I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me..

Memento

And you are waiting, expecting that one thing,
which infinitely enriches your life;
the mighty, tremendous,
the awakening of the stones,
depths, turned to you.
Dawning in the bookshelves
are volumes in gold and brown;
and you think of encompassed lands
of images, of the garments of
women lost again.

And suddenly you realise: that was it.
You rise to your feet and before you stands
a past year’s
fear and guise and prayer.

- Rilke

On the Edge of the Night

My room and this vastness,
awake over parroting land, -
are one. I am a string,
strung over rustling wide
resonances.

The things are violin bodies,
full of grumbling dark;
inside the wifes' weeping is dreaming,
inside the rancour of whole dynasties
is stirring in the sleep…
I shall
shake silverly: then
everything underneath me will live,
and what errs in the things,
will strive after the light,
which falls from my dancing tone,
around which heaven waves,
through narrow, yearning cracks,
into the old
chasms without
end…

Rilke

'a person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship'.

Rilke

Wasted Sunsets

The days are gone when the angels came to
stay,
And all the silent whispers would be blown
away
And lying in the corner a pair of high heeled
shoes,
Hanging on the wall, gold and silver, for the
blues,
One too many wasted sunsets
One too many for the road
And after dark the door is always open
Hoping someone else will show

Someone is waiting behind an unlocked door
Grey circles overhead empty on the floor
The cracks in the walls have grown too long
The slow hand is dragging on afraid to meet the dawn.

- Deep Purple

The Graveyard by the Sea

This quiet roof, where dove-sails
saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throb
visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in
flame --
That sea forever starting and
re-starting.
When thought has had its hour,
oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!
What grace of light, what pure toil
goes to form
The manifold diamond of the elusive
foam!
What peace I feel begotten at that source!

When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
Time's air is sparkling, dream is
certainty --
Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.
Sure treasure, simple shrine to
intelligence, 
Palpable calm, visible reticence,
Proud-lidded water,
Eye wherein there wells
Under a film of fire such depth of sleep --
O silence! . . . Mansion in my soul,
you slope
Of gold, roof of a myriad golden tiles.
Temple of time, within a brief sigh
bounded, 
To this rare height inured I climb,
surrounded 
By the horizons of a sea-girt eye.
And, like my supreme offering to the
gods,
That peaceful coruscation only breeds
A loftier indifference on the sky.

Even as a fruit's absorbed in the
enjoying,
Even as within the mouth its body
dying
Changes into delight through
dissolution,
So to my melted soul the heavens
declare
All bounds transfigured into a
boundless air,
And I breathe now my future's emanation.

Beautiful heaven, true heaven,
look how I change!
After such arrogance, after so much
strange
Idleness -- strange, yet full of potency --
I am all open to these shining spaces;
Over the homes of the dead
my shadow passes,
Ghosting along -- a ghost subduing me.
My soul laid bare to your
midsummer fire,
O just, impartial light whom I admire,
Whose arms are merciless, you have I
stayed
And give back, pure, to your original
place.
Look at yourself . . . But to give light implies
No less a somber moiety of shade.
Oh, for myself alone, mine, deep
within
At the heart's quick, the poem's fount,
between
The void and its pure issue, I beseech
The intimations of my secret power.

O bitter, dark, and echoing reservoir

Speaking of depths always beyond
my reach.
But know you -- feigning prisoner of
the boughs,
Gulf which cats up their slender
prison-bars,
Secret which dazzles though mine
eyes are closed --
What body drags me to
its lingering end,
What mind draws it to this
bone-peopled ground?
A star broods there on all that I have lost.

Closed, hallowed, full of
insubstantial fire, 
Morsel of earth to heaven's light
given o'er --
This plot, ruled by its flambeaux,
pleases me --
A place all gold, stone, and dark
wood, where shudders
So much marble above so many
shadows:
And on my tombs, asleep, the faithful sea.

Keep off the idolaters, bright watch-dog,
while --
A solitary with the shepherd's smile --
I pasture long my sheep, my
mysteries,
My snow-white flock of undisturbed
graves!
Drive far away from here the careful
doves,
The vain daydreams, the angels'
questioning eyes!
Now present here, the future takes its time.

