• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
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    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
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    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
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    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
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    • FLOORBOARDS
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    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
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mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: 1961

A Solitude by Denise Levertov

26 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

1961, 7*, air, anxiety, being, blindness, breeze, children, Denise Levertov, doors, exit, face, hands, image, journey, joy, light, movement, nowhere, passing, people, presence, quiet, right, seeing, shame, smile, solitude, sound, speech, stairs, staring, station, stranger, streets, sunlight, thought, train, water, way, world

                                A Solitude

                A blind man. I can stare at him
                ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it?
                No, he is in a great solitude.

                O, strange joy,
                to gaze my fill at a stranger’s face.
                No, my thirst is greater than before.

                In this world he is speaking
                almost aloud. His lips move.
                Anxiety plays about them. And now joy

                of some sort trembles into a smile.
                A breeze I can’t feel
                crosses that face as if it crossed water.

                The train moves uptown, pulls in and
                pulls out of the local stops. Within its loud
                jarring movement a quiet,

                the quiet of people not speaking,
                some of them eyeing the blind man,
                only a moment though, not thirsty like me,

                and within that quiet his
                different quiet, not quiet at all, a tumult
                of images, but what are his images,

                he is blind? He doesn’t care
                that he looks strange, showing
                his thoughts on his face like designs of light

                flickering on water, for hedoesn’t know
                what look is.
                I see he has never seen.

                And now he rises, he stands at the door ready,
                knowing his station is next. Was he counting?
                No, that was not his need.

                When he gets out I get out.
                ‘Can I help you towards the exit?’
                ‘Oh, alright.’ An indifference.

                But instantly, even as he speaks,
                even as I hear indifference, his hand
                goes out, waiting for me to take it,

                and now we hold hands like children.
                His hand is warm and not sweaty,
                the grip firm, it feels good.

                And when we have passed through the turnstile,
                he going first, his hand at once
                waits for mine again.

                ‘Here are the steps. And here we turn
                to the right. More stairs now.’ We go
                up into sunlight. He feels that,

                the soft air. ‘A nice day,
                isn’t it?’ says the blind man. Solitude
                walks with me, walks

                beside me, he is not with me, he continues
                his thoughts alone. But his hand and mine
                know one another,

                it’s as if my hand were gone forth
                on its own journey. I see him
                across the street, the blind man,

                and now he says he can find his way. He knows
                where he is going, it is nowhere, it is filled
                with presences. He says, I am.

 

how to be in another’s head about being in another’s head: this is a wonderful example of Whalen’s ‘graph of the mind’ – the reach and score of effervent; there is a wonderful clarity and excise about these words such that the encounter is ours as much as just reported; thank you Denise Levertov, as she touches her throat lightly to feel the vibrations as she listens

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

air wormhole: THE DESOLATE FIELD by William Carlos Williams
anxiety wormhole: anxiety
being & water wormhole: `whappn’d!
breeze & hands wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George
doors wormhole: letting them go
light wormhole: I don’t need to go out / onto the balcony to see behind me / to know what’s going on
passing wormhole: SPRING STRAINS by William Carlos Williams
people wormhole: tram
quiet wormhole: new blue porsche
seeing wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
smile wormhole: SUMMER SONG by William Carlos Williams
streets wormhole: PASTORAL by William Carlos Williams
thought wormhole: presence
train wormhole: all the low clouds keeping pace / through the train window, / always arriving, whether fast or / slow, but never actually moving
world wormhole: scintillating to mind’s content

 

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Tulips by Sylvia Plath – How Far To Step Before You Raise The Other Foot

11 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1961, 2014, 8*, air, anatta, beauty, being, books, born-again, breathing, child, compassion, contingency, death, exigence, existence, eyes, faces, family, flowers, freedom, green, hands, head, hospital, identity, journey, life, light, love, nurses, others, peace, perspective, pocket, poetry, pointlessness, reading, realisation, red, renunciation, river, Salinger, seagull, shadow, silence, sleep, smile, sun, Sylvia Plath, Tao, thinking, time, tulip, velcro, walls, white, windows, winter, wisdom, world

