Tuesday, October 14, 2003

How do you know you're in a Mystery: it codifies your
experiences
.

'But there are excavations of excavations.' --The Book of
Concealed Mystery
(Mathers tr)

"One must sense the dark is occupied." --Jeffrey Gburek.

"Wittgenstein said of his [Trakl's] poems: 'I do not under-
stand them, but their tone delights me. It is the tone of a man of real genius.' " --Selected Poems ed C Middleton*

Alternative self-histories are more futile than most.

"Spinnen suchen mein Herz." ('Spiders look for my heart.')
--Trakl

"Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can
do: but this turns out to be something which not many people
want done." --C S Lewis

"I'm wearing/ windows for walls,/ and the street keeps coming
through." --Michelle Shocked, "Disoriented" (from her hard-to-find
EP)

   'Casida of the Rose

  The rose
was not searching for the sunrise:
almost eternal on its branch,
it was searching for something else.

  The rose
was not searching for darkness or science:
borderland of flesh and dream,
it was searching for something else.

  The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.' --Lorca (tr Bly)

Contraries: truth & Mystery. Their opposites: lies &
banality.

Banality--a cancer with its own health & its own antibodies.

What techniques are to problems, initiations are to
Mysteries.

I like a cop car parked beside me. I don't like a cop car
driving beside me.

Holidays spread, like a stain, into whole seasons.

   '181. [A veces, siento]

At times I feel
like the rose
that I shall be, like the wing
that I shall be;
and a perfume shrouds me, alien and mine,
mine and a rose's;
and a wanderlust grips me, alien and mine,
mine and a bird's.'

--tr Eloise Roach, Juan Ramon Jiménez Three Hundred Poems
1903-1953

--------------------------------------------------------
*   "A Waltz in Old Vienna"

Once Wittgenstein gifted Georg Trakl
Though quipping, "His verse boasts a lock'll
   Withstand the best key;
   It's yet poetry."
And Trakl pushed back his debacle.

4-13-01

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