drunken morning

be fearless

Berkeley Anti-War Demonstrator
Unknown Artist, American 1970

how to be perfect

"How to be perfect" by Ron Padgett


get some sleep

eat an orange every morning

be friendly it will help make you happy

hope for everything...expect nothing

take care of things close to home first

straighten up your room before you save the world

then, save the world

be nice to people before they have the chance to behave badly

wear comfortable shoes

do not spend too much time with large groups of people

plan your day so you never have to rush

show your appreciation to people who do things for you

even if you have paid them...even if they do favors you don't want

after dinner wash the dishes

calm down

don't expect your children to love you so they can if they want to

don't be too self critical or too self congratulatory

don't think that progress exists...it doesn't

imagine what you would like to see happen

and then don't do anything to make it impossible

forgive your country every once in a while

if that is not possible...go to another one

if you feel tired...rest

don't be depressed about growing older

it will make you feel even older which is depressing

if you burn your finger put ice on it immediately

if you bang your finger with a hammer hold your hand in the air for twenty minutes

you'll be surprised by the curative powers of ice and gravity

do not inhale smoke...take a deep breath

do not smart off to a policeman

be good

be honest with yourself, diplomatic with others

do not go crazy a lot its a waste of time

drink plenty of water...when asked what you would like to drink say "water please"

take out the trash

love life

use exact change

when there's shooting in the street don't go near the window

(listen)

gunter grass

Why I am silent, silent for too much time,
how much is clear and we made it
in war games, where, as survivors,
we are just the footnotes.

That is the claimed right to the formal preventive aggression
which could erase the Iranian people
dominated by a bouncer and moved to an organized jubilation,
because in the area of his competence there is
the construction of the atomic bomb.

And then why do I avoid myself
to call the other country with its name,
where since years – even if secretly covered -
there is an increasing nuclear power,
without control, because unreachable
by every inspection?

I feel the everybody silence on this state of affairs,
which my silence is slave to,
as an oppressive lie and an inhibition that presents punishment
we don’t pay attention to;
the verdict “anti-Semitism” is common.

Now, since my country,
from time to time touched by unique and exclusive crimes,
obliged to justify itself,
again for pure business aims - even if
with fast tongue we call it “reparation” -
should deliver another submarine to Israel,
with the specialty of addressing
annihilating warheads where the
existence of one atomic bomb is not proved
but it wants evidence as a scarecrow,
I say what must be said.

Why did I stay silent until now?
Because the thought about my origin,
burdened by an unclearing stain,
had avoiding to wait this fact
like a truth declared by the State of Israel
that I want to be connected to.

Why did I say it only now,
old and with the last ink:
the nuclear power of Israel
threat the world peace?
Because it must be said
what tomorrow will be too late;
Because - as Germans and with
enough faults on the back -
we might also become deliverers of a predictable
crime, and no excuse would erase our complicity.

And I admit: I won’t be silent
because I had enough of the Western hypocrisy;
Because I wish that many will want
to get rid of the silence,
exhorting the cause of a recognizable
risk to the abdication, asking that a free and permanent control
of the Israel atomic power
and the Iran nuclear bases
will be made by both the governments
with an international supervision.

Only in this way, Israelis, Palestinians, and everybody,
all people living hostile face to face in that
country occupied by the craziness,
will have a way out,
so us too.

(haaretz)

Recording on Saturday Afternoon

Freestyle Over-Dead By Design - Canibus.mp3

Freestyle Over-Dead By Design - Canibus.mp3 by Leonid Basin

organ grinder

Occupy Society

Daddy, we're so sorry

We're so s - s- sorry yeah

We just like to party

Like to p- p- party yeah

So don't blame us when our bail is high

Ha -ha - ha -higher than your daughter

And don't blame society

When she da -duh -dies a martyr

BNB

i see you

"The Bard"

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. (read more)

The Matrix ~ A Poem

burn

"they say time...

is the fire...

in which we burn"


Delmore Schwartz

Refusal

Beloved,

In what other lands or lives

Have I known your lips

Your hands

Your laughter brave

Irreverent.

Those sweet excesses 

That I do adore.

What surety is there

That we will meet again, 

On other worlds some

Future time undated.

I defy my body's haste.

Without the promise

Of one more sweet encounter

I will not deign to die.

Maya Angelou

i was

For just a moment...

I forgot who I was

For just a moment...

I was one with the universe

For just a moment...

I was

Explicit

Don't watch this video if you're easily offended

The Power of a Poem

Miroslav Holub, whose name always caught my ear because it was so exotic, has long been a favourite poet of mine. He was not only a poet and a writer but also a practising scientist in the field of immunology. Consequently, his poetry tends to be intellectual, hard-hitting and precise. M.H. was born in Plzen, in Western Bohemia (later called Czechoslovakia.)