 

 

 

                Tulips by Sylvia Plath

                The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
                Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
                I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
                As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
                I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
                I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
                And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

                They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
                Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
                Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
                The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
                They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
                Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
                So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

                My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
                Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
                They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
                Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
                My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
                My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
                Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

                I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
                stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
                They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
                Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
                I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
                Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
                I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

                I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
                To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
                How free it is, you have no idea how free——
                The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
                And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
                It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
                Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

                The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
                Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
                Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
                Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
                They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
                Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
                A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

                Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
                The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
                Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
                And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
                Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
                And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
                The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

                Before they came the air was calm enough,
                Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
                Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
                Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
                Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
                They concentrate my attention, that was happy
                Playing and resting without committing itself.

                The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
                The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
                They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
                And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
                Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
                The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
                And comes from a country far away as health.

Sylvia Plath, “Tulips” from Collected Poems.   Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath.

                                              ——~ O ~

                Tulips by Sylvia Plath

I read this with a big stupid smile on a long flight from Gran Canaria.   It is the third or fourth time I have read it. Some poems open like pockets when read additionally, enfoldingly.   And make you smile, stupidly, because you hadn’t realised how much there ever is in the very same journey being made in the reading.   How much more beautiful can something become: I am beginning to understand why Seymour Glass suffered from the utter-ness of beauty – how beauty can demand your respective and perspective extinction in its unfoldment if you are not too careful.   And Seymour Glass and Sylvia Plath were not too careful – what beauty they saw, how shocking (for us) to behold … if we are not careful.

              “The tulips are too excitable …”

ah, it has started, too quick, too late for me to define myself ‘perspectived’ from it – go with it, go with it, trust Sylvia, she went with it, she had no choice, she was ill (emergency appendectomy, recent miscarriage) it will be alright, she coped, she made … Beauty

                                                                     “… it is winter here.
                Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
                I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
                As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands …”

She let her self go, with the season and the walls and the quiet.   Relinquishing.   Liking it.   Finding a more stable existence than all of the rough contingency that perpetually leaves her off-balance. Being it: …

              “I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
                I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
                And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.”

This is not morbidity or illness, this is rest (‘I have nothing to do with explosions’ – beautiful self-humour, the past tantrums and anger dressed as sophistication).   This is relief.   This is healthy: this most wonderful, laconic humour; she lets her self go then turns to look at what is left with a detachment and indulgence that you would have for your own child:

              “They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
                Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
                Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.”

This is so funny, and not merely because of the ‘pupil’ pun, a beautiful acceptance of how earnest those poets can be, looking at everything to take in its significance.   And having accepted herself in all her tragicomedy, what else to look at but the rest of the world:

              “The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
                They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
                Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
                So it is impossible to tell how many there are.”

‘… doing things with their hands’, having accepted the endearing stupidity of one’s own doings, then looking at the impersonal world, but with that same love – impartially, freshly, benignedly, resignedly.   So, what have I got in my thirty-year life so far?

              “My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
                Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
                They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
                Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
                My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
                My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
                Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

                I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
                Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
                They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
                Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
                I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
                Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
                I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.”

Watching all the emphemerality is where it gets uncomfortable – we’re not supposed to think this, are we?   Surely this is by what we define our value – you can’t renounce this, you can’t be born-again from this, you can’t give this up, that’s going too far!   But the realisation is implacable: you can’t lose one without the other (… the Tao that can be named, is not the eternal Tao).   If you fall short – one without the other – you lose the both.   If you grant your own lack of exigence, but not others’ lack, you lack compassion for them and your realisation is selfish and isolated.   If you grant the lack of exigence of other, but not your own, you are lost in pointlessness and your realisation is mad.   If you lack either compassion or wisdom you are foreshortened, even when whole release was so close.   This is where the carefulness is so crucial: calculated openness (which begs its own opening), or complete opening which takes no prisoners.

