Be Still, and Be Still

I. It is because it rests on nothing, because it lacks even the shadow of an argument that we persevere in life. Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown.
     By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the great Unknown.
     Where can so much Void and Incomprehensibility lead? We cling to the days because the desire to die is too logical, hence ineffective. If life had a single argument in its favor — distinct, indisputable — it would annihilate itself; instincts and prejudices collapse at the contact of Rigor. Everything that breathes feeds on the unverifiable; a dose of logic would be deadly to existence....
— E. M. Cioran, from "Variations on Death, in PART I: "Directions for Decomposition," in A Short History of Decay, pp. 10-11.

....Each suffering, except ours, seems to us legitimate or absurdly intelligible; otherwise, mourning would be the unique constant in the versatility of our sentiments. But we wear only the mourning of ourselves. If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings. And if we had a miraculously present memory which sustained the totality of our present pains, we should succumb beneath such a burden. Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.
— E. M. Cioran, from "The Key to Our Endurance," in Ibid., p. 26.

     (The great systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. What advantage is it to know that the nature of being consists in the "will to live," in "idea," or in the whim of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtile displacements of meanings. What is loathes the verbal embrace, and our inmost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moments. Moreover, Being itself is only a pretension of Nothingness.
     We define only out of despair. We must have a formula, we must even have many, if only to give justification to the mind and a façade to the void.
     Neither concept not ecstasy are functional. When music plunges us into the "inwardness" of being, we rapidly return to the surface: the effects of the illusion scatter and our knowledge admits its nullity.
     The things we touch and those we conceive are as improbable as our senses and our reason; we are sure only in our verbal universe, manageable at will — and ineffectual. Being is mute and the mind is garrulous. This is called knowing.
     The philosophers originality comes down to inventing terms. Since there are only three or four attitudes by which to confront the world — and about as many ways of dying — the nuances which multiply and diversify them derive from no more than the choice of words, bereft of any metaphysical range.
     We are engulfed in a pleonastic universe, in which the questions and answers amount to the same thing.)
— E. M. Cioran, from "Farewell to Philosophy," in Ibid., pp. 48-49.

....Since the most eloquent decadences edify us no further as to unhappiness than the stammerings of a shepherd, and ultimately there is more wisdom in the mockery of an idiot than in the investigations of the laboratories, is it not madness to pursue truth on the paths of time — or in books? Lao-tse, reduced to a few texts, is not more naïve than we who have read everything. Profundity is independent of knowledge. We translate to other levels the revelations of the ages, or we exploit original intuitions by the latest acquisitions of thought. Thus Hegel is a Heraclitus who has read Kant; and our Ennui is an affective Eleaticism, the fiction of diversity unmasked and exposed to the heart....
— E. M. Cioran, from "Return to the Elements," in Ibid., p. 50.

Think About It

 Anguish
                                    Is it possible that She will get us forgiven for ambitions continually crushed, — that an affluent end will make up for the ages of indigence, — that one day of success will lull us to sleep on the shame of our fatal incompetence?
     (O palms! diamond! — Love, force! — higher than all joys and all fame! — in every respect, — everywhere, demon, god, — youth of this being here: myself!)
     And may the accidents of scientific wonders and the movements of social brotherhood be cherished as the progressive restitution of our primitive franchise.

     But the Vampire who makes us agreeable, commands us to enjoy ourselves with what she leaves us, or, in other words, that we should be more amusing.

     Wounds, from the tossings of the wearing air and the sea; torrents from the silence of the waters and murderous air; tortures that laugh in their silence abominably rough.
— Arthur Rimbaud, Anguish (entire), in Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems, Joseph M. Bernstein (ed.), pp. 206-207.

....It took me a long time, my lifetime so to speak, to realize that the colour of an eye half seen, or the source of some distant sound, are closer to Giudecca in the hell of unknowing than the existence of God, or the origins of protoplasm, or the existence of self, and even less worthy than these to occupy the wise. It's a bit much, a lifetime, to achieve this consoling conclusion, it doesn't leave you much time to profit by it....
— Samuel Beckett, from "First Love," in First Love and Other Shorts, pp. 32-33.

....In twos often they came, one hard on the other, thus, How shall I go another day? and then, How did I ever go on another day? Or, Did I kill my father? and then, Did I ever kill anyone? That kind of way, to the general from the particular I suppose you might say, question and answer too in a way, very addling. I strive with them as best I can, quickening my step when they come on, tossing my head from side to side and up and down, staring agonizedly at this and that, increasing my murmur to a scream, these are helps. But they should not be necessary, something is wrong here, if it was the end I would not so much mind, but how often I have said, in my life, before some new awful thing, It is the end, and it was not the end, and yet the end cannot be far off now, I shall fall as I go along and stay down or curl up for the night as usual among the rocks and before morning be gone. Oh I know I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store, that makes me happy, often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it. Where did I get it, from a dream, or a book read in a nook when a boy, or a word overheard as I went along, or in me all along and kept under till it could give me joy, these are the kind of horrid thoughts I have to contend with in the way I have said....
— Samuel Beckett, from "From an Abandoned Work," in Ibid., pp. 44-45.

....Any guides we later asked about the value of these myths always gave us what appeared to be evasive answers. "They are as true," one of them told us, "as your own fairy stories and scientific theories." "A knife," said another, "is neither true nor false. But someone who grasps it by the blade is truly in error."
— René Daumal, Mount Analogue, p. 95.

    This is how I sum up for myself what I wish to convey to those who work here with me:

     I am dead because I lack desire;
     I lack desire because I think I possess;
     I think I possess because I do not try to give.
     In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
     Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
     Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing;
     In desiring to become, you begin to live.
— René Daumal, from Postface, Ibid., p. 113.

In Your Head

     "The benignant efficacies of Concealment," cries our Professor, "who shall speak or sing? Silence and Secrecy! Altars might still be raised to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and strategic of these, forbode to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman [Talleyrand] defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal...."
— Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Archibald MacMerchan (ed.), p. 198.

151, 23. From Suicide. The thought of self-destruction had occurred to Carlyle in his years of depression. "My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in a rotten carcass, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain, till my intellect is obscured and weakened, and my head and heart are alike desolate and dark. How have I deserved this? Or is it mere fate that orders these things, caring no jot for merit or demerit, crushing our poor mortal interests among its ponderous machinery, and grinding us and them to dust relentlessly? I know not. Shall I ever know? Then why don't you kill yourself, sir? Is there not arsenic? is there not ratsbane of various kinds? and hemp? and steel? Most true, Sathanas, all these things are, but it will be time enough to use them when I have lost the game which I am yet but losing. You observe, sir, I have still a glimmering of hope; and while my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not breaking their hearts would still remain to be performed when hope had utterly fled....
— From Thomas Carlyle's Journal, in "Notes" to Ibid., p. 349.

173, 9. But the whim we have. "When we speak of happiness and being happy, we half unconsciously mean some extra enjoyment, if I may say so, pleasure, some series of agreeable sensation, superadded to the ordinary pleasure of existing, which really, if free from positive pain, is all we have right to pretend to. In place of reckoning ourselves happy when we are not miserable, we reckon ourselvesmiserable when not happy. A proceeding, if you think of it, quite against rule! What claim have I to be in raptures? None in the world, except that I have taken such a whim into my own wise head; and having got so much, I feel as if I could never get my due....
     "And so when the young gentleman goes forth into the world, and finds that it is really and truly not made of wax, but of stone and metal, and will keep its own shape, let the young gentleman fume as he likes; bless us, what a storm he gets into! What terrible elegies and pindaries and Childe Harolds and Sorrows of Werther! O devil take it, Providence is in the wrong; has used him (sweet, meritorious gentleman) unjustly. He will bring his action of damages against Providence! Trust me a hopeful lawsuit!
— Thomas Carlyle, from Wotton Reinfred, pp. 92-94, in Ibid., p. 357.

