FENG-KAN

I have been to Tientai
maybe a million times
like a cloud or river
drifting back and forth.
Roaming free of trouble
trusting the Buddha’s spacious path
while the world’s forked mind
only brings men pain.

BLAISE CENDRARS

I’m not an extraordinary worker, I’m an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies - even that of writing.

LI BAI - “Visiting a Taoist on Taitien Mountain”

Amongst bubbling streams
a dog barks; peach blossom
is heavy with dew; here
and there a deer can
be seen in forest glades!
No sound of the mid-day
bell enters this fastness
where blue mist rises
from bamboo groves;
down from a high peak
hangs a waterfall;
none knows where he has gone, so sadly I rest,
with my back leaning
against a pine.

PHILIP LARKIN - “Annus Mirabilis”

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me )-
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up till then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle For a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

PHILIP LARKIN - “High Windows”

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

SAMUEL BECKETT from Molloy

The glorious, the truly glorious weather would have gladdened any other heart than mine. But I have no reason to be gladdened by the sun and I take good care not to be. The Aegean, thirsting for heat and light, him I killed, he killed himself, early on, in me.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ from One Hundred Years of Solitude

Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves over Pilar Ternera’s bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards. 

FRIDAY 023

Marcel Theodor Anthony Bosch

CARL JUNG

No tree, it is said, can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell. 

MARGARET ATWOOD from Lady Oracle

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

THOMAS MERTON from Love and Living

The purpose of education is to show us how to define ourselves authentically and spontaneously in relation to our world—not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of ourselves as individuals. The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is, therefore, more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom.

Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here and there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions … is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of “choice” when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery.

ALICE WATERS

We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture.

bell hooks from All About Love: New Visions

Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.

NOAM CHOMSKY from Power and Terror

Everyone’s worried about terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.

MILAREPA - “Song of the Twelve Deceptions”

Worldly affairs are all deceptive;
So I seek the Truth Divine.

Excitements and distractions are illusions;
So I meditate on the Non-dual Truth.

Companions and servants are deceptive;
So I remain in solitude.

Money and possessions are also deceptive;
So if I have them, I give them away.

Things in the outer world are all illusion;
The Inner Mind is that which I observe.

Wandering thoughts are all deceptive;
So I only tread the Path of Wisdom.

Deceptive are the teachings of Expedient Truth;
The Final Truth is that on which I meditate.

Books written in black ink are all misleading;
I only meditate on the Pith-Instructions of the Whispered Lineage.

Words and sayings, too, are but illusion;
At ease, I rest my mind in the effortless state.

Birth and death are both illusions;
I observe but the truth of No-Arising.

The common mind is in every way misleading;
And so I practice how to animate Awareness.

The Mind-holding Practice is misleading and deceptive;
And so I rest in the realm of Reality.

COCOROSIE - “South 2nd”

We don’t need no baseball bats
We don’t need no silver ghats
But we’re gonna fight tonight
Put up your dukes and fight
Big brother’s just standing on the side
Watching you flex your pride
But you know if they all jump in
Big brother’s got your skin

The ice cream truck it sings no more
All the kids from school are keeping score
You swing and you duck and you hit the floor
But you gotta get up at least once more
Mama comes screaming down the stairs
Everybody looks but nobody scares
Mama can’t believe that nobody care
It’s her baby boy how do they dare
Mama says bitch come over here
If you’re so tough you’ll have no fear
But why’s you bring your friends
And the whole damn school
To watch my baby boy go down like a fool

But brother says mama they’re the same damn size
Got to let him grow up and get street wise
But mama says baby go get that bat
And come back down and beat some ass

Somebody’s baby boy ain’t coming home tonight
Somebody’s baby boy ain’t coming home tonight
Somebody’s baby boy ain’t coming home tonight

One wrong move and it’ll be too late
Mama won’t be making no birthday cake
It all went down one afternoon
In Brooklyn

KOBAYASHI ISSA

Sitting serenely,
a plump toad enjoys viewing
the mountain horizon

FUCK

Anna Yausheva, 2009

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain’t worth a shit. Not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.

DAGHDA COSANTÓIR DANDELION

I am the wild hunter of the forest deep
And I am the fire upon the hill
And I am the sower of the seed
And the tiller of the soil of the earth
And I am the golden warrior whose arrows are the shafts from the sun
The thunder is my hoof fall
The wilderness is my shrine
I wield the oaken staff
The elements at my call
By day I am the sun
By night I ride upon the wild winds.

MILO De ANGELIS - “The Window”

In the hotel
room, behind the curtains
that show a subdued square
for the first time
“I would only like to repeat, you know, nothing else”
this afternoon
it’s impersonal, does not apply to anyone
does not select, is already a land
full of guests, who complete
its started work
in someone else
as that bridge stays there
calm, no longer
what unites two banks.


Translated by Lawrence Venuti.

THOMAS MANN from Tonio Kröger

To see things clear, if even through your tears, to recognize, notice, observe – and have to put it all down with a smile, at the very moment when hands are clinging, and lips meeting, and the human gaze is binding with feeling – it is infamous, Lisabeta, it is indecent, outrageous – but what good does it do to be outraged?

ALAN RICKMAN

It’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.

NATHALIE STUTZMANN

There are two types of artists: those that strive their whole life to show how much what they're doing is difficult - they have their audience - and those who spend their life trying to make people believe it is not at all difficult, which is the category I belong to.

That is also probably a form of madness. It is less spectacular, perhaps, but I prefer that the audience be able to go to what is essential. I do not want them to stop at being impressed with the performance, even though they might notice it, but that they be able to abandon themselves to the beauty of the music.

DENISE LEVERTOV - “People At Night”

A night that cuts between you and you
and you and you and you
and me : jostles us apart, a man elbowing
through a crowd.          We won’t
                  look for each other, either-
wander off, each alone, not looking
in the slow crowd. Among sideshows
                  under movie signs,
                  pictures made of a million lights,
                  giants that move and again move
                  again, above a cloud of thick smells,
                  franks, roasted nutmeats- Or going up to some apartment, yours
                  or yours, finding
someone sitting in the dark:
who is it really? So you switch the
light on to see: you know the name but
who is it ?
        But you won’t see. The fluorescent light flickers sullenly, a
pause. But you command. It grabs
each face and holds it up
by the hair for you, mask after mask.
                  You   and   you and I   repeat
                  gestures that make do when speech
                  has failed          and talk
                  and talk, laughing, saying
                  ‘I’, and ‘I’,
meaning ‘Anybody’.
                            No one.

EMINEM - “The Real Slim Shady”

May I have your attention please?
May I have your attention please?
Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Slim Shady please stand up?
We’re gonna have a problem here..

Y'all act like you never seen a white person before
Jaws all on the floor like Pam and Tommy just burst in the door
And started whooping her ass worse than before
They first were divorced, throwing her over furniture (Ah!)
It’s the return of the… “Ah, wait, no way, you’re kidding,
He didn’t just say what I think he did, did he?”
And Dr. Dre said… nothing, you idiots!
Dr. Dre’s dead, he’s locked in my basement! (Ha-ha!)
Feminist women love Eminem
chigga chigga chigga
“Slim Shady, I’m sick of him
Look at him, walking around grabbing his you-know-what
Flipping the you-know-who.” “Yeah, but he’s so cute though!”
Yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose
But no worse, than what’s going on in your parents’ bedrooms
Sometimes, I wanna get on TV and just let loose, but can’t
But it’s cool for Tom Green to hump a dead moose
“My bum is on your lips, my bum is on your lips”
And if I’m lucky, you might just give it a little kiss
And that’s the message that we deliver to little kids
And expect them not to know what a woman’s clitoris is
Of course they gonna know what intercourse is
By the time they hit fourth grade
They got the Discovery Channel, don’t they?
“We ain’t nothing but mammals..” Well, some of us cannibals
Who cut other people open like cantaloupes [SLURP]
But if we can hump dead animals and antelopes
Then there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope
[*EWWW!*] But if you feel like I feel, I got the antidote
Women wave your pantyhose, sing the chorus and it goes

‘Cause I’m Slim Shady, yes I’m the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won’t the real Slim Shady please stand up,
Please stand up, please stand up?

Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records;
Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!
You think I give a damn about a Grammy?
Half of you critics can’t even stomach me, let alone stand me
“But Slim, what if you win, wouldn’t it be weird?”
Why? So you guys could just lie to get me here?
So you can, sit me here next to Britney Spears?
Yo Shit, Christina Aguilera better switch me chairs
So I can sit next to Carson Daly and Fred Durst
And hear ‘em argue over who she gave head to first
Little bitch, put me on blast on MTV
“Yeah, he’s cute, but I think he’s married to Kim, hee-hee!”
I should download her audio on MP3
And show the whole world how you gave Eminem VD [AHHH!]
I’m sick of you little girl and boy groups, all you do is annoy me
So I have been sent here to destroy you [bzzzt]
And there’s a million of us just like me
Who cuss like me; who just don’t give a fuck like me
Who dress like me; walk, talk and act like me
It just might be the next best thing but not quite me!

I’m like a head trip to listen to, cause I’m only giving you
Things you joke about with your friends inside your living room
The only difference is I got the balls to say it
In front of y'all and I don’t gotta be false or sugarcoated at all
I just get on the mic and spit it
And whether you like to admit it [*ERR*] I just shit it
Better than ninety percent of you rappers out can
Then you wonder how can kids eat up these albums like Valiums
It’s funny; 'cause at the rate I’m going when I’m thirty
I’ll be the only person in the nursing home flirting
Pinching nurses asses when I’m jacking off with Jergens
And I’m jerking but this whole bag of Viagra isn’t working
And every single person is a Slim Shady lurking
He could be working at Burger King, spitting on your onion rings
[*HACH*] Or in the parking lot, circling
Screaming “I don’t give a fuck!”
With his windows down and his system up
So, will the real Shady please stand up?
And put one of those fingers on each hand up?
And be proud to be outta your mind and outta control
And one more time, loud as you can, how does it go?

'Cause I’m Slim Shady, yes I’m the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won’t the real Slim Shady please stand up,
Please stand up, please stand up?
Ha ha
Guess there’s a Slim Shady in all of us
Fuck it, let’s all stand up

ANGIE DICKINSON

My mother was against me being an actress - until I introduced her to Frank Sinatra. 

Making America great again.

ORSON WELLES

I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

SAMUEL BECKETT from Watt

And is it not strange most strange that one says of a thing that it is full, when it is not full at all, but not of a thing that it is empty, if it is not empty? And perhaps the reason for that is this, that when one fills, one seldom fills quite full, for that would not be convenient, whereas when one empties one empties completely, holding the vessel upside down, and rinsing it out with boiling water if necessary, with a kind of fury.