Take off your words they get in the way...

Narcissus

"Narcissus knew that he could never have himself. But if he'd had a photograph maybe his tragedy would have been avoided."

Vik Muniz, Mirrors; Or, 'How to Steal a Masterpiece'

There are no paradises other than lost paradises.

J.L. Borges

Conversation with a stone

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look round,
breathe my fill of you."

"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I've come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don't have much time.
My mortality should touch you."

"I'm made of stone," says the stone,
"and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don't have the muscles to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.
Admit you don't know them well yourself."

"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,
"but there isn't any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me, but you'll never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
all my insides turned away."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I don't seek refuge for eternity.
I'm not unhappy.
I'm not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I'll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe."

"You shall not enter," says the stone.
"You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I haven't got two thousand centuries,
so let me come under your roof."

"If you don't believe me," says the stone,
"just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,
although I don't know how to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in."

"I don't have a door," says the stone.

Wislawa Szymborska

city poetics

I missed reading a good poem, or writing one. trying to write one. suddenly coming up with one. but I don't have much time nowadays. what a bad excuse! or, let me say, I don't have a poetic space in my mind these days. so I am indulging myself on the neon scriptures of the city, of the boards, of the ads posted on lamp posts, that is, on the poetics of the city. I wish I was taking their pictures. This is something I saw today, and hence I leave you with the unbearable lightness of its heaviness.

Silence is a text which is easy to misread.

on lies, secrets, and silence

"She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together, she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over ... she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men. She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds la Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salomé, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together."

from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Adrienne Rich

dreams on the back of a tiger

What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him -even concerning his own body- in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, and the intricate quivering of the fibres? She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous - as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger.

Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.

If you ever run across a bear...

The bears are extremely curious animals. They generally avoid contact with humans yet they might get close in search of food, especially during their food frenzy in fall before they hibernate. Bears can be dangerous and attack in cases when they are protective of their siblings or if they are wounded.

If you ever run across a bear

• don't run; you won't have any chance. Bears are faster and stronger than you, and they can climb trees. Even if you manage to climb a tree, the bears are known to be patient. And running will only trigger bears' curiosity.
  
• stand still and try to create noises, for example by using two stones: bears are afraid of avalanches, the trembling of the earth beneath their feet and falling of the rocks and soil. Who doesn't fear that if one lives on the mountains?
• you can play dead if you are good at it. Still, the bear might check whether you are really dead or just pretending, they are just smart.

madness and meaning / what is a blog?

Is a blog more than (or, less than) a marker board, like the surface of a fridge covered with pictures and notes and ads? I love my virtual magnet board where I stick some quotes and notes and pics.

Here is such a quote on madness, from an article on the story of Nabokov "Signs and Symbols":

"madness, unlike literature, fails in the quest of meaning and is therefore associated to silence, as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida suggested, whereas literature, although sometimes verging on madness, is characterized by the desire to live and to move away from the silence of death."
Jacqueline Hamrit
this is a madness driven outside the shore of language where the fishes of meaning swim.

and a contrary one:

"On n'est fou que de sensé ("Only meaning drives you mad" or "No madness without meaning"), writes [Michèle] Montrelay, -the unconscious is the only defence against a language frozen into pure, fixed or institutional meaning, and what we call sexuality, in its capacity to unsettle the subject, is a break against the intolerable limits of common sense."
Jacqueline Rose

By posting them, I am intending to forget about them, but at the same time to make them near, so as to return and think about them in a new light. Why do people stick notes on their fridge door? In order to remember, or to materialize and externalize so that they don't have to keep in their minds all the time?

reminders of the day

circles on the water

I watch the drops dripping on the surface of the water. they form circles and then the circles merge to create other circles, and they tremble and they tremble me. I extend my hand to touch the surface which looks like solid and put my finger just above the water and the line of the surface bounds with the touch, my finger still dry. I look closer as the circles fade and as reflection of the sky with white clouds on the surface gets clear, the visage of my face enters the frame, so distant, so mysteriously real.

düş: kurmacanın gerçeğe dokunduğu yer

düş: kurmacanın gerçeğe dokunduğu yer

düş bütünlüğün sağlandığı yer, geleceğin ve geçmişin birleştiği, renklerin aktığı, istemsiz imgelerin hareket ettiği uzam. iç ile dışın ayrılamadığı boyut.

düşlerimin berraklığı ve iletilerinin dolaysızlığı dehşete düşürüyor beni. nereden kopup geldiklerini bilmediğim imgeler başka bir dünyanın kaynağına açılıyor. kehanet, öngörü, yoğun bir yaşama arzusu.

saçmalık.

düş ben imgesinin sakatlandığı, kırıldığı yer. anlamın saçmalaştığı, arzunun sıvılaştığı, bilincin buharlaştığı, benlik ile dış arasındaki sınırların kalktığı enlem. düş, içinden dünyaya düşülen yer. asla geri dönülemeyen. her zaman farklı, her zaman yeni, her zaman şaşırtıcı, her zaman beklenmedik.

düşlerim kehanetimdir, ne olduğumun ve ne olacağımın kehanetleri. ne olmak istediğimin. ne olmak istemediğimin. ne olmaktan korktuğumun. ne olmaktan kaçındığımın. ne olmayı ertelediğimin. ne olamadığımın. olma hallerimi kurcaladığım ve kurguladığım boşluk.

düş olmadığım öbür yanlarımın toplamı. düş, yanlarımı her açıdan görebildiğim nokta.

Something

I am still amusing myself with the Lacanian definition of love:

Love is to give what you don't have, to someone who doesn't want.

more will come...

a beginning of writing?

"Love is mute, Novalis says; only poetry makes it speak. Song means nothing: it is in this that you will understand at last what it is that I give you; as useless as the whip of yarn, the pebble held out to his mother by his child."

"To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not --this is the beginning of writing."

Roland Barthes, from Fragments: A Lover's Discourse

auto-erotics

Unuseful lists # 2

a to do list

• look out from the window until you count ten people passing your street
• learn the speeling of "procrastination"
• write a poem entitled "pair per tree"
• contemplate on whether it is possible at any moment to do nothing
  
• examine the petals of a caucus-like flower for at least ten minutes
• miss your street while walking back home, indeliberately
• make a shopping list of thing you would never want to buy
• make a "please no!" gift list, terminable
• make a list of possible responses to use in case you encounter relationship clichés such as "it's not you, it's me"
  

A long journey,
starts with a small step.

"I think it was John Lennon who once said 'life is what happens when you're making other plans', and that's exactly the way I feel. Although he also said 'I am the walrus, I am the eggman', so I don't know what to believe."

Tim Canterbury, in BBC sitcom The Office