              “I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
                To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
                How free it is, you have no idea how free——
                The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
                And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
                It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
                Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.”

This is not morbid, this is not just what she is about – don’t foreshorten her.   This is a great yearning for the peace of not being entrapped.

This is where Sylvia falls short.   She can embrace her own extinction as escape from her painful world (the whole universe come to a single point of bright tulips in a vase), but she cannot pervade her realisation into the world; it keeps snagging her, they keep snagging her.   Nevertheless she is so beautiful in the candour which whimpers, ‘I can’t’:

              “The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
                Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
                Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
                Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
                They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
                Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
                A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.”

The others (her family, the world) are hooking onto her like Velcro; she cannot accept their non-exigency, only her own.   And to the extent that she cannot accept theirs she is losing her own self-realisation in relief, and becoming paranoid:

              “Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
                The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
                Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
                And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
                Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
                And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
                The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

                Before they came the air was calm enough,
                Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
                Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
                Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
                Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
                They concentrate my attention, that was happy
                Playing and resting without committing itself.

                The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
                The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
                They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
                And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
                Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
                The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
                And comes from a country far away as health.”

You can’t help but love the head of someone that glimpses beauty but is frightened by its implications, seemingly chained by the very things she is enamoured of in the belly of a dark cave.   I would hold her dear cranium, feel all of its connected weight …

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

air & pointlessness wormhole: tag cloud poem VI – anyone’s eyes
beauty wormhole: old age
being & identity & poetry & shadow & thinking & world wormhole: the precision // the gentleness // and / the letting go
books & Sylvia Plath wormhole: ‘like a piece of ice on a hot stove / the poem must ride on its own melting’
breathing & love wormhole: our life
child wormhole: on
compassion wormhole: ‘n’
death & family & life wormhole: letters to Mum III – ongoing-term // eventually
eyes & reading & time wormhole: the air of architecture
faces & hands wormhole: city-centre-coffee-shop / talk
green wormhole: cold wind
light wormhole: St. Ludwigskirche
others & sun wormhole: movement
realisation wormhole: I will eventually drift tectonic
red wormhole: the poppies / of van Gogh
river & seagull wormhole: a riveral
silence wormhole: the Buddha head in an antique shop
sleep wormhole: my fidgety self
smile wormhole: no biggie:
tulip wormhole: honest
walls wormhole: deepening with each step
white wormhole: time
windows wormhole: waiting room
winter wormhole: no hat

 

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brave new world?

15 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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Tags

1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011, 4*, growth, history, lifetimes, world

 

 

 

in ’61 we had to make way for a new baby I guess – someone else in my world
in ’71 I started the journeys to school where the world was brown and leafy
in ’81 I got married and dedicated my world to another
in ’91 I don’t really know what had happened to the world
in ’01 I offered my markbook to make my mark in the world
in ’11 I finally gave up offering but not sure if I am discovering – bracken-wet and new-vista –

a brave new world?

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

part of >>> years
1971 wormhole: 1971
history wormhole: bombs on / Catford
lifetimes wormhole: Woolwich Central – / making life better II
world wormhole: have

 

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1961 – Marilyn

28 Monday May 2012

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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Tags

'scape, 1961, 2010, 3*, grey, Marilyn Monroe, palm tree, pool, rain, years, yellow

 

 

 

                               1961 – Marilyn

                               slanting rain
                               against the single palm
                               against the patio door
                               on the sandstone flags
                               by the grey grey pool

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

grey wormhole: ‘the old / Lotus Elan …’
rain wormhole: 1977
years wormhole: 1964
yellow wormhole: until

 

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1961

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

'scape, 1961, 2010, 4*, childhood, petrol, sand, tram, years

 

 

 

                                               1961

                           a tramline – petrol steel –
                           set in sandstone
                           by a few cobbles
                           curving straight, straight along

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

childhood wormhole: riddled
years wormhole: 1964

 

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes." ~ Annie Dillard

pages coagulating like yogurt

  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Chapter 1
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    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
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    • Introduction
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
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    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
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    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
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