The brittle insect scrapes at the dry loam;
All is burnt up, used up,
drawn up in air
To some ineffably rarefied solution . . .
Life is enlarged,
drunk with annihilation,
And bitterness is sweet, and
the spirit clear.
The dead lie easy, hidden in earth
where they
Are warmed and have their mysteries
burnt away.
Motionless noon,
noon aloft in the blue
Broods on itself -- a self-sufficient theme.

O rounded dome and perfect diadem,
I am what's changing secretly in you.
I am the only medium for your fears.
My penitence, my doubts,
my baulked desires --
These are the flaws within your diamond pride . . . 
But in their heavy night,
cumbered with marble,
Under the roots of trees
a shadow people
Has slowly now come over to your side.
To an impervious nothingness
they're thinned,
For the red clay has swallowed
the white kind;
Into the flowers that gift of life has passed.

Where are the dead? -- their homely
turns of speech,
The personal grace, the soul informing each?
Grubs thread their way where tears
were once composed.
The bird-sharp cries of girls
whom love is teasing,
The eyes, the teeth,
the eyelids moistly closing,
The pretty breast that gambles
with the flame,
The crimson blood shining when lips
are yielded,
The last gift, and the fingers that
would shield it --
All go to earth, go back into the game.

And you, great soul, is there yet
hope in you
To find some dream without
the lying hue
That gold or wave offers
to fleshly eyes?
Will you be singing still when you're thin air?

All perishes. A thing of flesh and pore
Am I.
Divine impatience also dies.
Lean immortality, all crêpe and gold,
Laurelled consoler frightening to
behold,
Death is a womb, a mother's breast,
you feign
The fine illusion, oh the pious trick!
Who does not know them, and is not
made sick
That empty skull, that everlasting grin?

Ancestors deep down there,
O derelict heads
Whom such a weight of spaded earth
o'erspreads,
Who are the earth, in whom
our steps are lost,
The real flesh-eater, worm unanswerable
Is not for you that
sleep under the table:
Life is his meat, and I am still his host.
'Love,' shall we call him?
'Hatred of self,' maybe?
His secret tooth is so intimate with me
That any name would suit him well enough,
Enough that he can see,
will, daydream, touch --
My flesh delights him,
even upon my couch
I live but as a morsel of his life.
Zeno, Zeno, cruel philosopher Zeno,
Have you then pierced me
with your feathered arrow
That hums and flies,
yet does not fly! The sounding
Shaft gives me life, the arrow
kills. Oh, sun! --
Oh, what a tortoise-shadow to
outrun
My soul, Achilles' giant stride left standing!

No, no! Arise!
The future years unfold.
Shatter, O body, meditation's mould!
And, O my breast, drink in the wind's
reviving!
A freshness, exhalation of the sea,
Restores my soul . . . Salt-breathing potency!
Let's run at the waves and be hurled back
to living!
Yes, mighty sea with such wild frenzies gifted
(The panther skin and the rent chlamys), sifted
All over with sun-images that
glisten,
Creature supreme, drunk on your own
blue flesh,
Who in a tumult like the deepest hush
Bite at your sequin-glittering tail --
yes, listen!
The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
Dares to explode out of the rocks
in reeking
Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
Break, waves! Break up with your
rejoicing surges
This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.


Paul Valery .

There is always a rather sordid side to literature, a lurking deference to one's public.

(continued)..

When you talk, I wonder whether you lie or tell the truth.

I lie.And I tell the truth.But I don't have any reason to lie to you.Why?..

Tell me, do things like these happen to you often?

Not very often, but it happens.I have doubtful morals you know.

What do you call having doubtful morals?

Being doubtful about the morals of other people.

Persistence of Memory

...Listen to me.
Like you, I know what it is to forget.

No, you don't know what it is to forget.

Like you, I have a memory.I know what it is to forget.

No, you don't have a memory.

Like you I too have tried with all my might not to forget.
Like you, I forgot.Like you, I wanted to have an inconsolable memory,
a memory of shadows and stone.
For my part, I struggled with all my might, every day, against
the horror of no longer understanding at all the reason for
remembering.Like you, I forgot...

Why deny the obvious necessity for memory?...

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Am going to sing my song
now.
Eventhough I haven't the voice.

The Rustics

The Rustics who take their ease
in long squattings,
will hear boughs breaking
among the red rustlings.

-Rimbaud, Text of the letter to Paul Demeny, May 15,
1871.

Guile

Insipid heap of fallen stars,
Pile up in the corners.
You'll be extinguished in God,saddled
with ignoble cares.

