open water, Kat 2018

Season's greetings all.

Here we are again. This year using Kat, you can use Toni too.

Again I have a plan, this time loose yet focussed. I'm not going to say too much about it, as that can scupper them. It's another path that's been emerging, further clarified, morphed. My biggest plan has to be to make some other changes to allow more focus on what I love, we shall see. Must have hope in these times, hope, I think, being an aspect of faith.

Last year's thread is here - http://www.librarything.com/topic/244499

completed 2018:



entries of Bible covers reflect completion of one book only thereof

"the forest was magical--Gothic in its green grandiosity"
- Cheryl Strayed, Wild.

"Indeed, if you ignore its particular circumstances, beliefs, and conclusions - the Lakes, Nature, the French Revolution, and the rest - then The Prelude begins to look very like the autobiography of almost any modern poet."
- Norman Nicholson in 'Wordsworth and the Modern Poet' in William Wordsworth 1770/1970 ed. Netta Clutterbuck.

"At about one o'clock in the afternoon I reached the path through the mountain pines, and sat down on a stone to rest. The forest lay hazily in the midday sun, and the warm scent from the pines floated up to me. Only now could I see that the alpine roses were in bloom. They stretched in a red ribbon over the scree. It was now much quieter than in the moonlit night, as if the forest lay paralysed by sleep beneath the yellow sun. A bird of prey circled high in the blue sky, Lynx slept, his ears twitching, and the great silence descended on me like a bell-jar. I wished I could sit here for ever, in the warmth, in the light; the dog at my feet and the circling bird above. I had stopped thinking long since, as if my worries and memories no longer had anything to do with me. When I walked on I did so with deep regret, and on the way I slowly changed, becoming the only creature that didn't belong here, a person troubled by chaotic thoughts, cracking branches with her clumsy shoes and engaged in the bloody business of hunting.
Later, when I reached the hunting lodge higher up the hill, I was my old self again, keen to find something usable in the hut. A faint hint of regret remained with me for hours.
I remember that expedition very well, perhaps because it was the first one; it rises like a peak from the unchanging months of my daily troubles. Incidentally, I haven't gone that way again since that time. I always wanted to, but I never got around to it, and without Lynx I don't dare go on expeditions any more. Never again shall I sit above the alpine roses in the midday sun, listening to the great silence."
- Marlen Haushofer, The Wall, p49.

Two days later, I met in the library a small man with a grey face, wrapped in warm clothes. This was Etchevarría. He spoke amiably about my country. He sat down in the dining room at a table next to mine, then gazed at me for a long time, kindly, and said at last: “You will not remain here long.”
A feeling of joy slowly grew within me: I was talking with a reasonable man who inspired no fear, who took me seriously and sympathetically. I spoke to him of my power over animals. He answered without a trace of irony: “Power over animals is a natural thing in a person as sensitive as you are.”
- Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (NYRB Classics) (pp. 61-62). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

'She reminds me of something. Not a younger version of me - I wasn't like her at all - but . . . The condition. Being a child. Being a girl. There are whole rooms of girlhood that I never got to see. I don't know what they are like. All I know is that I missed them.' She reached out and touched the back of my hand very gently. Her own hand was cold, in spite of the warm day. 'We all have to mourn,' she said. 'The real trick is not to throw everything else away.'
- John Burnside, Ashland & Vine, p92-93

"Knowing Moon was homosexual didn’t upset me, though of course it wasn’t something I could forget. It was the idea of an independent man, a proud spirit, being shut up like an animal in a military prison and having to put up with the ghastly crew who always seemed to grope their way in to run those places – that’s what appalled me."
- Carr, J.L.. A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics) (Kindle Locations 1401-1404). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

"In his youth M. always carefully weighed his words - it was only later that he tended towards levity. In 1919, when he was still very young, he once told me that there was no need at all to have a lot of books, and that it was best to read one book all one's life. 'Do you mean the Bible?' I asked. 'Why not?' he replied. I thought of the splendid greybeards of the East who read the Koran throughout their lives - perhaps they are the only representatives left of that ancient tribe who read a single book - but could scarcely picture my light-hearted companion as one of them. 'Well I didn't mean I will, of course,' he admitted 'but all the same . . . '
M. did not achieve his own ideal - such single-minded devotion is impossible in the twentieth century - but this remark he made in 1919 was not accidental. There are people whose every word flows from a general, integrated view of the world, and perhaps this is always true of poets, even though they vary in the range and depth of their understanding. Perhaps it is this that drives them to express themselves and serves also as the measure of their authenticity. There are, after all, people who write verse as readily as poets, and though there is always something obviously lacking in such verse, it is not easy to define. For this reason it is naive to talk about poets not being recognised by their contemporaries. A real poet is always recognised immediately - by his enemies as well as his well-wishers. It seems inevitable that a poet should arouse enmity. At the end of his life this happened even to Pasternak, who for so long and with such skill - the same skill with wgich he charmed all who met him - had avoided provoking the blind fury of the philistines. Perhaps people are angered by the poet's sense of his own rightness, by the categorical nature of his judgements ('The bluntness of our speech is no mere children's bogey' as M. said in one poem), which in turn derives from the wholeness of his vision. Every poet is a 'disturber of sense' - that is, instead of repeating ready-made opinions current in his time, he extracts new sense from his own understanding of the world. People who are content with generally received formulas are inevitably outraged by a new idea when it comes to them in its raw state, still unrefined, with all its rough edges. Isn't this what M. had in mind when he spoke of poetry as 'raw material', saying that it was incomparably 'rougher' than ordinary everyday speech? People shy away from this raw material and ask in what way the poet is better than they, or they accuse him of arrogance and a desire to lay down the law. This was the spirit in which Ahkmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak were hounded - and Mayakovski, too, until he was made into a State poet. For a long time after he was dead, people also talked in this vein of Gumilev. This is how it always is - though the captives of ready-made formulas easily forget what they were saying a week ago if they are ordered to adopt a new set of opinions. Luckily, however, poets also have their friends, and it is they who matter in the long run."
- Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Against Hope, pp269-270. (There are so many wonderful parts to this book, this just happens to be one thought provoking one I am at at the moment and happened to type in. M. is of course her husband, Osip.)

"SILENCE GUARDS THE FIRE WITHIN

A second, more positive, meaning of silence is that it protects the inner fire. Silence guards the inner heat of religious emotions. This inner heat is the life of the Holy Spirit within us. Thus, silence is the discipline by which the inner fire of God is tended and kept alive.

Diadochus of Photiki offers us a very concrete image: “When the door of the steambath is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good. Thereafter the intellect, though lacking appropriate ideas, pours out a welter of confused thoughts to anyone it meets, as it no longer has the Holy Spirit to keep its understanding free from fantasy. Ideas of value always shun verbosity, being foreign to confusion and fantasy. Timely silence, then, is precious, for it is nothing less than the mother of the wisest thoughts.”6"

Nouwen, Henri J. M.. The Way of the Heart (pp. 23-24). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Happy New Year, Kat. Like the Strayed quote.

Happy New Year, and good reading!

