[via FFFFound!]

The Case for 'Spiritual Atheism'

School for Visionaries

The teacher sits with eyes closed.
When you play chess alone it’s always your move.
I’m in the last row with a firefly in the palm of my hand.
The girl with red braids, who saw the girl with red braids?

—

Do you believe in something truer than truth?
Do you prick your ears even when you know damn well no one is coming?
Does that explain the lines on your forehead?
Your invisible friend, what happened to her?

—

The rushing wind slides to a stop to listen.
The prisoner opens the thick dictionary lying on his knees.
The floor is cold and his feet are bare.
A chew-toy of the gods, is that him?

—

Do you stare and stare at every black windowpane
As if it were a photo of your unsmiling parents?
Are you homesick for the house of cards?
The sad late-night cough, is it yours?

— Charles Simic (Jackstraws)

[via it loved to happen]

#10: A man is already in heaven. It's kind of nice and calm although he still keeps his life-long fear of dying one day.

#71: All of her fears suddenly went away. 'From now on, I'll stay with my eyes closed,' she said to herself and almost immediately got the desire to open them.

Nedko Solakov's series Fears
[via CR blog]

The poet who decided early on that poetry was about communicating with other people, not about lofty hermeticism and language games, was dying in the silence of his solitary days and nights. One of the last humans who spoke to him in his hours of agony was an uneducated woman who took care of his small household, a wonderful person with a great heart. I like to think of it: in the vast polyphony of the almost hundred years of his dramatic existence, the ultimate sound he heard was an unschooled voice of goodness. Perhaps in this soothing voice he found something like an arch between his early idyllic childhood in the Lithuanian countryside and his closing moments; and in between there remained, bracketed out for once, the rage of modern history, the loneliness of his long exile, the violence of his struggles, of his thought, his imagination, his rebellions.

-Adam Zagajewski, 'I Can't Write a Memoir of Czeslaw Milosz'

Dedication

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.

-Czeslaw Milosz

Is not general incivility the very essence of love?

—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

['Love and Addiction']
[via Fort of Sand]

-DoDo Jin Ming
[via Heading East]

we have passed from death into life, because we love...

-John

For a while we lived with people,
but we saw no sign in them of the faithfulness we wanted.
It's better to hide completely within
as water hides in metal, as fire hides in a rock.

-Rumi

Unhappiness is not to love without being loved, but to be loved when one does not love.
_____

All existence-issues are passionate. To think about them so as to leave out passion is not to think about them at all. It is to forget the point that one indeed is oneself an existing person. To exist is an art.

-Kierkegaard, Provocations

The Player

Ladies' Car

Lies I've told my 3 year old recently

Lies I've told my 3 year old recently

Trees talk to each other at night.

All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.

Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.

Tiny bears live in drain pipes.

If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.

The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

I will always be there.

[via clusterflock]

"Why do you want to write poetry?" If the young man answers, "I have important things I want to say," then he is not a poet. If he answers, "I like hanging around words listening to what they say," then maybe he is going to be a poet.

—W. H. Auden

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

-Carl Sagan

“Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”

-Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)

[quoted here]

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

-Elbert Hubbard

Alone With Everybody

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

-Charles Bukowski

Wannabe hip hop artist: Yo, you like hip hop?
Local: No. But he does. (points at random tourist standing still and disappears into the crowd)

--42nd & Broadway

[Overheard in New York]

The only man who is educated is the man who has learned how to learn; the man who has learned how to adapt and change; the man who has realized that no knowledge is secure, that only the process of seeking knowledge gives a basis for security. Changingness, a reliance on process rather than upon static knowledge, is the only thing that makes any sense as a goal for education in the modern world.

-Carl Rogers

Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.

-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

My guest, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West, says the Iraq war is already won. I assume by Michael Phelps.

-Stephen Colbert

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

[via Seed's daily zeigeist]

Monet's 'Waterlilies'

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

-Robert Hayden

[via]

I cannot grow;
I have no shadow
To run away from,
I only play

I cannot err;
There is no creature
Whom I belong to,
Whom I could wrong.

I am defeat
When it knows it
Can now do nothing
By suffering.

All you lived through,
Dancing because you
No longer need it
For any deed.

I shall never be
Different. Love me.


-W.H. Auden, 'Song for St. Cecilia's Day,' II

Poets are ordinary people with a special love and distrust of language.

-George Szirtes

Epitaph

Now I'm not the brightest
knife in the drawer, but
I know a couple things
about this life: poverty
silence, impermanence
discipline and mystery.

The world is not illusory, we are

From crimson thread to toe tag

If you are not disturbed
there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry

And I know who I am
I'll be a voice
coming from nowhere,

inside-

be glad for me.


-Franz Wright

Swifts

1. Fist

It is impossible for me to remember
the cozy room I slept in as a child.
Somebody made my bed up to be paradise.
It was hard for me, a hard night, when I entered art.

The tendons in my wrist are visible.
What will I do now I have made this fist?
To loosen it feels weird, anticlimactic—
a misuse, a misunderstanding, of fists.

That's how it was with me that night.
And so, mysteriously, I lost my sweetness.
Weird, to feel intended for violence,
when what I wanted was an hour of rest.

-Dan Chiasson

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

-Hermann Hesse

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Joffe Numeroff

Don't give anything to anyone.

THE END

-Book-A-Minute

Snake Game Played on Dorm Windows

Watch the end to see a game of Pong.
[via Urban Prankster]

Listen

Everything about you,
my life, is both
make-believe and real.
We are like a couple
working the night shift
in a bomb factory.

Come quietly, one says
to the other
as he takes her by the hand
and leads her
to a rooftop
overlooking the city.

At this hour, if one listens
long and hard,
one can hear a fire engine
in the distance,
but not the cries for help,

just the silence
growing deeper
at the sight of a small child
leaping out of a window
with its nightclothes on fire.

-Charles Simic

When libertarians, for example, mock France for having a 35-hour work week, they confront the question with such a pinched, narrow vision that they are unable to see the other perspective. Perhaps it is less productive, in purely mercenary terms, to have a 35 hour work week. But that only means that the French don't consider economic productivity the end-all, be-all of human existence. It only means that the French see value in having more time in the day and in the week, time to eat and sleep and relax and socialize and, you know, have fun. But once someone has decided that only productivity, the accumulation of capital, is important, there's no way to genuinely confront the issue at hand.

-L'Hôte

“improved” art

[via inspire me, now!]

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

-James Baldwin

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

To talk about oneself a great deal can also be a means of concealing oneself.

-Friedrich Nietzsche