"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered; "But I like it."

[ source ]

From Stephen Crane's The Black Riders and Other Lines:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."


See also: http://cnx.org/content/m29214/latest/

Carving A Bone

Nothing is Easy

About Carving a Bone.

R.I.P. - The Canon is Dead

Canon PowerShot SD400 - 5.0 MegaPixel
[Taken with the camera on my phone.]

Haiku Upon the Death of My Camera


Morning walk with the dog
Pine branch against the blue blue sky
I dropped my camera

Funeral Blues - W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The Story of A Bone: A Short Experiment in Narrative

A primitive attempt to tell a story with images. It is the simplest story that I know that retains meaning even through my coarse renderings. The experience made it all too clear, once again, that I have miles to go before I sleep.

The Mechanics of Nostalgia: Little Hope Cemetery

Experienced Present

Remembered Past

A Google Buzz post from my friend Staci sent me to a recent Boing Boing post on Through a Plastic Lens: Toy Camera Photography. This led to me to a search for toy camera actions for use in Photoshop. I found a link off of a Flickr page from Dave Ward Photography (see below) that produced outstanding results. When the final image came through, I laughed out loud. Makes me want to find an old toy camera and get deep into the darkroom alchemies of actual film.

The "Old Toy Camera" action gives photos a look similar to an aged print shot on a toy camera (like the Diana or Holga), or on an antique camera. This particular action is not intended to imitate any one camera's particular look, but rather to simply add some of the general elements which make aged photos and images shot on toy and antique cameras so beautiful.

The file also includes two additional actions which imitate the borders often found on vintage and toy camera images.

The action was created on a Mac using Photoshop 7.0, but should work on a PC and on later versions of Photoshop.

Download the Old Toy Camera action for Photoshop

This action is also available at the Adobe Studio Exchange. 

How a specific time is represented photographically is fascinating to me. I sense that this is going to become a moot point in the digital age, but not long ago you could "tell" the time period of a photograph by a wide variety of semiotic markers extraterritorial to the subject of the photograph. Types of camera, film stock, developing processes, etc. all marked or "dated" the image quite specifically.

A few examples all from the excellent Square America: A Letter From The Vanishing World (The Readers):

 

[ source ]

[ source ]

[ source ]

[ source ]

[ source ]

The Bone's Prayer to Death its God - The Dry Salvages, Section II

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.

For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.

Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

Dry Salvages from The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

Response to Shelton Walsmith's Hamden Series

Remember, O Man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return

And He said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live 
And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest... Ezekiel 37:3

Note: [click for larger image] as always, the details in Dore are astonishing: the skeleton on the left pushing the coffin up, the incarnating forms as the eye travels up to Ezekiel, the riveting skeleton on the right with arms raised, seeming not to be agonizing with incarnation but rejoicing in it, one imagines the skull at lower center to start rising out of the ground, bones gathering together underneath.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot has shaped my development perhaps more than any other. I remember being a sophomore in high school, studying in the library, a friend throwing down a copy of The Waste Land upon the table with frustration, saying that it would take a genius to understand it. Why, I asked. It's just really difficult, they replied, significantly adding, everyone knows it means something, but Eliot made it difficult to figure out what exactly that is. My friend continued, he even added footnotes because no one could figure it out. I was intrigued. I wondered why a poet would make something intentionally difficult. 

At the time, I knew of basically two types of poetry: Shakespeare and everything else. With Shakespeare, the difficulty - as I sophomorically conceived it - was in the language being dated, "old." To figure out Shakespeare's poetry, you just had to look all the strange words up in the dictionary, learn about Elizabethan customs. But he was not deliberately trying to be difficult or obscure. That was just the way people talked and wrote back then. (I had much to learn.) What other poetry I knew was mostly comprised of Poe, Frost and Dickinson.

Every high school sophomore would like to think themselves a genius, so I started in on The Waste Land. I quickly came to the realization that by this standard, I was no genius. Nevertheless, I determined myself to read it through to the end. I tried reading it out loud, under my breath, and this opened up the meter for me, being able to listen for hints of meaning. (I have never stopped this practice of reading poetry "out loud to myself.") Images and ideas piled on top of each other, like photographs in a drawer. By the time I reached the dialogue in the Game of Chess section, I could discern flashes of meaning beneath the surface. Enough to hook me. Enough to change my life. Not long after, I was deep into reading Weston's Ritual to Romance, Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and Jung's Man and His Symbols. The Waste Land started to make a great deal of sense to me. Took me a few years and a lot of hard work until I could say that I finally "understood" The Waste Land. So much for my genius. And I should add that it was about ten years later, sitting on a bench in Hyde Park in London, alone and in love with that city, that the poem surrendered completely, unforgettably, to me.

Of course, during my agonies with The Waste Land, I read the rest of Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men, Gerontion, Journey of the Magi, the masterpiece, The Four Quartets. Also Ash Wednesday.

The poem was written in 1927, his first work since his conversion Anglicism. Eliot stayed deep in the shadows of Dante all his life. And it is through the reflected radiance of the Commedia that you can best discern the momentous Purgatorial Turnings glowing between the lines of Ash Wednesday. This is a poem about conversion and redemption. Eliot is turning away from the old life, from the muted apostasies of Gerontion (1920):

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year

Came Christ the tiger

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

Among whispers

from the bleak quips of prediction in the Hollow Men (1925):

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

towards an authentic petition for redemption:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

into a genuine religious longing, "even among these rocks":

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will

In the Dantean cosmology, those who suffered in the Inferno had no hope of Purgatory. None but Dante and Virgil had ever traveled to the absolute nadir of that Hell and moved on, and up, into Purgatory. There are few inventions in the history of the written word that show greater audacity, of creative transgression, than Dante's recounting of this journey out of the Inferno. Dante created a Cosmos that verges upon being more substantial than our own. He mapped out the Christian World of the Soul. To this day, many understand the afterlife as according to Dante. To do this, he allowed himself, as the living author to transgress Divine Law. Dante wrote himself a way out of Hell. It's beautful. One of the first on a series of literary coup de graces to God.

