Reckoner by Radiohead

Reckoner

You can't take it with you
Dancing for your pleasure

You are not to blame for
Bittersweet distractor
Dare not speak its name
Dedicated to all you
all human beings

Because we separate like
ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)
Because we separate like
ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)

Reckoner

Take me with you
Dedicated to all you
all human beings

- Reckoner, by Radiohead, written by Thom Yorke.

This coming Tuesday- Radiohead, Gara and Brodie. It's like going home.

The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

"I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.

When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me.

In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me:

"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."

Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written.

I am not done with my changes."

- The Layers- by the late, American Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz

Compiling Poets Forever Young

How many golden roads end at The Samarkand,
When midnight chokes the disquieted soul
And history finds another fall from grace?

Those who with songs beguile the pilgrimage.
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die
For lust of knowing what should not be known.
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.

The thief speaks now to many here
But none level on this line
We, bare-foot servant-princes feel
The cold distance they will find


James Elroy Flecker, (November 5, 1884- January 3, 1915)
Jimi Hendrix, (November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970)

Sold in Salvador

At first she's a prom girl, but then slurred speech and a vacant look that reads only money, speak of something else entirely. Shake and sigh and So Wrong- in this oldest city- and seem to pray that maybe she gets it together enough that baby daughter wont realise until she can... Handle it? Run her own game? Get the hell out of here? And to where? This is The Where.

You have to pay me.

I don't think anyone cries for them. Desired and reviled for the same thing by the same people. Such a shame at such a price. Lie down with heady everything and stand with condemnation- they are nothing- and you are still clean.. if you forget.

You have to pay me.

And so what? Run drugs or scam gringoes or make something beautiful that no-one ever sees and it's tomorrow again and you're still hungry, and so the fuck what? Stop the screams and the pain and maybe it's a forgotten day or two ahead or maybe just the streets again.

We all sell. But people cry for your pain.

Opening to "Om"

An excerpt of a poem by Herman Hesse, set to a Baraka-like scene.

Wanderer, Worshipper, Lover of Leaving

"The Sufi poet and mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi, was born in Afghanistan 800 years ago and UNESCO has designated 2007 the 'Year of Rumi'. His poetry is astonishing in its beauty, wisdom, and spiritual depth, and we hear from the pre-eminent translator and promoter of Rumi in the West, Coleman Barks. Included in the program are musical excerpts from 'The Rumi Concert' held in Melbourne in August 2007, and we hear from one of the world's great scholars of Rumi, Dr Zeki Saritoprak."

TheSpiritofThings on ABC Radio National
Listen Now |Download Audio

I cannot recommend this highly enough. If you are familiar with Rumi, it is a pure delight. If you are not, it is as if to catch a glimpse of one's beloved for the first moment- or rather 54 remarkable minutes. N.B. The podcast will only be accessible for a limited time, after which only a transcription will be available.

All that is left
to us by tradition
is mere words.

It is up to us
to find out what they mean.

ibn al-`Arabi ( أبن عربي), Tarjuman al-Ashwaq

Previously, I've posted Rumi's poem "Quietness", his "lecture" on "The Dream That Must Be Interpreted", another poem "All The Hemispheres" and an interview with Coleman Barks.

In Memory of Those Who Melt the Soul Forever

(Photo by Arun Siva)

Their spring meadows

are desolate now. Still, desire

for them lives always

in our heart, never dying.

These are their ruins.

These are the tears

in memory of those

who melt the soul forever.

I called out, following after

love-dazed:

You so full with beauty,

I've nothing!

I rubbed my face in the dust,

laid low by the fever of love.

By the privilege of the right of desire for you

don't shatter the heart

Of a man drowned in his words,

burned alive

in sorrow.

Nothing can save him now.

You want a fire?

Take it easy. This passion

is incandescent. Touch it.

It will light your own.

- Ibn Arabi (أبن عربي),

Different Ways of Laughing

The February edition of Guernica magazine features an interview with Coleman Barks- the translator of "The Essential Rumi"- the Sufi poetry that has been speaking so clearly to me these past months.

Guernica: Rumi’s poems constantly loop back to emptiness and silence, “that disciplined silence,” he calls it. Do you have to cultivate that silence in order to translate his work?

Coleman Barks: If I'm not in the receptive place, [it won't work], but it seems like a place I want to go. It's like going to sleep when you're tired, you just do it. You fall into it. It's a beautiful lucid dream that has language that I can fiddle with.

Guernica: How might he [Rumi] respond to the many kinds of religious fundamentalism which are rampant all over the world?