Rimbaud

More than ever before, we roister,
As on to our ant heaps come
Tumbling the yellow heads,
On these extraordinary dawns.

Dance of the Hanged People

Hurray! the gay dancers whose bellies are gone!
You can cut capers on such a long stage!
Hop! never mind whether its fighting or dancing!
Maddened, they saw on their fiddles!

Oh the hard heels, no one's pumps are wearing out.
And nearly all have taken of their shirts of skin.
The rest is not embarrassing and can be seen without shame.
On each skull the snow places a white hat.

The crow acts as a plume for these cracked brains,
A scrap of flesh clings to each lean chin
You would say, to see them turning in their dark combats,
They were stiff knights clashing pasteboard armours.

Ho there, shake up those funeral braggarts,
Craftily telling with their great broken fingers
The beads of their loves on their pale vertebrae:
Hey the departed, this is no monastery here!

Oh! but see how from the middle of this Dance of Death
Springs into the red sky a great skeleton, mad,
Carried away by his own impetus, like a rearing horse,
And, feeling the rope tight again around his neck,

Clenches his knuckles on his thighbone with a crack
Uttering cries like mocking laughter,
And then like a mountback into his booth,
Skips back into the dance to the music of the bones!

Rimbaud

Lets mince

Character(before N):I have decided to do away with the angles.
Character(after C):What angles?
Character(before N):All possible angles.
Character(after C):And then?
Character(before N):You can have an angle.
Character(after C):There is no angle here.
Character(before N):Its like the same as before.You can always go to a flying saucer party if you're invited to one.You should.Irrespective of my accompanying you or not.
Character(after C): But I'd like to go together with you.
Character(before N):Am afraid that's not always going to be the case.

(after C) went to one.
(before N)was asked to come.
(before N) refused vehemently(for reasons unknown)and called on a friend to decide about dashing it.


So then?

Charlotte et son Jules

Charlotte gets out of her current lover's car(Gerard Blain) and goes up to her ex-lover's room(Jean-Paul Belmondo).He greets her with a display of just about every attitude a man can show towards a woman:wily, paternal, condescending, he soon turns to pleading.Charlotte, who hasn't uttered a word, says to him,"I forgot my toothbrush", and leaves.

Godard's best short film(1958)

The Night Must Fall

I'd often stand at the window
stand and stare at you.
It all seemed to warm me off,
the strange city, whose unconfiding landscape
gloomed as though I didn't exist.
The nearest thing didn't mind if I misunderstood them.
The street would thrust itself up to the lamp,
and I'd see it was strange.

A sympathisable room up there, revealed in the lamp light:
I'd begin to share, they'd notice and close the shutters.
I'd stand.
A child would cry, and I'd know the mothers in the houses,
what they availed,
and I'd know as well the inconsolable grounds of
infinite crying.
Or else a voice would sing, and what was expected
be just a little surpassed;
or an old man coughed below,
full of reproach, as if his body were in the right
against a gentler world.
Or else, when an hour was striking,
I'd begin to count too late and let it escape me.
As a strange little boy, when at last they invite him to join them,
cannot catch the ball, and is quite unable
to share the game the rest are so easily playing,
but stands and gazes- whither?
I'd stand and all at once
realise you were being friends with me, playing with me,grown up
Night, and I'd gaze at you.
While towers were raging, and while, with its hidden fate,
a city stood around me and undivinable mountains
camped against me and Strangeness, in narrowing circles,
hungrily prowled round my casual flares of perception:
then, lofty Night,
you were not ashamed to recognize me.
Your breathing went over me; your smile upon all that
spacious consequence passed into me.

Rilke

Ahem..

'Why dost thou shade thy lovely face?O why
Does that ecclipsing hand, so long, deny
The sunshine of thy soul-enliv'ning eye?'

Francis Quarles

Meaning the end..

There is in every art a struggle between techniques and artistry, the means and the end, the story to be told and the grammar and the words used in its telling.Technique can always be acquired, grace and ease of movement but rarely, the difference between dancing and acrobatics lies not so much in technique as in a state of mind.

The acrobat performs his steps in such a fashion as to underline the difficulty of a task.In his case the drama is implicit in the physical performance.That is the only idea behind his performance.His climax consists of a dazzling finish to whip up applause.There is relief in this climax that he has succeeded in overcoming his difficulties.

The street at night

a river
of columns of colour
trembling nervously
dilating
vanishing
an ephemera circling
spiralling...