And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
— Ezra Pound, Canto 1
[Robert Louis Stevenson] says that, in a sense, poetry is nearer to the common man, the man in the street. For the materials of poetry are words, and those words are, he says, the very dialect of life. Words are used for everyday humdrum purposes and are the material of the poet, even as sounds are the material of the musician. Stevenson speaks of words as being mere blocks, mere conveniences. Then he wonders at the poet, who is able to weave those rigid symbols meant for everyday or abstract purposes into a pattern, which he calls “the web.” If we accept what Stevenson says, we have a theory of poetry—a theory of words being made by literature to serve for something beyond their intended use. Words, says Stevenson, are meant for the common everyday commerce of life, and the poet somehow makes of them something magic.
—Jorge Luis Borges, from his lecture Thought and Poetry, given at Harvard in 1967 and collected in This Craft of Verse
A view of MedellÃn from a house in the Robledo district in mid-morning.
january 2010 – bryce canyon from paulboccaccio on Vimeo.
(this post tests out the emergency wobblecam system using a video i took in early january.
i might do more of these when i’m abroad. with less wobbling.)
Being aware of the history of literature—or of any other art, for that matter—is really a form of unbelieving, a form of skepticism. If I say to my self, for example, that Wordsworth and Verlaine were very good nineteenth-century poets, then I may fall into the danger of thinking that time has some how destroyed them, that they are not as good now as they were. I think the ancient idea—that we might allow perfection to art without taking into account the dates—was a braver one.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “A Poet’s Creed”
The first thing to say about J.G. Ballard is not that he is among our finest writers of science fiction but that he is among our finest writers of fiction tout court period. Ballard himself might retort that, granted the first claim, the second is redundant, since the only important fiction being produced today is science fiction (or the fiction of the untrammeled imagination, or of hypothesis, or of the metaphysical pushing to the limit of scientific datum: unsatisfactorily as it is, we always end up with science fiction).
— Anthony Burgess, from his introduction to The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard
I’m continually impressed by Ezra Pound’s translations of Li Bai (or Li Po). This poem in particular, and especially now, as many of my friends (so many) scatter across the country. They all go to better things, and not a one is sad, but nonetheless, to echo Pound: Let us resolve also to make nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing. Bon voyage, friends.
Exile’s Letter
From the Chinese of Li Po, usually considered the greatest poet of China: written by him while in exile about 760 A. D., to the Hereditary War-Councillor of Sho, “recollecting former companionship.â€So-kin of Rakuho, ancient friend, I now remember
That you built me a special tavern,
By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin.
With yellow gold and white jewels we paid for the songs and laughter,
And we were drunk for month after month, forgetting the kings and princes.
Intelligent men came drifting in, from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially, there was nothing at cross-purpose;
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship.
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds and without regret.
And then I was sent off to South Wei, smothered in laurel groves,
And you to the north of Raku-hoku,
Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories between us.
And when separation had come to its worst
We met, and travelled together into Sen-Go
Through all the thirty-six folds of the turning and twisting waters;
Into a valley of a thousand bright flowers that was the first valley,
And on into ten thousand valleys full of voices and pine-winds.
With silver harness and reins of gold, prostrating themselves on the ground,
Out came the East-of-Kan foreman and his company;
And there came also the “True-man†of Shi-yo to meet me,
Playing on a jewelled mouth-organ.
In the storied houses of San-Ko they gave us more Sennin music;
Many instruments, like the sound of young phœnix broods.
And the foreman of Kan-Chu, drunk,
Danced because his long sleeves
Wouldn’t keep still, with that music playing.
And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap,
And my spirit so high that it was all over the heavens.And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars or rain.
I had to be off to So, far away over the waters,
You back to your river-bridge.
And your father, who was brave as a leopard,
Was governor in Hei Shu and put down the barbarian rabble.
And one May he had you send for me, despite the long distance;
And what with broken wheels and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going
Over roads twisted like sheep’s guts.
And I was still going, late in the year, in the cutting wind from the north
And thinking how little you cared for the cost and you caring enough to pay it.
Then what a reception!
Red jade cups, food well set, on a blue jewelled table;
And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning;
And you would walk out with me to the western corner of the castle,
To the dynastic temple, with the water about it clear as blue jade,
With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums,
With ripples like dragon-scales going grass-green on the water,
Pleasure lasting, with courtezans going and coming without hindrance,
With the willow-flakes falling like snow,
And the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset,
And the waters a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows—
Eyebrows painted green are a fine sight in young moonlight,
Gracefully painted—and the girls singing back at each other,
Dancing in transparent brocade,
And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,
Tossing it up under the clouds.And all this comes to an end,
And is not again to be met with.
