SUN BUER - "Precious Treatise on Preservation of Unity on the Great Way"

The Tao is uncontrived, yet there is nothing it does not do.
It can be witnessed by the mind, not known by knowledge.
What is “knowing”?  What is “witness”?
Knowledge dismisses knowledge.

Witness only responds.
Response comes from nowhere.

Mind then penetrates.
Penetrate the One, and all tasks are done.

The One is the root.
The task is the door.
When the task returns to One, the One is ever present.

The presence should not be reified;
provisionally we speak of keeping it.

Keep open selflessness and naturally be eternal.

SAM SHEPARD from “Dust”

He thought if he wandered long enough, he’d get good and lost. He’d get so hopelessly lost that he’d be forced into some part of himself that he’d never known before. Some part he’d be forced to meet up with. The proposition thrilled and terrified him. It was the mind that wouldn’t cooperate. He couldn’t control the picturings. There was no rhyme or reason to their appearance. He watched them pop up in his head as though he were sitting in a Wednesday matinee from long ago, with no one else in the theater.

He saw John Wayne wearing a buffalo coat. President Bush in a baseball cap, with a tie on. Bombs falling on Baghdad. Bombs seen from high above as though he were looking straight down through the hatch. The fat, self-satisfied face of General Schwarzkopf. A boy swinging a sledgehammer at the Berlin Wall and not making a dent. Pictures of news. Pictures of faces making news. Pictures of crows and hawks. A dead rabbit’s head.

Then Madilia. Her eyes. Her violent, magnificent eyes.

MARGARET ATWOOD from Surfacing

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

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.

RAINER MARIA RILKE - “Loneliness”

Being apart and lonely is like rain.
It climbs toward evening from the ocean plains;
from flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs
to heaven, which is its old abode.
And only when leaving heaven drops upon the city.
It rains down on us in those twittering
hours when the streets turn their faces to the dawn,
and when two bodies who have found nothing,
disappointed and depressed, roll over;
and when two people who despise each other
have to sleep together in one bed–
that is when loneliness receives the rivers …

GUO GO from Passing Through the Gateless Barrier

Although you may have understood this, that you are free, you may still think, “I am free and yet I am confronted with all kinds of scattered or wandering thoughts, with obstructions everywhere I turn.” For instance, when you sit, you may feel obstructed by drowsiness; when you stand, you’re bothered by physical pain; or when you interact with others, you’re annoyed by certain personality types that you may not like. You’re actually in a good place if you come to this realization, as you recognize that you can do something about it. It is worth reflecting on, over and over again, observing yourself in daily life, in your interactions with others.

MAUREEN STEWART

Once a friend of mine was about to go to Italy. I asked her if she had been there before. “Yes,” she said, “but I was too full of myself. So I’m going back, and this time, I hope to see it.”

@chasingamoment

JOHN ASHBURY

“Strange Cinema”

In sooth, I come here sadly,
not trembling, not against my will,
hoping you will set the record straight.
You can, you know, in a minute
if the wind is right and no felon intervenes.

And we sit and you tell me how crazy I am.
I shall petition the other board members
but am afraid nothing will ever come right.
It has been going on too long for this to happen,
yet it was right to go, to go on as it did,
even if there was a strangeness in the rightness
that no one can see now. They see the night
in its undress, plaits unplaited, brushed,
the sound of the surf churning on distant rocks,
can think only about how heavenly it would have been
if it had all happened later of differently.

Now, according to some sources,
new golfing trends are a commodity,
along with silence, and sweetness.
Doucement, doucement …
And when the sweetness is adjusted,
why, we’ll know more than some do now.
That is all I can offer you,
my lost, my beloved one.

FERNANDO PESSOA

We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

ALEX HALBERSTADT - "Elegy for a Boyhood Lover Slain in Battle"

               after Gore Vidal's Palimpsest

The branches shake, Jimmy, it rains in that trance;

Tuxedo in the colonnades asks after your breakfast.

A fire rises and falls in the house of Cadmus,

light on your bare neck, your voice

almost washed out in memory's reel.

Rapt in that flood I heard the night away

through Ovid, through mauve firs thrashing.

Your voice like a bellrope dangles in sterile heat

amid these unspooled metaphors. Today

the dry sun annuls the slide into la terra trema, but

through sweet parallax I watch you, sixteen, climb

like Phaethon the too-large chariot, the pitcher's

mound in Griffiths Stadium. A fire

in the house of Cadmus, a fire, and hard rain

in that trance. Tuxedo in the scullery,

the nails of your thick fingers flash

in the night-light. Still as a deer I smell

you through the monogrammed cloth.

The milk on your breath tarries the years.

"Verbose and hard" the Times once wrote,

and even now I stiffen, but strangely,

as a battered word reforms, anagrammatic.

A fire rises and falls, another trance

but no rain any more, no mansion.

Only the newsprint-brittle bacchanals of the sea.

The sun depilates boughs and dries the cliffside

veins of sediment and clay. Your Hesperidian form

gone, still I imagine you poised on a cot

dark-faced over your mother's Leaves of Grass:

Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, dash me

with amorous wet, I can repay you, awake,

not noticing the roan morning or the locust calls

on Iwo Jima.

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

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

SAMUEL BECKETT from Ohio Impromptu

Relief he had hoped would flow from unfamiliarity. Unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar scene. Out to where nothing ever shared. Back to where nothing ever shared. From this he had once half hoped some measure of relief might flow.

T'AO CH'IEN

Around my door and yard no dust or noise.
In my bare rooms, no busyness.
After so long a prisoner in a cage
I have returned to things as they are

JEAN COCTEAU

I have always preferred mythology to history. Because history is made up of truth which eventually turn into lies. Mythology is made of up lies which eventually become truth.

SUSAN CAIN from Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.