Thanks Dan and Mark. I did things a bit backwards and wished people Happy New Year at the end of my last thread. But let me say it again here, as it is needed these days, wish all Club Readers/Redders the best for 2018, may be it be happy, peaceful and healthy - and full of the reading we need.

Finding Them Gone: Visiting China's Poets of the Past by Red Pine / Bill Porter, Kindle ed.

Bill Porter and Red Pine are one and the same person. As I understand it he translates as Red Pine and his travel books are published as Bill Porter. This book being both.

I think it may have been tomcat who recommended (or was it confirmed my choice of?) Red Pine's translation of the TaoTeChing; anyway I'm most grateful to have found that -- I've also stalled in my reading of his commentary on The Heart Sutra. But I like his style and translations. His translation of the TaoTeChing seemed to read beautifully to me and had a lovely concise yet somehow thorough selection of commentaries sampled from.

Somewhere in the last year I got fired up to read Chinese poets. It began with Li Bai and remembering I'd learned about him and been interested in him as a child. Of course I was somewhat aware of Chinese poetry before - but somewhat (and I am not sure Ezra Pound had helped here).

So it was perhaps inevitable I'd look to Red Pine and this seemed a good way to start - a book in which he travels to grave sites, memorial halls, sites of huts and other sites associated with Great Chinese poets and poetry. So, along the way we get a travelogue of this pilgrimage trough modern China (the book was published in 2016), but also history of China and biography of poets, some consideration of translation, some consideration of the development of Chinese poetry (and culture more generally), photographs of many of the sites, descriptions of them and some felt sense for them in light of the inspiration found there by the poets and then by Red Pine in his familiarity with them and in this pilgrimage - and finally of course we get a good few poems translated by the author, often those especially relevant to the moments of his quest and the places.

I have found it a very engaging book that has helped open Chinese poetry to me really -- the depth of its quality - to learn more properly of how inherently poetic a land it is and was. I think it was here I learned Chairman Mao was a poet - as it was tradition and vital that cultured people were interested in this. But this is salutary to someone that writes a bit themselves. The poets herein though are much more ancient that Chairman Mao. Most totally new to me -- most utterly inspiring. I need to read the book again and make copious notes (I'm considering a file card system for famous Chinese poets) and also to study more closely the geography and history, to let it seep in further.

I've thought about my reaction to these poets in general - there may be much to explain it. In some ways China of the past and the respect for poetry may make it seem a dream land for poets. Yet it was not that at all, many of these poets dealt with political problems, poverty, exile was common (as a standard problem for those at court), some faced execution. It's somehow been some sort of revelation, somehow I had not touched enough the living stream of such words from China and despite some study of the country I'd been confined to political and historical views of it. For some time of course I wasn't hearing my own interest in poetry, never mind picking up on such.

My interest in the Tao may partly explain my interest in this poetry as this, it, is intimately part of the culture and experience of these poems. The poet who was my first way in and stands out to me above all is Li Bai who is very associated with Taoism (more so than Confucianism - he refused to take the civil service exams, that feels like something I can understand).

More generally than Li Bai though I think it is the frequent interest in nature and in human's place in it and in the recognition of the place of humans (the poets) in the world beyond the cares of human society. The final chapter is about Han-Shan (Cold Mountain) and friends, wholly inspiring and red pine's starting point in his life of translating Chinese poets I believe. Han-Shan having been influential on late twentieth century western writers and culture I understand - people whose point of view I may tend to align with. In this Han-Shan and many of these poets are aware of issues I find very contemporary and personal - how to live a good life, some feeling that this may be aided by some withdrawal or seclusion from the world. This is an issue I feel very much - it seems so hard to live in such a way in our modern world, to be able to withdraw as a hermit. Their poetry transmits this issue, I am sure it was not easy then either - but again and again also shows the bliss they sometimes experienced in a poem, and sometimes hints at what may be there far beyond the poems, Lin Ho-ching on the lake in the snow perhaps, Han-shan in his cave, again and again . . .

I'll quote two poems, the first, when I read it I knew I was in love with this book. it is by Su Tung-p'o (sometimes known as Su Shi):

"On the River, looking at Mountains

From our boat I watched mountains race by like horses
herds in the hundreds passing in a flash
those ahead diverging suddenly changing shape
those behind merging running away in fright
looking up I saw a narrow winding trail
and in the mist above someone hiking
I waved from the boat and started to yell
but our sail flew past like a bird heading south"

trans. Pine, Red. Finding Them Gone: Visiting China's Poets of the Past (Kindle Locations 1048-1054). Copper Canyon Press. Kindle Edition.

Apologies the Chinese characters do not copy over too.

Red Pine explains that poem was written by a twenty two year old in 1059CE. That immediately makes me think that this was seven years or so before the Battle of Hastings, and all that, and wondered how much hiking was going on in our western parts then - maybe I should not assume it is leisurely hiking, though it seems clear in this book such interest in being in nature was not unknown in these times and before, was an interest of many of these poets. Of course there must surely have been westerners that enjoyed or could have enjoyed such, there must? Maybe I am ignorant and if I ever read Wanderlust I'll learn of more and ways in which it was in the culture here then - but was it? - my picture of our culture then was not of such things.

The other poem I select as it was also part of what made me start to follow the bliss I have in these poems - I came across an internet meme of this poem in another translation. It speaks, from Li Bai, beautifully, and is famous of course:

"Conversation in the Mountains

You ask why I settled on Jade Mountain
I smile and don’t answer my heart is at peace
the peach blossoms in the stream disappear into the distance
there’s another world beyond the world of man"

trans. Pine, Red. Finding Them Gone: Visiting China's Poets of the Past (Kindle Locations 3692-3696). Copper Canyon Press. Kindle Edition.

There are many gems in translation in this book -- and many gems beyond in learning of the authors' travels and the context of these poems. I heartily recommend it and beyond it, of what it speaks.

Enjoyed your excellent review of Finding them Gone. A good introduction to Chinese poetry?
I will keep my eyes open for this book. Glad you copied the book cover as that will stay in my head longer than the title (although Red Pine is a fairly catchy moniker)

>8 baswood: Thanks - I certainly found it a good introduction. It has gone alongside other reading, there was another book on Li Bai (Li Po) and Tu Fu I completed in December and added to my last thread and there are others I'm looking at beyond that. I read it on my Kindle, though I have also bought a hard copy which is better for the map, it's going to be a gift. I enjoy Red Pine's style.

A really fascinating review, kat. Love the poems, and really like the idea of learning about China through a pilgrimage to poetic sights. I had the same question as Bas, and will keep this book in mind.

William Wordsworth 1770/1970 edited by Netta Clutterbuck

This quite short book was published by The Trustees of Dove Cottage in 1970 to celebrate the bicentenary of Wordsworth's birth. It has eight short essays on the man, appreciations of his poetry, looking at his context and his legacy, by some interesting Wordsworth scholars - Johnathan Wordsworth, Stephen Gill, Robert Woof, Norman Nicholson and Basil Willey among them (probably those that stood out most to me). It was very informative, and in such brief space on themes such as 'The Growth of the Poets Mind', 'Wordsworth and the modern Poet' - covered ground both familiar and yet gave food for thought.