The most insatiable people are certain ascetics who go on hunger-strike in all spheres of life, thinking that in this way they will simultaneously achieve the following:
     1) a voice will say: Enough, you have fasted enough, now you may eat like the others and it will not be accounted unto you as eating.
     2) the same voice will at the same time say: You have fasted for so long under compulsion, from now on you will fast with joy, it will be sweeter than food (at the same time, however, you will also really eat).
     3) the same voice will at the same time say: You have conquered the world, I release you from it, as from eating and from fasting (at the same time, however, you will both fast and eat).
     In addition to this there also comes a voice that has been speaking to them ceaselessly all the time: Though you do not fast completely, you have the good will, and that suffices.
— Franz Kafka, "The Hunger Strike" (entire), in Parables and Paradoxes, p. 187.

Consent to Advice

     They will never understand this book, those who search for happiness. The soul remains unsatisfied; it falls asleep amid happy surroundings. It becomes inert rather than alert. The soul should remain alert, active. It should find happiness not in HAPPINESS but in the awareness of its violent activity.
     It follows that sorrow is to be preferred over joy, for it quickens the soul; when it does not vanquish it stimulates. It causes suffering, but pride of undaunted living compensates for minor lapses. Supreme arrogance is the mask of intense living. I would not exchange the intense life for any other; I have lived several lives, and the least of these was the real one.
— Andrè Gide, The Notebooks of Andrè Walter, The White Notebook, p. 26.

     Writing bores me, for what is there to write? Of all the emotions that demand expression, why choose one rather than another? Yet I must write, for my head is bursting under the pressure of accumulated emotions.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., The Black Notebook, p. 85.

     Strange enough how creatures of the humankind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion, and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute law-giver; mere use —  and want — everywhere leads him by the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases to be marvelous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable....
— Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Archibald MacMechan (ed.), pp. 49-50.

....Often we would condole over the hard destiny of the Young in this era: how after all our toil, we were to be turned-out into the world, with beards on our chins indeed, but with few other attributes of manhood; no existing thing that we were trained to Act on, nothing that we could so much as Believe. "How has our head on the outside a polished Hat," would Towgood exclaim, "and in the inside Vacancy, or a froth of Vocables and Attorney-Logic! At a small cost men are educated to make leather into shoes; but at a great cost, what am I educated to make? By Heaven, Brother! what I have already eaten and worn, as I came thus far, would endow a considerable Hospital of Incurables." — "Man , indeed," I would answer, "has a Digestive Faculty, which must be kept working were it even partly by stealth. But as for our Miseducation, make not bad worse; waste not the time yet ours, in trampling on thistles because they have yielded no figs. Frisch zu, Bruder! Here are Books and we have brains to read them; here is a whole Earth and a whole Heaven, and we have eyes to look on them: Frisch zu!"
— Thomas Carlyle, Ibid., p. 106.

....Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Percept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at.
— Thomas Carlyle, Ibid., p. 149.

     "To me, in this our life," says the Professor, which is an internecine warfare with the Time-spirit, other warfare seems questionable, Host thou in any way a Contention with thy brother, I advise thee, think well what the meaning thereof is. If thou guage it to the bottom, it is simply this: "Fellow, see! thou art taking more than thy share of Happiness in the world, something from my share: which, by the Heavens, thou shalt not; nay I will fight thee rather." — Alas, and the whole lot to be divided is such a beggarly matter truly a "feast of shells," for the substance has been spilled out: not enough to quench one Appetite; and the collective human species clutching at them! — Can we not, in all such cases, rather say: "Take it, thou too-revenous individual; take that pitiful additional fraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wantest; take it with a blessing: would to Heaven I had enough for thee!" — If Fichte's Wissenshaftslehre be, "to a certain extent, Applied Christianity," surely to a still greater extent, so is this. We have here not a Whole Duty of Man, yet a Half Duty, namely, the Passive half: could we but do it, as we can demonstrate it!
    But indeed Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct. Nay, properly Conviction is not possible till then; inasmuch as all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex and vortices: only by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience does it find any center to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system. Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that "Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action." On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: "Do the Duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.
— Thomas Carlyle, Ibid., pp. 176-177.

You Thought?

....Saith Mr. Bacon, "Well, my master, then I'll tell you, hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."
— Francis Bacon, Wisdom of the Ancients, Apopthegms, p. 382.

     Bion, that was an atheist, was showed in a port city, in a temple of Neptune, many tables of pictures of such as had in tempest made their vows to Neptune, and were saved from shipwreck: and was asked, "How say you now? Do you not acknowledge the power of the gods?" But saith he, "Ay; but where are they painted that have been drowned after their vows?"
— Francis Bacon, Ibid., p. 392.

     Antisthenes being asked of one, what learning was most necessary for man's, answered, "To unlearn that which is nought."
— Francis Bacon, Ibid., p. 393.

     One said to Aristippus, "'Tis a strange thing why men should rather give to the poor, than to philosophers." He answered, "Because they think themselves may sooner come to be poor, than to be philosophers."
— Francis Bacon, Ibid., p. 402.

     One was examined upon certain scandalous words spoken against the king. He confessed them, and said, "It is true, I spake them, and if the wine had not failed, I had said much more."
— Francis Bacon, Ibid., p. 410.

     Without good-nature, man is but a better kind of vermin.
— Francis Bacon, Wisdom of the Ancients, Ornamenta Rationalia (Elegant Sentences), p. 420.

     Number itself importeth not much in armies, where the people are of weak courage; for (as Virgil says) it never troubles a wolf how many the sheep be.
— Francis Bacon, Ibid., p. 422.

     If a man look sharp and attentively, he shall see fortune; for though she be blind, she is not invisible.
— Francis Bacon, Ibid., p. 424.

     If you would work on any man, you must either know his nature and fashions, and so lead him; or his ends, and so persuade him; or his weaknesses and disadvantages, and so awe him; or those that have interest in him, and so govern him.
— Francis Bacon, Ibid., p. 425.

     Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. [The New Science, G. Vico, 241]
That's where it's at: decline.
The Decline of the West
A graffito (heiroglyph) from May 1968 in Paris:
"America is the only nation in history to go from barbarism to decadence with no civilization in between."
— Norman O. Brown, Closing Time, p. 29.

Minding the Mind

Nay, number (itself) in armies importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage for (as Virgil saith) It never troubles a wolf how many the sheep be.
— Francis Bacon, Essay XXIX, "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates," in Francis Bacon: Essays/Advanced Learning/New Atlantis & c., Richard Foster Jones (ed. & sel.), p. 85.

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business. For expert men can execute and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one, but the general counsels and the plots and marshalling of affairs come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgement wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them, for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously [carefully]; and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others, but that would [should] be only in the less important arguments and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled water, flashy [insipid or showy] things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise, poets witty, the mathematics subtile, natural philosophy deep, moral grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt studia in mores ["Studies pass into manners."] Nay there is no stand [obstacle] or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies, like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics, for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for they are cumini sectores [hair-splitters]. If he be not apt to beat over [treat comprehensively] matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases. So every defect of the mind may have a special receipt.
— Francis Bacon, Essay L, "Of Studies," in Ibid., pp. 143-145.

....while antiquity envieth there should be new additions, and novelty cannot be content to add but it must deface. Surely the advice of the prophet is the true direction in this matter, Sate super vias antiquas, et videte quaenam sit via recta et bona, et ambulate in ea ["Stand in the old paths, and see which is the straight and good way, and walk in that."] Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way, but when the discovery is well taken, then to make progression. And to speak truly, Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi ["The antiquity of time is the youth of the world."] These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrograde, by a computation backward from ourselves.
     Another error, induced by the former, is a distrust that any thing should be now to be found out, which the world should have missed and passed over so long time, as if the same objective were to be made to time that Lucian maketh to Jupiter and other the heathen gods, of which he wondereth that they begot so many children in old time and begot none in his time .... So it seemeth men doubt [fear] lest time is become past children and generation, wherein contrariwise we see commonly the levity and unconstancy of men's judgements, which, till a matter be done, wonder that it can be done, and as soon as it is done, wonder again that it was no sooner done, as we see in the expedition of Alexander into Asia, which at first was prejudged as a vast and impossible enterprise; and yet afterwards it pleaseth Livy to make no more of it than this, Nil aliud quam bene ausus vana contemnere ["It was nothing but being bold enough to despise empty apprehensions."]....
— Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Ibid., p. 209-210.