Dante's intention was to set up a moral allegory: that the "lost souls" of the living still have hope. Turn your life around. Release yourself from the bindings of sin and begin the Purgatorial ascent up to the Divine.

Here is Eliot on the matter:

Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot

I

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is

nothing again

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessèd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live? shall these

Bones live? And that which had been contained

In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

Because of the goodness of this Lady

And because of her loveliness, and because

She honours the Virgin in meditation,

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

It is this which recovers

My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions

Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn

In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.

Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

There is no life in them. As I am forgotten

And would be forgotten, so I would forget

Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only

The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping

With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences

Calm and distressed

Torn and most whole

Rose of memory

Rose of forgetfulness

Exhausted and life-giving

Worried reposeful

The single Rose

Is now the Garden

Where all loves end

Terminate torment

Of love unsatisfied

The greater torment

Of love satisfied

End of the endless

Journey to no end

Conclusion of all that

Is inconclusible

Speech without word and

Word of no speech

Grace to the Mother

For the Garden

Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity

Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister

Under the vapour in the fetid air

Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below;

There were no more faces and the stair was dark,

Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth driveling, beyond repair,

Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair

Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit

And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene

The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green

Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,

Lilac and brown hair;

Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind

over the third stair,

Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair

Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy

Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between

The various ranks of varied green

Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,

Talking of trivial things

In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour

Who moved among the others as they walked,

Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand

In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,

Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing

Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring

One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.

The new years walk, restoring

Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring

With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem

The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream

While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue

Between the yews, behind the garden god,

Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down

Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence

Not on the sea or on the islands, not

On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,

For those who walk in darkness

Both in the day time and in the night time

The right time and the right place are not here

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for

Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,

Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,

time and time, between

Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait

In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray

For children at the gate

Who will not go away and cannot pray:

Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender

Yew trees pray for those who offend her

And are terrified and cannot surrender

And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks

In the last desert before the last blue rocks

The desert in the garden the garden in the desert

Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

And the weak spirit quickens to rebel

For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell

Quickens to recover

The cry of quail and the whirling plover

And the blind eye creates

The empty forms between the ivory gates

And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth

The place of solitude where three dreams cross

Between blue rocks

But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away

Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Fibonacci's Sequence: Series II: killers exist, and doves, and doves

doves exist, dreamers and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxon, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

- From alphabet by Inger Christensen

The length of each section of Inger Christensen's alphabet is based on Fibonacci's Sequence, a mathematical sequence beginning 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21..., in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers.

 

Silk by Alessandro Baricco: What is most beautiful...

 

Snow, Moon, and Flowers | 雪月花山水図 | Mori Kansai |  1868

I found a copy of Alessandro Baricco's Silk on one of my sister's bookshelves the other day. It had been several years since I had last read it, so at the end of a long day, I opened it and began. I was tired and didn't figure to last long with a book I had read several times before. But the story worked its enchantment upon me once again. I read it on through to the end. As I lay there with the closed book upon my chest, I felt as if I could start it over again. It is a good story.

Silk is a mere 91 pages long, comprised of 65 chapters. The story is supported by an elegant architecture - almost zen-like in its simplicity. Some of the short chapters trace over months of time, while others, often with fewer words, explore a single moment. The effect is similar to the Chinese painters that used emptiness to charge the meaning of their landscapes. What is most beautiful is what is evoked but never described.

The story is set in the late 1800s. Herve Jouncour is a silk merchant who lives in a small town in southern France. He is married to a woman with a beautiful voice. Each year, due to various circumstances, he must travel to Japan to buy silkworm eggs. While in Japan, he meets a young woman, the mistress of the most elusive man in all of Japan, Hara Kei. Herve and the young woman do not speak to each other. But something happens between them. He leaves. The next year, he returns. Barrico weaves his threads over the same patterns, deepening the detail with each passing. By the end, you realize in the hands of an author with less control, less discipline, the story could have easily run to a thousand pages.

I was having dinner with one of my most influential teachers one night, not long before he died, and asked him what he was reading. He told me that as he had grown older, he had less desire for new stories, new books. He found himself returning to the old ones again and again, reading through the familiar traces, moving into narrative depths he had not had access to on previous readings. He rarely smiled. But I remember him smiling then, and saying, one of the gifts of age is to have a beloved book open up after many years to reveal previously unknown treasures within. He paused and added: such a gift.

In a few years, I am certain, I will read Silk again. And I am sure that it will again have some small gift to offer me, something that I have passed by on all my previous readings, something that I barely even noticed.... It is one of those kinds of books.

The Laughing Bone Store: Silk: book information, blurbs, editorial and customer reviews, lists and more of the usual Amazon razmatazz

Fibonacci's Sequence: Series I: poems, days, death

doves exist, dreamers and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxon, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

- From alphabet by Inger Christensen

The length of each section of Inger Christensen's alphabet is based on Fibonacci's Sequence, a mathematical sequence beginning 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21..., in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers.