e. e. cummings - “unlove’s the heavenless hell and homeless home”

unlove’s the heavenless hell and homeless home
of knowledgeable shadows (quick to seize
each nothing which all soulless wraiths proclaim
substance, all heartless spectres, happiness)
lovers alone wear sunlight. The whole truth
not hid by matter; not by mind revealed
(more than all dying life, all living death)
and never which has been or will be told
sings only — and all lovers are the song.
Here (only here) is freedom: always here
no then of winter equals now of spring;
but april’s day trancends november’s year
(eternity being so sans until
twice i have lived forever in a smile)

BJÖRK – “Possibly Maybe”

your flirt finds me out
teases the crack in me
smittens me with hope

possibly maybe probably love

as much as i definitely enjoy solitude
i wouldn’t mind perhaps
spending little time with you
sometimes
sometimes

possibly maybe probably love

uncertainly excites me
baby
who knows what’s going to happen?
lottery or car crash
or you’ll join a cult

possibly maybe probably love

mon petit vulcan
you’re eruptions and disasters
i keep calm
admiring your lava
i keep calm

possibly maybe probably love

since we broke up
i’m using lipstick again
i’ll suck my tongue
as a remembrance of you

SIGMUND FREUD from “Screen Memories” (1899)

I was the child of people who were originally well-to-do and who, I fancy, lived comfortably enough in that little corner of the provinces. When I was about three, the branch of industry in which my father was concerned met with a catastrophe. He lost all his means and we were forced to leave the place and move to a large town.

Long and difficult years followed, of which, as it seems to me, nothing was worth remembering. I never felt really comfortable in the town. I believe now that I was never free from a longing for the beautiful woods near our home, in which - as one of my memories from those days tells me - I used to run off from my father, almost before I had learnt to walk.

WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA - "Negative"

In the dun-colored sky
A cloud even more dun-colored
With the black outline of the sun.

To the left, that is, to the right
A white cherry branch with black flowers.

On your dark face, light shadows.
You have sat down at a small table
And laid your grayed hands on it.

You give the impression of a ghost
Who attempts to summon the living.

(Because I'm still counted among them,
I should appear and knock:
Good night, that is, good morning,
Farewell, that is, hello.
Not being stingy with questions to any answer
If they concern life,
That is, the storm before the calm.)

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

RYŌKAN

I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deeper despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.  

Jette Stoltz (1923-2010).

CORMAC McCARTHY from Blood Meridian

The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.

KELLY LUCE from the opening lines of “Three Scenarios in which Hana Sakaski Grows a Tail”

It is her thirteenth birthday. She wakes alone. Her right hand reaches around to feel a soft length of hair that wasn’t there when she took her bath the night before. She shuffles to the mirror, cranes her neck. The tail is three inches long and gleams silver with a lavender tinge, one end thin and flyaway, the other as thick as rope. It sprouts from the asymmetrical dark button at the base of her spine - what her mother used to call her Hydrangea Mole.

FANNIE LOU HAMER

Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.

ALBERT CAMUS from The Plague

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

ANTONIN ARTAUD from The Theatre and Its Double

All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression hides what it makes manifest. It sets the mind in opposition to the real void of nature by creating in reaction a kind of fullness in thought. Or, in other terms, in relation to the manifestation-illusion of nature it creates a void in thought.

All powerful feeling produces in us the idea of the void. And the lucid language which obstructs the appearance of this void also obstructs the appearance of poetry in thought. That is why an image, an allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal have more significance for the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

EUNICE TIETJENS - “To Jake”

You are turned wraith. Your supple, flitting hands,
As formless as the night wind’s moan,
Beckon across the years, and your heart’s pain
Fades surely as a stainèd stone.
And yet you will not let me rest, crying
And calling down the night to me
A thing that when your body moved and glowed,
Living, you could not make me see.
Lean down your homely, mist-encircled head
Close, close above my human ear,
And tell me what of pain among the dead—
Tell me, and I will try to hear.

For God so loved the world ...

Artist unknown.

Younsik Kim for Yoon 6 Photography

CARL SAGAN from The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.

When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites - now down to 10 seconds or less - lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

NORMAN MAILER

I don’t know if I need seclusion, but I do like to be alone in a room.

DŌGEN

The moon reflected
In a mind clear
As still water:
Even the waves, breaking,
Are reflecting its light.

JULIAN RANDALL - “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King”

Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged
           I know            I know             the kingdom is not fair
but it’s what I have  a montage of red and a mitosis
           of knuckles    I’m not sure how you could expect me
to love anything       Ain’t no question
                                                sadness is regal like that
                           golden and replaceable  once I wanted
a lineage of identical men             once a mouth soft and hot
as the quickest way that gold can hurt you     You see
           a pattern yet?            I practice the want of nothing       and fail
                                           I’ve been shown how ugly I can be
when I am invisible
                                           I don’t believe in yesterdays
The throat of loneliness?              Straddled with my knife
            I press my hands to my face         and the lament is a valley
the light sags through          What do you do when you have
                      lost Everything?         Rewrite the history of Everything
I don’t like my smile             because someone told me I didn’t like it
            Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered
                        Flex the antonym of Missing             I avenge myself
Stretch my hands      I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty
                                                            ain’t no question          I monarch
the lonely       I my own everything now I miss my love and
           it is an American grief          I strike the smell from nostalgia
cut my memory to spite my country        What is the odor of nothing
           but my dominion in want of excess             I grin and pillars of                       bone flower
into sawed-off crowns           say I flex the light and the light flexes
            heat shimmer             unfurling like a bicep           my lust a                              mirage
where the body is merely a congealing of the river           I can feel it
  slowly drifting away from me     The world I knew is gone
and getting more gone           and my anthem populating my nose
           with an abundance of salt  I slip the shroud over the life I named
and forget I belonged to someone once         My sovereign’s face is a riot
of diamonds whining        This will be a beautiful death      and I am             free
and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again
I rock the jeweled shroud           become the bride of my own sad light

SHARA McCALLUM - “No Ruined Stone”

When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
that distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.

GRAHAM HANCOCK

In our society, if we want to insult somebody, we call them “a dreamer.” In ancient societies, that was praise.

FLORENCE RIPLEY MASTIN - “Dust”

My words are dust.
I who would build a star,
I who would touch the heel of the white sun;
Staggering up the inaccessible sky,
I look upon the dust.
The stainless clouds go mounting
In shining spires;
And a little heap of dust
Are my desires.
Yet, dwelling long upon these peaks
Unchained upon the flickering western sky,
I have beheld them at the breath of darkness
Fade slowly out and die.
What of my lineage?
Arrogant and swift,
I bend above the dust,
Untouched of all my grief,
Untarnished of the hour,
And lo! the leaf—
The passionate climbing flower!

SAMUEL R. DELANY from Dhalgren

Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.