![\"'Le](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/lebestiaire_derenty_delanouvelle_1996_sm.jpg?resize=600%2C800&ssl=1\")
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[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<\/a> 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).]<\/em><\/p>\n From whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Georges Bataille [source: various sites, including this one<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n …and (italicized paragraph):<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Neil Gaiman [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n One With The Sun<\/strong><\/p>\n Child Child, slender Green apples, poured full But here is an old track (A.F. Moritz [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n Mysticism for Beginners<\/strong><\/p>\n The day was mild, the light was generous. (Adam Zagajewski, translated By Clare Cavanagh [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Deng Ming-Dao [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n
\none with the sun
\nin trackless fields
\nof yellow grass and thistle, scent
\nof humid heavy air and the wing music
\nof bees and flies.<\/p>\n
\nnakedness to itself unknown,
\ntrue colour of the light
\ndispersed invisibly
\nor glowing around the black hulls
\nof distant thunderheads, around
\nthe grasshopper\u2019s countenance,
\nsolemn, vigilant and wise.<\/p>\n
\nof density, of crispness, float unmoved
\nunder leaves on the slope. Brown
\nfallen apples nest
\nin secret whorls of grass. The apple tree:
\nalone in so much space. And below
\nin the woods by the water
\na sweet dead branch
\ncracks lightly
\nin the shadow in the wind.<\/p>\n
\nthrough the grass head-high
\nto a child: who
\nmade it? They must have
\npassed and passed by this one tree,
\nby the abandoned, tireless car
\nwhere rabbits peer out, and the circle
\nof black embers,
\ncans, springs, skeletons
\nof furniture. They too
\npassed here many times
\non their way from the street\u2019s end
\nto the oaks that screen
\nthe river. There
\nthe sun is nesting now, night
\nrises with pale flutterings
\nof white wings from roots
\nof plants and the black water.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nThe German on the caf\u00e9 terrace
\nheld a small book on his lap.
\nI caught sight of the title:
\nMysticism for Beginners<\/em>.
\nSuddenly I understood that the swallows
\npatrolling the streets of Montepulciano
\nwith their shrill whistles,
\nand the hushed talk of timid travelers
\nfrom Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
\nand the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—
\nlike nuns in fields of rice,
\nand the dusk, slow and systematic,
\nerasing the outlines of medieval houses,
\nand olive trees on little hills,
\nabandoned to the wind and heat,
\nand the head of the Unknown Princess<\/em>
\nthat I saw and admired in the Louvre,
\nand stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
\nsprinkled with pollen,
\nand the little nightingale practicing
\nits speech beside the highway,
\nand any journey, any kind of trip,
\nare only mysticism for beginners,
\nthe elementary course, prelude
\nto a test that’s been
\npostponed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n