Coleman Barks: He didn't like there to be religious boundaries. He said if you think there's an important difference between being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist, then you're making a division between your heart, what you love with, and the way you act in the world. That was such a wild and extreme thing to say in the 13th century with the Crusades coming across that peninsula. It's pretty wild to say even now. We're all the same species. We all have children. We fall in love. We all have an impulse to praise and to worship. He says it's all "thing," it's all one song that we're singing...

"Another Place" by Antony Gormley.

All the Hemispheres

(Click to enlarge)

A scaled down version of a poster I put together for the quintessential mother, Mrs Kate Josephson, who celebrates her birthday today. Thank you once again for the roots and the wings that made the last five years abroad so comfortable.

Photograph: Toni Frissell, "Weeki Wachee spring", Florida, 1947.

Poetry: Hafez e Shiraz, "All the Hemispheres", Persia, 14th Century.

Eurydice- Sue Hubbard

Strolling a pedestrian underpass between Waterloo and the Thames I chanced upon the most beautifully eloquent language I have read in years. Stenciled upon the walls, so publicly hidden from view, is "Eurydice"by Sue Hubbard.

"I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,

the damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.

Already your face recedes beneath the station clock,
a damp smudge among the shadows
mirrored in the train's wet glass,

will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out
past cranes and crematoria,
boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shards

of roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud,
the rows of curtained windows like eyelids
heavy with sleep, to the city's green edge.

Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.

You turned to look.
Second fly past like birds.
My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud.

This path unravels.
Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping.

Above the hurt sky is weeping,
soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue.

I dream of a green garden
where the sun feathers my face
like your once eager kiss.

Soon, soon I will climb
from this blackened earth
into the diffident light."

- Sue Hubbard.

Instamatic Focal Point: Siwa, Egypt

And
For no reason
I start skipping like a child

And

For no reason
I turn into a leaf
That is carried so high
I kiss the Sun's mouth
And dissolve

And

For no reason
A thousand birds
Choose my head for a conference table,
Start passing their
Cups of wine
And their wild songbooks all around

And

For every reason in existence
I begin to eternally
To eternally laugh and love!

When I turn into a leaf

And start dancing,
I run to kiss our beautiful Friend
And I dissolve in the Truth
That I Am.

- Hafez (خواجه شمس‌الدین محمد حافظ شیراز)

The Gift

The next sunrise shall find me in a plane headed to Cairo. Two years after the memorable Holiday of Justice- Brodie, Tom and I are again convening in Egypt. Since our last trip, Brodie has been PAI, trained at a Zen monastery and now McKinzies eagerly awaits his arrival. Gara has transcended us all; after AI he returned to his Cairo as a full-blown, real world journalist writing for a Middle Eastern news magazine of high repute.

With me I shall bring two others who I've recently grown fond of- the Sufi poets Rumi and Hafez. I can imagine no finer backdrop by which to read their masterful expressions than the open desert sky.

Rumi is a 13th century Sufi poet- an Tajik-Persian author who has been very influential and popular in and out of the Islamic world. The poem I posted yesterday is a great example of the form; a beautifully emotive and revealing expression of the human struggle with a zen-like brevity. Hafez was a recent surprise to me. On Friday I was given The Gift by a bookmaster at a wonderful store here in Amsterdam. "The Gift" is a collection (a divan) of Hafez's poetry that has been completely enthralling me over the past week. From the first poem that I opened randomly in the store I was awestruck. These are the words of a 14th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic.

STOP BEING SO RELIGIOUS

What
Do sad people have in
Common?

It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past

And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.

What is the beginning of
Happiness?

It is to stop being
So religious

Like

That.

- Hafez (خواجه شمس‌الدین محمد حافظ شیراز).

The bookmaster spoke to me of savouring Hafez; of supping upon each poem, gnawing upon it's bones and sucking the very marrow of it's spirit, delighting in each sweet whisper.. and laugh... and gentle nod. The Gift was bound and offered, I bowed and took it with both hands in full gratitude.

Much of life is spent thinking back happily upon experiences like that which will unfold over the next six days. I cannot imagine any four greater souls to be journeying with. Such brothers in whom I constantly finding and losing the thousand fragments of my self.

Quietness- Rumi

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

- Rumi (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی)

If there was a heart that speaks other than the heart that knows, this would be their lovemaking. I sit forlorn and emptied, yet no shiver can touch my soul, for it too has gone with Rumi.

The Fog of War- Marlene Dumas

I finally took time to stop and read this poem; part of an art installation by Marlene Dumas. It hangs in a cultureless corridor filled with art, that I'd passed dozens of times on the way to my office. I wonder if I'm the only person whose stopped to read it, and if any others did whether they too shivered at the realisation of the vacuum surrounding them.