     But the greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge. For men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason to the benefit and use of men; as if there were sought in knowledge a couch, whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace, for a wandering and varible mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate. But this is that which will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and action may be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been....
— Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Ibid., p. 214.

....But in reality that which I meditate and propound is not Acatalepsis but Eucatalepsis, not denial of the capacity to understand but provision for understanding truly, for I do not take away authority from the senses, but supply them with helps; I do not slight the understanding, but govern it. And better surely it is that we should know all we need to know, and yet think our knowledge imperfect, than that we should think our knowledge perfect, and yet not know anything we need to know.
— Francis Bacon, from Novum Organum (Magna Instauratio), in Ibid., pp. 330-331.

Light Steering

               Ax
Whoever swings an ax
Knows the body of man
Will again be covered with fur.
The stench of blood and swamp water
Will return to its old resting place.
They'll spend their winters
Sleeping like the bears.
The skin on the breasts of their women
Will grow coarse. He who cannot
Grow teeth, will not survive.
He who cannot howl
Will not find his pack ...

These dark prophecies were gathered,
Unknown to myself, by my body
Which understands historical probabilities,
Lacking itself, in its essence, a future.
— Charles Simic, in Dismantling The Silence.

      Confessions of the Author
                              For Ernst Simon
Once with a light keel
I shipped out to the land of legends
through the storm of deeds and play,
With my gaze fixed on the goal
And in my blood the beguiling poison —
Then one descended to me
Who seized me by the hair
And spoke: Now render the Scriptures!

From that hour on the galley
Keeps my brain and hands on course,
The rudder writes characters,
My life disdains its honor
And the soul forgets that it sang.
All storms must stand and bow
When cruelly compelling in the silence
The speech of the spirit resounds.

Hammer your deeds in the rock, world!
The Word is wrought in the flood.
— Martin Buber, in A Believeing Humanism: Gleanings, p. 33.

       The Straight and Narrow Road
At each mile
each year
old men with closed faces
point out the road to children
with gestures of reinforced concrete.
— Jacques Prévert, in Paroles, p. 37.

It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him. For the one is unbelief, the other is contumely, and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Diety. Plutarch saith well to that purpose: Surely (saith he) I had rather a great deal men should say there was no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should say that there was one Plutarch that would eat his children as soon as they were born; as the poets speak of Saturn. And as the contumely is greater towards God, so the danger is greater towards men. Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not, but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men....
— Francis Bacon, Essay XVI, "Of Superstition," in Francis Bacon: Essays/Advanced Learning/New Atlantis & c., Richard Foster Jones (ed. & sel.), pp. 49-50.

....It was truly said, optimi consiliarii martui ["the best counsellors are dead"]; books will speak plain when counsellors blanch. Therefore it is good to be conversant in them, specially the books of such as themselves have been actors upon the stage.
— Francis Bacon, Essay XX, "Of Counsel," in Ibid., p. 62.

Some in their discourse desire rather commendation of wit [mind, native ability], in being able to hold arguments, than of judgement, in discerning what is true, as if it were a praise to know what might be said, and not what should be thought. Some have certain common places and themes wherein they are good, and want variety, which kind of poverty is for the most part tedious and when once perceived, ridiculous. The honourablest part of talk is to give the occasion [suggest the subject], and again to moderate [set limits] and pass to somewhat else, for then a man leads the dance. It is good in discourse and speech of conversation to vary and intermingle speech of the present occasion with arguments, tales with reasons, asking of questions with telling of opinions, and jest with earnest, for it is a dull thing to tire, and, as we say now, to jade [ride] any thing too far....
— Francis Bacon, Essay XXXII, "Of Discourse," in Ibid., p. 96.

Mobile Thinking

However much the highway makers want
to redesign it, land
is not rectangular, and birds resist
the shortest distances between two points
of rest. Even the interstate
must make concessions, breasted
by hills, bushwacked by whatever
stubborn undergrowths of hair.
Tacked on a wall, America's at home,
the state lines stack up square
against the rectitude of architects.
But travellers find in fact,
by accident, by air,
in window cinemas of stream
and film and field no understated
frames: the inland borderlines
are lost in their translation, are
not there. And all the mapmen, Mad-
ison Avenue small talk and model
mongers stay unmoved by dust
and thunder storms, becoming
more remote to me, who hit
the road, than any ruminant
well-meaning cows that don't
know one tit from another.
Down to earth, I know her
shifting motherhood, I leave
a little rubber on her lips. The tourist
pictures tell the truth: the earth
is very old. Her lovers learn
no ease or symmetry on trips.
My roadmap, full of wrinkles,
will not fold.
— Heather McHugh, "Wheels," in The Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry, David Rigsbee/Ellendea Proffer (eds.), p. 258.

Between the trial for embezzlement and the trial for impiety
Phidias sickened in prison and then went mad.
When we brought his water he flung it on the floor
and scraped up the hard-packed clay with his rotting nails
to mold crazed figurines:
a man with his head attached between his legs
and on his shoulders a great erection,
women with holes in their breasts and teats on their buttocks,
babies with too many arms and not enough legs,
a hunched hermaphrodite with a giant hand
coming out of its rump like a rooster's tail

When they put him on trial he crowed like a rooster himself
and when they asked what he meant by that he said
he was Zeus the Cock crowing so the sun would rise.
They convicted him, but some of the jurymen wept
and all of them shuddered. Back in prison
while his friends were scraping up his fine
he ate crusts of his bread but molded the insides
with his saliva into indefinable forms
intestines that flowered into cabbages,
livers with claws, things without names or existence
except in his hands and our half-tainted eyes.

He began to save his excrement in a corner
saying that it was his earnings to pay his fine.
That last day when we found him he had torn
one wrist with his toenail, blending the oozing blood
into the lumpy mass. It lay beside him,
his masterpiece self-portrait, like him dead,
only a little more stinking than his flesh
and not much different for long between them.
We buried it beside him, never spoke of it.
We jailers learn too much we don't dare tell.
Some nights I dream that the whole acropolis
quakes into chaos and the long walls crumble
golden Athena melts and this bright air
glooms into prison dimness and the stench
of Athens rotting.
— Ann Deagon, "The Death of Phidias," in Ibid., pp. 313-314

Ballade
I die of thirst beside the fountain
I'm hot as fire, I'm shaking tooth on tooth
In my own country I'm in a distant land
Beside the blaze I'm shivering in flames
Naked as a worm, dressed like a president
I laugh in tears and hope in despair
I cheer up in sad hopelessness
I'm joyful and no pleasures anywhere
I'm powerful and lack all force and strength
Warmly welcomed, always turned away.

I'm sure of nothing but what is uncertain
Find nothing obscure but the obvious
Doubt nothing but the certainties
Knowledge to me is mere accident
I keep winning and remain the loser
At dawn I say "I bid you good night"
Lying down I'm afraid of falling
I'm so rich I haven't a penny
I await an inheritance and am no one's heir
Warmly welcomed, always turned away.

I never work and yet I labor
To acquire goods I don't even want
Kind words iritate me most
He who speaks true deceives me worst
A friend is someone who makes me think
A white swan is a black crow
The people who harm me think they help
Lies and truth today I see they're one
I remember everything, my mind's a blank
Warmly welcomed, always turned away.

Merciful Prince may it please you to know
I understand much and have no wit or learning
I'm biased against all laws impartially
What's next to do? Redeem my pawned goods again!
Warmly welcomed, always turned away.
— François Villon, in The Poetry of François Villon, Galway Kinnell (tr.), pp. 177-179.

To Look More Deeply

     There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these three drugs [mescaline, lysergic acid, and psilocybin]. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge. They provide the raw material of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his behavior and the whole system of his knowledge. As an escape, an isolated and dissociated ecstasy, they may have the same sort of value as a rest cure or a good entertainment. But this is like using a giant computer to play tic-tac-toe, and the hours of heightened perception are wasted unless occupied with sustained reflection or meditation upon whatever themes may be suggested.
— Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology, pp. 20-21.

