The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation. (Letters, p 381)
Bonhoeffer
Day: October 25, 2017
Your autumn uniform
White trainers
Huge,red coat with huge red pockets over
Orange anorak with zipped inner pocket over
Metallic gold pleated skirt with no pockets
Top in deep purple with fluted sleeves and no pockets
Fishnet tights with secret waist pocket for your Tablet
Padded bra with pocket for smartphone[s] and wallet
Elastic garter with pocket for keys
Mini torch,biro and magnifying glass in velvet wrist bag
Wine coloured hat with inner pocket for reading glasses.
Messenger bag with pocket for Newspaper du jour.
Trolley for all your other must-haves like your ten cats
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Not the sands but more the ice unzipped
I worried about quicksands and escape
Sucked into the sands by giant lips
I forgot that ice is thin and easy breaks
Is worry wasting time and a mistake?
Yet we need to learn from other’s trips
I fretted over quicksands and escape
I fell through ice and now cold makes me ache
A trip, a trap, a tumble, we are stuck
I forgot that ice is thin and easy breaks
In ice cold water, how the brain can creak
No resources, internet or book.
I fretted over quicksands yet escaped
Feeling happy, I forgot to check.
I didn’t measure, neither did I look
I forgot that ice is thin, can crack and break
When we’re on Cloud 9 we are at risk
Not the sands but more the ice unzipped
I worried about quicksands and escape
I forgot that ice is thin, so easy breaks
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The safe way to live
I got married and my husband had never changed a light bulb but neither of us changed our minds
I got married so that it would be legal to iron a man’s underpants weekly.
I got married so I could pick cake crumbs out of the carpet as free exercise.
I only got married for sex as the forbidden would be a duty then.Still, it felt very sinful so that was ok.
I was so shy, my husband thought I was dumb until I cried,
Do it again,Sam.
Alas, he is called John.
Still, I was a very technical virgin who loved pulling the gas stove to pieces to see how it worked.One day I shall mend it but for now we live on fish and chips.
When you think about it,getting to know the opposite sex is very dangerous.
Getting to know anybody is dangerous but women don’t usually rape you while you are drunk or while you are sober either.Still ,worse than rape is emotional betrayal or spiritual invasion.
Not getting to know anyone will make us very isolated so on balance, get friend, lovers and partners as and when it is possible
The only safe way to live is to commit suicide then no-one can hurt you anymore.Is there a logical error there somewhere?
I think, take a cat or two to bed, have a baby by the usual or by artificial means and have hundreds of friends.Why limit yourself? I do and look where it’s got me.Nowhere
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Art in the Age of Terror
As an artist, Mr.Bridle is interested in the relationship between the digital and physical world, in how the former changes the way we think about the latter. “Drones are one of those technologies that seemed to go from science fiction to completely mundane without going through a critical-thinking stage,” he said. “It seemed to stand for so much: war, crime, violence and technology.” He has since realized versions of the work, called “Drone Shadow,” in locations from Washington to Istanbul.
The latest version of “Drone Shadow” falls across the atrium of the Imperial War Museum London as the first work in the exhibition “Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11.” Curated by Sanna Moore, the show explores how artists have responded to conflict since those calamitous events. Taking the attack on the World Trade Center as a cultural turning point, the exhibition “reflects on the continuing state of emergency we’ve been in and how the world has changed: mass surveillance, civil rights, detentions without trial,” Ms. Moore said.
The scale of “Age of Terror” — the largest contemporary art exhibition ever staged by the Imperial War Museum — reflects the increase in the number of artists responding to conflict in recent years, Ms. Moore said.
The show opens with works that respond directly to Sept. 11 before moving on to consider how the attacks have permeated daily life, in the United States and beyond. Some began in the immediate aftermath: Tony Oursler started filming the footage used in his work “9/11” in Lower Manhattan soon after the second plane hit. The piece “9/12 Front Page” by the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann assembles 151 newspaper covers from around the world from the following day, many carrying the same photograph.
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Wait on God,like waiting on a tide.
Wait on God,like waiting on a tide.
The moon exerts her pull with dignity
No human force can change how these seas ride.
We plead with God forever to abide!
Should we fear his great sagacity?
Wait on God as waiting for the tide.
Maybe it is his will which decides
Not ours to go there in audacity
No human force can change how these seas ride.
Do not mock and torment him we flayed
With no control over our temerity
Wait on God be patient towards the tides
When we suffer we obey our pride
Demand he save us from indignity
No human force can change how great seas ride
For a lover, life meets fantasy
How can we see our incapacity?
Wait on God,like waiting on a tide.
No human force can change the wild seas ride.
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Much treasure
A mere mirage
My new-found hope may be a mere mirage;
An illusion of no help in my despair.
Yet imagination stirs up love and her courage
And helps the mind and heart in their repair.