An Interlocking Rubaiyat in Celebration of Platform Staff in General and London Victoria in Particular in the Spirit of a Monist Metaphysic

Sitting on a train, with the Ethics on my mind.
Spent hours scoping out Spinoza, and trying hard to find
How consciousness and matter can so manifest
In such a single Substance, all things of one kind.

Stepping from my day dream, fleeting passed the rest.
My station has approached, so I reason that it's best
To alight unto the platform, where shortly it's laid bare
"My bag and laptop left me", to the Monos I confessed.

I rush to Platform Staff, and to these best of Men I share,
"My most necessary possessions to Victoria will fare".
Alarmed they race to radio a colleague down the line
No hopes they give, nor promises, yet act in utmost care.

The minutes pass and hope falls flat, but curse no luck of mine
Knowing full determinism, to fate I must resign.
At last a call, a railway man- my laptop he did find.
From"Deus sive Natura"through these such Men doth shine.

______________________________________________________________


Commentary on "An Interlocking Rubaiyat in Celebration of Platform Staff in General and London Victoria in Particular in the Spirit of a Monist Metaphysic".

1- In case it wasn't clear, thank you thank you thank you for returning my laptop, thus saving me from having to fall into a fetal position and give up all efforts concerning written language.
2- I guarantee this is the only Spinoza-themed customer feedback form that South West Trains has ever received.
3- One of my favourite pieces in The Onion, "I Could Write A Better Rubaiyat Than That Khayyam Dips:^t". Ahh, rubai humour.
4- Watch out for me in bars; "Anyone here written a freaking rubaiyat? I wrote one once... Mighty fine set of quatrains that was..."

Faith by David Whyte

I want to write about faith
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow night after night

faithful even as it fades from fullness
slowly becoming the last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness
but I have no faith in myself
I refuse to give it the smallest entry

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith

- David Whyte

Photo from Blue Ridge Muse

Be Crazy Dumbsaint of the Mind

Although I think sanctifying a person denies their true reality as an integration of both the dark and light in all humanity- and that seeking the intervention of Saints is not only illogical but probably heretic- it is at times like these that I look to Saint Isidore of Seville, Proposed Patron Saint of Internet Users. After quietly reciting "A Prayer before Logging onto the Internet and the Catholic Online Forum" (there's internet outside the Catholic Online Forum?) I discovered that St. Isidore had blessed my trip to the intertubes with Awesome.

It was manifest in the form of Jack Kerouac reading from "Visions of Cody" as interviewer Steve Allen accompanies on soft jazz piano.

(via BernieBelleDexter and BoingBoing)

As mentioned on the video, Kerouac wrote his legendary novel "On the Road" over three weeks- on one continous stream of teletype paper. This "first-thought=best thought" approach is characteristic of his style, which he called Spontaneous Prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness. On the request of Allen Ginsberg and others in the Beat Generation he wrote "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose", a list of thirty essentials for his Spontaneous Prose.

(N.B. This following should be read out loud- and feel like jazz and scripture)

1- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2- Submissive to everything, open, listening
3- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4- Be in love with yr life
5- Something that you feel will find its own form
6- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7- Blow as deep as you want to blow
8- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9- The unspeakable visions of the individual
10- No time for poetry but exactly what is
11- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15- Telling the true story of the world in interior monologue

16- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19- Accept loss forever
20- Believe in the holy contour of life
21- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22- Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29- You're a Genius all the time
30- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The Poet by Hermann Hesse

(Photo: Boat at Sunrise, by Unmesh)

The Poet - by Herman Hesse, 1911

Only on me, the lonely one,
The unending stars of the night shine,
The stone fountain whispers its magic song,
To me alone, to me the lonely one
The colorful shadows of the wandering clouds
Move like dreams over the open countryside.
Neither house nor farmland,
Neither forest nor hunting privilege is given to me,
What is mine belongs to no one,
The plunging brook behind the veil of the woods,
The frightening sea,
The bird whir of children at play,
The weeping and singing, lonely in the evening, of a man secretly in love.
The temples of the gods are mine also, and mine
the aristocratic groves of the past.
And no less, the luminous
Vault of heaven in the future is my home:
Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward,
To gaze on the future of blessed men,
Love, overcoming the law, love from people to people.
I find them all again, nobly transformed:
Farmer, king, tradesman, busy sailors,
Shepherd and gardener, all of them
Gratefully celebrate the festival of the future world.
Only the poet is missing,
The lonely one who looks on,
The bearer of human longing, the pale image
Of whom the future, the fulfillment of the world
Has no further need. Many garlands
Wilt on his grave,
But no one remembers him.