     Nowadays a man can belong to so-called cultured circles without, on the one hand, having any sort of conception about human destiny or, on the other hand, being aware, for example, that all the constellations are not visible at all seasons of the year. A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrotwise that the earth moves round the sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens. This sun about which they talk to him in class hasn't, for him, the slightest connection with the one he can see. He is severed from the universe surrounding him, just as little Polynesians are severed from their past by being forced to repeat, "Our ancestors, the Gauls, had fair hair."
— Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, Arthur Wills (tr.), pp. 45-46.

     The words addressed to Thomas, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed," cannot refer to those who, without having seen it, believe in the fact of the resurrection. That would be praising credulity, not faith. There are old women everywhere who are only too ready to believe no matter what tale about dead people returned to life. Surely those who are called blessed are they who have no need of the resurrection, in order to believe, and for whom Christ's perfection and the Cross are in themselves proof.
— Simone Weil, Ibid., p. 269.

....The rainbows beautiful semicircle is the testimony that the phenomena of this world, however terrifying they may be, are all subject to a limit. The magnificent poetry of this text is designed to remind God to exercise his function as a limiting principle. "Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth."
     And like the oscillations of the waves, the whole succession of events here below, made up, as they are, of vibrations in balance mutually compensated — births and destructions, waxings and wanings — render one keenly alive to the invisible presence of a plexis of limits without substance and yet harder than any diamond. That is why things are beautiful in their vicissitudes, although they allow one to perceive a pitiless necessity. Pitiless, yes; but which is not force, which is sovereign ruler over all force.
     But the thought which really enraptured the ancients was this: what makes the blind forces of matter obedient is not another, stronger force; it is love. They believed that matter was obedient to eternal Wisdom by virtue of the love which causes it to consent to this obedience.
     Plato, in his Timeus, says that divine Providence dominates necessity by exercising a wise form of persuasion over it.
— Simone Weil, Ibid., p. 288.

     The order of the world is the same as the beauty of the world. All that differs is the type of concentration demanded, according to whether one tries to conceive the necessary relations which go to make it up or to contemplate its splendor.
     It is one and the same thing, which with respect to God is eternal Wisdom; with respect to the universe, perfect obedience; with respect to our love, beauty; with respect to our intelligence, balance of necessary relations; with respect to our flesh, brute force.
     A return to truth would make manifest, among other things the truth of physical labor.
     Physical labor willingly consented to is, after death willingly consented to, the most perfect form of obedience.
— Simone Weil, Ibid., p. 295.

Loose Attachment

     The danger of the crowd, of this "completely uncultivated" public of which Goethe spoke, is due not only to its lack of culture, so that it can be too easily flattered, but also to its very bigness.... How good it is for the artist to know whom he is addressing! No longer knowing this, in our own day, the artist either breaks with his age and seals himself off, as has happened to the best; counting on posterity to compensate for the present, he flatters ideally an unknown public, vaguely dispersed in the future, or else (but does he still deserve the name of artist?) flatters a crowd hit or miss. The resulting works I will not name but you know them.
— Andrè Gide, from "Four Lectures," Pretexts, p. 57.

    Need we console ourselves by saying that they were weaklings? Let us say rather: true education is for the strong alone. Taking root is for the weak, sinking into the hereditary habit that will keep them from the cold. But for those who are not weak, who do not put comfort above all else, uprooting is called for in proportion to their strength, to their virtue — the pursuit of the unfamiliar setting that will require of them the maximum of virtue. And perhaps we could measure the worth of a man by the degree of displacement (physical or intellectual) to which he can adjust....
— Andrè Gide, from "The Barre's Problem," in Ibid., pp. 78-79.

     One morning Wilde had me read an article in which a rather obtuse critic congratulated him on "his ability to invent pretty stories to better clothe his thought."
     "They think," began Wilde, "that all thoughts are born naked. They do not understand that I cannot think except through stories. The sculptor does not seek to translate his thought into marble; he thinks in marble, directly.
— Andrè Gide, from "In Memoriam Oscar Wilde," in Ibid., p. 142.

     "There are," he would say, "two kinds of artists: some bring answers, the others bring questions. You must know if you are of those who answer or of those who question; for the one who questions is never the one who answers. There are works that wait and are not understood for a long time: they brought answers to questions not yet asked; for the question often comes a terribly long time after the answer."
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., pp. 142-143.

     But for some reason I feel it is wicked to use a calculated means to get what I want, for instance to end up in bed with some one, though I do not disapprove what I want. I will not use such means, and I do not get what I want.
     I do not diapprove my vices, but I disapprove a calculated plan to succeed in satisfying them. As I will say it later, happiness must happen, be a proof that we live in paradise, or why bother?
     Yet the concrete is at least real, even if really lousy. The abstract wish is usually delusory and the calculated means don't work anyway. Goethe again, "Beware what you wish for in your youth, for you will end up getting it in your middle age."
— Paul Goodman, Little Prayers & Finite Experience, p. 23.

     The weakness of "my" anarchism is that the lust for freedom is a powerful motive for political change, whereas autonomy is not. Autonomous people protect themselves stubbornly but by less strenuous means, including plenty of passive resistence.
     The pathos of oppressed people, however, is that, if they break free, they don't know what to do. Not having been autonomous, they don't know what it's like, and before they learn, they have new managers who are not in a hurry to abdicate. The oppressed hope for too much from New Society, instead of being vigilant to live their lives....
— Paul Goodman, Ibid., p. 47.

     Shaakamuni was quite indifferent to criticism or derision. He didn't think anything of it. Someone, curious about this, said to him, "World-honored One, you are so indifferent to the criticism and derision of others. It is hard to understand your feelings. Please explain."
     Then Shakamuni said, "Well, I will tell you by simile: Suppose someone placed filth on their hands and offered it to you. Will you receive it?"
     "If it is filth, I certainly will not accept it!"
     "Just so. Whatever other people say, I don't accept it; so I do not get angry."
     Whatever people say, if one does not accept it, then one does not get angry. You accept, therefore you worry about it. If you do not accept, there is no problem; you will not be controlled by anyone. It's free and easy. Worry in itself is not bad, but to create worries is bad.
— Haya Akegarasu, The Fundamental Spirit of Buddhism, Gyomay Kubose (tr.), p. 74.

Beyond Reason

     I have paid the price for not breaking away from the bourgeois world and living altogether as an artist. Why, why didn't I have the ultimate courage to live beyond reach of all laws and taboos, to be what I am, as Genêt is what he is, committed to no one, subjected to no restrictions, 'Le poète maudit,' and live with those who obey no taboos, and not as I am doing, living in the wrong world for the sake of protection, as my father did, a protection for which you pay with your life. The protection which conventional life offers, with its rules, structure, legalities, etc., is also a total loss of freedom.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. VI, 1955-1966, Gaunther Stuhlmann (ed.), p. 23.

     Aldous Huxley and I disagree about the necessity of drugs for everyone. When I took LSD, I proved to myself that it only opened the same realms which one can have access to by way of dreams, poetry, writing. I wrote House of Incest without it.
     Huxley and I do not communicate. He is too much the scientist and not a poet. I cannot imagine his friendship with Lawrence. They must have argued a lot. I find him too scientific, too literal, too precise. I still feel, as I always have, that the effort made to live, love and create without artificial stimulants is part of the enrichment. It strengthens the creative will, whereas those who are passive and fond of shortcuts will never be vigorous creators. There is also the matter of connecting the visions to create one's life. Drug users do not take that second step. They see paradise, and decide they will return to the vision of it, and not bother with seeking to create it as Varda did. Michaux is an exception. He is still one of the great writers after ten years of using drugs, but that is because he was a powerful poet before he took drugs.
— Anaïs Nin, Ibid., p. 132.

     "Suffering consists in being unable to reveal oneself and, when one happens to succeed in doing so, in having nothing more to say."
— Andrè Gide, The White Notebook, p. 43.

     "Et non erat qui cognosceret me" ... Nor the others, for souls can not know each other. The courses followed by these who are most nearly alike are still PARALLEL.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., p. 45.

