viable alternative
"Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I've written and find that it's all worthless . . . What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of, if he existed, would have done better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing."
- Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.
You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.
You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don't care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have ever cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.
Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.
- Gwendolyn MacEwen
Afterworlds
"Gazing at the rain, I consider what it means to belong, to become part of something. To have someone cry for me. From someplace distant, so very distant. From, ultimately, a dream. No matter how far I reach out, no matter how fast I run, I'll never make it.
Why would anyone want to cry for me?"
- Haruki Murakami
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
- Billy Collins
Litany
Nine Horses
"Do you know why a Sheikh breathes into the ear of a newly born child? Of course you do not! You put it down to magic, primitive symbols representing life, but the practical reasons, the deadly serious business of nourishing the inner consciousness, passes you by."
- a Sufi Sheikh
Rafael Lefort
The Teachers of Gurdjieff
The Ball
As long as nothing can be known for sure
(no signals have been picked up yet),
as long as Earth is still unlike
the nearer and more distant planets,
as long as there's neither hide nor hair
of other grasses graced by other winds,
of other treetops bearing other crowns,
other animals as well-grounded as our own,
as long as only the local echo
has been known to speak in syllables,
as long as we still haven't heard the word
of better or worse mozarts,
platos, edisons, elsewhere,
as long as our inhuman crimes
are still committed only between humans,
as long as our kindness
is still incomparable,
peerless even in its imperfection,
as long as our heads packed with illusions
still pass for the only heads so packed,
as long as the roofs of our mouths alone
still raise voices to high heavens –
let's act like very special guests of honour
at the district firemen's ball,
dance to the beat of the local oompah band
and pretend that it's the ball
to end all balls.
I can't speak for others –
for me this is misery and happiness enough:
just this sleepy backwater
where even the stars have time to burn
while winking at us
unintentionally.
- Wislawa Szymborska
"Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough."
- Jeanette Winterson
"Why do we bother with the rest of the day, the swale of the afternoon, the sudden dip into evening, then night with his notorious perfumes, his many-pointed stars? This is the best - throwing off the light covers, feet on the cold floor, and buzzing around the house on espresso - maybe a splash of water on the face, a palmful of vitamins - but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso, dictionary and atlas open on the rug, the typewriter waiting for the key of the head, a cello on the radio, and, if necessary, the windows - trees fifty, a hundred years old out there, heavy clouds on the way and the lawn steaming like a horse in the early morning."
- Billy Collins
It would be an endless battle if it were all up to ego
because it does not destroy and is not destroyed by itself
It is like a wave
it makes itself up, it rushes forward getting nowhere really
it crashes, withdraws and makes itself up again
pulls itself together with pride
towers with pride
rushes forward into imaginary conquest
crashes in frustration
withdraws with remorse and repentance
pulls itself together with new resolution
- Agnes Martin
"Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."
- David Foster Wallace
"Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."
- Frederick Buechner
Wishful Thinking
"Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own."
- Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbably beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
- Mary Oliver
Starlings in Winter
Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
- Joanna Macy
The Adamantine Perfection of Desire
Nothing more strong
than to be helpless before desire.
No reason,
the simplified heart whispers,
the argument over,
only This.
No longer choosing anything but assent.
Its bowl scraped clean to the bottom,
the skull-bone cup no longer horrifies,
but, rimmed in silver, shines.
A spotted dog follows a bitch in heat.
Gray geese flying past us, crying.
The living cannot help but love the world.
- Jane Hirshfield
When we live our lives it's something like a race - our minds
become concerned and covered over and we get depressed and
have to get away for a holiday.
And then sometimes there are moments of perfection
and in these moments we wonder why we ever thought life was
difficult.
- Agnes Martin
"There need be nothing preternaturally sweet or homespun about the moods embodied in domestic space. These spaces can speak to us of the somber as readily as they can of the gentle. There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to.
As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us."
- Alain de Botton
The Architecture of Happiness
"The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived."
- Frederick Buechner
"It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't."
