technomadic
notes from the ever-emerging field
-
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep. -
- Trying to use words, and every attempt
- Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
- Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
- For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
- One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
- Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
- With shabby equipment always deteriorating
- In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
- Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
- By strength and submission, has already been discovered
- Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
- To emulate—but there is no competition—
- There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
- And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
- That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
- For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
- Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
- The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
- Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
- Isolated, with no before and after,
- But a lifetime burning in every moment
- And not the lifetime of one man only
- But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
- There is a time for the evening under starlight,
- A time for the evening under lamplight
- (The evening with the photograph album).
- Love is most nearly itself
- When here and now cease to matter.
- Old men ought to be explorers
- Here or there does not matter
- We must be still and still moving
- Into another intensity
- For a further union, a deeper communion
- Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
- The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
- Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
-
Even after all this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
“You owe me.”
Look at what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.— Hafiz -
This We Have Now
This we have now
is not imagination.This is not
grief or joy.Not a judging state,
or an elation,
or sadness.Those come and go.
This is the presence that
doesn’t.— Rumi(Source: newtab)
-
Those who don’t feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don’t drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.If you want to improve your mind that way, sleep on.
I’ve given up on my brain.
I’ve torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.
If you’re not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you, and sleep.— Rumi (via Jacqueline) -
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.— Rumi -
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
[…]
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
[…]
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.— T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock -
Language is fossil poetry.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson -
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople— it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying—
you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now’and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpeople,simply isn’t. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain’s a mammal. Mostpeople’s wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king,hasn’t a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus,would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn’t a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcendentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected infra mortally millenniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”—
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
— E.E Cummings, Complete Works, Introduction
