• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1
    • 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
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
    • William Carlos Williams
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • wormholes

mlewisredford

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

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: Salinger

between

02 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

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2018, 5*, ambition, being, between, birth, career, doing, eyes, growth, justice, living, practice, reference, Salinger, Sartre, speech, study, teaching

                                                                                                between

                                there’s something not right about all this
                                the mismatch between what is said and

                                the delay of their eyes, between justice
                                and making living, the ‘bad faith’ and

                                the ‘phoniness’, the study and the reference,
                                the practice and the ambition, the birth

                                and the growth, the teaching and
                                the career – leaves you betwixt

                if you’re at all
                lucky

 

 

 

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

being wormhole: Fishermen at Sea, 1796
career wormhole: how to teach
doing wormhole: on facing the Have
eye wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – pageant of the trees
justice wormhole: London refugee march – 120915
living wormhole: Victorian pipework
practice wormhole: to arms, then;
speech wormhole: somehow
study & teaching wormhole: coterminalism – there is nothing happens by itself, / 070118

 

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concordance

19 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

2014, 7*, age, armour, discovery, Donald Fagen, expectation, eyes, flow, Gran Canaria, Have, holiday, identity, image, life, looking, music, passing, Salinger, sea, sitting, sun, Sylvia Plath, waves, writing

                                                                                                how to be
                                                                                in a holiday resort
                                                                where the Have is strolled
                                                and swaggered and tattoo’d
                                catching glance like after-image
                when the eyes are closed?

                                                                ~O___,

                                why aren’t I writing?            Well
                                                                I am
                but I was expecting to see something else when I wrote
                                the flow of another holiday
                                                rather than the
                                                                concordance
                                                that I have still yet to discover
                                in my writing eyes wide
                                                closed

                                                                ,___O~

                                                                certainly
                                                the sun and skin keep me
                                                                lapping without gain
                                                                and replaying the chorus from the ‘Nightfly’                
                                                                                unsure if I ever got the verse

                                                                ___“O”—

                                                                but nevertheless
                                                I still worry that I don’t write
                                                                as Plath and Salinger would lifefully so

                                                                I even know the answer
                                but I cannot sit at the moment,
                                                                I thought I had armour by the sea but it has

                                                                so quickly rusted
                                                and I’m overweight and 54 thinking
                                                                of illness and waste

 

 

 

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

eyes & Salinger wormhole: slightly / uphill
flow wormhole: happen//ing
Have wormhole: pass and / fro
holiday wormhole: holiday
identity wormhole: h’rk ‘eh ‘heh ‘hair ‘yeah ‘eh?
life wormhole: I turn to wake up
looking wormhole: Tara mantras
music wormhole: in the Java ‘n’ Jazz
passing wormhole: ‘someone …’
sea & sun & Sylvia Plath & waves & writing wormhole: jump start
sitting wormhole: woman / has worked in the gym / got a build

 

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slightly / uphill

18 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2014, 5*, black, dog, downhill, eyes, garden, grass, head, house, leaning, portrait, running, Salinger, shrub, time, uphill, walls, windows

                while the shrubs and low wall
                and even the grass
                                leaned
                journeying towards the shuttered-
                window house

                                slightly
                                uphill

                Salinger lay downhill
                head locked intent into the eyes
                of the black mongrel who was
                onthepoint of running away
                                all the
                                time

 

 

 

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

black wormhole: ‘charcoal grey-slate sky …’
dog wormhole: with endless love
eyes wormhole: just
garden wormhole: while
house & windows wormhole: … vague / thunder
time wormhole: holiday
walls wormhole: every step I take

 

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to allow / passage

28 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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1940s, 2015, 4*, daughter, father, legacy, looking, mouth, passing, pavement, portrait, profile, Salinger, smile, walking

                           the father
                           walks ahead
                with a Salinger smile from
                           the 1940s

                           to allow
                           passage
                on the narrow pavement
                           and in

                           profile his
                           daughter
                following behind wasn’t smiling
                           looked

                           up to his
                           shoulder
                had exactly the same lower tick to
                           her mouth

 

 

 

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

daughter wormhole: love and precision
father wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Follow Your Nose
looking wormhole: … swap round
mouth wormhole: traffic lights and broad avenue
passing & walking wormhole: embodying
smile wormhole: the silent night of the Batman

 

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not / the Catcher

24 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2016, 7*, being, Catcher in the Rye, doing, edge, identity, life, momentum, patience, recognition, retirement, Salinger, steering

                and I never wanted
                to be visible from
                the beginning

                always knew that
                was not where I
                act, but in the

                shift that lets
                momentum spend
                but steers

                way before the edge; not
                the Catcher here – much
                much more patient than that

 

retirement #2; having caught my breath a little, there is time, perhaps, to take the despondancy and meld (sic) into it, on an atomic level, what really was lost during all that time?