I’ll dwell not in the mind’s relentless thoughts;
I’ll use my eyes and ears and skin
Then in that trap, I never shall be caught.
I’ll see and hear to moderate this din.
In wider focus, all will take their place
I’ll focus less on this wound I bear late
And see both good and bad in every space.
So not dismiss the world and all its states.
Changing vision shows us truer measures.
Perception valued brings to us much treasure.
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He created man to be a refugee
Cut off from land by wiles of tricky sea,
For Norfolk is deceptive in its tides,
He grabbed my hand and said, just run with me
If we had drowned then now I would not be
In England where our shrill-voiced voters stride,
Cut off by hopes installed by trickery
Nor would I, by Donald vexed,fear, see
How he may ask the Good Lord to abide
He grabbed the votes and said, all lie with me
I shall not argue over cups of tea
About how many immigrants God made;
Cut off from thought by wiles of trickery
I believe that God has no pity
He created man to be a refugee
He gave no hope yet said,hey, worship me!
Oh, haunt of mystics send thy remedies
They’re drowning in the places we can’t see
Cut off from land by tides of your Son’s sea
The dark eyed children drown along with Thee.
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What haunts me are the quicksands of the soul
What haunts me are the quicksands of the soul
The heart and mind and body all agree
That I will drown by struggling towards a goal
Apparently, we try to be more whole
But this can only come by grace all new
What haunts me are the quicksands of the soul
It’s best to let go of a hope too cruel
To lie quite still without fear of taboo
Or I will drown by struggling towards a goal.
Opposing all that we learned in our schools,
Where teachers spoke to you and you and you
What taunts me are the quicksands of the soul
The art of living is not found in rules
But by wandering without any hint or clue
We can sink by struggling towards a goal.
Though we may use the stars to travel by
The moon is covered by her alibi.
What haunts me are the quicksands of the soul
Where we may drown by struggling towards a goal
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Poem by Anne Sexton
http://www.inspirationalstories.com/poems/clothes-anne-sexton-poems/
Clothes
Put on a clean shirt
before you die, some Russian said.
Nothing with drool, please,
no egg spots, no blood,
no sweat, no sperm.
You want me clean, God,
so I’ll try to comply.
The hat I was married in,
will it do?
White, broad, fake flowers in a tiny array.
It’s old-fashioned, as stylish as a bedbug,
but is suits to die in something nostalgic.
And I’ll take
my painting shirt
washed over and over of course
spotted with every yellow kitchen I’ve painted.
God, you don’t mind if I bring all my kitchens?
They hold the family laughter and the soup.
For a bra
(need we mention it?),
the padded black one that my lover demeaned
when I took it off.
He said, “Where’d it all go?”
And I’ll take
the maternity skirt of my ninth month,
a window for the love-belly
that let each baby pop out like and apple,
the water breaking in the restaurant,
making a noisy house I’d like to die in.
For underpants I’ll pick white cotton,
the briefs of my childhood,
for it was my mother’s dictum
that nice girls wore only white cotton.
If my mother had lived to see it
she would have put a WANTED sign up in the post office
for the black, the red, the blue I’ve worn.
Still, it would be perfectly fine with me
to die like a nice girl
smelling of Clorox and Duz.
Being sixteen-in-the-pants
I would die full of questions.
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Poetry and survival
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/may/19/poetry.features
Tadeusz Rozewicz likes to tease. At his home in Wroclaw, west Poland, the 80-year-old Polish poet and dramatist tells me that on a visit to Scotland, he saw the Loch Ness monster; he declares that “Harry Potter will make our kids stupid,” and concludes with “I don’t like bad journalists, bad poets, bad painters, bad singers, and bad politicians, the latter inflict most harm. Next to the Germans.” Such statements are always accompanied by a chuckle or a grin, though the last comment betrays something of his past.
Rozewicz is one of Poland’s great post-war poets, and his latest work is now being championed by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin. While Nobel prizes went to compatriots, Wislawa Szymborska, for her spirited, idiosyncratic poems, and to Czeslaw Milosz, for his more traditional, neo-classical work, Rozewicz seemed alone in his quest to find a language that could carry the horrors of war.
Born in Radomsko, Poland, in 1921, Rozewicz was a member of the resistance during the second world war, as was his brother who was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944. “I saw people who were brought through the streets on carts,” he explains, “dead bodies, naked bodies – these were Russian prisoners brought out from a German camp.”
In the aftermath, the nascent poet struggled to pick out the words for all he had witnessed. With its notions of beauty and transcendence, Poland’s Romantic heritage was incompatible with the Nazis’ murderous occupation of his country. Perhaps the only poet explicitly to take on Adorno’s famous refutation, Rozewicz writes in “I Did Espy a Marvellous Monster”: at home a task / awaits me: / To create poetry after Auschwitz.
How my heart sings 