Day: March 13, 2018

That was one topic we never did in the cemetery.

100_0172.jpgPray Father,give me some washing.I’ve got Wikileaks and a new obsession.
Tell me more,my child.
I think someone has been inside my computer.
They can’t be human.
Why not,Father?
Well, we are not thin enough to get into the computer.
Ah, they turn themselves into particles and come in with the current..
when it’s high tide.
Do you mean tied?
No,Father.I’ve not been reading that book.
Neither have I but in the confessional I’ve heard it all.
And how does that make you feel?
Why pay to read a fantasy when you can dream up your own?
Some are born dim… others become dim…….
Well,any sins tonight.
I’m so sorry.I was planning to tell a lie but I forgot.
There’s a list of sins in the Missal…
Yes,I’ve not tried most of them yet… just got a pang of anger
when aa brick fell on my head.
That’s natural,my child.
Has a brick ever fallen on your head,Father.
Not yet but I’m only 97.
Wow,you look much older.Are you longing to diet?
Why, is there no food in heaven?
I wonder who cooks.
Maybe they live on manna.
Does God eat food
That was one topic we never did in the cemetery.
Do you mean the seminary.
At my age,it’s all one.
You have reached Nirvana….congratulations.
Well.I’d prefer a cup of tea.
You English!
What are you?
I’m a great Dane.
Did you say a grey Dane.
That too.
Well perk up;the show’s not quite over till the gnat really stings.
Do gnats eat string?
String… it’s my passion.Love it or mate it…get involved.
Live a little.
And for your penance… you must have a bath…
Why?
I don’t like the way you smell.
Well,I am a dog.. we like sniff.Can I borrow your hankey?
Definitely.
I’ll wash it for you.
Well,it’s not over till that gnat gets a sting!

Humility

“The loftiest in status are those who do not know their own status, and the most virtuous of them are those who do not know their own virtue.”

Imam ash-Shafi`i

“Your humbleness humbles others and your modesty brings out the modesty of others.” Abdulbary Yahya

“Humility is not to think less of yourself, but to think about yourself less.” Waleed Basyouni

— Quran, http://islamicartdb.com/quotes/about/humility/

Standing

Standing near L Cohen’s grave I saw
The long generations of Jews  with their  ceremonies
Their rituals and rites
Not to mention how they loved to argue
And how when he was a little boy his Dad died
Soon after he  learned about WW2 and the killing of European Jewry
All his life he was tormented by depression and terror.
In his song,The Future, he says
I’m just the little Jew who wrote the Bible.
I’ve seem the future and it’s murder
And,. do you know, he was right
Three thousand years,two thousand five hundred years
Cohen means priest,son of Aaron.
And they never had a Second Vatican Council  moment
As then the Catholic Church wrecked its own rituals
They seem a bit wiser but I don’t know enough about it
Leonard cut his father’s bow tie in half
He dug a a hole in the garden and buried it with a note
That’s when his poetry began
And we still hear it floating out like silk across the grasses and forests
Forget your perfect offering

Then love itself was gone

I heard there was a sacred chord

There’s no-one left to torture

We don’t  like babies, anyhow.

Anthem

We’ve seen them rise and fall

We’re just the little Jews who wrote the Bible

Jesus was a sailor

Forsaken, almost human,

Only drowning men could see him

So long

 

What had melted into the wall

During the day I listened to Leonard Cohen
At night I read Lit Crit. Sylvia Plath and,er,Sylvia Plath, and,er Sylvia Plath,Daddyeee!
I saw Eliezer a Cohen young and old and everywhere in between and his smile and his eyes.
His fear and his courtesy
I read Sylvia in language of Lacan, Rose,Derrida
I had no idea what they meant
At the time.
Maybe it went to another place
Then one night,I got into bed and I read nothing.
It was over.
I sang all of Joan of Arc myself  and included Jennifer Warne’s    gestures full of feeling
Then I fell asleep.
I knew what had melted into the wall.
And what was still here.
There was me.

On not knowing yourself

12373243_647033108769904_7426608511503873995_n.jpghttps://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-not-knowing-yourself-whats-adam-phillips-saying-about-life-story/#!

 

 

“Description becomes proscription. Authentic insight into oneself, repeated enough, calcifies into self-curtailment. There’s a sense in which self-definition arrests the free and unscripted play of relating to ourselves, in the same way that the hasty definition of another person, the undue assurance that we know them, narrows the range of experiences we are likely to have with them. A real relation is vulnerable to the actuality of other people, and to other instincts within ourselves. A real relation is therefore always a risk, and this is why we so rarely allow one to happen. “We do not believe in our lives,” Stanley Cavell once wrote, “so we trade them for stories.” We know in advance how these stories end, and that is their appeal: experience adheres to our precepts.