 

 

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

being wormhole: ‘field of corn …’
doing wormhole: matter
identity & retirement wormhole: monument to vainglory
life wormhole: Prajnaparamita // Maitreya
recognition wormhole: just saying, is all VI: // accountable / for my own outbreath / …

 

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no one – poewieview #24

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

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1970, 2016, Bowie, buildings, control, death, echo, emptiness, form, identity, illusion, land, life, night, Salinger, society, stairs, suicide, vista, wind

                           am I really the only one
                           who doesn’t know that
                           buildings are stage props
                           to keep illusion of form
                           and land from blowing
                           away in the night wind

                           the echo of stairwells
                           is inevitable reminder
                           the topple of vistas a
                           tease, but no one saw
                           old James Castle jump
                           we never lost control

 

James Castle jumped from a tower … at which school, and from which book?   Therefore who is the ‘I’ and ‘we’ of poem?   The Man Who Sold the World, 1970

Read the collected movements in David Bowie: Movements in Suite Major

 

 

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

Bowie wormhole: like ink – poewieview #23
buildings wormhole: bavardage
echo wormhole: my // shell – poewieview #19
death & wind wormhole: mauve
emptiness wormhole: 1964
identity wormhole: what I am about to say is true / what I just said was a lie
life wormhole: Dear Sir/Madam,
night wormhole: London Hearts – poewieview #4
society wormhole: miss / ad / venture – poewieview #22
stairs wormhole: the start of adolescence

 

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sit

20 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

2010, abandonment, ageing, Batman, bedroom, being, biography, birthday, books, border, branches, cape, carpet, cars, Catcher in the Rye, childhood, children, comics, compassion, counting, cowl, crying, Dad, divorce, father, flower, fog, fracture, French, green, guru, history, house, identity, image, leaf, life, living room, lyric, marriage, moonlight, Mum, music, night, numbers, parents, pattern, planets, posture, power, Salinger, self-compassion, sentient beings, settee, shadow, sitting, skyline, speech, stone, sunlight, superhero, Superman, surrealism, talking to myself, teaching, wife, world, writing, yin yang

 

 

 

                           I stared at the pattern of the carpet
                           driving my cars behind the settee
                           while my parents said final things
                           to each other; the twirl of the branches

                           a better life, the curl of a flower;
                           you’d better go, the border; and
                           never step back in this house again,
                           the shadow of the leaf is also a

                           darker green; I had never studied
                           the pattern before – never had to,
                           never could – I can work it out now,
                           see how it repeats; I think something

                           is happening with Mum and Dad
                           on the other side of the settee; but
                           this pattern continues around the
                           whole carpet, around the whole room;

                           only later – in bed – is it announced
                           what I had already known, and only
                           then could I ask why does it have to
                           happen to us and cry; only when it

                           was announced, only when it was
                           expressed; I had already known
                           but I could only count the patterns,
                           I could only drive the cars; and

                           as I cried, I was numb – pattern
                           before settee – I could fracture
                           from the world, just find a pattern;
                           you’re the man of the house now,

                           someone said to me, so I studied
                           the pages of comicbooks – patterns
                           of power, solving under cowl,
                           jumping under cape, between the

                           skyline and the world: I shall
                           throw stones high, until they
                           don’t come down; I shall dig so low
                           that no one could follow, no;

                           I shall count all numbers; I shall
                           collect all numbers; I shall
                           discover all planets; I shall adopt
                           the posture of heroes, no; I shall

                           number the histories; I shall weave
                           the texture of music; I shall taste
                           the shock of lyric; I shall smell
                           the books, no; I shall sunlight

                           the chorus; I shall cry the biography;
                           I shall see the image, and write them
                           into existence, yes; I shall follow
                           the curl and the twist and the twirl

                           under moonlight all the night long;
                           then, I shall play catch in the rye;
                           I shall alors les boulevards; I shall
                           yin the old yang; I shall surreal in

                           the fog; I shall honour my guru
                           I shall marry my wife; I shall father
                           my children; I shall teach in those classes –
                           but forty two years on, he had still

                           just left; and I still didn’t know how
                           to be the man; time to get out from
                           behind the settee, take a seat with
                           all the others, and
                                                  just
                                                  sit there with them all awhile