I went up to the court for examination,
Tried Layu’s luck, offered the Choyu song,
And got no promotion,
And went back to the East Mountains white-headed.And once again we met, later, at the South Bridge head.
And then the crowd broke up—you went north to San palace.
And if you ask how I regret that parting?
It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end, confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking—
There is no end of things in the heart.I call in the boy,
Have him sit on his knees to write and seal this,
And I send it a thousand miles, thinking.(Translated by Ezra Pound from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the Professors Mori and Araga.)
Let’s not postpone enjoying poetry until we have time for poetry. Make time instead.
This one is by Pablo Neruda.
| Si Tu Me Olvidas
Quiero que sepas Ahora bien, Si de pronto Si consideras largo y loco Pero |
If You Forget Me
I want you to know Well, now, If suddenly If you think it long and mad, But |
Bruce Sterling, photo by kandinski
This unorganized lump of speculation is more or less a dump of my brain’s activity after I read Bruce Sterling’s talk, “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” which he gave at Transmediale 10, Berlin, Feb. 6, 2010.
A few quotes:
Refuse the awe of the future. Refuse reverence to the past. If they are really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.
and
Yes, you will look ridiculous. But by what standard? By what standard can you be held to be ridiculous? Why not just go and make yourself a personal public testimony for a future that doesn’t exist? Why not just carry it out with a kind of Gandhian dedication, and see what happens?
and
Atemporality is a philosophy of history with a built-in expiration date. It has a built in expiration date. It’s not going to last forever. It’s not a perfect explanation, it’s a contingent explanation for contingent times.
Of course you should read the transcript to get a proper sense.
But what he proposes isn’t true atemporality: even if we glean data from various time periods, even if we transport ourselves, as in Borges’s famous story, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, through experience and force of will, and in our minds recreate a former time, we still live and act in a sequence; we haven’t shimmied out of time entirely. If we were to break out of chronology (if such a thing were possible) we would need to write a new method of thinking onto our brains, to use the same hardware for an unintended but feasible purpose, like using a bobbypin to pick a lock. In fact, the act of escaping time and reprogramming ourselves is the same: as we are now, we assume relationships between the moments we see. But if that were not true, what sorts of thoughts could we have? Would they be discrete, or would all the thoughts we had and ever would have coalesce into an amalgam of experience, sensation, and intention? Is that how to know an atemporal being, by the shape his thoughts and acts make as he slides through a cross-section of time, like the Sphere in Flatland, projecting the dimensions of his character onto a sequential topography?
Cross reference this TED talk by Daniel Kahneman about memory and happiness, in which Kahneman says, “We think of our future as anticipated memories,” and explains the differences between the “remembering self” and the “experiencing self.”
So then, what defines our culture’s collective remembering self? Is it simply the consensus between members? I don’t think the experiencing self exists from the collective point of view, because currently—and I say “currently” in view of Sterling’s talk, with a loose grip on my map of how any given process executes in our transient society—our culture assembles its collective consciousness through transmissions of stories from one person to another. If we can each become neurons, then we will have some collective identity and function, and perhaps spawn a collective experiencing self.
To quote Borges from Pierre Menard again, “Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.â€
(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hiperactivo/ / CC BY-SA 2.0)
Today is your last day to apply for the Clarion Workshop. If you write short stories, apply.
I haven’t written about the workshop much (at least on here—in private correspondence I’ve written extensively) but since I attended last year, in the summer of 2009, I’ve grown as a reader, writer, critic, observer, tactician, &c. My friends there—and I, gloriously, count my instructors among my friends—recommended books to me that have made the last few months a delight; my memory of past conversations, and the letters we write continue to lay fresh avenues of thought; I have an extended family built on shared, self-imposed affliction and composed of the finest people I have had the privilege to live with, cheek-by-jowl. Nothing I’ve done compares.
The instructors this year are excellent. Delia Sherman, George R.R. Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer. And, if I may repeat myself: Samuel R. Delany. Samuel R. Delany is teaching this year. Samuel R. Delany. Yes.
So I say again, with fervency and earnest eyes and overly familiar hand-pressing: If you write short stories, apply to the Clarion workshop. Today is your last day. Midnight according Pacific time, so you slobs on the east coast have until three.