz
- for Joseph Cornell
Hexagons of wood and glass, scarcely bigger than a shoe box, with room in them for night and all it's lights.
Monuments to every moment, refuse of every moment, used: cages for infinity.
Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice, pins, stamps, and glass beads: tales of time.
Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes: in the four corners of the box shadowless ladies play at hide and seek.
Fire buried in the mirror, water sleeping in the agate: solos of Jenny Colonne and Jenny Lind.
"One has to commit a painting," said Degas, "the way one commits a crime." But you contructed boxes where things hurry away from their names.
Slot machine of visions, condensation flask for conversations, hotel of crickets and constellations.
Minimal, incoherent fragments: the opposite of History, creator of ruins, out of your ruins you have made creations.
Theater of the spirits: objects putting the laws of identity through hoops.
The "Grand Hotel de la Couronne": in a vial, the three of clubs and, very surprised, Thumbelina in gardens of reflections.
A comb is a harp strummed by the glance of a little girl born dumb.
The reflector of the inner eye scatters the spectacle: God all alone above an extinct world.
The apparitions are manifest, their bodies weigh less than light, lasting as this phrase lasts.
Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes my words became visible for a moment.
trans by Elizabeth Bishop
Big Book Of Poetry
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Digressions - Hunt, Cowboy Mouth & Ondaatje
So to cheer me up, and because I realized that I am posting something or the other here almost everyday (mostly as a way to distract myself from myself), I decided that I need to change my logo. And by fortuitous circumstances I discovered the work of Hundertwasser, an Austrian artist. I think it is highly impossible to view these paintings, and still feel as angst-y as before. Thus-ly a logo is made out of a painting, a sort of a reminder to myself that life does not follow (perhaps it was never meant to) the tyranny of straight lines, that it spirals, circles, sits in large blobs, sprouts as trees from high windows, grows globular Islamic domes, slides on floors that are slightly titled, is slightly deranged, and is always colorful, even in moments of heavy sadness (what would its color then?). Also here are few further links.
And here is today's music video (courtesy YouTube), featuring Cowboy Mouth, a band from New Orleans (now nearly gone, Lordy!) whose music is not very well know, perhaps deservedly because they are not all that sonically hot, but whose live performances resemble some good ol' fashioned revival meetings, i.e., they rock in the truest sense. My first encounter with these gentlemen took place a few years ago, when I was a greenhorn at the Heartbreak Bar, and to substitute that fallible religion called Love, I took to live music. It was a concert of some 30,000 souls all jumping up and down hollering as Fred beat mad rhythms on those drum, and make all of those present believe, for a moment at least, in the milk of human kindness and love. So yes, if they are coming to a town near you, kind readers, you should go get some religion.
Speaking of New Orleans, I wonder if anyone of you have read Michel Ondaatje’s novel "Coming Through Slaughter"? It apparently is styled like set of jazz tunes, with improvisation at its heart. While the writing in this novel, like the latter novels, throws off sharp sparks like those that can be seen off a knife grinder's wheel, I felt it doesn't somehow congeal into an artifact called a novel. Maybe this is because of my limitations as a reader?
My Daily Notes
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