     "Reason!" they say, and to me this is sheer arrogance. What has their Reason done?
     It is always contrasted with the soul; when the heart acts, reason interferes.
     It is repulsed by devotion. The sublime is always ridiculous. Daring, poetry — everything that makes life worth living is foolish. Reason would protect us; it is utilitarian, but it makes life intolerable to the soul!
     It is despised by true lovers, for one who loves no longer lives for himself. His life is but a means of loving. If he finds one which is better and which will make for closer union, he will neglect — perhaps reject, forget — his own life in favor of it.
     I have never had any happiness which reason sanctions.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., p. 52.

     I am almost ashamed to quote the words of Lessing, repeated by Goethe in his Elective Affinities, words so well-known that they bring a smile to  the lips: "Es wandelt niemand unbestraft unter Palmen," words that can be translated only by the fairly trite sentence: "No one walks with impunity under palm trees." What is meant but this: Though we leave their shade, we are never the same again.
     I have read it, put it back on the shelf in my library — but there were certain words in that book which I cannot forget. They have penetrated so deeply into me that I cannot separate them from myself. Henceforth I am no longer the one I was before I met them. Though I may forget the book in which I read them, though I remember them only imperfectly — this is of little importance; no longer will I be the person I was before I read them. How can their power be explained?
     Their power comes from the fact that they have merely revealed to me some part of myself of which I was still in ignorance; for me they were only an explanation — yes, but an explanation of myself. It has already been said that influences act through resemblances. They have been compaired to mirrors of a kind that might show us not what we already are in actual fact, but what we are in terms of our latent characteristics.
....
     In comparison, what matters all I learn through my brain, all that I succeed in retaining only by a great effort of memory? Thus through learning I can accumulate within me weighty treasures, a great encumbering wealth, a fortune, a precious instrument, to be sure, but forever, to the end of time, different from me. The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.
     This type of knowledge bears no similarity to that intimate cognition which can be termed rather recognition mixed with love — true recognition, like a feeling of kinship rediscovered.
— Andrè Gide, Pretexts, from "Four Lectures," p. 26-27.

Good Gentle Gide

     "Books have taught me that every liberty is provisional and never anything but the power to choose one's slavery, or at any rate one's devotion — as the thistle seed flies hither and thither, seeking a fertile soil in which to fix its roots — and can only flower when motionless. But as I had learned at school that men are not guided by reasoning and that every argument may be opposed by a contrary one which needs only to be found, I set about looking for it, sometimes, in the course of my long journeyings.
— Andrè Gide, The fruits of the Earth, Book IV, p. 66.

     And now, Nathaniel, throw away my book. Shake yourself free of it. Leave me. Leave me; now you are in my way; you hamper me; I have exaggerated my love for you and it occupies me too much. I am tired of pretending I can educate anyone. When have I said that I wanted you to be like me? It is because you differ from me that I love you; the only thing I love in you is what differs from me. Educate! Whom should I educate but myself? Nathaniel, shall I tell you? I have educated myself interminably. And you? I have not done yet. I only esteem myself for my possibilities.
     Nathaniel, throw away my book; do not let it satisfy you. Do not think your truth can be found by anyone else; be ashamed of nothing more than of that. If I found your food for you, you would have no apetite for it; if I made your bed, you would not be able to sleep in it.
     Throw away my book; say to yourself that it is only one of the thousand possible postures in life. Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write, what someone else could say, could write, as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else, and out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, ah, Nathaniel, the most irreplaceable of beings.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., ENVOI (entire), p. 179.

     This morning I am like the man who knows that his pen is a little too full of ink and for fear of making a blot, traces a garland of words.
— Andrè Gide, The New Fruits, Book I, in Ibid., p. 200.

     "He who is happy," I once wrote, "and who yet thinks, he shall be called the truly worthy." For what good to me is a happiness built upon ignorance? Christ's first word is to embrace sadness itself in joy: "Blessed are those who weep." And he has little understanding of this word who sees in it nothing but an encouragement to weep!
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., p. 222.

       The Earth Worm

The worm artist
out of soil, by passage
of himself
constructing.
Castles of metaphor!
Delicate
            dungeon turrets!
He throws off
artifice as he
contracts and expands the
muscle of his being,
ringed in himself,
tilling. He
is homage to
earth, aerates
the ground of his living.
— Denise Levertov, in The Sorrow Dance, p. 26.

Nathaniel = Us

     Do not hope, Nathaniel, to find God here or there — but everywhere,
     Every creature points to God, none reveals Him.
     Every creature we let our eyes dwell on distracts us from God.

     While other people were publishing or working, I, on the contrary, devoted three years to travel to forget all that I had learned with my head. This unlearning was slow and difficult, it was of more use to me than all the learning imposed by men, and was really the beginning of an education.
     You will never know the efforts it cost us to become interested in life; but now that life does interest us it will be like everything else — passionately.

     I chastised my flesh gladly, taking more pleasure in the chastisement than in the fault — so intoxicating was the pride I took in not sinning simply.
     Suppress in yourself the idea of merit — one of the minds great stumbling-blocks.

....All our life long we have been tormented by the uncertainty of our paths. How can I put it? All choice, when one comes to think of it, is terrifying: liberty when there is no duty to guide it, is terrifying. The path that has to be chosen lies through a wholly unexplored country, where each one makes his own discoveries, and — note this — for himself alone; so that the vaguest track in the darkest Africa is more easily distinguishable.... Shady groves allure us, and the mirage of perenial springs. Or rather, springs will flow where our desires bid them; for the country only comes into existence as our approach gives it form, and the landscape about us gradually falls into shape as we advance; we cannot see as far as the horizon; and even the foreground is nothing but a succession and changeable appearance.
     But why comparisons when the matter is so serious? We all believe we shall eventually discover God. In the meantime, alas, where are we to address our prayers? At last we end by saying that He — the Unfindable — is everywhere, anywhere, and kneel down at haphazard.
     And so, Nathaniel, you are like the man who should follow as his guide the light he holds in his own hand.

     Wherever you go, you will never meet with anything but God. "God," said Menalcas, "is what lies ahead of us."

     Nathaniel, look at everything as you pass on your way, but stay nowhere. Remember that it is only God who is not transitory.

     Let the importance lie in your look, not in the thing you look at.

     All your gathered knowledge of what is outside you will remain outside you to all eternity. Why do you attach so much importance to it?
     There is profit in desires, and profit in the satisfaction of desires — for so they are increased. And indeed, Nathaniel, each one of my desires has enriched me more than the always deceitful possession of the object of my desire.

     Many are the delicious things, Nathaniel, for which I have been consumed with love. Their splendor came from my ceaseless burning for them. I never wearied. All ferver consumed me with love — consumed me deliciously.
     A heretic among heretics, I was constantly drawn to the most opposite opinions, the most devious thoughts, the extremest divergences. Nothing interested me in a mind but what made it different from others. I went so far as to forbid myself sympathy, which seemed to me the mere recognition of a common emotion.
     No, not sympathy, Nathaniel — love.

     Act without judging whether the action is right or wrong. Love without caring whether what you love is good or bad.
     Nathaniel, I will teach you ferver.
     A harrowing life, Nathaniel, rather than a quiet one. Let me have no rest but the sleep of death. I am afraid that every desire, every energy I have not satisfied during my life may survive to torment me. I hope that after I have expressed on this earth all that was in me waiting to be expressed — I hope that  I may die satisfied and utterly hopeless.

     No, not sympathy, Nathaniel, love. Surely you understand they are not the same. It was the fear of losing love that made me sometimes sympathize with sorrows, troubles, sufferings that else I could hardly have borne. Leave to each one the care of his own life.
— Andrè Gide, The Fruits of the Earth, Book I, pp. 11-14.

     Never long, Nathaniel, to taste the waters of the past.
     Never seek, Nathaniel, to find again the past in the future. Seize from every moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys — or else believe that in its prepared place another joy will surprise you.
     Why have you not understood that all happiness is a chance encounter and at every moment presents itself to you like a beggar by the roadside? Woe betide you if you say your happiness is dead because you had not imagined it in that form — and because you will only accept a happiness in conformity with your principles and wishes.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., Book II, p. 34.