The volume also had some interesting illustrations and also two poems - 'To the River Duddon' by Norman Nicholson and 'Sonnet To Wordsworth' by Sidney Keyes, both of which I like.

I am, or was until this last week, back at reading The Prelude (1805 version). I've read the two book 1799 version at least twice. I also read further than where I am now in the 1850 version, but in the last year, after being able to attend one session of a group at the Wordsworth Trust I went back again to the start of the 1805 version - and was going well but life intervened. My job can be quite stressful and I find it hard to read this when I'm more distant from being really relaxed. During my Christmas leave, at the end, I went back to the start of the seventh book and read that, but have stalled again this week at the start of book the eighth. The seventh book is not one of my favourites, relating time he lived in London, it has moments, but overall it really makes me think of someone papering over a career gap (and that makes me think of my own), I get that growth of his a little less, and just have a sense to some degree of how he is trying to show it, keep in touch with it himself, in an environment that did not suit it, but careful of how he says that. Maybe I am unfair.

Anyway - I explain all that as it was good to read this short volume when touching Wordsworth again and had a huge sense reading these essays of people well in touch with Wordsworth's way of feeling the world. It will be very good for me to get through this patch and get in touch with that feeling.

I have learned that there is a book that looks at Wordsworth from a Taoist point of view and I can quite understand that. I'd love to read it but am trying to get the work itself into me first and then the other essays in my Norton critical, and it is slow slow progress in some ways.

I also just bought a copy of Reading Paradise Lost by Pamela Woof, whose classes I am sometimes lucky to attend. In her preface it was interesting to see her argue that Wordsworth was 'the best knower of Milton' and that she would allude to him too in the text. I'm not ready to read her further on this at the moment nor to get back to Milton, but I hope to. I see now checking what she wrote that she has it in these partial quotation marks and so wonder where that idea may have come from*. But in reading my Norton Critical and its footnotes it is clear at times how often he alludes or uses Miltonian ideas and phrases or mutates them to his needs.

But this little book, in touch with the wonderful feeling of Wordsworth and for his world and the world, a nice read in trying to feel my way back to such.

* edit - ahh, I knew this and forgot, Lamb called Wordsworth this.

>7 tonikat: I enjoyed your thoughtful review. What an interesting book. I've always been a wee bit skeptical of translated poetry considering the monumental task it is for a translator.

>12 avaland: - Thanks. I understand scepticism, there are lines drawn of course between those who believe translation is and is not possible of poetry. I believe both those things. Of course in a way any time you read any poem you are translating it to yourself, so you may argue it is a a fundamental part of reading it, of reading in fact. I think Red Pine, in fact I am sure I have seen him comment, that an early teacher encouraged him to think of translation as writing a poem himself, and I enjoy his style in doing this - he seems to pay respect to origins, in a scholarly way, whilst also trying to capture a sense he apprehends, and I enjoy his way with this, they speak to me in what I make of them myself. I'd now very much like to learn more of the original Chinese, but, there are so many other things to learn.

edit - coincidentally came across this - https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/should-we-all-write-in-chinese/p05t8dzj

and also hoping I wasn't sounding patronising, just meant to share my own dialogue about poetry in translation.

Interesting about Wordsworth, and, among other things, about his tie to Milton’s PL

Thanks Dan.

I’m keeping an eye on what you have been discovering about Wordsworth, too - slowly working up the courage to have a proper go myself.

>16 thorold: no courage needed, just heart.

Having said that, I'm shocked, I had read book eight through in 1805 version, may have finished last Monday, but my week was such I had not consciously reflected on it. Anyway, just read it through again. Excellent, brings on book seventh, gives it more purpose. I'm dropping back into it, could it save me this working week?

Keep going with the Wordsworth. Enjoying your comments.

Thanks Bas. Onwards tonight, I hope.

>7 tonikat: >8 baswood: >10 dchaikin: >12 avaland:

I gave a friend a copy of Finding Them Gone - he read the first page which reminded me clearly how the heart runs through this book, poetry of the heart. He recognises there are Chinese poets of the head too, but these are poets of the heart.

I've been browsing through it more. I may suggest a hard copy, the kindle is fine and searchable, the map and photos may be better in the hard copy (for me and my eyes).

I found this review - lest you need it extolled further.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/made-in-china/#!

(though beware there is a spoiler to a story of Thrushes that I'd have left to the book.)

I may 'complete' (my first entire read through) of the 1805 Prelude tonight, though on past form perhaps I should not say such a thing. But flying along and wowed, loving his restoration . . . which speaks so much to my own impairments and would be restorations . . . reading him and thinking, about me, about him and not least about him thinking made me think of Shakespeare:

Sonnet 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

it was the first line that came back to me, but all may be relevant, not least as Wordsworth too addresses a dear friend, though not with the same tones of love of course, I do not mean to suggest so. But then I think it may be different, how Wordsworth can return to that haunt from which he waited for the horses to go home for Christmas, to find he loses his father, yet can return, feeling he has learned something, that is different in a way. And Wordsworth was finding this path with loss long before he met his friend. But those sessions, he shares, and evokes.

In thinking about a biography to read (I'm not sure I'll go back to Hunter Davies for now - I want more literary comment), I found these:

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/loss-in-a-life/

https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2015/07/12/book-review-william-wordsworth-a-life-...

But in a way I am not sure about my immediate further reading. I keep thinking of Emily Dickinson. Though it may also be a good time to revisit the Lyrical Ballads and read them beyond my copy of the original ballads. Will have to decide whether to follow that call inside or stick awhile whilst in the neighbourhood, alert to Wordsworth. There are arguments for some discipline and also for just following bliss, and although bliss may be in both, perhaps to follow the feeling is my thing for now.

edit - maybe it is just the first two lines that really fit. His tone with grief may be a bit different, need to think about that, maybe more unsaid but lived with. Maybe I shall also have to read back through those ballads and those of the later edition and other poems as I am sure grief is there. And it occurs to me too that his friend is of course Coleridge, but friend in the sense of this sonnet may also be Nature for Wordsworth, and also man in the best sense. (not to mention Dorothy and Mary, family.) And perhaps also his own past Self.

Great to follow some more in depth poetry reading.

>13 tonikat: I believe both those things myself. Your comments about translation presents an intriguing approach to reading it. I hope I think of that the next time I have a volume of translated poetry in my hands. I read a lot of translated fiction, almost as much as that in original English; but that's not true of poetry (although there is always some poetry in each issue of "World Literature Today").

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I saw the recent film version of this several years ago and liked it very much. An influence, I'm sure.

So, I bought the book and it has sat a while. But I needed to address my gender imbalance in reading and something about this book called me.

It tells the story of a middle aged woman who goes to spend a weekend in the Austrian mountains with two friends. The friends pop down to the village on arrival and she is left alone, with their dog, goes to bed. Gets up next day, no friends. She waits and then walks down the road to find them when she walks slap bang into an invisible wall, separating her from the rest of humanity. McGuffin established. It's really not that important maybe, or I find it of lesser importance. It may be it is due to some doomsday device as everyone beyond it seems frozen or turned to stone. Sometimes I wondered if she is frozen in some purgatory of the moment and surroundings of her death, her shadow in what weapons can do - but that is my own imagination only, really.