The danger is that we may become ventriloquized by a story we have told about ourselves and believe to be vested with the prestige of an authoritative interpretation. Freud thought he found “an intimate connection between the story of a patient’s sufferings and the symptoms of his illness.” The story was at once an attempt at pain management and a cause of our suffering. We do not want our pain (except for when we do), but, Phillips reminds, we express enormous wishfulness in our descriptions of pain. We have much invested in these descriptions and in the picture of reality they convey. We have considerable incentive, psychically and socially, to build a durable discourse for the self and its suffering. New experience confirms rather than alters the narrative logic.

Though this “self-talk” is no one’s doing but our own, often much of it ends up set against oneself. In “Against Self-Criticism,” the remarkable central essay of Unforbidden Pleasures, Phillips pulls at a rotten thread woven within our stories of self. There is a powerful capacity in us — Freud called it “superego” — that prejudges us, which is an intractable stereotyper. This part of our mind pulls away to condemn of the rest of the psyche, which presumes knowledge of the worth of our wishes and of the compromises our wishes make with reality. “The superego […] casts us as certain kinds of character,” Phillips writes, “it, as it were, tells us who we really are; it is an essentialist; it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do.” Superego says that underneath our efforts and best intentions lies something more suspect. Why, Phillips will beg us to ask, does it respect effort and intention so little? And how did it acquire this claim on the actual?

Within the superego’s narrow discourse, few things seem as appropriate as the deferral of self-love, as delaying an undaunted mode of life. “So frightened are we by the superego,” Phillips writes, “that we identify with it: we speak on its behalf to avoid antagonizing it.” A bureaucratic voice drones on within consciousness, passionlessly employed in our own service. Its repetitive soliloquy drowns out other interpretive possibility, offers stop-gap satisfactions of self-knowledge that stop us from other kinds of knowing. Our stories of why we are inadequate tend to be our least imaginative and yet our most convincing. We feel duty-bound to believe the tales, issuing as they do from a register of ruthless certitude. We are, to tweak a line from Stevens, the emperors of not enough ideas about ourselves.”

The mystery of seeing

Annie Dillard on How to Live with Mystery, the Two Ways of Looking, and the Secret of Seeing

 

“But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.”

Alfred

Photo0429Photo0425Alfred, was it you who burned the cakes
And entered English history by mistake?
Or were you an archangel sent to me
To give me comfort sitting on my knee?

Was the oven powered by oaken trees?
Did the smell of burning ride the breeze?
Oh,Alfred if you come  back home to me
I’ll bake a cake especially for your tea

In love again

 
I saw  the sun rise over the North Sea
Accentuating coloured fishing boats.
The beauty of the dawn brought hope to me
A restful pleasure made my soft eyes dote.
The peace of this small town has caught my heart.
Scenes from ancient times repeat again
The gulls swoop low to sketch their flying charts
Remote as ever from the realm of man.
The shingle beach,the Church where Britten lies
The in and out of tides, the salty sea;
An exact match of houses, hill and skies.
The amber shop, the bakers, the oak tree.
In my mind I walk in love again;
Though of the two, a single one remains

The naughty cat

I had a cat which never scratched or bit
Her manners were perfection , I can say
But on the stairs she lay and fell asleep
So tripped me up when I had got a tray

She always knew when I had a new dress
For she would leap down from the window sill
And she would try to milk the fabric pure
Till I had threads and holes where she had pulled.

She  used her scratching post when we were home
Yet when we went away, she disobeyed
For we found scratches on the sofa arms
Where she had exercised the right to play

Yet when she died  we missed her very much
So now she’s sitting on the sofa, stuffed

 

 

November Surf by Robinson Jeffers

 

pexels-photo-248771.jpeghttp://www.robinsonjeffersassociation.org/2010/08/november-surf/

 

November Surf

Some lucky day each November great waves awake
and are drawn
Like smoking mountains bright from the west
And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness:
then suddenly
The old granite forgets half a year’s filth:
The orange-peel, egg-shells, papers, pieces of clothing,
the clots
Of dung in corners of the rock, and used
Sheaths that make light love safe in the evenings: all
the droppings of the summer
Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy:
I think this cumbered continent envies its cliff then….
But all seasons
The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,
Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up
the long coast
Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:
The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks
more numerous,
The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains
The dignity of room, the value of rareness.


Read more poems by Robinson Jeffers

A  virus causes tremors in the soul!

The mind and body are ideally whole
Heart  and spirit tempered by life’s pains
A  virus causes tremors in the soul!

Every day events can take their toll~
Chilblains and carbuncles take the blame
The mind and body are a  perfect whole

In  our sleep, our dreams take curtain calls
We are little Shakespeares by life lamed
A  virus causes tremors in the soul!

As we grow we each endure the Fall
This choice for knowledge causes us great shame
The mind and body are a  perfect whole

Envy, jealousy and hate  on love do haul
All   digested fit within our frame
A  virus causes tremors in the soul!

Love how words combine to play a game
And attempt to give all beings names
The mind and body  may  become a  whole
But  viruses cause tremors in the soul!