it's very beautiful. old monks weeping and longing for becoming... thank you so much for what you told me yesterday. it _does_ matter, doesn't it? and your poems help to live in beauty. and maybe this takes away the fear a little bit, the fear of becoming. we are not monks, not all of us, very few maybe...
A little gimmicky, but the monks wishing to be pure flame, neither ash nor mud, speaks to the spiritual ambition of man, despite the worldly act of lighting a smoke. A lot in a few lines. But I don't know if the lighter works with the monks, exactly; maybe therein lies a bit of your ambivalence.
I really like the imagery in the second stanza. Although, I don't visualize a lighter. I see a match with the cupped hands. I notice also the presence of a walker (or at least one who stands) - moving through the world without the machine of the speaker. A similar separation is realized in "Encounter". Good piece, James.
Only where there is language is there world. --Martin Heidegger
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The word that fits would mime the genesis. --Michel Deguy
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Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.
... that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent, star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars ...
Ein Klage-Himmel, "a lament-heaven," from Rilke's "Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes." Poetry's post-rupture, post-lapsus, post-death-of-Eurydice dream of recreating that primal world -- Eden, childhood, Orpheus's singing -- where word and thing were one.
3 comments:
it's very beautiful. old monks weeping and longing for becoming...
thank you so much for what you told me yesterday. it _does_ matter, doesn't it? and your poems help to live in beauty. and maybe this takes away the fear a little bit, the fear of becoming. we are not monks, not all of us, very few maybe...
A little gimmicky, but the monks wishing to be pure flame, neither ash nor mud, speaks to the spiritual ambition of man, despite the worldly act of lighting a smoke. A lot in a few lines. But I don't know if the lighter works with the monks, exactly; maybe therein lies a bit of your ambivalence.
CE
I really like the imagery in the second stanza. Although, I don't visualize a lighter. I see a match with the cupped hands. I notice also the presence of a walker (or at least one who stands) - moving through the world without the machine of the speaker. A similar separation is realized in "Encounter". Good piece, James.
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