But it leaves her, alone in the hunting lodge, with dog, sparse supplies and a cow.

And so she copes. She was a country girl, a mountain girl even. The book begins very factually I think, at least I noticed as I began (it has a wonderful eye, ear, heart, for detail). It is her report, written some way in of having survived a while, written to help her through a winter, on whatever paper she could find. This report in itself engaging as she manages through year one, preparing for winter. She finds some fruit. Her hands hurt chopping wood, scything hay. She consolidates, does not go far. She discovers a mountain meadow with a herder's hut up there, the Alm.

The next year she decides she will transmigrate to the Alm for summer, better for her cow.

In the process of all this she's somehow discovering herself. Did it take such an invisible barrier for her to get some of what she needs, peace to be in touch with herself. I can understand that. It may be a book that speaks to feminism. But I think it speaks to all. She discovers her humanity, her feeling for the life around her stands out -- but I cannot get away that it is feminine humanity, feeling, that is highlighted, of course, her senses for her world.

At the Alm she gains a sense of calm (not peace, I think she distinguishes them, if I remember correctly) and perspective, some sort of clarity at height. It is lyrical in a way, beautiful, but pulls no punches in her realisations. Later she knows this summer will not be recreated. There is a moment earlier she speaks of walking from and regretting, I think that moment, which I think I recognise for myself in a way, seems key to me for this book and my attraction to it and her journey. Even in her other moments she is aware she does not find that again. She seems to come alive to her world, feels loss in how she missed it previously. Understands how the world speaks to her, but not in a fantasy, in a very realistic un-deluded way.

I won't spoil it with more details or the ending, I hope I haven't in what I have said. I remembered that ending as bleak in the movie, but I felt more hope and growth in the book, readiness. The ending also poses questions of gender. Maybe the whole book does as I suppose it is men that have created this situation. In other ways with this glass wall I wonder how recognisable it may have been to centuries of women and limitation, except that this wall gives her freedom to work for herself, listen to just herself. I also think her journey is somewhat of a writer's journey. Having read it I both enjoyed it and yet thinking of it can flatten my mood, such realities and the absence of other possibilities (though they may not be denied, they are absent and not referred to). I highly recommend it (and the film).

(edit - added that quote I remembered in my post of quotations above - http://www.librarything.com/topic/278176#6283850)

>24 tonikat: sounds almost like a psychological thriller....on my list it goes!

Enjoyed your excellent review of The Wall, which has a very interesting premise. I have kinda heard of this book and might even have seen it in the shops. I wonder if it is marketed for those readers who like psychological thrillers - sounds like they may be disappointed.

>25 Tess_W: I definitely recommend it, it is psychological, but thriller, no not sure I could agree. Though in a way I do find it thrilling, and when I was into it quite a page turner.

>26 baswood: thanks - Doris Lessing has her blurb on my front cover.

>23 avaland: thanks, I hope it's a good thing when you have that poetry in your hands . . .

Down Below by Leonora Carrington, Kindle ed.

I was prompted to read this by this yesterday - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/03/08/leonora-carrington-cauldron-at-midnig...

When I was seventeen or eighteen I loved Max Ernst's 'Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism)'. I entirely forgot it over the years, until some time in the last five or ten. Though I was always drawn by surrealism - I think there was a tv documentary at about the same time about the surrealist do in London in the 30s. Obviously their influence is large. A connection to dreams, to the irrational seemed important to me - and I had a lot of trust in this, in humanity there, if it is treated correctly.

Now I am more cautious - cautious of flagrant adventurism, tearing up what may have purpose, rendering vulnerable. Maybe I always was cautious - what I am especially cautious of is what others make of their misunderstanding of what you find. But then such people can misunderstand anything, make something of nothing. But I guess I am cautious. Someone tried to teach me of surrealism recently, that assumption I don't know about it, but they seemed to be unaware of the possibility of consequences, maybe and needing it somehow. I think I can recognise some of that in me over the years, some need for it (maybe a function of my own trappedness). I am a big scaredy cat mostly anyway, so maybe I'd aways be cautious. I suppose if you break down all the barriers I see that there is a possibility you can encounter anything, and something I have learned big time, is you may encounter difficulties that some of our best wisdom is there to try to guard us against, who would want to have to work through some of those Old Testament stories again, in practice? That's a huge part of the possible danger I think.

I may be getting a bit circular there, am full of cold, that was an interesting condition to read this in last night. This book Leonora Carrington's account of the period after her lover Max Ernst was interned a second time, alone in the Ardeche, war breaking out and Germans advancing. Her being persuaded to flee, the horrific journey, escaping to Andorra and then Spain. In the process, as her world has come apart she is clearly experiencing things in a different way, heightened, very sensitive, but vulnerable - teaching herself to walk again to be able to go up a mountain, yet able to approach horses others scare. She makes her way to Madrid where her behaviour is increasingly idiosyncratic, unpredictable. She also writes of being raped by a group of Requeté officers. And also seemingly minded over by people she felt as malevolent. In the end she awakes in an asylum in Santander (she knew not where and they were not about to tell her) - and in a way her journey is only beginning as she is treated with drugs that provoke severe epileptic fits. She accounts her experience of the place, her mythology of (mis)understanding it, the brutality she experiences (restrained, tied down) and the conversations. She seems to recover somewhat, finally, plans are made for her to be taken to South Africa during the war. But she sees enough sense and finds a way to escape. She is of course again escaping the plans of her wealthy family - who had sent her nanny to the institution to live with her.

Her account makes me look in new eyes as such famous episodes as her serving a guest, before all this happened, in her life with Ernst, serving them an omelette containing clippings of their hair. Surreal or something else?

Her experience clearly horrendous - she has lost her partner (for the second time) to internment and Europe is collapsing around her - she flees, recounting passing lorries of dead bodies. She's personally in trauma - there is a line that Marina Warner in her introduction also points out - she goes to the woman she escaped with:

“I begged her to look at my face; I said to her: ‘Don’t you see that it is the exact representation of the world?’”

Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (NYRB Classics) . New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

That, to me, may seem madness, but as so often, makes perfect sense, surely, for a sensitive artist in such circumstances. No, not 'a sensitive artist' but for her, Leonora Carrington, person in that time and place. I also have a sense that it comes on top of having escaped her family. Lots of changes and instabilities all around her.

It is a remarkable book that will long live with me, I think, I hope. Though I cannot wholly understand her intensity, what it was to feel the grounds of the asylum were the Garden of Eden for example. But for me it does speak to my own experiences of vulnerability, seeing the world differently, mistreatment and the malevolent - something that seems drawn out of some others in response to such vulnerability and difference. She is true to that experience that made palpable, and safe, such insecurity - she writes at one time of not knowing if she can write of one terrible day, and I am not sure she succeeded in that part of her description entirely, but that she did try to, of such an event, is worthy of so much respect. An inspiration.

I don't have the feeling she sought this, a la people who write manifestos and seek the mad, as that she was in an urgent personal dialogue with all this - absolutely necessary on her own path, reported from in her writing and art. She made several small observations in the course of the book that I wholly agree with, another was, again of her friend:

"I think that she interpreted me fragmentarily, which is worse than not to interpret at all."

Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (NYRB Classics) (p. 6). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

Though maybe those that write manifestoes are just on their own path that they need. There is an interesting comment recounted by Marina Warner in her Introduction:

"Magouche Fielding, who in the forties was married to Arshile Gorky in New York, once commented drily, “Surrealism wasn’t good for your health. I don’t think anyone would take it as a cure. It was like filleting fish, taking out the backbone of quite ordinary people. Max Ernst, now, was as strong as an ox.”"

Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (NYRB Classics) . New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

She goes on to explain how Leonora Carrington remained fearful of a recurrence of such an experience.

Perhaps my caution is nothing to do with surrealism as much as having had a taste of such experience, all convention challenged, feeling a beating heart to the world. We do need to challenge the iron bonds of senseless sense and convention, but we always need to respect, not least ourselves, and The Golden Rule, whilst trying to touch life - a liberation that may be found more gently, just a breath or a dream away, always possible (always here if we can just get out of our own way?). What is obvious is that there was a lot of mistreatment happening in the world then.

There was one further thing - as she returns to lucidity she meets a person named Etchevarría, who seems to have an artistic perspective, synthetic and generous, listening and allowing - a person that a person such as her needs, but whom I am sure is not always available. I wondered if this was an artist by that name, but am not sure from the text. But, what a person for her.

She's energised me and encourages a sense of respect that those deemed respectful often do not really have in their baffledness to holiness in the heart's affections they don't get.

Surrealism or a feverish head cold - I am not sure

>30 baswood: - it's both, I am serious though, I find it validating of difficult experience that she could and did write this. It's only the tone of my piece, a bit meandering, that is affected by my cold (one of my worst ever), I was not aiming at surrealism, not about someone else's experience of this sort, but obviously she was steeped in it and this was first published in a surrealist magazine during the war.

and for a soberer but helpful point of view

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2275-i-have-no-delusions-i-am-playing-leonora-c...

but happily Down Below is not now out of print.

fever broke, feeling a bit better.

The Prelude (1805) by William Wordsworth

This is one of those posts where I am daunted by speaking on the book, its reputation, that of its author and of others' reactions to it. Maybe a few more things besides that. Not least as an emerging writer that is quite as fallible as anyone. But, as ever, I'm going to try to give some reactions and thoughts whilst it is fresh, yet has sat with me a while now. It's also only realistic to preface what I say with this and to note that this, as with some other important works, may in fact, I hope, be something I am in conversation with now and so I may post again on it (and them) as and when they are with me.

" Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song,
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams? For this didst thou,
O Derwent, travelling over the green plains
Near my 'sweet birthplace', didst thou, beauteous stream,
Make ceaseless music through the night and day,
Which with its steady cadence tempering
Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me
Among the fretful dwellings of mankind,
A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm
Which Nature breathes among the hills and groves?
. . . "

The Prelude of 1805, in Norton Critical Edition, Book First pp42-44

The Prelude is a long poem written in a style addressing his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge clearly a very special friend whom he trusted to speak to like this. The poem charts the growth of the poet's mind (meaning in the language of those times his spirit, not just thought) from birth into early adulthood. The tone is therefore quite intimate, that intimacy born of trust and faith in another, in one who will understand. It was not published until after Wordsworth's death - his reputation in life did not rest on it, a few had seen it, Coleridge had this version read to him before he departed for Malta I think. In fact its place in his reputation only became clear some time after it was published - it may be argued it had been misunderstood somewhat at first.

The volume I read this version in has the 1799 two book version in it, this (that I have completed) the 1805 version and also the version published in 1850. I have to be honest I have not read the later parts of the 1850 version (beyond book ninth I think) - yet. Nor have I read all the criticism and response that this Norton Critical helpfully includes. But I want to think about it a bit and not get stuck having not spoken of it at all.

I've read the 1799 version at least twice, a kernel of often powerful writing, famous sections (skating, for example, under the stars). I've made a note in LT that I read it last in 2009. So have made a very quick review of my then thread - memories return. I didn't say much about it, others said more - I did speak of my love for it. I suppose then, and after a class on it, I was daunted by how much more there was the later version/s. The Norton Critical helpfully has the later versions facing each other on opposite pages - and that definitely put me off for a while. I think during 2016 I decided to just seize the moment and dived into the 1850 version, with the thought that that was the version the public knew first. But got stuck (any number of reasons).

In late 2016 I got to attend one (very helpful) class with a group reading the 1805 version and that sorted me out to restart with that. I made a start but had to refocus last summer and then made my final assault earlier this year. I've read each of the books, until the final three I think, at least twice. It calls for familiarity - ideally I'd like to write notes to overview each book, write out my favourite sections and thoughts. This post can hardly touch them - and many are far from me as it is some time since I read parts. There are many many lyrical sections I would like to quote, some I have marked, some I would have to find again. First I want to work out some other thoughts, to set the scene.

The overview of this journey - from his poet's early childhood, then school (he went to Hawkshead Grammar, a boarder with a villager, a then well regarded school), University, University hols (including walking through France in the early days of revolution and over the Alps), time in London after graduation (my least favourite section), time in France as the Revolution takes turns and towards war with his homeland (and in which he manages to avoid mentioning his having a child with a lover there, which he hid from his contemporaries) and then final books that chart a challenge to his Imagination in all this and how it is restored and a conclusion (poetry found -- though as we know unfortunately it seems it became less found with him with the years, or changed).

Amidst this there is so much - his foundational theme of relationship with nature, how that develops into relationship to others, and how he comes to a philosophical position on this relationship. A relationship that is two way. If I remember my reading about Blake correctly, he, without seeing The Prelude, was concerned Wordsworth was dominated by nature and not what may be found within. Whilst in fact I think he'd have found something to recognise in Wordsworth's own final position on the role of the imagination in relationship to nature. That has not said it like it deserves to be said - maybe this will be a good section for me to quote:

" This love more intellectual cannot be
Without Imagination, which in truth
Is but another name for absolute strength
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And reason in her most exalted mood.
This faculty hath been the moving soul
Of our long labour: we have traced the stream
From darkness, and the very place of birth
In its blind cavern, whence is faintly heard
The sound of waters; followed it to light
And open day, accompanied its course
Among the ways of Nature, afterwards
Lost sight of it bewildered and engulphed,
Then given it greeting as it rose once more
With strength, reflecting in its solemn breast
The works of man, and face of human life;
And lastly, from its progress have we drawn
The feeling of life endless, the one thought
By which we live, infinity and God."

The Prelude of 1805, in Norton Critical Edition, Book Thirteenth, p468
(Note intellectual here means spiritual.)