....The great waves advance and succeed one another noiselessly. They follow one another, and each in turn lifts the same drop of water and barely moves it from its place. Their form alone moves on; the water is lent them, and leaves them, and accompanies them never. Form never dwells in the same being for more than a moment; it passes on through each being, then leaves it. Let there be no thought, my soul, to which you cling. Cast each one of your thoughts to the sea winds and let them bear it from you. Your own efforts will never carry it up to heaven.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., Book III, p. 59.

Honest Engine

....As far as I am concerned, a mind's arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling between them all forms of sensibility. Thus with Huysmans, the Huysmans of En Rade and La-Bas, I find so much in common about our ways of valuing the world, of choosing with all the partiality of despair among what exists, that though unfortunately I have been unable to know him save by his work, he is, perhaps, less of a stranger to me than any of my friends. But has he not also done more than anyone else to consummate that necessary, vital discrimination between the apparently fragile link which can be of the utmost aid to us and the dizzying array of forces which conspire together for our destruction? He has familiarized me with that tremendous ennui which almost any spectacle induced in him; no one before Huysman could, if not exemplify this great victory of the involuntary over the ravaged domain of conscious possibilities, at least convince me in human terms of its absolute inevitability and of the uselessness of trying to find loopholes for myself. How grateful I am to him for letting me know, without caring about the effect such revelations produced, everything that affects him, that occupies him in his hours of gravest anxiety, everything external to his anxiety, for not pathetically "singing" his distress like too many poets, but for enumerating patiently, in the darkness, some quite involuntary reasons he still found for being and for not being — to whose advantage he never really knew — a writer! He, too, is the object of one of those perpetual solicitations which seem to come from beyond, which momentarily possess us before one of those chance arrangements, of a more or less unfamiliar character, whose secret we feel might be learned merely by questioning ourselves closely enough. Need I add how differently I regard Huysmans from all those empiricists of the novel who claim to give us characters separate from themselves to define them physically, morally — in their fashion! — in the service of some cause we should prefer to disregard! Out of one real character about whom they suppose they know something they make two characters in their story; out of two, they make one. And we even bother to argue! Someone suggested to an author, I know, in connection with a work of his about to be published and whose heroine might be recognized, that he change at least the color of her hair. As a blond, apparently, she might have avoided betraying a brunette. I do not regard such a thing as childish, I regard it as monstrous....
— Andrè Breton, Nadja, pp. 11-13.

....I shall add, in my defense, only a few words. The well-known lack of frontiers between non-madness and madness does not induce me to accord a different value to the perceptions and ideas which are the result of one or the other. There are sophisms infinitely more significant and far-reaching than the most indisputable truths: to call them into question as sophisms, it must be admitted that they have done more than anything else to make me hurl at myself or at anyone who comes to meet me, the forever pathetic cry of "Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?"
— Andrè Breton, Nadja, pp. 144.

                  The Neighbor
Unknown violin, are you following me?
In how many far cities your solitary
night must have talked to my own!
Do hundreds play you? Does one alone?

Are there in all great cities livers
who, had it not been for you,
would already have ended themselves in the rivers?
And why must I always be there too?

Why am I evermore the neighbour
of those that timidly force you to sing
and to say: This life is a heavier labour
than the heaviness of everything?
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from "The Book of Images," in Selected Works, Vol. II, Poetry, Lieschman (tr.), p. 114.

                      Death
There, a blue draught for somebody to drain,
stands Death, in a large cup without a saucer.
A rather odd position for a cup:
stands on the back of a hand. And still quite plain
and visible alog the smooth glazed slope
the place where the handle snapped. Dusty. And 'Hope'
inscribed in letters half washed down the sink.

The drinker destined for the drink
spelt them at breakfast in some distant past.
What kind of creatures these are, that at last
have to be poisoned off, it's hard to think.

Else, would they stay? Has this hard food, in fact,
such power to infatuate,
They'd eat for ever, did not some hand extract
the crusty, present, like a dental-plate?
Which leaves them babbling. Bab, bab, ba...
.........

O falling star,
seen from a bridge once in a foreign land: —
remembering you, to stand!
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Uncollected Poems 1906-1926," in Selected Works, Vol. II, Poetry, Lieschman (tr.), pp. 316-317.

Give me, O Earth, for keeping
tears, of your purest clay.
Pour, O my being, the weeping, lost within you, away.
Let the withheldness flow where
that will receive which should.
Nothing is bad but the nowhere,
all that exists is good.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 350.

Well, Write

A great book, a great evil.
— Callimachus (c. 305 - c. 240 B.C.), Fragments, in An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete Social History of Almost Everything, Frank Muir, p. 101.

The only reward to be expected for the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
— Voltaire (1694-1778), Letter to Mlle. Quinault, in Ibid., p. 102.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.
— William Faulkner (b. 1897), in Ibid., p. 104.

An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it.
— John Ruskin (1819-1900), in Ibid., p. 238.

The seeds of this nineteenth-century concept of the Great Artist as Semi-Lunatic were probably sown during the period of the Italian Renaissance when Leonardo da Vinci claimed that there was a bit more to art than slapping colour on to wet plaster as instructed. He argued that painting was cosa mentale, 'a spiritual thing'; and the Bible clearly stated — Hosea ix:7 — 'the spiritual man is mad'.
— Ibid., p. 238.

Art is something you marry, it's not something you rape.
— Edgar Degas (1834-1900), in Ibid., p. 238.

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.
— Augustin Saint-Gardens (1848-1907), in Ibid., p. 238.

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure; but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.
— Samuel Johnson (1709-1984), from Boswell's Life, 5 Aug. 1763, in Ibid., p. 329.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
— Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), in Ibid., p. 248.

The Wise Listen

     One fool can ask a question that a thousand wise men cannot answer. What one fool spoils, a thousand wise men cannot repair.
— Torat he-Kenaot, p. 42; Bet Jonathan, p. 8,
in The Talmudic Anthology, Newman/Spitz (eds.), p. 129.

     The only thing to do with an idiot and a thorn is to get rid of them.
— Shemat Rabbah, 6, 5, in Ibid., p. 129.

     The wise man knows at the commencement of a matter what its end will be.
— Y. Sotah, 5 (end), in Ibid., p. 133.

     For two and a half years the schools of Shammai and Hillel argued the question, and finally decided by majority vote that it were better for man not to have been created. Inasmuch, however, as he was created, he must closely scrutinize his doings.
— Erubin, 13, in Ibid., p. 258.

....One day on the road he saw a man planting a carob tree. He said to him: "A carob tree brings forth no fruit for seventy years. Are you certain that you will be live for seventy years?"
     The man replied: "Did I find the world empty? As my fathers have planted for me, I am planting for my children."
— Makkot, 23, in Ibid., p. 285.

.... If one man says to thee: "Thou art a donkey," do not mind; if two speak thus, purchase a saddle for thyself.
— Bereshit, R., 45, 10, in Ibid., p. 354.

     R. Ilai said in the name of R. Eleazar ben R. Simeon: "It is just as much a Mitzwah for a man not to rebuke when he is certain it will do no good, as it is for him to offer rebuke when it will be accepted."
— Yebamot, 65, in Ibid., p. 381.

     The motto of Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when I am for myself only, what am I? And if not now, when? (Abbot 1:14) is in the spirit of the commandment: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
     A sound morality must take account of our own interest equally with the interest of others.
— Moore, "Judaism," ii, 86, in Ibid., p. 423.

     The stone fell on the pitcher? Woe to the pitcher. The pitcher fell on the stone? Woe to the pitcher.
— Esther Rabbah, 7:10, in Ibid., p. 434.

     The Sage said: "It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it."
— Abot, 2, 21, in Ibid., p. 501.

     A sigh breaks half the body.
— Berakot, 58, in Ibid., p. 552.

Ideal Talk

     So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend sight, the sovereign sense and concept's chief content, blurs. 'The lover,' Rilke wrote, 'is in such splendid danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extention, they come together and have no permanence.'
— William Gass, On Being Blue - A Philosophical Inquiry, pp. 18-19.

     "And if your knowledge has further increased, that too is a thing I mean to discover. And as the man who finds in his path beehives in a tree has a right to the honey, so I shall gather the fruit of your wisdom; and I shall avail myself of your counsel. Evenings of great drought on the earth, we shall discourse of the things of the spirit. Probative things and uncertain. And we shall delight in the lusts of the spirit ... But from one race to another the road is long; and I too have business elsewhere. Make haste! I await you!
— St.-John Perse, from "The Glory of Kings," 3, Louise Varèse (tr.),
in St.-John Perse: Collected Poems, Auden/Varèse/etc. (trs.), p. 85.

     Ah! very great tree of language, peopled with oracles and maxims, and murmuring the murmur of one born blind among the quincunxes of knowledge....
— St.-John Perse, from "Winds," I,1. Hugh Chisholm (tr.), in Ibid., p. 229.

 ... think not it is with God as with a human carpenter, who works or works not as he chooses, who can do or leave undone at his good pleasure. It is not thus with God; but finding thee, ready, he is obliged to act, to overflow into thee; just as the sun must needs burst forth when the air is bright, and is unable to contain itself .... If the painter had to plan out every brush mark before he made his first he would not paint at all.
— Meister Eckhart, quoted by Amanda Coomaraswamy in Transformation of Nature in Art, in The World of Zen, Nancy Wilson Ross (ed.), p. 284.

     The artist must atune himself to that which wants to reveal itself and permit the process to happen through him.
— Martin Heidegger, in The World of Zen, Nancy Wilson Ross (ed.), p. 284.

     In reality, the individual never creates anything; if man creates it is as universal man, anonymous, and as manifestations of the Principle. In ages of truer wisdom artists, scholars and thinkers did not dream of attaching their names to the works which took form through them.
— Hubert Benoit, The Supreme Wisdom, in The World of Zen, Nancy Wilson Ross (ed.), p. 284.

Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.
— Witter Bynner, first poem in The Way of Life, his poetic version of the Tao Te Ching of Lao-tzu, in The World of Zen, Nancy Wilson Ross (ed.), p. 318.

Poetic Freedom

"The Poem Rising By Its Own Weight"

The poet is at the disposal of his own night.
                                                 Jean Cocteau

The singing robes fly onto your body and cling there silkily,
you step out on the rope and move unfalteringly across it,

and seize the fiery knives unscathed and
keep them spinning above you, a fountain
of rhythmic rising, falling, rising
flames,

and proudly let the chains
be wound about you, ready
to shed them, link by steel link, padlock by padlock —

                            but when your graceful
confident shrug and twist drives the metal
into your flesh and the python grip of it tightens
and you see rust on the chains and blood in your pores
and you roll
over and down a steepness into a dark hole
and there is not even the sound of mockery in the distant air
somewhere above you where the sky was,
no sound but your own breath panting:
then it is that the miracle
walks in, on his swift feet,
down the precipice straight into the cave,
opens the locks,
knots of chain fall open,
twists of chain unwind themselves,
links fall asunder, in seconds there is a heap of scrap-
metal at your ankles, you step free and at once
he turns to go —
but as you catch at him with a cry,
clasping his knees, sobbing your gratitude,
with what radiant joy he turns to you,
and raises you to your feet,
and strokes your disheveled hair,
and holds you,
                     holds you,
                                    holds you
close and tenderly before he vanishes.

— Denise Levertov, The Freeing of the Dust, pp. 92-93.


                 Shutaku (1308-1388, Rinzai)

For all these years, my certain Zen:
Neither I nor the world exist.
The sutras neat within the box,
My cane hooked upon the wall,
I lie at peace in moonlight
Or, hearing water plashing on the rock,
Sit up: none can purchase pleasure such as this:
Spangled across the step-moss, a million coins!

Mind set free in the Dharma-realm,
I sit at the moon-filled window
Watching the mountains with my ears,
Hearing the stream with open eyes.
Each moment chants true sutra:
The most fleeting thought is timeless,
A single hair's enough to stir the sea.
— In Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews, Lucien Stryk/Takashi Ikemoto (eds.), p. 7.

Hakuin (1685-1788, Rinzai)

You no sooner attain the great void
Than body and mind are lost together.
Heaven and Hell — a straw.
The Buddha-realm, Pandemonium — shambles.
Listen: a nightingale strains her voice, serenading the snow.
Look: a tortoise wearing a sword climbs the lampstand.
Should you desire the great tranquillity,
Prepare to sweat white beads.
— Ibid., p. 17.


Kando (1825-1904, Rinzai)

It's as if our heads were on fire, the way
We apply ourselves to perfection of That.
The future but a twinkle, beat yourself,
Persist: the greatest effort's not enough.
— Ibid., p. 19.

Anguished Faith

                                          Anguish

     Is it possible that She will have me forgiven for ambitions continually crushed, — that an affluent end will make up for ages of indigence, — that a day of success will lull us to sleep on the shame of our fatal incompetence?
     (O palms! diamond! — Love! strength! — higher than all joys and all fame! — in any case, everywhere — demon, god, — Youth of this being: myself!)
     That the accidents of scientific wonders and the movements of social brotherhood will be cherished as the progressive restitution of our original freedom? ...
     But the Vampire who makes us behave orders us to enjoy ourselves with what she leaves us, or in other words to be more amusing.
     Rolled in our wounds through the wearing air and the sea; in torments through the silence of the murderous waters and air; in tortures that laugh in the terrible surge of their silence.
— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, p. 95.

     Why do we say: "Our God and the God of our fathers"?
     There are two kinds of people who believe in God. One believes because he has taken over the faith of his fathers, and his faith is strong. The other has arrived at faith through thinking and studying, The difference between them is this: The advantage of the first is that, no matter what arguments may be brought against it, his faith cannot be shaken; his faith is firm because it was taken over from his fathers. But there is one flaw in it: he has faith only in response to the command of man, and he has acquired it without studying and thinking for himself. The advantage of the second is that, because he found God through much thinking, he has arrived at a faith of his own. But here too there is a flaw: it is easy to shake his faith by refuting it through evidence. But he who unites both kinds of faith is invincible. And so we say, "Our God" with reference to our studies, and "God of our fathers" with an eye to tradition.
     The same interpretation has been given to our saying, "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob," and not "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," for this indicates that Isaac and Jacob did not merely take over the tradition of Abraham; they themselves searched for God.
— Martin Buber, Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings, pp. 13-14.

     God says to man as he said to Moses: "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet" — put off the habitual which encloses your foot and you will recognize that the place on which you happen to be standing at this moment is holy ground. For there is no rung of being on which we cannot find the holiness of God everywhere and at all times.
— Martin Buber, Ibid, p. 15.

    You should utter words as though heaven were opened within them and as though you did not put the word into your mouth, but as though you entered into the word.
— Martin Buber, Ibid, pp. 28-29.

     He who utters the word "Lord," and in doing so prepares to say "of the world," is not speaking as he should. At the moment he is saying "Lord," he must only think of offering himself up to the Lord, even if his soul perished in the Lord and he were not able to add the word "world." It should be enough for him to have been able to say "Lord."
— Martin Buber, Ibid., p. 29.

     Question: "Ye shall serve the Lord your God, and He will bless thy bread." Why is "ye" written first, and later "thy"?
     Answer: To serve — that means to pray. When a man prays, and even if he does this alone in his room, he shall first unite with all of Israel; thus, in every true prayer, it is the community that is praying. But when one eats, and even if it is at a table full of people, each man eats for himself.
— Martin Buber, Ibid, p. 31.

     Said the Great Maggid to Rabbi Zusya, his disciple: "I cannot teach you the ten principles of service. But a little child and a thief can show you what they are.
     "From the child you can learn three things:
         He is merry for no particular reason;
         Never for a moment is he idle;
         When he needs something, he demands it vigorously.
     "The thief can instruct you in seven things:
         He does his service by night;
         If he does not finish what he has set out to do in one
             /night, he devotes the next night to it;
         He and those who work with him love one another;
         He risks his life for slight gain;
         What he takes has so little value for him that he gives
            /it up for a very small coin;
         He endures blows and hardship, and it matters
            /nothing to him;
         He likes his trade and would not exchange it
            /for any other."
— Martin Buber, Ibid, pp. 55-56.

     Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: "For my sake was the world created," and in his left: "I am dust and ashes."
— Martin Buber, Ibid., p. 106.

