“What is it, boy?”

Photo: sleeveface
thx Don.

Some people call it a “fairy tale” . . .

. . . millons of others, including myself, the American Dream.

I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

Caroline Kennedy, “A President Like My Father”, New York Times, January 27, 2008

Yes We Can.

It was a revelation.

Rodin knew that the first indispensable factor was an [the] unerring knowledge of the human body [my ital].

His [Rodin's] art was not based upon any great idea, but upon the conscientious realization of something small, something capable of achievement, upon a matter of technique. There was no arrogance in him. He devoted himself to this insignificant and difficult aspect of beauty which he could survey, command and judge. The other, the greater beauty, must come when all was ready for it, as animals come to drink when night holds sway and the forest is free of strangers.

With this discovery began Rodin’s own peculiar work. All traditional conceptions of plastic art now lost their meaning for him. Pose, group, compostion, none of these things any longer existed. Only an endless variety of living surfaces, only life; and the mode of expression which he had evolved for himself was immediately concerned with that life. It was henceforth a question of making Life and all its fullness obey his purpose. Rodin seized upon Life as he saw it everywhere about him. He laid hold of its slightest manifestations, he observed it, he sought it out. He lay in wait for it at moments of transition, of hesitation, he overtook it in flight, and everywhere he found it equally great, powerful and enthralling. No part of the body was insignificant or negligible, every part was alive. Life showing in the face, full of reference to time and as easily read as on a dial, was, when seen in the body, less concentrated, greater, more mysterious and eternal. There it wore no disguise. Where it felt indifference, it showed indifference, and in the proud it was proud . . . Man had become a temple, there were thousands upon thousands of such temples, all of which were alive and no two alike. But the thing was to show that they were all the temples of one God.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Auguste Rodin

I first read (devoured) this slim volume of Rilke’s observations on Rodin in university, a rare copy found only in the stacks at the Main Branch of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. It’s been out-of-print for some time. New editions have recently surfaced (including this one by Dover). An enormous influence.

A “new shiver.”

Literature grows like the grass between the heavy gray paving stones of thought.

We shall have to resign ourselves to this: that literature offers no signs, has never offered any signs, by which it can immediately be identified. The best, if not the only, test that we can apply is that suggested by Housman: check if a sequence of words, silently pronounced as the razor glides across our skin of a morning, sets the hairs of the beard on end, while a “shiver” goes “down the spine.” Nor is this mere physiological reductionism. He who recalls a line of verse while shaving experiences that shiver, that romaharsa, or “horripilation,” that befalls Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita when overwhelmed by the epiphany of Krsna. And perhaps romaharsa would be better translated as “happiness of the hairs,” because harsa means “happiness,” as well as “erection,” including the sexual variety. This is typical of a language like Sanskrit that does not love the explicit, but hints that everything is sexual. As for Baudelaire, he was proud that Hugo had sensed, on reading his verses, a “new shiver.” How else could we recognize poetry—and its departure from what came before? Something happens [a certain vibration or luminescence of the sentence]*, something Coomaraswamy defined as “the aesthetic shock.” Whether prompted by the apparition of a god or a sequence of words, the nature of that shock doesn’t change. And this is what poetry does: it makes us see what otherwise we wouldn’t have seen, through a sound that was never heard before.

ROBERTO CALASSO, Literature and the Gods

* in Goethe’s words, the “open mystery” of every form.

Babe.

As a weak vase isn’t always able to receive it,
Only at intervals can man bear divine fullness.

HEATH LEDGER 1979—2008

Thing of beauty.

Things.

If possible, out of practice and grown-up as your feelings are, bring them back to any one of your childhood’s possessions, with which you were familiar. Think whether there was anything nearer to you, more familiar, more indispensible than such a thing. Whether everything else—except it—was not capable of acting unkindly or unjustly towards you, of frightening you with pain, or confusing you with uncertainty? If, amongst your early expectations, you knew kindness, confidence and the sense of not being alone—do you not owe it to that thing? The first time you shared your little heart, as one shares a piece of bread which must suffice for two, was it not with a thing?

That small, forgotten object, willing as it was to represent any and every thing, made you familiar with thousands of things . . . You scarcely remember it, and you are seldom aware that you still need things which, like the things of your childhood, expect your confidence, your affection, your devotion. How does this happen? How does it come about at all that things are related to us? What is their history?

Do you remember such things? Perhaps there is one which for a long time seemed to you simply ridiculous. But one day you were struck by its urgency, the peculiar, almost desperate earnestness which all things possess; and did you not notice how a beauty such as you would not have thought possible came over this thing almost against its will?

If you have experienced such a moment, I would now call it to my aid. It is the moment which restores things to their real life. For no object can affect you if you do not allow it to surprise you with an unimagined beauty. Beauty is always something added to that which is already there, and what that something is we do not know.

And it has not yet become superfluous to repeat that beauty cannot be “made”. No one has ever made beauty. One can only create kindly or sublime conditions for that which sometimes dwells amongst us, an altar and fruits and a flame. The other is not in our power.

For all happiness that has ever thrilled the heart; all greatness, even to think of which almost destroys us; every spacious, world-transforming idea: there was a moment when these were nothing but a pursing of the lips, the lifting of the eyebrows or the shadow on a brow: and this contour of the mouth, this line above the eyelids, this shadow on a face . . .

And the longer one looks, the more does even this content become simplified, and one sees: Things.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Auguste Rodin

As a boy, that “thing” was Cecil (an early “sign”).

“the awesome”

Since the beautiful is only
The beginning of the awesome, as we are barely able to
endure it.

RILKE

Forwarded

It’s coming on six o’clock
again.
The sun rehearses an elaborate
little speech, strictly
pro forma—no, wait—
it’s saying something, like
Be glad it’s over.
We waited for you.
I loved you,
and these were the consequences:
bright nights, lit sea,
buttered roofs, dandelion breath.
The dream of seeing it all.

Next year let’s live in harm’s way,
under the big top. Incongruous,
blue will find us, and the sun.

Like the growl of a friendly dog
it backs up, shivers itself
out of here . . .

“Never heard . . . anymore.”

JOHN ASHBERY, A Worldly Country (2007, Ecco-HarperCollins)

Yes,
mtvU Poet Laureate

Why I’m a gayboy.

“No psychology ever again!”*

Grasp the good fortune that the ground on
which you stand cannot be any bigger than
the two feet planted on it.

FRANZ KAFKA, The Zürau Aphorisms

*This collection is a treasure-trove of penned observations by one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. Here’s a few more standouts:

The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.

We are instructed to do the negative; the positive is already within us.

The fact that the only world is a constructed world takes away hope and gives us certainty.

Is there anything as blithe as believing in one’s own household god!

The spirit only becomes free at the point where it ceases to be invoked as a support.

How is it possible to rejoice in the world except by fleeing to it?