But there is more yet - on the way we have details of the poet's life, his moments skating, hanging upside down from cliffs, moments his life turns - the waiting for a Christmas return to home only to then lose his father (having already lost his mother), his walks in the early morning with a friend at school at Esthwaite when at school, his crossing the Alps, his ascent of Snowden, so so much more - made vivid and as he explains these personally for him. Beautiful. It deserves poetry in response - and a life lived in tune with such in the now. In the now - he does strike me as absolutely modern (as Rimbaud may say), yet in a way in so doing seems to lose some touch with that - this prelude was meant to lead into a longer work on the maturity of the poet I think, never completed. He is of course most modern in his breaking with the conventions of poetry it had fallen into - in using modern diction, plain language and as tomcat noted on my 2009 thread, experimenting with form. His thought too most radical - he is for the French Revolution, in the way he idealised its possibility and such transformation at home. There is much more to that - it is well known they were spied upon when living in Somerset as possible spies. It is also well known he was later seen as more reactionary by later Romantics. Though the later books of the 1805 version are very egalitarian and I understand this was not largely changed in the 1850 version. We must be careful what we say, as our own times have shown what forces can form themselves.

But, I'm ending up only introducing things.

There is one thing I want to notice - I am not sure what it means, and it is something I need to think on much more. The 1805 version was largely written following the loss of his brother John, a ship captain who went down with his ship. Whom I understand William saw as a silent poet. I want to be very cautious about this, but it occurred to me that whilst in way the book is therefore imbued with a sense of life that may come in grief, that I notice it does not talk through that grief. It brings you to it, the enormity of it (not of this specific loss, but for example the loss of his father), it allows you to then have a sense of apprehension of what it must mean, but does not dwell on the grief - but it does (I am wondering) show how life may be turned to beyond that.

Wordsworth's loss of his father having lost his mother already and therefore being an orphan is even more relevant in the situation it left him in life: where the man his father worked for (a Lord) would not settle what was owed him as the family agreed. This led for example to William being separated from his sister Dorothy from that time in childhood until they were young adults (she was a massive part of his writing life, his life, and recognised as such in this poem too - a third in the friendship with Coleridge, equal in it in many ways). So, in a way, Wordsworth faced daily reminders and hurts from his loss I think. And I'm thinking therefore very understandable if his style reflects finding meaning in life in the face of loss. As I've said this is something I need to think much more about - and as I read him. Perhaps this is somehow true of all of us, he just focused on this more, in his own way and amidst the so much more that he brings to life, in that process.

Personally there is one thing more to say. Later in life, when he’d found his way to living at Rydal Mount, he had frequent visitors, especially many Americans. One was Emerson. When I picked him up again a couple of years ago I was lucky to visit the area again and went to Rydal Mount (I’d almost forgotten I’d been when I was training as a counsellor). One of the explanatory cards in the living room there quotes Emerson, who explains when he visited that Wordsworth started reciting, chanting I think, and Emerson almost reacted by laughing (finding it laughable), before realising Wordsworth was in the right in this. That it seems to me says so much of him, even later when he is often seen as different, still in touch with the heart’s tenderness and poetry and willing to share this wisdom, trusting in another, who indeed found their way to understand. A journey we may all recognise and one which speaks to me, having faced challenge, perhaps to have found a false laugh when with falseness, needing to offer more silence and apparently irrelevant faith in fellows.

I should have checked what I remembered of Blake on Wordsworth, so, from Ackroyd's biography of Blake:

"Blake's opinions of the younger writer are not known, although he has left one or two suggestive remarks about Wordsworth. He thought him a fine poet but remarked to Crabb Robinson that 'Wordsworth loves Nature - and Nature is the work of the Devil'. He also said that Wordsworth's account of passing Jehovah 'unalarmed' in The Excursion had provoked in him a bowel complaint, and later he added this note to his copy of the poem: 'Solomon when he married Pharaoh's daughter & became a convert to the Heathen Mythology talked exactly in this way of Jehovah as a very inferior object of man's contemplation, he also passed by him unalarmed & was permitted. Jehovah dropped a tear & followed him by his Spirit into the abstract void. It is called the divine Mercy. Satan dwells in it, but mercy does not dwell in him."
- Peter Ackroyd, Blake, p382

This must be where I remembered he had thoughts on Wordsworth from.

Still I think therefore that he would have been interested in Wordsworth's view of the importance of the Imagination. It is interesting as i have thought at times that the challenge Wordsworth faces may be seen as a challenge to the soul - very clearly, he uses the word intellect, but it is the spirit. And that also interesting given his later apparent reaction and orthodoxy.

I may be wrong, but such comments suggest to me that Blake had thought quite a bit of Wordsworth to reach such conclusions (based on what he knew of him)

Nature as the work of the Devil, a very interesting thought, which I can only wonder about, as to whether it can be wholly true. Mercy a quality never to dismiss, that perhaps the imagination can bring to the world, and must, and in these times.

>33 tonikat: >34 tonikat: Thanks! very interesting. That seems to open up the whole question of the dialogue between The Prelude and Paradise Lost again, which is clearly a Big Topic - and one I would like to get my head around before I try to say too much about W.

>35 thorold: - indeed.

I think in the earlier book I read celebrating Wordsworth's bicentenary that someone pointed out then (1970) how two hundred years later books were still be written on him and much more remains to be said. I'l look forward to your thoughts when you begin to want to share them.

I am interested in a book I came across looking at The Prelude from the point of view of Taoism. Need to find it again, maybe. Or maybe just think on those lines.

I have read a little of Paradise Lost before, but will restart. I also have an audiobook of it which I have heard can help to listen to as I progress.

I had a thought - the poem Wordsworth never finished was The Recluse, but I wonder, if the poet in maturity was exactly what he became, his own poem in his later life.

(Though I mainly found his edits in the 1850 version not to be as good as the 1805.)

Yes, I’ve been using the Penguin Prelude, which has 1805 and 1850 as parallel text - without getting too obsessive about the detail, I also had the idea that many of the 1850 changes made things less sharp. But There are so many that it’s really hard to generalise about them.

I agree - I may be influenced by others there. But also a sense that maybe he was being too careful and that loses something. But it is very hard to know, and maybe to him he had good reason, it's his poem. It's another reason to become acquainted with detail.

I read Jonathan Wordsworth's essay on 'The two part Prelude of 1799'. It reminds me of course many of the core moments of the Prelude date from then (and some in 1798). Of course before his loss of his brother, but of course his childhood full of the losses I allude to. He has a fuller understanding and analysis and points to the nature of the 'spots of time' and links that idea to moments of loss and indeed his consideration on the loss of his father (by William Wordsworth). I think you could, I would argue those spots of time are liminal spaces, between things.

He also, whilst he does say that all the parts of the Prelude are amongst Wordsworth's greatest writing, makes a case that began to suggest to me seeing the 1799 Prelude as poetically superior in some way (though it lacks some of the famous sections such as Snowdon) as the work through of the later versions loses some coherency of the original presentation, maybe moves away from a natural poetry. He gives examples that lose power for having gained greater, perhaps prosaic, detail e.g. the being lost section at age about 5 and the gibbet.

He makes a nice point that Wordsworth, even when writing at his height was a bad reviser and usually made things worse (I know that feeling) and compares the Prelude in this to The Rape of the Lock as a counter example in which Pope is a better reviser.

Following your thoughts and notes on The Prelude with much interest.

thank you Bas - it is good to know I have a couple of readers on this.

Sad to learn of Lucy Brock-Broido's death by reading this warm hearted appreciation - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/08/future-readers-lucie-brock-broido...

>41 tonikat: I suspect you have more readers than you think.

>39 tonikat: I read with interest, just no comments to make!

>43 SassyLassy: >44 Tess_W: both made me smile, thank you

at least, I hope that is a good thing (both)

do you think perhaps they (The Sun) haven't read it? (Frankenstein) -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/dc3ccf24-96c0-4237-8f72-40790f2c7948

compassion for the "monster" what next, compassion for other people?

>46 tonikat: The Guardian had fun mocking this story as well. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/mar/07/forget-frankenstein-what...

But then David Barnett turned up to defend the Sun journalists from the charge of illiteracy: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/mar/07/frankenstein-mary-shelle...

>47 thorold: thanks - but the Barnett piece confuses things, who had said anything about Sun readers? And how you go from The Sun as the villagers with burning torches to those correcting it as such - why, it could a spin off, sequel, battle of the burning torches -- oh it's been done...is being done...for real.

But yes it is an attack on empathy -- but then that too is the point of the book, said "monster" murders when treated with none.

I saw a great tweet recently - "Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein wasn't the monster - wisdom is knowing Frankenstein *was* the monster".

yes . . . though maybe wisest still to label no one as a monster . . . least of all powerful media outlets

>49 wandering_star:, Love it.

I did like it too.

Meanwhile -

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influe...

https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consu...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/how-to-protect-your-facebook-...

I have often thought that facebook would lead to the end of the world as we knew it.

sadly wise

(is it ever possible to be un-sadly wise? (see Ecclesiastes?))

Ashland & Vine by John Burnside

I happened on this book last weekend when I was in London, browsing whilst I waited for others. I don't often buy new books in actual bookstores these days. The choice I decided to make was between this and Patrick Modiano's The Search Warrant: Dora Bruder, which I've thought about buying before, I wonder if even I did the last time I was at this bookshop. I was even more minded to as I've read some Burnside but no Modiano. But something called me to the Burnside, possibly as it was about two women exchanging stories, possibly as I read a page of each, and those pages called more to Burnside.

To some extent Ashland & Vine seems deliberately written to be more something of a popular novel, a paperback, to fit a need. This bothered me a bit, especially initially, but I got beyond that forgave it, and it repaid that to me. Burnside is a poet of course, one I enjoy very much. I wondered if he was deliberately not indulging that ability too much. Yet it is a very poetic book, in sensibility even when it's language is not trying to be overly. Maybe it takes a poet to be able to stand away from it.

In part I wrote about it today as I read the TLS review of it -- which seems a wanton misunderstanding to me, an act of meanness that does not touch so much that is good in this book. If you have access you can read the TLS review here - https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/stale-water/ -- the comparison with stale water, made in comparison of a single sentence with one of Updike's, whilst it may make some point on that single sentence (though ho hum to that), seems utterly unfair as to the spirit of the book as a whole, misses the sensibility of it and analyses it as novel as mechanism. But then this book does have some counter cultural messages that maybe, I wonder, some may wish to diss. The Guardian's review of it made up a bit for me - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/21/ashland-and-vine-by-john-burnside-...

Ashland & Vine begins with a young woman, a Kate, though we learn her name later, who seems very poetic, loves Emily Dickinson -- maybe this drew me to it. She is struggling with grief in young adulthood. Lost to it with drink and drugs. There are shorthands to this book that are not fully explained - but something about her rang true to me, including how she fell in with the wrong crowd and its most hypnotic character. But anyway - she finds herself out, whilst looking for oral histories, and tries a house she had not meant to and there meets Jean Culver. And there is some connection between them - Jean will tell her stories, but only if Kate stays dry...and that condition is never so boldly put. And Kate does. They meet over tea and cake and increasingly - and Jean (I think Kate does not tell her her story as such, that we see, we learn that elsewhere), Jean tells her stories, which chart her life, a life in the context of twentieth century America - they tell stories from points of view not represented so much in media today. There are further developments.

I suppose in a way this naturally speaks to the counsellor in me...and so, as ever, also the client in me. It speaks maybe to me as another Kate, on my own path of personal growth, accepting where I am, understanding it, trying to stand where I am. It speaks as a way of re-finding life, the poetry of life, the moments, the joy in the midst of challenge, specific and also the general social, political and economic challenges of modern life. It can be a very moving book. Even as it obeys some rules of popular fiction it has some very interesting ground, viewpoint - though some things are done in shorthand I sensed movements of a symphony underneath. I do not agree at all with the TLS review that books and movies are treated with anything other than an honest suspicion, they are not treated as outright lies. And in fact nor do I believe that Jean's stories are held as lies - far from it, and whatever they may be as facts, there is truth to them and between Jean and Kate which seems to be the foundation upon which Kate can live again. That does not question story, that validates story, even when it may be lie, and even if it takes her to being able to simply be in moments as moments, disconnected from narrative. Though I am not sure it does that in a straightforward way, but perhaps in a mindful, poetic way. It is a book of healing and growth in the face of pain and misunderstanding and small mindedness. For me there is something great in that. I found it very enjoyable and rewarding - validating being human and something of the cultural tensions of our time that are often unspoken of now.

Coincidentally, this morning I completed reading Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematograph and these two quotes spoke to me in light of the TLS review, and also more generally:

"It is as if there are two TRUTHS: one that is dull, flat, boring, at least in the eyes of those who daub it with falsity; the other . . ."

Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematograph (New York Review Books Classics) (Kindle Locations 754-755). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

The TLS reviewer would read that, for me, in only they way they wish and so somehow miss something. There are passages in Ashland & Vine that make new, for me, there are also passages that are less so, as ever. Claire Lowdon in the TLS says there is little in Ashland & Vine that will make things new for you - but for me that somehow misses the point of this book, how it is aimed, how it shows and re-discovers, a journey towards such rebirth maybe, not always in it, and so quite proper not to always be in it, it brings back the possibility (a junction - Ashland & Vine, maybe). I don't think it is a book meant to be quite like Updike's, and Burnside maybe quite happy to keep some of that for elsewhere - but it suggests a way, to life. And then this:

"MISUNDERSTANDINGS. No (or hardly any) harsh criticism or praise that is not based on some misunderstanding."

Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematograph (New York Review Books Classics) (Kindle Locations 791-792). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

Finally to finish with a quote from the book itself:

"I had wakened early, and I was sitting in bed, reading a book. Times like that felt like a gift the house silent around me, no need to be anywhere, a new book off the shelves in Jennifer's room that had nothing to do with schoolwork. I'd had glimmerings before that any problem I'd had with drinking and drugs had to do with time. Now I was sure. If you need to recover from anything, having time, being slow, is the best therapy. Because getting high is nothing more than an attempt to stop time. To be still. To be."

John Burnside, Ashland & Vine, p291.

Notes on the Cinematograph by Robert Bresson, Kindle ed.

I've seen little Bresson over the years. I remember enjoying some of Lancelot du Lac once but did not see it all. I may have seen some of Pickpocket and Au Hasard Balthazar (and saw more of the latter in the last year or two). Maybe as I start to watch him I'll find something I remember, was part of childhood. But, recently I saw L'Argent, which I found so very impressive.

