The Self I Cannot See

From whiskey river:

Life continuously refuses to show us the plot. The desire to give it shape, and by shape, meaning, is so great anything will do. But Orwell would have us stand against all the “smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don’t cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being.

(Terrance Keenan [source, including the first three sentences])

…and:

Self-Portrait

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers – but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor’s profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I’m no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife’s face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don’t know.
I’m truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that — so far —
belongs to me.

(Adam Zagajewski; translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])

Not from whiskey river:

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.

(Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

…and:

There was a Young Maid who said: “Why
Can’t I look in my ear with my eye?
If I put my mind to it
I’m sure I can do it.
You never can tell till you try.”

(Anonymous)

…and (excerpt):

Matins

I

I’ve felt undeserving. I’ve made myself ill with the glory,
in the unleavened garden
disgorged the lies and scared away with a stick a snake.
What made me cover that which I could not have?

I’ve grieved and walked in catacombs,
I’ve felt undeserving. I’ve made myself ill with the glory.
Even the falling leaves gesture their renunciation.
I disgorge the lies and abhor the serpant’s hiss.

I remember seasons, things I bring from far away,
and grieve. I walk in catacombs.
In gardens now, by the stone walls, sunlight closes,
the falling leaves gesture their renunciation.

I remember being in a field touching a man’s body.
I remember seasons, things I bring from far away
and things that hold their breath for shame.
His skin was soft as a girl’s and he closed his eyes.

I placed apple petals on his eyelids;
we were lying in a field and I touched his body.
Then there were clouds, an uncanny silence,
as when in a green place the air holds its breath for shame.

What made me covet what I could not have?
Ill with the power and glory, a thrashing in my chest,
I remember the unleavened gardens,
petals falling singly, the yellow snake disgorging lies.

(Carol Frost; read the whole thing here (The Poetry Foundation))

I thought I’d wrap this up on a sassy, upbeat note with a video set to 1966’s “Stop and Take a Look at Yourself,” by the Northern soul girl group The Shalimars:

(I haven’t found lyrics to the song anywhere online; if anyone wants to attempt a transcription, well, y’know…)

Update 2010-05-01: The Shalimars, and their “Stop and Take a Look at Yourself,” are really invisible on the Web. About the only references I can find are to videos, and some eBay sales, and occasional mentions on Northern-soul fan pages and forums. But there’s nothing about them, really, except:

• Their name supposedly inspired the name of the disco group Shalamar, in the 1970s. The Shalimars may or may not have been the same group known as Sari and The Shalimars, whose name also pops up on a lot of Northern-soul sites.
• If you’d like to know what they looked like, see this YouTube video — the same song, played over a simple black-and-white still photo of the three of them.
• They recorded on the Verve label.
• “Stop and Take a Look at Yourself” has been ranked #200-and-something on a list of the top 500 Northern soul hits of all time.
• The song was written by a songwriting duo named Jackson and Barnes.
• The Shalimars’ version of “Stop and Take a Look at Yourself” was produced by a Hal Weiss, who (I’m guessing) is the producer who also worked with Ronnie & The Hi-Lites on “I Wish That We Were Married” in the ’60s.

Okay now, Google, do your stuff: bring to this page someone who knows something about them…

_____________________

Note: The image at the top of the post is called LoOk at YoUrSelF, by ludosibilla (Flickr). The caption there reads:

se non ti parlo è perchè non voglio diventare schiavo delle mie parole
se non ti parlo è perchè preferisco esser padrone del mio silenzio
jarabe de palo

I don’t know Italian, which I think this is; but having run it through an online translator I think it says something like:

if you do not speak it is because I will not become a slave to my words
if you do not speak it is because I prefer to be master of my silence
(Jarabe de Palo)

“Jarabe de Palo” is the name of a Latin rock group, from Spain; I’d guess that these are lyrics to one of their songs.