The fear I imagine as a small, quick bird alighting behind my sternum, dark-eyed and defenseless. To relieve its worry it scrapes its beak against my ribs. I have compassion for it, and would like to give it what it’s searching after.
A prominent example in the Wu-men-kuan is case no. 35 which reads simply, “Master Wu-tsu said, ‘Ch’ien and her soul are separated. Which one is the true soul?’” This case appears to be dealing with the philosophical topic of non-duality: how can a person be divided into component parts, such as body and soul, when she constitutes an indivisible collective unity? Yet, the case is just as clearly based on a famous T’ang legend recorded in the Li-hun chi, expressing the theme of duty versus passion (which later became such an important influence on Tokugawa literature). The folktale uses supernatural elements such as a spirit journey and bilocation in the story of a young woman who appears to her parents, who have resisted her wedding plans, to be sick and lifeless when she is separated for five years from the man she loves. Yet the “other Ch’ien” has run off with her lover and spent the time in a secret marriage. When she returns home out of a sense of responsibility for her family, Ch’ien is reunited with her tormented soul that was manifested in a body lying motionless in bed the entire time of her flight. Everyone, now purged of feelings of guilt and deception, is able to experience a sense of harmony and fulfilled responsibilities.
—Steven Heine, “Putting The ‘Fox’ Back in The ‘Wild Fox Kōan,’” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56 (1996).
A person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. At the moment of conception, the large reproductive cell produces the large reproductive cell. Which, in its turn, produces the large reproductive cell. In saecula saeculorum. Your haploid heart. The trouble with Tribbles.
Work goes on. It’s not not valuable?
Walking with L.L. yesterday, we passed the most beautiful magnolia in the sun, pods like fuzzy bears waving pink flags. Just about to drop their colors. Got you in a corner, got you in a cottage. Forward, fire.
There were a number of works, she said, executed when Bourgeois was the mother of small children, in which she portrays herself as a spider, and what is interesting about these works is not just what they convey about the condition of motherhood — in distinct contrast, she said, to the perennial male vision of the ecstatically fulfilled madonna — but also the fact that they appear to be children's drawings drawn in a child's hand. It is hard to think, she said, of a better example of female invisibility than these drawings, in which the artist herself has disappeared and exists only as the benign monster of her child's perception. Plenty of female practitioners of the arts, she said, have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over subjects that male intellectuals find distasteful, or perhaps simply because they have chosen not to fulfil their biological destiny and therefore have had more time to concentrate on their work. It is understandable, she said, that a woman of talent might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms; yet the image of Bourgeois's spider, she said, seems almost to reproach the woman who has run away from these themes and left the rest of us stuck, as it were, in our webs.
—Rachel Cusk, Kudos
The skull in parts. The feeling that the bones have come unfused and the wind gets in.
…and with his erratic, irregular gait, as if he had pebbles in his shoes, he would make his way to dissolute Avenida Floral, that impertinent ramshackle avenue with its little rusting houses, where prostitutes, transsexuals, and young homosexuals stood leaning, shielded by the lampposts’ dim light, and the food carts and the little windows of the stores. Immune to the air, the cold, the fear, Katzuo crossed the gas station goaded on by delight, approached the open lots, and stationed by the wall, there in the street, hallucinatory, he stared captivated…
Augusto Higa Oshiro, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, tr. Jennifer Shyue
There is something new on those particular blocks of Market or Telegraph—in good lighting, of course, when the danger radar isn’t going off. The weird ease of knowing what kind of trash you are, that it’s exactly the trash one is supposed to find in these neighborhoods.
Thank you emotion, I’m ready for the recollected in tranquility part now.
The sun’s chariot never gets too high these days. I think there’s not enough feed for the horses.
When melancholy comes down feather-light, not enough to tip the scale, that’s the sweet spot. A cat in a sunbeam, that’s all I am. The bliss of an empty hour. Watching motes vector in 3-space, squandering God’s gifts. Like some other things Dante had to come down hard on.
BREACHED FOR GOOD
And broached too, I guess.
I like the songs on the Cindy Lee record and the lo-fi production has its aura, but my sticking point is how rhythmically sloppy the playing is. The thing about the Motown girl groups was, whether or not the muse had visited the songwriters that day, you could count on the backing band for a groove. Yes modern recording software makes it trivial to snap to the grid, yes the human touch etc., but if you don’t have access to those particular session musicians I think you have to work around it somehow. It feels like a much bigger deal than vocal fragility, which is easy to love. In this genre at least.
The first section of Je Tu Il Elle, where she’s eating sugar out of a paper bag, is about the best post-Beckett routine I’ve seen, and in the context of the whole film maybe the most hopeful.
Nous n'irons plus au bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés…
Sautez, dansez,
Embrassez qui vous voudrez
Readers have long noted the copious references to drinking in Tao’s poems: the first known editor of Tao’s works, Xiao Tong (501-531), wrote that “there are those who have doubts about Tao Yuanming’s poetry, since wine is present in each poem.” Xiao then opined that “I, however, think that his true intentions do not lie in wine; rather, he made his mark through wine.”
[...]
啸傲东轩下
聊复得此生I whistle complacently from the eastern veranda,
Somehow having found my life again.—Wendy Swartz, “Pentasyllabic Shi Poetry: Landscape and Farmstead Poems,” in How To Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology, ed. Zong-Qi Cai