His dates are 1923 - 1998, so he lived a moderately long life. An aspect of literature that has always captivated me is the war-time experiences of the authors and how those experiences have shaped the works that they have written. So, having completed his secondary school studies, Miroslav Holub could not go on to university study (during the Nazi occupation, the Germans closed down Czech universities) and he worked as a labourer at a warehouse and at a railway station. After the Second World War, Holub studied at Charles University in Prague, first at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, then from 1946 at the Faculty of Medicine. After this he became a notable immunologist and an international poet.

In the Irish language revival we had a return to "caint na ndaoine" ("the talk of the people")  with the likes of An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire, Pádraig Mac Piarais and Pádraig Ó Conaire.  Wordsworth sought to do the same with the language of English poetry - using the language of ordinary people. Together with S.T. Coleridge he wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which they sought to use the language of ordinary people in poetry.  Likewise Holub maintained that "only by capturing life around us we may be able to express its dynamicism, the immense developments, rolling on around us and within us."  This also meant that it was necessary to give up regular, rhymed and melodious poetry and to adopt irregular and free verse. This was the poetics of Holub's first collections, especially Denní sluzba (Day duty, 1958) and Achilees a zelva (Achilles and the tortoise, 1960), His later collections developed it further.

The poem I would like to share with my readers is called The Door.  My father used always quote the old saying, "God never closes one door unless he opens another."  Opening a door is a very positive image or metaphor, letting the air of liberty and imagination in.

The Door


Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there's
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.


Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog's rummaging.
Maybe you'll see a face,
or an eye
or the picture
of a picture.


Go and open the door.
If there's fog
it will clear.


Go and open the door.
Even if there's only
the darkness singing,
even if there's only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing is there,
go and open the door.


At least
there'll be
a draught.


(translated by Ian Milner)

Endings and Beginnings

Endings and Beginnings
At any point in time, I suppose, we could say that we are both finishing and beginning.  This moment is the end of the moment immediately preceding it and the beginning of the one following it.  This year 2010 is for me the end of thirtieth academic year since I qualified as a teacher - and I have gone through 30 of those endings.  Each one of those endings saw the beginning of the Summer months and of freedom.  I often find myself returning to that great poem by T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets which rates as one of the greatest modernist poems bar none.  Therein you hear the voice of the emptiness of the modern age speak to you.  It is a treasure trove for anyone on a spiritual quest in the desert of the modern age.  In the first section, called Burnt Norton, we read, and these words are replete with meaning and bear a fruit that is nothing less than the observation of a Buddhist mind before that fruit's fall to the ground:

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with precision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

 In section four of that same poem, called Little Gidding we read, in stanza five of that section:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right...
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them...

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.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning...

In the above quotations the italicization is mine alone.  This is a noble poem, a poem which does not yield up its fruits, its insights very easily at all.  It is a poem which must be pondered like a scriptural text, and, indeed, it does not matter what religion that scriptural text is from.  Indeed, it could also be from an agnostic or even an atheistic text for that matter.  However, it would be a spiritual text in the broadest sense of that term.  To my mind, at least, this is a poem that rattles around in my mind, in my heart and in my soul and quite often I find myself remembering snatches of lines.  It works on one's mind rather like a brilliant piece of music, one that has incantations and the rhythms of great prayers in its very musical strains.

And so we bid farewell to this years sixth years, who, in that bidding of farewell, become by a strange benediction last year's sixth years.   And now the present fifth years are ready to replace their predecessors in the chain of life or in the chain of being.  Often, I think the ancients got it more correct than we people of the line.  Let me explain.  For the ancients their world was circular - night preceded day and day preceded night, the sun came up in the East and set in the West, day after inevitable day.  The seasons came and went in their turn, and so onwards the circle turned.  Life, like nature, sometimes erringly called inanimate nature, was always cyclic.  There was birth and death and then birth and death all over again.  Then these pre-moderns swallowed the myth of linearity, by this I mean the myth of inevitable progress, that life could only get better and better and better, that humankind could only improve and improve and improve.  However, Nietzsche and his likes sounded a warning for that ridiculously naive belief.  Then, the First World War sounded the death-knell for the myth of indefinite progress.  Naive humankind had come of age in the bloodbath that was No Man's Land.  Humankind was very much a flawed entity which had written its nature too large, which had overestimated by far its importance in the scheme of things, which inevitably thought it had the answer to life's mysteries...

Indeed, it would seem to this writer at least that all of life can be boiled down to observing it, to observing the very breath that enlivens the body wherein the psyche dwells, let us call this phenomenon the Body-Mind or the Mind-Body.  It would seem that things come and go and that we can add this or that bit to it, give the world this or that little push, alter it a little, compose this or that, build this or that, sing this or that, play this or that, even invent this or that, but yet the world goes on as it must and we will all eventually be dust, for we are only a small part in the overall chaos, significant only in our insignificance.

Above the famous alchemical symbol, the ouroborus!

Marvin the Martian

" You are making me very angry! "

Time

They say...time

is the fire

in which we burn

...

The Age Of Aquarius