[1] Absurdity

On a bookstore’s flashy electronic display, names of people born this day, and falling in the following categories: industrialists, sitcom actors, movie stars, pop queens, and fashion models. If you could notice who were not covered – writers, poets, philosophers - those animate ghosts of bookstores –you perhaps have seen the absurdity, moving like a blood clot, to the heart of United States of America

[2] Random lines, understood and not understood, from here and there

Peregrina paloma imaginara Que enardeces los ultimos amores Alma de lut, de musica y de flores Peregrina paloma imaginara – Ricardo Jaimes Freire, a Bolivian poet

Bad is Bach! – Slogan on a t-shirt

Glittergates of elfinbone – James Joyce

[3] Approximately two visual thoughts

An fundamental visual pattern – echoing Borges’s twelve patterns of metaphor in poetry – is the gesture of a woman’s hand playing with her hair, perhaps placing it behind her ear, perhaps letting it fall across her face. Even though he has seen this before, he always experiences a sharp aesthetic pleasure in observing this gesture.

An artist facing a blank sheet of paper with paints and brushes perhaps finds it a little easier to capture a face, with all it planes, angles and curves, that someone facing the same sheet with words.

On seeing a woman’s red hanging earrings, I also see my sister’s first set of earrings, also red and hanging, after her ears were punched some twenty years ago.

[1] The Riddle of Poetry

· Poetry, and even books of poetry, is something beyond aesthetic theories

· Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars.

· … books are only occasions for poetry.

· A poem is a book is dead until someone reads it.

· Art happens only when we read a poem

· I must confess that I think a book is not really an immortal object to be picked up and duly worshipped, but rather an occasion for beauty.

· So we needn’t really worry about the fate of ‘classics’?

· Greek: oinopa pontos. English: wine-dark sea.

· Sometimes beauty is also created by how language and the reader simply shift in and with time.

· And at the end of it, poetry is impossible to define in language.

[2] Metaphor

· Every word is a dead metaphor.

· That sentence is a metaphor in itself, and is true in an etymological sense.

· Twelve or so ‘stock patterns’ of metaphors can be identified at work in various poems.

· Chesterton: A monster made of thousand eyes? Night sky

· Stevenson: a mere animal, the color of flowers? A woman

· The effectiveness of Chuan Tzu’s beautiful poem of metaphor – a man dreaming he was a butterfly etc – hinges on the use of butterfly. It would have not been as beautiful if he had used, say a tiger, a whale or a typewriter instead.

· The beauty of Frost’s repetition of the line ‘and miles to go before I sleep’, lies in its allusive use of metaphor. Miles = life. Sleep = death.

· Some metaphors, like the Anglo Saxon kenning – sea = whale road – cannot be traced back to one of the stock patterns of metaphor.

to be completed later

[1] August afternoon. Hot and humid. The sun had returned after a week on intermittent rain. He is hunched over a pool webbed with iron, watching a school of newly hatched gold fish swim in arcs among lotus roots. He can’t fix his attention one single little fish as their bodies are one deliberate blur – a crowd milling about in a stadium - in the pool, dark as an eye.

Then it happens, slowly. The blue of the sky seeps in, a few cloud float in, the adjacent building arrives in its suit of red brick and black shades drawn down, and finally a human onlooker saunters in – a person uncertain if he is the right room, in the right building – his own face looking back at his own.

[2] In a bookstore café, still an August afternoon, the heat still wet like a dog’s tongue – the smell of coffee, talk and distances. The fluorescent green table top is a sea between two continents of persons sitting at them & the space between the fingers in a clenched fist is how far this afternoon stands from that afternoon with you, in memory’s archives.

Someone - two, actually, enclosed in the same envelope of a body – is trying out baby names – Flora, Flores, Florence – by saying them out in a voice that vibrates in this ear. Someone else is discussing money and politics and both, someone is keying something into a computer, someone is crushing ice in a blender buzzing like a chain saw, and someone is there, here, observing all this – the eyes of God are observing this someone – till someone else looks back.

[3] A face disembarks from the hold of a glassy August afternoon. This face, now labeled – raven hair, skin shining like volcanic rock, and angles of the face sharp as a Sicilian vendetta – is crisply mounted on wax paper, leaving an after scent of chloroform, and stored away.

You will forget this face, the heat will do it. You will remember this face, dust whirling under open dormer windows on a hot August afternoon will resurrect it.

[4] Machado says: What the poet is searching for/ is not the fundamental I/ but the deep you.

You, which ‘you’, are you seeking in this August afternoon?

[5] Light, deep August afternoon’s, falling on the bare arms, neck and shoulders of a girl sitting by the far window, is absorbing more than a reflection from her skin.

Something else is shining, this mystery which lies beneath.

[6] Light is growing weak; the August afternoon is turning in, its day done. When your note came last, I was reading Spanish poetry, and when I came today I was reading Spanish poetry. If I think of you – musical as a Jimenez’s naked woman, ‘Music -/ a naked woman/ running mad through pure light’ – instead of these far separated wordy notes, Time becomes the wheel, is the wheel, instead of the road underneath it.

I shall say this to you, if I remember it, when we meet again in a hot August afternoon.