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July 30, 2007
o mother
o mother: you who are without an equal, who stood before all this silence, long ago in childhood. who took it upon yourself to say: don’t be afraid; i’m here. who in the night had the courage to be this silence for the child who was frightened, who was dying of fear. you strike a match, and already the noise is you. and you hold the lamp in front of you and say: i’m here; don’t be afraid. and you put it down, slowly, and there is no doubt: you are there, you are the light around the familiar, intimate things, which are there without afterthought, good and simple and sure. and when something moves restlessly in the wall, or creaks on the floor: you just smile, smile transparently against a bright background into the terrified face that looks at you, searching, as if you knew the secret of every half-sound, and everything were agreed and understood between you. does any power equal your power among the lords of the earth? look: kings lie and stare, and the teller of tales cannot distract them. though they lie in the blissful arms of their favorite mistress, horror creeps over them and makes them palsied and impotent. but you come and keep the monstrosity behind you and are entirely in front of it; not like a curtain that it can lift up here or there. no: as if you had caught up with it as soon as the child cried out for you. as if you had arrived far ahead of anything that might still happen, and had behind you only your hurrying-in, your eternal path, the flight of your love.
--rilke, the notebooks of malte laurids brigge
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poems
…poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. you ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. for poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. for the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. you must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quite, retrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. you must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. but you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. and it is not yet enough to have memories. you must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. for the memories themselves are not important. only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
--rilke, the notebooks of malte laurids brigge
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narcissus and echo
who was echo?
well echo of course was a nymph, the daughter of a sea nymph who had been hotly pursued by pan. who was pan? than half man half goat whose lusts were absolutely insatiable. and echo refused to comply; she resisted these advances. and pan, who is the god or nymph of shepherds, drove the shepherds mad so that they tore echo to pieces leaving nothing behind except a small voice, which would repeat whatever it had heard.
who was echo?
echo was a nymph who kept badgering and chattering and chatting up hera as hera hit out to view zeus in his many indiscretions and infidelities and finally hera, so put off by this constant chatter, reduced echo to an entity that could only speak when spoken to and would have to repeat whatever she heard last.
narcissus and echo
it so happened narcissus had stayed apart from his companions. he helloed them, “where are you? i am here.” and echo caught at the syllables, as if they were precious, “i am here,” she cried, “i am here, and i am here, and i am here.” narcissus looked around wildly, “i’ll stay here he shouted, you come to me. and “come to me” shouted echo, “come to me, to me, to me, to me.” narcissus stood baffled whether to go or stay; he began to run, calling as he ran, “stay there,” but echo cried back weeping to utter it “stay there, stay there, stay there, stay there.” narcissus stayed and listened, then more quietly, “let’s meet half way, come.” and echo eagerly repeated it, “come.” but when she emerged form the undergrowth, her expression pleading, her arms raised to embrace him, narcissus turned and ran, “no he cried, no. i would sooner be dead than let you touch me.” echo collapsed in sobs as her voice lurched among the mountains, “touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me.”
--ovid, metamorphoses
translation: ted hughes
what happened to narcissus?
what he said to echo is horrible and she approached him with true love. aphrodite doesn’t like it when someone does this. and so what aphrodite did was see to it that narcissus would fall in love with his reflection and he would so pine away for being unable to join this object of great beauty, that he would destroy himself and he would die. but so beautiful was he that the gods then turned him into a flower of the same name, which would grow amidst the rocks; they could save the beauty while destroying the vanity.
--prof. daniel robinson
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a hand outstretched in the darkness
art, like prayer, is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.
--kafka
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shape necessitated by content
whenever ‘form’ is nowadays demanded, in society and in conversation, in literary expression, in traffic between states, what is involuntarily understood by it is a pleasing appearance, the antithesis of the true concept of form as shape necessitated by content, which has nothing to do with ‘pleasing’ or ‘displeasing’ precisely because it is necessary and not arbitrary.
--nietzsche
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July 28, 2007
god's music
but, Master, if some pure spirit with a virgin ear were to lie down beside your music: he would die of bliss; or he would become pregnant with infinity, and his fertilized brain would explode with so much birth.
--rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
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July 27, 2007
the essence of religious feeling
the essence of religious feeling doesn’t fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, or with any atheisms; there’s something else here that’s not that, and it will eternally be not that; there’s something in it that atheisms will eternally glance off, and they will eternally be talking not about that.
from the idiot by dostoevsky
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July 23, 2007
and it’s a very good thing, literature
and it’s a very good thing, literature, a very good thing…a profound thing! a thing that strengthens people’s heart, instructs…literature is a picture, that is in a certain way a picture and a mirror; the expression of passion, a kind of subtle criticism, an exhortation to edification and a document.
you perhaps would like to know how i occupy myself when i am not writing? i read. i read an awful lot, and reading has a strange effect on me. i will read through something i read a long time ago and it is as though i am wound up with new powers. i pay attention to everything, understand everything clearly, and draw from it the ability to create for myself.