 

 

 

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

abandonment & divorce wormhole: … back to the outbreath
Batman wormhole: zok! and pow!
bedroom & Dad wormhole: 1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012
being & identity & talking to myself & world & writing wormhole: out!
books wormhole: library: start where you are IV // all the distance I have travelled!
branches wormhole: Exceat to Cuckmere Haven
carpet wormhole: Ashdown Forest / 080213 14:47
cars wormhole: after all?
childhood & music wormhole: fantasia
comics wormhole: Detective Comics #345
compassion wormhole: de Boeddha // of light
father wormhole: sight / seeing
fog wormhole: my life / of others
green wormhole: three musicians
history wormhole: Brugges April 2015 – looking lost
house wormhole: House by the Railroad, 1925
life & speech wormhole: “write, let’s break outta here!”
living room wormhole: Woolwich Central – making life better II
Mum wormhole: dream 230315
night wormhole: mauve / night
posture & sitting & superhero wormhole: exactly equal
power wormhole: the continental stride of trains
shadow & teaching wormhole: … anymore
skyline wormhole: The Louvre in a Thunderstorm, 1909
stone wormhole: Evening Wind, 1921
Superman wormhole: escape from Flat Planet

 

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Jean Miller kissed Salinger

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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'scape, 2014, 6*, blue, breeze, clouds, coffee, cream, curtains, doors, dress, evening, fingers, Gran Canaria, horizon, leaves, morning, open, palm tree, reading, Salinger, stopped, stucco, suddenly, summer, sun, talking to myself, taxi, terrace, time, writing

 

 

 

                                now let’s see
                those same leaves on the palm frond waving
                alternately like flippy fingers, same as this morning
                                have stopped
                                awhile

                                yes, and the
                light blue rough stucco wall dividing our terrace
                120 from 121 is lined cream coffee by the sun
                                twenty five
                                to nine and

                                the curtain
                by the open door hangs slightly billowing
                like the morning of the first dress of the summer
                                the day
                                I read

                that Jean Miller kissed Salinger in the taxi
                and continued after the sun dipped below the
                                cloudhorizon
                                suddenly

 

 

 

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

blue & clouds wormhole: cloud
breeze & leaves wormhole: no hat
coffee wormhole: we’re born // to die
curtains wormhole: achieving good-enough living
doors wormhole: the Buddha head in an antique shop
evening wormhole: deeper
horizon wormhole: Batman#175
morning & sun & time wormhole: corroboration
open wormhole: oh-pen too
reading wormhole: letters to Mum V – carrying on in duty and love
talking to myself wormhole: extrapolates
writing wormhole: sunny morning

 

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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

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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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Shine On Award

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in announcements, awards

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Bowie, Edward Hopper, Herge, light, Neal Adams, Pink Floyd, Salinger, Sylvia Plath

AHhh …

shineon1

… there I was, all ready to curl up in my own spot of light there, when from out of the rumbling of the city, from out of the sky, came the voice of Tazein, ‘My dear!   I have nominated you for Shine On Award’; … wha- whosaidthat – turning quickly around, nothing.   But I heard …; what can it all mean?   Am I already shining?   Do I have light to shine?   If so, where is it – turning back, quickly, again?   Am I doing it now?   Was I about to stop doing it?   Quick, gather (are there any dragons in the corner?): what do I know?   Who can help me …?   Buddy?   Seymour?

Buddy: ‘Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it’1 so I have to find the light, outside, get in it … get in it! … no that can’t be right, that’s when you’ve lost it (‘always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos’); it’s inside …

Seymour: ‘She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home.   The new announcer is worse than Grant — if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days.   He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly.   The baby stood her ground like an angel.   She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the lightbulbs’2.   So it is inside, but … ‘Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun // blown on the steel breeze’3, what is the use of light (inside) if it does not shine – if it cannot shine – (on the outside)?   OK, ok, let’sthinknow – light makes no sense just by itself, it is just neurosis, there is no yin to receive it (to be), the light was separated from the darkness for a reason on the first day …

‘Before I had studied Chan (Zen) for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers.   When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers.   But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest.   For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers’4; so, to ‘shine’ is to ‘know’ (the mountains and rivers …), if I just search for the light I will lose the mountains and rivers, if I keep the light for myself, they will lose me … I have to shine the light while looking for it because it never was un-separate in the first place …

… ‘Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast.   Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker.   I was furious.   The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour.   I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat.   He said to shine them anyway.   He said to shine them for the Fat Lady’1 … ‘the least of these’5

