[Image: “Le Bestiaire,” a mural painted by B. de Renty and Ph. de Lanouvelle (1996) on the side of a building on Rue de la Croix Nivert in Paris. (Click here to enlarge.) You can find other photos of the building around the Web; this one comes from a comment at the page cited below as a source for the Georges Bataille quotation. The mural itself may or may not still exist at that location (I couldn’t see it via Google Street View).]
From whiskey river:
As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we “possess” this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves.
Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.
(Georges Bataille [source: various sites, including this one])
…and (italicized paragraph):
The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
(Neil Gaiman [source])
Not from whiskey river:
One With The Sun
Child
one with the sun
in trackless fields
of yellow grass and thistle, scent
of humid heavy air and the wing music
of bees and flies.Child, slender
nakedness to itself unknown,
true colour of the light
dispersed invisibly
or glowing around the black hulls
of distant thunderheads, around
the grasshopper’s countenance,
solemn, vigilant and wise.Green apples, poured full
of density, of crispness, float unmoved
under leaves on the slope. Brown
fallen apples nest
in secret whorls of grass. The apple tree:
alone in so much space. And below
in the woods by the water
a sweet dead branch
cracks lightly
in the shadow in the wind.But here is an old track
through the grass head-high
to a child: who
made it? They must have
passed and passed by this one tree,
by the abandoned, tireless car
where rabbits peer out, and the circle
of black embers,
cans, springs, skeletons
of furniture. They too
passed here many times
on their way from the street’s end
to the oaks that screen
the river. There
the sun is nesting now, night
rises with pale flutterings
of white wings from roots
of plants and the black water.
(A.F. Moritz [source])
…and:
Mysticism for Beginners
The day was mild, the light was generous.
The German on the café terrace
held a small book on his lap.
I caught sight of the title:
Mysticism for Beginners.
Suddenly I understood that the swallows
patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
with their shrill whistles,
and the hushed talk of timid travelers
from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—
like nuns in fields of rice,
and the dusk, slow and systematic,
erasing the outlines of medieval houses,
and olive trees on little hills,
abandoned to the wind and heat,
and the head of the Unknown Princess
that I saw and admired in the Louvre,
and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed.
(Adam Zagajewski, translated By Clare Cavanagh [source])
…and:
Erosion. Gnarled roots. The carcass of a dead deer. A flight of swallows. The high spirals of hawks. Bladed reflections of rushing water. Just budding bare branches. Gray rock, cracked, shattered, and worn. A fallen tree. A lone cloud. The laughter of plum branches.
Even a little circle of rocks beside the trail—who put them there, or did any hand arrange them, and no matter which, what are the secrets of that circle?
(Deng Ming-Dao [source])
…and:
Asking the Way
You fools who ask what god is
should ask what life is instead.
Find a port where lemon trees bloom.
Ask about places to drink in the port.
Ask about the drinkers.
Ask about the lemon trees.
Ask and ask until nothing’s left to ask.
(Ko Un, translated By Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock [source])
Froog says
I assume you had spotted that, in addition to Zagajewski’s own book of that title, there is also this: http://www.amazon.com/Mysticism-Beginners-John-Cross-Made/dp/1565482433/
Not sure if this could have been the impulse for the poem: was it published first?
I suspect there may have been one or two other books by this name as well over the years – catchy title!
By the way, you had me at ‘interstices’. You’ve been waiting ages for a pretext to use that in a post title, haven’t you?
Froog says
Are you having spam filter issues again, JES?
I tried to leave a comment here at the weekend, but it didn’t appear. (My VPN dropped out as I was trying to post it, so I thought at first it hadn’t gone through for that reason. But when I tried a second time, I got one of those “Looks like you’ve already said this” messages. Interrupted and/or duplicated transmission may perhaps have resulted in my not being recognised as a long-time non-robot?)
John says
Thanks for the heads-up about the missing comment. It HAD been caught in the sp*m lint trap until just now, when I marked it as “Not Spam.” Whereupon it promptly disappeared entirely.
Let’s see, if I recall from the quick read-through…
(1) You mentioned that the Zagajewski title reminded you of this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Mysticism-Beginners-John-Cross-Made/dp/1565482433
(I don’t know if that’s the exact same link, but pretty sure it’s the same book.)
I trust that the poem sent you in search of the book, whereupon you discovered the surprisingly similar title… that you were not already familiar with the …John of the Cross variant. It doesn’t seem like a book which might have found its way onto your reading list!
(2) Yes, good catch: I believe have been waiting to use “interstices,” albeit subconsciously. When I prestidigitated the title out of the air, I immediately toggled over and did a search for another post title here which used “interstices” — and was surprised to find none. Heh.
Just curious: when you post comments, are you still seeing the scrambled/warped numbers-and-letters reCaptcha images? or are you seeing the new easier-to-use gimmick they’ve come up with? Mine looks like this at the moment:
[partial screen capture]
You don’t actually have to enter anything, just check the box.
(Since Google took over reCaptcha’s maintenance a few years back, they’ve apparently heard the complaints about inscrutability. This new device doesn’t “remember” that you’ve been at a site before — instead, it watches your behavior at the user interface (mouse clicks, say, and keystrokes and typos and such) to determine that you’re probably a human and not a sp*mbot. But it lacks 100% self-confidence: you still must check the box!)
Once you’ve done that, then it recognizes you for the duration of the current visit — no more boxes to check. When you return later, it starts over again.
Progress, creepy progress.
Froog says
Thanks, JES.
Yes, I have been getting spambot-denial option for the last few months. I think when I tried to post this comment I had a slow and glitchy connection, and it maybe wasn’t displaying the first time.
It did display the second time; but I wasn’t allowed to re-submit as a non-robot because my first attempt had already been diverted to spam. Not so very intelligent, Google – could do better!
I didn’t realise this new safeguard was monitoring my keyboard behaviour, though; that is more than a bit creepy. I have lately been getting a bit paranoid about people being able to turn on my laptop camera remotely, and am considering putting sticking plaster over the lens.
The Discalced Carmelites have long been an interest of mine. No, not really. They threaten to become so now, though.
It occurred to me that ‘Mysticism for Beginners’ was such a wonderfully evocative title that it might have been used for many different books. But the Zagajewski poem collection and that primer on John of the Cross seem to be the only two (in English) known to Amazon. There could be a niche to exploit there….
Oh, darn – my writing must have been becoming too mechanical! Or maybe I just didn’t make any typos? That ruddy widget didn’t believe I wasn’t a robot this time!
Froog says
And in a further wrinkle…. my original comment is now displaying at the top of this thread, but with an ‘Awaiting moderation’ banner across it.
Gremlins, gremlins.
John says
Ah — there it is!
Now anyone but you and I who might drop in here will be thoroughly confused by the chronology.
John says
…which is actually all right, as long as my comment count just shot up!
s.o.m.e. ones brudder says
Another one of those titles. How about: “A glimpse of the interstices?” With the question mark…