Shipwrecked by the Laughter of the Gods

In a June 2005 Wall Street Journal article, "Ted Haggard, the head of the 30-million strong National Association of Evangelicals, jokes that the only disagreement between himself and the leader of the Western world is automotive: Mr. Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas he prefers a Chevy." Link

Perhaps Bush's Press Secretary would like to add one more difference to the list- Mr Bush spends his free time clearing scrub in Texas- whereas Haggard flies to Denver for amphetamine heightened sex trysts with male escorts. Link

In 2004, the NAE that Haggard led reaffirmed, that "Homosexual activity, like adulterous relationships, is clearly con­demned in the Scriptures."

As Kahlil Gibran wrote-

"But what of those to whom life is not an ocean, and man-made laws are not sand-towers,

But to whom life is a rock, and the law a chisel with which they would carve it in their own likeness?

What of the cripple who hates dancers?

What of the ox who loves his yoke and deems the elk and deer of the forest stray and vagrant things?

What of the old serpent who cannot shed his skin, and calls all others naked and shameless?

And of him who comes early to the wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all feasters law-breakers?

What shall I say of these save that they too stand in the sunlight, but with their backs to the sun?

They see only their shadows, and their shadows are their laws."

An Answer in Search of a Question

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

The fifth stanza of T.S. Eliot's poem Little Gidding- which opens Tom Tykwer's 1999 film Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt).

Flowing into the memorable opening monologue,

'Mankind, probably the most mysterious species on our planet. A mystery of open questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we believe to know? Why do we believe anything at all?

'Innumerable questions looking for an answer, an answer which will raise the next question and the following answer will raise a following question and so on and so forth.

'But in the end, isn't it always the same question and always the same answer?'

LINK

Nine Tentative Definitions of Poetry

"Indeed if teachers, either through habit or fear, are so tied to the dictionary that the imaginative flight of students is inhibited, they world do well to follow Carl Sandburg through the following lines:

NINE TENTATIVE DEFINITIONS OF POETRY

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
2. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
3. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.
4. Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest of dead marches.
5. Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.
6. Poetry is a payback of invisible keepsakes.
7. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
8. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
9. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words."

From a text I'm reading called "Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education", 1964, by Hullfish and Smith, quoting "The Sandburg Range", 1928, by Carl Sandburg.

A Jailbird to Your Music

Caught deep in a world of work, when something very different echoes eerily over my headphones and calls me out. It's the "psych-folk duet" CocoRosie- and their intensely beautiful "Tekno Love Song".



"I fell in love with a bad, bad man
Ever since I met him I been sad, sad, sad
June faded into blooms of September's moon waned and grooved
Your perfume haunted me long after I saw the swing of heaven's gate open in toward me
Luxurious in your arms, your smile is the cool sun in the dark
Misery rejoices when you're near and fever
No sign of sickness keeps me burnin' down in my heart
Winter melts, she shys away quite like the silence a dying star makes

I'm a jail bird to your music, a criminal in your prayers
I watch you in your sleep even when you're not there

Picture this: your lips on my lips
The mirror has to do for now 'cause you vanished like a cloud
Rainbows wept colour all over the streets
When you went away maybe one day we'll meet
"Oh woman," you're callin' meI haven't slept a wink since 1916
I wasn't born then but sure feels time's been tickin'
Shadows parade outside my door
I wish we were dancin' across this old floor
Car horns honkin' down that dirty street
I wish you were yellin' tellin' to wash my feet
Lipstick I'd wear for one million years
Just to stop your eyes from fallin' them tears..."

Transcribed by sliceacadeua, emphasis mine.
Photo by Sean McCalbe for thezapgun.com

Older than Thou

As I have alluded the Holiday of Justice was a unique and wonderful.
I will not squeeze the chilled set of awesome experiences into a laundry
list of "done"s, but a couple of tales demand the telling. However, they
wont really encapsulate the most unique part of the holiday- the part
that has stayed and grown in me- the feeling of being in the incredible
and very different civilisational space that is Egypt. Reflecting on the
thoughts and feelings that flowed around me there I wrote this poem.

"Older than thou"

They seem to shout in sultry silence.
Eras have gone and the blood of their construction
Has passed with generations.
Ideologies now clash where the beating heart
Long silenced, once pulsed with the rythm of the Sun.

It is raw like summers glare, this new vision.
Seeks not to imitate the land of my forbears
But speaks in absolutes that comfort, guide and frighten.
Its sober tongue pleases my ear with melody
Though my heart and mind are not tuned for such a message

I wonder if they are waiting to be found
Or in finding, are they waiting for wonder?
Renunciation of sin or self? Of wandering or world?
These ancient walls too high for me to stand atop
And judge with even hands the kindness of the other.

To find only endings of stories long told
Is to forget the land of experience and origination.
Fed by an older Nile, it flows unrestrained
To the ancient shifting sands whose banks offer a canvass
Upon which we will paint the young minds of tomorrow.