not a pretty picture. not a good. not a bad. picture. but an argument.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Thursday, February 18, 2016

more


The New, my friends, is not a matter of
letting machines force out our handiwork.
Don't be confused by change; soon those who have
praised the “New” will realize their mistake.

For look, the whole is infinitely newer
than a cable or a high apartment house.
The stars keep blazing with an ancient fire
and all the more recent fires will fade out.

Not even the largest, strongest of transmissions
can turn the wheels from what will be.
Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons.

More than we experienced has gone by.
And the future holds the most remote event
in union with what we most deeply want.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (Appendix)
translated by Stephen Mitchell





Monday, February 15, 2016

Saturday, February 13, 2016

"the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility"




                                    You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
      You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
      You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
      You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
      You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


from "East Coker" by T. S. Eliot



Tuesday, February 2, 2016

"Here on the rim, cringing under the cracked whip of winter"

There is no center;
the centers
travel with us unseen
like our shadows
on a day when there is no sun.

We must move back:
there are too many foregrounds.



...

An other sense tugs at us:
we have lost something,
some key to these things
which must be writings
and are locked against us
or perhaps (like a potential
mine, unknown vein
of metal in the rock)
something not lost or hidden
but just not found yet

that informs, holds together
this confusion, this largeness
and dissolving:

not above or behind
or within it, but one
with it: an

identity:
something too huge and simple
for us to see.

from "A Place: Fragments" by Margaret Atwood