CHARLES SIMAC - “So Early in the Morning”

It pains me to see an old woman fret over
A few small coins outside a grocery store—
How swiftly I forget her as my own grief
Finds me again—a friend at death’s door
And the memory of the night we spent together.

I had so much love in my heart afterward,
I could have run into the street naked,
Confident anyone I met would understand
My madness and my need to tell them
About life being both cruel and beautiful,

But I did not—despite the overwhelming evidence:
A crow bent over a dead squirrel in the road,
The lilac bushes flowering in some yard,
And the sight of a dog free from his chain
Searching through a neighbor’s trash can.

SAMUEL BECKETT from Molloy

In me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible further on.

MILAREPA - “The Profound Definitive Meaning”

For the mind that masters view the emptiness dawns
In the content seen not even an atom exists
A seer and seen refined until they’re gone
This way of realizing view, it works quite well

When meditation is clear light river flow
There is no need to confine it to sessions and breaks
Meditator and object refined until they’re gone
This heart bone of meditation, it beats quite well

When you’re sure that conducts work is luminous light
And you’re sure that interdependence is emptiness
A doer and deed refined until they’re gone
This way of working with conduct, it works quite well

When biased thinking has vanished into space
No phony facades, eight dharmas, nor hopes and fears,
A keeper and kept refined until they’re gone
This way of keeping samaya, it works quite well

When you’ve finally discovered your mind is dharmakaya
And you’re really doing yourself and others good
A winner and won refined until they’re gone
This way of winning results, it works quite well.

Charles Coburn
(1877-1961)

MARK TWAIN

Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

LEONARD PRICE from “Radical Buddhism”

… Those of us in the jaded and desperate West who hear the resonance of truth in the teachings of the Buddha must hear also that urging to act, to start an inner rebellion against our ancient sloth and stupidity. Yet the more we ponder the more we recognize the enormity of the task, and an understandable reaction is to set about re-defining just what has to be done and just how prudent it might be to fling ourselves into action. The danger here–so typical in our comfortable and seductive society–is to forget the radical imperative of suffering and try to make over Buddhism into a tame amalgam of platitudes suitable for pleasant contemplation–praising it in order to avoid practicing it. Indeed, Buddhism is rational, patient, deep in wisdom, but should we then just bask in its reflected light?

Complacency is death. If, out of custom and timidity, Western Buddhists turn their religion into a museum piece, or worse, a hobby, they lose the essence. It is easy enough to settle for an undemanding status quo, a modicum of calm, a pleasant sense of harmonious living, and it is easy enough to postpone or forget any effort to break the shackles of old delusion, believing that one need not strain when the road will likely be long. But in accommodating too much to personal or societal expediency we cheapen our ideals and slide further from the disturbing implications of the Noble Truth of Suffering. We may even take the Buddhist vision of kamma as an indication that “everything is as it should be.” But everything is not as it should be. Everything is in fact miserable. If we are complacent we blind ourselves, and there is no safety in blindness …

Nichelle Nichols by Gage Skidmore - May 2013.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO - “My Gift To You”

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you’ll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You’ll find it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you’ll remember me,
if only just a little.

SAM SHEPARD from Seduced

What difference does it make? It’s a good story. One story’s as good as another. It’s all in the way you tell it. That’s what counts. That’s what makes the difference.

SAMUEL BECKETT from All That Fall

I use none but the simplest words, I hope, and yet I sometimes find my way of speaking very … bizarre.

STIG SÆTERBAKKEN from “Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music”

I believe disharmony and asymmetry correspond to a disharmony and an asymmetry within us, because we ourselves are not whole, or complete. Because we are never fully and completely ourselves. Because our lacks, our weaknesses, and our fears make up an essential dimension within us. Because our wounds are meant not only for healing, but also the opposite, to be kept open, as part of our receptivity to that which is around us and within us. And because there is also relief in this, not to be healed, not to be cured, melancholia satisfies us by preventing us from reaching satisfaction, it clams us by keeping our anxiety alive, it gives us peace by prolonging the state of emergency, the state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.

MILAREPA

If you lose all differentiation between yourselves and others,
fit to serve others you will be.
And when in serving others you will win success,
then shall you meet with me;
And finding me, you shall attain to Buddhahood.

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.

Jodie Foster, 1976.

RITA DOVE - “The Breathing, The Endless News”

Every god is lonely, an exile
composed of parts; elk horn,
cloven hoof. Receptacle
for wishes, each god is empty
without us, penitent,
raking our yards into windblown piles….
Children know this: they are
the trailings of gods. Their eyes
hold nothing at birth then fill slowly
With myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls,
out for the count, each toe pouting from
the slumped over toddler clothes:
no blossoming there. So we
give our children dolls, and
they know just what to do-
line, them up and shoot them.
With every execution
doll and god grow stronger.

E. M. FORSTER

I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking. 

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.

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.

RYAN ADAMS - "Oh My Sweet Carolina"

I went down to Houston
And I stopped in San Antone
I passed up the station for the bus
I was trying to find me something
But I wasn't sure just what
Man I ended up with pockets full of dust

So I went on to Cleveland and I ended up insane
I bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance
I was spending money like the way it likes to rain
Man I ended up with pockets full of 'caine

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

I ain't never been to Vegas
But I gamble all my life
Building newsprint boats I race to sewer mains
Was trying to find me something
But I wasn't sure just what
Funny how they say that some things never change

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

Up here in the city feels like things are closing in
The sunsets just my light bulb burning out
I miss Kentucky and I miss my family
All the sweetest winds they blow across the south

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

May you one day carry me home

FRIDA KAHLO

You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and who brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.

HANNAH ARENDT from The Origins of Totalitarianism

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Scenes from "Little Red Riding Hood"

by Edward Gorey