- David Foster Wallace
"A little bit of hell is all of hell, right? A little bit of delusion is all of delusion. And, just the same way, a little bit of enlightenment is all of enlightenment, even in the moment you're reaching, and full of longing, and thinking you don't have it, of course you have it. Because your Buddha nature's always with you. It's just that you haven't noticed yet. It's always now and we're always here now and enlightenment is just the basis of our consciousness. Thinking it's not here is one of the things that keeps you from noticing it. You might not be deluded in this moment at all. You might be quite free. You might feel the joy that's just the natural joy of being human."
- John Tarrant
The Story, Around the Corner
is not turning the way you thought
it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,
the way a child draws the tail of a pig.
What came out of your mouth,
a riff of common talk.
As a sudden weather shift on a beach,
sky looming mountains of cloud
in a way you cannot predict
or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,
takes its own side. And it is strange.
Far more complicated than a few phrases
pieced together around a kitchen table
on a July morning in Dallas, say,
a city you don't live in, where people
might shop forever or throw a thousand stories
away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it
aren't sure. Is this what we wanted?
Stories wandering out,
having their own free lives?
Maybe they are planning something bad.
A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember
is growing into a weird body with many demands.
One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,
knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.
- Naomi Shihab Nye
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while."
- Joan Didion
Rough Guide
Impossible to look directly into
another's eyes. Impossible to look
into your own. You read the dense book
of being like a document you flick through.
Eyes, even an inch apart, are blurs,
clouds, like the concept of yesterday
which has an entity you sometimes stray
into beyond the limits of his and hers,
The unknown: the roughest of the rough guides,
and all it says is: you're here, you'd better make
the best of it. You entered by mistake
and so you'll leave. It's what the route map hides
and languages obscure, the magnetic pull
of all you ever see of the beautiful.
But I have seen the beautiful. I know
its contours and the rough guide it provides
is blissfully specific: the hand that rides
the ridge of the collarbone or moves along the brow,
the perfect form of momentary light
in this line or another. It's what Blake
saw at the top of the stair, the terrible earthquake
at the root of the flesh we think of as delight.
It's what you see when you shut your eyes and see,
the angel with the whip or a flaming sword
that burns your eyes down to the spinal cord,
the shit, blood, semen smell of mortality
you get used to because it follows you
everywhere and is both beautiful and true.
- George Szirtes
Reel
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word "finite" (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves)
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality as truth.
- Jeanette Winterson
"The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them."
- Jean Cocteau
Why are people called Buddhas
After they die?
Because they don't grumble any more,
Because they don't make a nuisance
Of themselves any more.
- Ikkyu
"We all proceed with approximately the same speed toward the same destiny. But some of us are enjoying the trip more than others."
- James Park
The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?
To be whole, it is enough to exist.
At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
it worth having been born.
- Fernando Pessoa
"How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travelers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel to cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who are fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse."
- Jeanette Winterson
The Passion
"We have no where to go (really) but down - eventually we must all let go and jump - it is supposedly that act which propels us to the next level - to enlightenment. What would bring us to this point - where we are willing to give up the self? Does the fall into the abyss always result in enlightenment? How would we know? What do we have to give up to make such a leap?"
- Hakuin Ekaku
"What transforms this world is knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed."
- Yukio Mishima
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
"Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself."
- John O'Donohue
"We bundle up but trees go naked in winter."
- Diane Ackerman
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
- William Carlos Williams
Winter Trees
"Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone."
- Czesław Miłosz
The Word "I"
Harder to breathe
near the summit, and harder
to remember
where you came from,
why you came
Winter's
harder, and harder to say
the word "I"
with a straight face,
and sleep -
who can sleep. Who has time
to prepare for the big day
when he will be required
to say goodbye to everyone, including
the aforementioned pronoun, relinquish
all earthly attachment
completely, and witness
the end of the world -
harder in other words
not to love it
not to love it so much
- Franz Wright
I was not meant to live anywhere except in Paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
When the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, but I was absent,
dedicated to invisible countries.
- Czesław Miłosz
Report From A Far Place
Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.
They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.
In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.
Be careful, though: they
burn, or don't burn, in their own
strange way, when you say them.
- William Stafford
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