Insight Out

     Sometimes one comes across a statement which, with a shock of recognition, illuminates the darkness of ignorance with a brilliant flash. I had such a "peak" experience as a teenager. Schiller, a much underestimated friend and contemparary of Goethe, wrote:

     Und so lange nicht Philosophy
     Die Welt zusammen haelt,
     Erhaelt Sie das Getriebe
     Durch Hunger and durch Liebe.
     (Until the day when philosophy
     will rule the world,
     it is being regulated
     by hunger and love.)

     Freud wrote in the same attitude later: "We are being lived by the forces within ourselves...."
— Frederick (Fritz) Perls, In and Out the Garbage Pail, p. 45.

....Light acquires a transcendental quality: it is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy. Here the light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated in a metaphysical bliss which makes everything clear without being known. No analysis can go on in this light: here the neurotic is either instantly healed or goes mad. The rocks themselves are quite mad: they have been lying for centuries exposed to this divine illumination: they lie very still and quiet, nestling amid dancing colored shrubs in a blood-stained soil, but they are mad, I say, and to touch them is to risk losing ones grip on everything which once seemed firm, solid and unshakeable. One must glide through this gully with extreme caution, naked, alone, and devoid of all Christian humbug. One must throw off two thousand years of ignorance and superstition, of morbid, sickly subterranean living and lying. One must come to Eleusis stripped of the barnacles which have accumulated from centuries of lying in stagnant waters. At Eleusis one realizes, if never before, that there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. At Eleusis one becomes adapted to the cosmos. Outwardly Eleusis may seem broken, disintegrated with the crumbled past, actually Eleusis is still intact and it is we who are broken, dispersed, crumbling to dust. Eleusis lives, lives eternally in the midst of a dying world.
— Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, pp. 45-46.

....For them beauty was incidental, for us everything. For them the physico-mathematical world palped, calibred, weighed and transmitted by their instruments was reality itself, the stars and planets mere proof of their excellent and infallible reasoning. For Durrell and myself reality lay wholly beyond the reach of their puny instruments which in themselves were nothing more than clumsy reflections of their circumscribed imagination locked forever in the hypothetical prison of logic. Their astronomical figures and calculations, intended to impress and overawe us, only caused us to smile indulgently or to very impolitely laugh outright at them. Speaking for myself, facts and figures have always left me unimpressed. A light year is no more impressive to me than a second, or a split second. This is a game for the feeble-minded which can go on ad nauseam backwards and forwards without taking us anywhere. Similarly I am not more convinced of the reality of a star when I see it through the telescope. It may be more brilliant, more wondrous, it may be a thousand times or a million times bigger than when seen with the naked eye, but it is not a whit more real. To say that this is what a thing really looks like, just because one sees it larger and grander, seems to me quite fatuous. It is just as real to me if I don't see it at all but merely imagine it to be there. And finally, even when to my own eye and the eye of the astronomer it possesses the same dimensions, the same brilliance, it definitely does not look the same to us both — ....
— Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, pp. 103-104.

....We move in clock time amidst the debris of vanished worlds, inventing the instruments of our own destruction, oblivious of fate or destiny, knowing never a moment of peace, possessing not an ounce of faith, a prey to the blackest superstitions, functioning neither in the body nor in the spirit, active not as individuals but as microbes in the organism of the diseased.
— Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, pp. 196-197.

....I neither regret the course I have followed nor desire things to be any different than they are. I know now what the world is like and knowing I accept it, both the good and the evil. To live creatively, I have discovered, means to live more into the world, identifying oneself with it and thus influencing it at the core, so to speak. Art, like religion, it now seems to me, is only a preparation, an initiation into the way of life. The goal is liberation, freedom, which means assuming greater responsibility. To continue writing beyond the point of self-realization seems futile and arresting. The mastery of any form of expression should lead inevitably to the final expression — mastery of life. In this realm one is absolutely alone, face to face with the very elements of creation. It is an experiment whose outcome nobody can predict. If it be successful the whole world is affected and in a way never known before. I do not wish to boast, nor do I wish to say that I am yet ready to make such a grave step, but it is in this direction that my mind is set....
— Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, pp. 206-207.

Art; Pointing Out

"A poem should not mean
But be."
— Archibald Macleish, in The Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, p. 33.

Chinese saying applies: "People in the West are always getting ready to live."
— The Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, p. 113.

"Art is the expression of an enormous preference."
— Wyndham Lewis, in The Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, p. 125.

....When two or more environments encounter one another by direct interface, they tend to manifest their distinctive qualities. Comparison and contrast have always been a means of sharpening perception in the arts as well as in general experience. Indeed, it is upon this pattern that all the structures of art have been reared. Any artistic endeavor includes the preparing of an environment for human attention. A poem or a painting is in every sense a teaching machine for the training of perception and judgment. The artist is a person who is especially aware of the challenge and dangers of new environments presented to human sensibility. Whereas the ordinary person seeks security by numbing his perceptions against the impact of new experience, the artist delights in this novelty and instinctively creates situations that both reveal it and compensate for it. The artist studies the distortion of sensory life produced by new environmental programming and tends to create artistic situations that correct the sensory bias and derangement brought about by the new form. In social terms the artist can be regarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass bearings in spite of magnetic deflection of the needle by the changing play of forces. So understand, the artist is not a peddlar of ideals or lofty experiences. He is rather the indispensable aid to action and reflection alike.
— The Vanishing Point, Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, p. 238.

....Only the visual sense has the properties of continuity and connectedness that are assumed in Euclidean space. Only the visual sense can create the impression of a continuum. Axex Leighton has said, "To the blind all things are sudden." To touch and hearing each moment is unique, but to the sense of sight the world is uniform and continuous and connected. These are the properties of pictorial space which we often confuse with rationality itself.
— Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, The Vanishing Point, p. 239.

     Pablo shook his head. "Kahnweiler's right," he said. "The point is, art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official and open to anyone, then it becomes the new academicism." He tossed the cablegram down onto the table. "How can I support an idea like that? If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it's been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it's not worth fighting for."
     I reminded him that Malherle had said a poet is of no more use to the state than a man who spends his time playing ninepins. "Of course," Pablo said. "And why did Plato say poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way. Of course the state has the right to chase him away — from its point of view — and if he is really an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat — worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. People just don't have that much vision."
— Françoise Gilot/Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, in Marshall McLuhan/Harley Parker, The Vanishing Point, p. 246.

There, Being

     "I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, p. 194.

     "No, I don't want to talk about it. But here's a story if you like, a story that made a great impression on me when I was in school. There was a king who had lost a battle and was taken prisoner. He was there, off in a corner, in the victor's camp. He saw his son and daughter pass by in chains. He didn't weep, he didn't say anything. Then he saw one of his servants pass by, in chains too. Then he began to groan and tear out his hair. You can make up your own examples. You see: there are times when you mustn't cry — oe else you'll be unclean. But if you drop a log on your foot, you can do as you please, groan, cry, jump around on the other foot. It would be foolish to be stoical all the time: you'd wear yourself out for nothing."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, pp. 199-200.

     When I reread The Black Book, .... In that book I drained the electric charge: The act of attacking oneself liberates the reader. He sees a reflection of himself. 'So,' he says to himself, 'I'm not mad after all; here's someone else who has experienced the same hidden, twisted, agonizing sensations.' But it's a path everyone has to go along. The words used by the creative person are not different from other men's.
....
     And also the scale! We describe giants and freaks in order to illustrate instincts and inclinations that are infinitely more attenuated in real life. But the monsters exist in every one of us.
— Lawrence Durrell: The Big Supposer, An Interview by Marc Alyn, Francine Barker (tr.), p. 46.

We shall be compelled to talk
                                  only
In puns so that our children
                          computers
                              should not understand
— Lawrence Durrell, Ibid., p. 146.

A lion, he was thrown to the Christians

Epitaph on the Tomb of the Vampire Poet
'Too much self-control betrays a lack of application'

Madness is the forgery of true experience

When Faust spoke the forbidden wish 'Verweile doch, du list so shon' (Moment, stay now! You are so beautiful), the Devil came and took his soul.

Poetry, like life itself, is far too serious not to be taken lightly.
— Lawrence Durrell, Ibid., pp. 149-150 passim.