STEPHEN BATCHELOR

It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored. How extraordinary it is to be here at all.

ANNE CARSON from “Short Talk On Who You Are”

I want to know who you are. People talk about a voice calling in the wilderness. All through the Old Testament a voice, which is not the voice of God but which knows what is on God’s mind, is crying out. While I am waiting, you could do me a favour. Who are you?

BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY - “I Called You Back”

And I called you back to a place beside me
And I called you back to a place beside me

Love found us easily
And if that’s all we have you will find we need nothing more

And I called you back to a place beside me
And I called you back to a place beside me

And every time we kiss
We find ourselves in love again

And the older that we get
We know that nothing else for us is possible

And I called you back to a place beside me
And I called you back to a place beside me

Mm, when I was quiet
Well, I heard your voice in everything

And I called you back to a place beside me
And I called you back to a place beside me

EDMUND WHITE from Our Young Man

These absurd showbiz queens are as much a part of New York street life as sirens, steam from manholes, or ghostly Asian deliverymen ferrying chop-suey-to-go on unlit bikes going the wrong way.

HAROLD PINTER from No Man’s Land

What a remarkably pleasant room. I feel at peace here. Safe from all danger. But please don’t be alarmed. I shan’t stay long. I never stay long, with others. They do not wish it. And that, for me, is a happy state of affairs. My only security, you see, my true comfort and solace, rests in the confirmation that I elicit from people of all kinds a common and constant level of indifference. It assures me that I am as I think myself to be, that I am fixed, concrete. To show interest in me or, good gracious, anything tending towards a positive liking of me, would cause in me a condition of the acutest alarm. Fortunately, the danger is remote.

SAMUEL BECKETT from Malone Dies

And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks look all alike.

TISZTA SZÍVVEL 

(English title: KILLS ON WHEELS)

Attila Till

Hungary, 2016

BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY - “Lay and Love”

From what I’ve seen, you’re magnificent

You fight evil with all you do

Your every act is spectacular

It makes me lay here and love you

From what I hear, you are generous

You make sunshine and glory too

When you walk in things go luminous

It makes me lay here and love you

From what I know, you’re terrified

You have mistrust running through you

Your smile is hiding something hurtful

It makes me lay here and love you

It makes me lay here and love you

I’m filled with violet and red and blue

I have a feeling from what I do

That you might lay there and love me too

DON DeLILLO from Point Omega

It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

PHILIP LEVINE – “Blue”

Dawn. I was just walking
back across the tracks
toward the loading docks
when I saw a kid climb
out of a boxcar, his blue
jacket trailing like a skirt,
and make for the fence. He’d
hoisted a wet wooden flat
of fresh fish on his right
shoulder, and he tottered
back and forth like someone
with one leg shorter than
the other. I took my glasses
off and wiped them on the tails
of my dirty shirt, and all
I could see were the smudges
of the men wakening one
at a time and reaching for
both the sky and the earth.
My brother-in-law, Joseph,
the railroad cop, who talked
all day and all night of beer
and pussy, Joseph in his suit
shouting out my name, Pheeel!
Pheeel! waving a blue bandana
and pointing behind me to
where the kid cleared the fence
and the weak March sun
had topped the car barns,
to a pale watery sky, wisps
of dirty smoke, and the day.

MIDDLETOWN

Will Eno, 2010

RAINER MARIA RILKE - "To Say For Going To Sleep"

I would like to sing someone to sleep,
by someone to sit and be,
I would like to rock you and croon you to sleep
and attend you in slumber and out.
I would like to be the only one in the house
who would know: The night was cold.
And you would like to hearken within and without
to you, to the world, to the woods,—
The clocks call striking to each other,
and one sees to the bottom of time.
And below a strange man passes yet
and rouses a strange dog.
Behind that comes stillness. I have laid
my eyes upon you wide;
they hold you gently and let you go

when something stirs in the dark.


Translated by M.D. Hester Norton

THE RAIN

Jannik Tai Mosholt, Christian Potalivo, Esben Toft Jacobsen

Denmark, 2019 - Season 2

BOBBY SEALE

All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.

DELIVERENCE

John Boorman

USA, 1972

MILAREPA - “The Song of Food and Dwelling”

I bow down at the feet of the wish-fulfilling Guru.
Pray vouchsafe me your grace in bestowing beneficial food,
Pray make me realize my own body as the house of Buddha,
Pray grant me this knowledge.

I built the house through fear,
The house of Sunyata, the void nature of being;
Now I have no fear of its collapsing.
I, the Yogi with the wish-fulfilling gem,
Feel happiness and joy where'er I stay.

Because of the fear of cold, I sought for clothes;
The clothing I found is the Ah Shea Vital Heat.
Now I have no fear of coldness.

Because of the fear of poverty, I sought for riches;
The riches I found are the inexhaustible Seven Holy Jewels.
Now I have no fear of poverty.

Because of the fear of hunger, I sought for food;
The food I found is the Samadhi of Suchness.
Now I have no fear of hunger.

Because of the fear of thirst, I sought for drink;
The heavenly drink I found is the wine of mindfulness.
Now I have no fear of thirst.

Because of the fear of loneliness, I searched for a friend;
The friend I found is the bliss of perpetual Sunyata.
Now I have no fear of loneliness.

Because of the fear of going astray,
I sought for the right path to follow.
The wide path I found is the Path of Two-in-One.
Now I do not fear to lose my way.

I am a yogi with all desirable possessions,
A man always happy where'er he stays.

Here at Yolmo Tagpu Senge Tson,
The tigress howling with a pathetic, trembling cry,
Reminds me that her helpless cubs are innocently playing.
I cannot help but feel a great compassion for them,
I cannot help but practice more diligently,
I cannot help but augment thus my Bodhi-Mind.

The touching cry of the monkey,
So impressive and so moving,
Cannot help but raise in me deep pity.
The little monkey’s chattering is amusing and pathetic;
As I hear it, I cannot but think of it with compassion.

The voice of the cuckoo is so moving,
And so tuneful is the lark’s sweet singing,
That when I hear them I cannot help but listen –
When I listen to them,
I cannot help but shed tears.

The varied cries and cawings of the crow,
Are a good and helpful friend unto the yogi.
Even without a single friend,
To remain here is a pleasure.
With joy flowing from my heart, I sing this happy song;
May the dark shadow of all men’s sorrows
Be dispelled by my joyful singing.

ETGAR KERET

There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.

Binyavanga Wainaina

(1971-2019)

Jacques Lacan from The Triumph of Religion

I did not write Écrits in order for people to understand them, I wrote them in order for people to read them. Which is not even remotely the same thing. People don’t understand anything, that is perfectly true, for a while, but the writings do something to them. And this is why I would be inclined to believe that—as opposed to what one imagines when one peers from the outside—people do read them. One imagines that people buy my Écrits but never open them. That’s false. They even wear themselves out working on them. 

Obviously, when one begins my Écrits, the best thing one can do is to try to understand them. And since one does not understand them, one keeps trying. I didn’t deliberately try to make them such that people don’t understand them— that was a consequence of circumstance.I spoke, I gave classes that were very coherent and comprehensible, but, as I turned them into articles once a year, that led to writings which, compared to the mass of things I had said, were incredibly concentrated and that must be placed in water, like Japanese flowers, in order to unfold. The comparison is worth whatever it’s worth.

How and When to Cut Your Garlic Scapes

JAMES JOYCE from “The Dead”

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead

Ryan Reynolds

If I were to become a life coach, the first thing I would do is let all my clients know they’ve just hired a life coach, so it’s already too late.

DONALD BARTHELME from "The Art of Fiction" - The Paris Review, No. 66 

One doesn’t take in Proust or Canada on the basis of a single visit.

KO UN - “A Smile”

Shakyamuni held up a lotus
so Kashyapa smiled.
Not at all.
The lotus smiled
so Kashyapa smiled.

Nowhere was Shakyamuni!

Paolo Roversi, Self-portrait, Studio 9 rue Paul Fort Paris, May 25, 2011. 

Jorge Luis Borges - “To A Cat”

Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law,
we look for you in vain;
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past,
the love of the distrustful hand.
You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.

RYŌKAN

Down in the village
the din of
flute and drum,
here deep in the mountain
everywhere the sound of the pines

Baruch Spinoza

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Margaret Atwood from The Penelopiad

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

Anne Carson - “Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking”

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

Christian Wiman - “This Inwardness, This Ice”

This inwardness, this ice,
this wide boreal whiteness 

into which he’s come
with a crawling sort of care 

for the sky’s severer blue,
the edge on the air, 

trusting his own lightness
and the feel as feeling goes; 

this discipline, this glaze,
this cold opacity of days 

begins to crack.
No marks, not one scar, 

no sign of where they are,
these weaknesses rumoring through, 

growing loud if he stays,
louder if he turns back. 

Nothing to do but move.
Nowhere to go but on, 

to creep, and breathe, and learn
a blue beyond belief, 

an air too sharp to pause,
this distance, this burn, 

this element of flaws
that winces as it gives. 

Nothing to do but live.
Nowhere to be but gone.

ТРИ

(English: III - THE RITUAL)

Pavel Khvaleev

Russia, 2015

PIANO CONCERTO IN C MINOR, OP. 55

Theodor Kullak

PIANO CONCERTO IN D MINOR, OP. 137

Alexander Dreyschock

VIOLIN CONCERTO in A MAJOR, OP. 8

Mieczysław Karłowicz