Basho on poetry

Learn from the pine

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.

Don't follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.

The basis of art is change in the universe. What's still has changeless form. Moving things change, and because we cannot put a stop to time, it continues unarrested. To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.

Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of things --mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity-- and enjoy the falling blossoms and the scattering leaves.

One should know that a hokku is made by combining things.

The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world.

One must first of all concentrate one's thoughts on an object. Once one's mind achieves a state of concentration and the space between oneself and the object has disappeared, the essential nature of the object can be perceived. Then express it immediately. If one ponders it, it will vanish from the mind.

Sabi is the color of the poem. It does not necessarily refer to the poem that describes a lonely scene. If a man goes to war wearing stout armor or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that.

When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate aa moment.

Composition must occur in an instant, like a woodcutter feeling a huge tree, or a swordsman leaping at his enemy. It is also like cutting a ripe watermelon with sharp knife or like taking a large bite at a pear.

Is there any good in saying everything?

...

Eat vegetable soup rather than duck stew.

Matsuo Basho

secret

best dreams are --
kept secret

I am There

I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is born, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the kent of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there, I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the sky cries,
and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home 

Mahmoud Darwish

Confessions # 1

In one of my previous jobs, I was asked to write letters on behalf of my employer who already had an assistant for that task. The letters were meant to be simple one or two sentences expressing regrets of declining a certain invitation to attend a certain meeting or gratitude of being invited to such a well-organized event. Not being in a position to decline the task I was given, and at the same time out of fury that I was asked to perform a basic task that someone in the position of my employer is supposed to be able to do, and adding to that, that my employer had an employee whose main task was to perform what I was asked, I wrote these letters of at most two sentences with an overtly stylized language which sounded too sophisticated that rather indicated an arrogant mockery than sophistication.

My employer liked the letters that I wrote so much that he kept asking for more.

I took a Kafkaesque pleasure in my secret revenge.

What happens to a dream deferred?

HARLEM
Langston Hughes


What happens to a dream deferred?


Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?


Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.


Or does it explode?

one of those moments, travelling in time

Hajo (Hans Joachim Rose), Self-Portrait, 1931

fire, gaze, the thing (or das ding)

“the outer gaze always alters the inner thing…by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire, that for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself, or otherwise perish in blindness, flawed.”

Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String

time

When one doesn't run, time passes slowly.

"In childhood everything is near, everything is immediately present, there isn't the possibility of distance, of an overview, every moment appears to be an eternity."

Peter Weiss

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.