--dostoevsky
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man is a shadow
in what a kind of uncertainty do we live, when a man rises from his bed in the morning, to be uncertain of his return to rest again: or when he lies down to sleep, whether ever he shall rise. well do the spaniards in their language call man a shadow, for in truth he is no more, his body being so frail and brittle, and exposed to so many dangers, that nothing is more to be admired, than that it should usually subsist so long.
as gold is purified in the furnace, so is the life of a good man purged by adversity...and as adversity and misfortunes have been to some men a means of their promotion, so has prosperity been to others an occasion of their misery.
--from cardan's three books of consolation
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July 22, 2007
how can he be happy that never felt grief
among advantages which adversity has, this is not the least, that, a man’s misfortunate days once past, he lives the rest of his life with greater delight. who can relish health, that has never been sick? who knows the sweetness of his country, so well as he has been long abroad? or who can take pleasure in riches but he that has been poor? as salt favors meat, so does past misery render our lives more pleasant.
perhaps you will say i would have pleasure without pain: this is contrary to nature, for joy is continually attended by sorrow, glory with envy, wisdom is not gotten without labor, wealth is not obtained without care, children are kept with trouble, banqueting is attended by sickness, ease with poverty, power with envy, quiet with weariness. everyman has something to complain of. some are afflicted with poverty, others want children, this man is sick, that man wants a wife, and this man would be rid of his. but that which is most strange is, that to be happy and liable to no misfortune, is also a calamity.
how can he be happy that never felt grief. this is certain, that without adversity a man cannot live comfortably, nor take delight in mirth without some sorrow. and is it not a comfort in our calamity to have not only one man for a companion, but all mankind.
truly the adversity of others, never made my misfortunes seem the less: but the unavoidableness of troubles, to which all naturally are subject, has much mitigated my private grieves. for who but a mad man will lament that which cannot be helped. a wise man considering the course of sublunary things, will expect any kind of mishap, and is prepared against the worst.
--from cardan's three books of consolation
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July 21, 2007
rodin's portraits
full of the living burden of his great knowledge, he looked into the faces of those about him like one who knows the future. this gives to his portraits their extraordinary clear definiteness, but also that prophetic greatness which, in the statues of victor hugo and of balzac, rises to an indescribable perfection. to create a likeness meant for him to seek eternity in some given face, that part of eternity by which the face participated in the great life of eternal things. he made none which he did not lift a little from its place into the future; as we hold an object against the sky in order to see its form with greater clarity and simplicity. this is not what we call beautifying a thing, nor is it right to speak of giving it characteristic expression. it is more than that; it is separating of the permanent from the ephemeral, the passing of a judgment, the executing of justice.
--rilke
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July 20, 2007
a grace of fate
i cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: i am completely powerless.
i can only make myself independent of the world-and so in a certain sense master it-by renouncing any influence on happenings.
the world is independent of my will.
even if everything that we want were to happen, this would still only be, so to speak, a grace of fate, for what would guarantee it is not any logical connection between will and world, and we could not in turn will the supposed physical connection.
and in this sense dostoevsky is right when he says that the man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence.
or again we could say that the man is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. that is to say, who is content.
the solution of the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of this problem.
but is it possible for one so to live that life stops being problematic? that one is living in eternity and not in time?
isn’t this the reason why men to whom the meaning of life had become clear after long doubting could not say what this meaning consisted in?
--wittgenstein
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detached from the outcome
self-actualizing people live their lives detached from the outcome. and detached from the outcome means i don’t do what i do because of what might show up for me. i’m not motivated by being famous; i’m not motivated by making money; i’m not motivated by other people’s approval. i’m motivated by doing what i love and loving what i do. and it’s the process of doing it and living it and loving it that appeals the most. and this is very difficult in a world which says that you are what you have and you are what you do and you are your accomplishments and your achievements and your acquisitions. when we begin to evaluate ourselves on the basis on all of these kinds of things, then attracting those kinds of things becomes almost the paramount motivator of our lives. and it is one of the most difficult things in the western civilization to get people to understand that doing what you love and loving what you do is its own reward and whatever the universe provides for you in the way of the outcome is what you accept. so that what you are motivated by is a sense of peace, fulfillment, and awareness that i’m doing what i love and loving what i do.
--dr. wayne dyer
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July 15, 2007
to be beautiful is to be true
this is not particularly a pretty world. we have uglified what is most beautiful in it. we have come very close to losing that sense of beauty and harmony and proportion, and in the absence of that sense we won’t even be aware of what we are doing to ourselves by making our house a fitful and horrific spectacle of a place. we more or less have given up on the idea that government has a central part to play in the cultivation of the civic dimension of life. we’ve given up very much the idea that there is something so universally expressed in human nature that there are certain cultural forms capable of nurturing this nature. in our multicultural tolerance we are losing out on something that gives substance to a shared humanity. we’ve come to think of beauty as an option and the greeks knew better; it’s a necessity. and it should finally be the source of all we prize and all the might we might will in the world. to be beautiful is to be true and to be those things is to be good. that was the ancient ideal and to lose that is to live in a mechanical and meaningless and empty life.
--prof. daniel robinson
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the mysterious
the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. it is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. he to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. to sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. in this sense, and in this sense only, i am a devoutly religious man.
what separates me from most so called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.
science can be created only by those who are imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. this source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. the situation might be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions. everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. schopenhauer's saying, 'a man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,' has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life's hardships, my own and others', and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance.
--albert einstein