1 J.D. Salinger, “Franny and Zooey”
2 J.D. Salinger, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”
3 Pink Floyd, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”
4 Qingyuan Weixin, translated D.T. Suzuki, “Essays in Zen Buddhism”
5 The Gospel of Matthew

OK, I get it now: I accept.    Here are a blooming bunch of shining lights for the Fat Lady –

sunlight: the long road
traffic lights: ‘at the traffic lights …’
moonlight: ‘the moonlight …’
twilight: twilight
lightning: ‘she shook the sweets …’
streetlight: write / by the / night / of the / lamp

The rules for the Shine On Award are:

1. Link back to the blogger who nominated you – done and done, thank you again for your faith Tazein
2. Offer the Award to ‘Shine On’ to other bloggers you know to shine – I’m supposed to do 15 but I’ll do just those I can see in all this darkness
3. Answer the questions given to you – I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to change the questions to answer; and answer them – make them more to do with shining; light …

1. what is your favourite colour (or combination of colours)?   why?

I must admit I’m rather partial to a big glob of charcoal grey with ANY shade of green; I like a nice aperitif of the brightest blue with squiffs of white; I used to like deep purple (dh’ dng danng, dh’dh’ dng danng, dh’ dng danng, dnng dngdng) and black, but now prefer mauve stirred once with thick yellow although it’s bad for my heart; I’ve become rather fond of olive mist before a lemon sunrise on spring heathland these days; and then some lime hints in a deep blue sky through the power cables at midday

2. what is your favourite light of the day/year?   why?

car lights that hang and rise in one corner of the room and then play across the room like a UFO when the car passes; I also like the sun settling orange diagonal across the dining table on an early Saturday evening at the beginning of a school holiday; and don’t forget the very first piece of sun across any old meadow that knows in its heart that spring is here, even if it’s wrong

3. when was the last time you ‘saw the light’?

when I recently re-joined a sitting class: I was asked why I came back (after an absence of about two years); I said I felt I needed to meditate with others – it’s what all the books keep telling me; my questioner responded that I need to meditate for others … bing; thanks Jay

4. who, for you, is the craziest diamond in music?

David Bowie CAME BACK!   Once I get over this and the familiar but awkward music has soaked into my skin a little, then the nuggets are to be found – the ‘flinks’ of certain phrases/music/delivery will make a ‘nick’ in the fabric letting something shiney out – which I will SING

5. who, for you, is the craziest diamond in art?

Neal Adams CAME BACK to Batman!   A barking mad story in itself – the Odyssey – but some of the panels are teeth-gritted visceral as they ‘step’ ever tantalisingly into whatif-possibility; … oh, alright, Herge’s street scenes as well; and his stairwell landings; and Hopper’s opened windows

6. who, for you, is the craziest diamond in literature?

I have recently found, and fallen in love with, the work of Sylvia Plath; yes, she shines best when it is most dark but she telescopes into her darkness with such tendril and overlap that it is like a sinewy muscular arm which you can’t help wish your arms looked like that; and she also has the perkiest little humour at times

7. are you a crazy diamond?

Nope: I am a piece of coal that has yet to be given to Superman to crush in his Krypton fingers.   Actually I suspect Supes would hand it back to me and ask why I was wasting his time with the cleanest of hands!   And I still wouldn’t get it.

My nominations are:

joe2poetry: straight and sincere blue light / through a glass of beer
emina redzic: light through the trees erasing all lapse of time and place
omrum: a tall apartment building bathed in red light as the residents variably get up for the day
suzy blue: actually blue with a hint of green; just look at her header pic and logo background
bruce ruston platypiphotography – especially when he mucks around with new colour app-thingies
Betty Generic: catalogues the changing light from her bedroom window every day; it has a ‘drawing in’ effect
miguel: sees the light of the city and the twists of his words through the drawn curtains of his bedroom … ‘blue, blue, ‘lectric blue, that’s the colour of the room where I shall live’
susan sweetland garay: has some beautiful light all over her site, never night
dieu on the grass: speaks through all the light in the champ de mars gardens on an early misty morning … although she lives in Canada
waywardspirit: every once in a while, while you’re happily drifting along in a poetic haze (streaked mauve with hints of lemon), wayward snaps on the overhead light of day and says ‘oi, have a look at this, you great poetic shirt’s blouse’ – harsh light with a smile and wonder

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

Bowie wormhole: 1972
light wormhole: Saturday / afternoon
Salinger wormhole: all

 

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