david and giants

trust TS Eliot to say something like this:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

the sort of thing that makes you understand how books/words/writers can be such intimate friends too. his four quartets especially make me think so.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

    The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

i think we need another cs lewis today.

literary quotes

finding my igoogle page again and realising how good it is. i especially like the OED and literary quotes function, along with the news segments and strange how-tos.

i know good stuff shouldn’t come all at once, but well…sometimes abundance is also realistic. (and two isn’t exactly abundant, but it gestures towards a beginning.)

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t have to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
-Toni Morrison

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
-Charles Baudelaire

what we live for

linus is a brave boy.

this morning i woke up early, like i meant to, but because i liked the dream i was at, i put my head back on the pillow. when i woke up again i was pissed for various reasons: it was not real; i knew it was not real but i let myself believe it; it happened again. so i didn’t bother even drawing the curtains, and just tried to do a little of something that makes nothing. when i finally had to leave the house, i walked out in a hurry, as usual. it was only when i took a number of steps towards the bus stop that i realised,

it was sunny outside. it was such a lovely day, and i didn’t know it.

i put my tolstoy aside for a while and re-read my miller again. and this time it feels like he is right here telling me exactly how i feel, and sharing his own thoughts about the same things i’m thinking about. and he makes so much sense:

“And that is the thing about life. You go walking along, thinking people are talking a language and exchanging ideas, but the whole time there is this deeper language people are really talking, and that language has nothing to do with ethics, fashion, or politics, but what it really has to do with is feeling important and valuable. What if the economy we’re really dealing in life, what if the language we are really speaking in life, what if what we really want in life is relational?”

-Donald Miller

random thoughts on an ordinary day

• - you know your experience is diversifying when you realise that there are more occasions that leave you silent from a lack of knowledge about the subject matter of a conversation. or when you get corrected point blank and are rebuffed in the face.
• - i miss my rational, empathetic friends.
• - there is a particular pleasure in figuring out the four lines of blake’s poem with an old school mate, in another class at another time and place:
  “To see a world in a grain of sand,
  And heaven in a wild flower,
  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
  And eternity in an hour.”
• - people can be nice in many ways. people can also be hurtful in many ways. people can be silly in many ways. most of all, people are greedy in many ways —
  greedy for company, greedy for money, greedy for space, greedy for love, greedy for time, greedy for happiness, greedy for meaning, greedy for satisfaction, greedy for affirmation, greedy for friends, greedy for words.
• - waiting for the screen to appear after pressing the “account balance enquiry” key feels the same as waiting for the screen to appear after keying in your matric number on the “check exam results” page.
• - people can be doing such different things in different places at the same time.
• - the cab fare from boon lay mrt station to changi airport terminal one during off-peak hours is $25.90.
• - compassion is one of the most tender things about a person.
• - i need conviction, and a cause to live and fight for. i need to see how this cause covers all the many sides of me. (i have it, i just need to remember.)
• - many people have baggage from their childhood; it shouldn’t be made a joke at a lecture.
• - where else have we to go? …

different ways of saying… (iii)

continued from the other one, over some time:

1. “deeply, deeply touched.”

2. “tell me how to read you — does your silence mean a yes?”

for someone so good with words, the repetition of a simple word says a lot. for someone so busy, to give that privilege of time, and to want to know, really say it all.

“tell me how to read you…” wasn’t said to me, but this must be one of the most tender things to say to someone like one’s own.

Verlaine, between Baudelaire and Mallarmé

Music first of all,
And for that prefer the Uneven,
More vague and more soluble in air,
With nothing in it that weighs or drags.

And you also must not go choosing
Your words without a certain disdain:
Nothing’s more precious than a tipsy song
Where Indistinct is joined to Precise.

***

Music again and always!
Let your verse be that winged thing
That one feels fleeing from a parting soul
Towards other loves in other skies.

Let your verse be the lucky chance
Scattered on the tense morning wind
That goes sniffing at mint and thyme…
And all the rest is literature.

reading this in the Tolstoy book i’m at now reminded me of eurolit and how much i enjoyed the french poets and their contemporaries. that indistinct sense of sensing the spleen and riding on some winged thing. these days i’ve been remembering mr blin.

wheeee

i wish there were a wand somewhere that i could wave and make everybody around me happy.

one of the most powerful things on earth must be the ability to make another person smile in his heart. there should be a super hero like care bear, who will shine the rainbow on his tummy on people, and make them all happy.

for all the problems in human relationships, it’s probably the only way one can connect enough with another to be able to leave semi-permanent prints on his life. maybe that’s where the problem lies…but maybe it doesn’t always have to be a problem.

floor bear

Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot was good. (there, another general word that doesn’t say anything much.) But it’s really the sort of thing that i can see us discussing in a class like metafictions. So much about the written, the unwritten, the said, the experienced, the remembered, the desired, the forgotten, the painful, the misrepresented, the loved.

Besides the trying to figure Flaubert out, the narrator Braithwaite, also struggles with the personal issue of figuring his wife’s infidelity and suicide out. There is a sense of confluence between the lives of F & B, and just as B points out the resistance of F against the true and the real in life, so B is himself also resisting the truth of his own life. Why is it that we can fill our head with so much, yet find ourselves so empty?

In talking about the cruelty of Flaubert to herself, F’s lover says with a voice given by B, “he feared me because he feared himself. He feared that he might love me completely. It was not simply terror that I should invade his study and his solitude; it was terror that I might invade his heart…he said that there were three preconditions for happiness — stupidity, selfishness and good health — and that he was only sure of possessing the second of these. I argued, I fought, but he wanted to believe that happiness was impossible; it gave him some strange consolation.” (175)

It is not something unique to him. But there must be some way out somewhere.