It led me to this book. It is divided onto two sections - Notes 1950-58 and 1960-74 (the latter shorter). The format really is note like - not unlike Pascal's Pensées, thoughts, sometimes a short paragraph, often a single sentence. Bresson has a reputation for purity and high art I suppose (they may not be the best words), and a very rigorous method. This book speaks of the cinematograph - this is a distinction Bresson makes for art of his sort from the popular film, and even many an art film. He's thinking the medium through very thoroughly as he needs it, as he sees it, it is powerful. So, it might be possible to be put off this book - but I'd say don't let that be so for you, especially if you have seen a film an want to know more. My Kindle ed. came with footnotes when he does refer to say Pascal, Montaigne or Baudelaire -- and really those notes are short, often just the original French. The notes have really helped give me more feel for what he was doing - it is poetics, it may remind me of reading Tarkovsky, just less spelled out or methodical. Insights he has in achieving what he does -- and especially interesting on his distinction between his 'models' and 'actors' and what he sees as the downfall of actors in what he is trying to show. It is a brilliant book on every page. Maybe it is one for those interested in Bresson and his approach. I hope to go on thinking about it, and need to.

It often seems also to be the product of his own struggle with what he does, thoughts on what he is doing, it can seem reflective of his process as well as on his process and clarification of it and in it:

A not so untypical section:

"Be precise in the form, not always in the substance (if you can).
•
It is what I do not get to know of F and G (models) that makes them so interesting to me.
•
Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.
•
Ideas gathered from reading will always be bookish ideas. Go to the persons and objects directly.
•
Have a painter’s eye. The painter creates by looking.
•
The pistol-shot of the painter’s eye dislocates the real. Then the painter puts it up again and organizes it in that same eye, according to his taste, his methods, his Ideal Beauty.
•
Every movement reveals us (Montaigne). But it only reveals us if it is automatic (not commanded, not willed)."

Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematograph (New York Review Books Classics) (Kindle Locations 771-781). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

I'm all for a book with counterculture messages. Enjoyed your review of Ashland and Vine. I struggle with some of Burnside's poetry, but this novel sounds really interesting.

Reminds me to catch some Robert Bresson films on TV

Hope you enjoy it if you try it (the novel). Bresson on tv, c'est magnifique!

It just struck me, thinking about Bresson. His thing about wanting models not actors, something in not acting that releases something true, perhaps. He is very against film as filmed theatre, trying instead to find the nature of his medium. What struck me was that maybe its not far from what a novelist does - how they describe the character, their appearance even, but we the readers invent them to ourselves - I wondered if his models are like that, except with the different cues available to vision, sound, editing. The control of the presentation in fact may open up creativity in the viewer, as a reader of a sort. In his book he refers back against theatre a lot, I don't remember novels as railed against as much.

What he shows somehow honest to his vision too. It may seem one of wanting control, but in the end lets go of it?

edit - I'm not saying it is the same thing he's showing, but something in the method reminded me of it, in the dimension I am thinking on, maybe.

Man and His Symbols by C. G. Jung

Has a slightly unfortunate gender imbalanced title, not so much the man part but maybe the 'his'. Perhaps it would be different now. Jung of course no stranger to a bit of gender controversy.

But he was of another time, yadda yadda etc. etc. ad nauseam.

I quite like him, overall, and I've not even met him. He goes far beyond that sort of (Papa Smurf - no) Santa Claus-like stereotype I sometimes fall into in thinking about him - and definitely is so much more, more I like.

I am a bit wary of it though - too easily maybe it is approached looking for god-like certainty and affirmations. It is good to read how hesitant he himself was with his conclusions in the final section by Marie-Louise von Franz.

This book was the last of Jung's life - it is not all by him, he has an initial chapter on the unconscious and then there are others by M.-L. von Franz (on Individuation), Joseph L. Henderson (on our relationship to ancient myth), Jolande Jacobi (looking at symbols in an individual analysis) and Aniela Jaffé (on symbolism in visual art), people then close to Jung and his work, selected by him. There is also a preface by John Freeman who stimulated the book, a stimulation Jung initially rejected until he had a dream that suggested it may help to write this as a way to address more people. His writing style is quite tricky I find, and I think I am not alone, I don't dislike it but had to start to get used to it.

Overall the book introduces his approach. I began it as I've taken a few introductory modules to Jungian principles and practice - nothing I can claim qualifies me to practice as as such, but very interesting and a very rich experience.

I don't mean to be mean with my Smurf comment, it says more of me. I like Jung very much. He is definitely a writer whom I can later stereotype in myself, or am given by others in a way that may do this - it happens with others, Hemingway is another - writers who are much richer than the image I am sometimes left with of them (is it just certain men?). Jung even more so than Hemingway could feel aggrieved at such treatment as he is very subtle and also very embracing and literally against easy stereotyping I think - the archetypes he identifies and the symbols associated with them he very clearly argues are not easily label-able (say that quickly?), but only best approached in close contact with whom they show themselves to and with a great deal of respect not to type cast them. (Something you may be interested that does not sit easily (at all?) with use of his ideas, for example, in the Enneagram, which was not his invention.)

His work is very rich -- maybe I am divesting myself of my tendency to type him even as I write (I hope so) -- though I do want to approach him with respect and some wariness, that may in part be wariness of myself and to the internal and social pressures to find answers and see things easily, and give them. I also want to remember that in a way 'Jung was not a Jungian', just as Freud not a Freudian and Rogers not a Rogerian (an idea formulated for me in past reading, thank you Brammer, Shostrom, Abrego, sorry I am not quoting you precisely and with a reference...no I let you loose, un-academically). His work can be a joy too, as life can be, amidst all its challenges, journeys, learnings, hellish aspects too - very full.

It has been interesting to learn that Jung, known as an earlier follower of Freud who split with him, may have had his own encounter with very fundamental challenge. This and whether he faced such illness I know are a matter of debate, not least amongst his Jungian heirs, but is to me also a rich possibility - that this doctor and follower of Freud's ways may have experienced something that helped him hold true to something fuller than medical and Freudian formulations and beyond them - a message from the heart of life to the clinical (and, for me, potentially cold and compartmentalist). I love that possibility, that affirmation. And his affirmation of more to life whatever the aetiology of that insight in him. His work may have great beauty in its sympathy to all of life, and help others open up a path towards their best. I would love to see a full copy of his Red Book, which was only published very recently, understandably.

I take so much from such approaches -- but must remember always to get passed the temptation that such views and interpretation can tempt me into being a sort of false hellfire preacher of myself, certain-ed to myself by superficial understanding and claiming verification in his (or anyone's name). Reading this and the courses have reminded me of that - even as they have also tempted me into thinking I know things, their greatest outcome is to help me feel something more, not decry that, give me some ways of seeing these things, and but remind me to be cautious with that, always dynamic, fluid, the beating heart of things -- and help me start to, even in a dream, to feel soulful, remember to try to heal in those dimensions.

I thought I wouldn't say much, thinking back on the book in some ways I remember dryness, or maybe something beyond anything I could capture in a systematic review. So here, sharing some of my idiosyncratic journey, maybe it opens it up a bit. I highly recommend it.

I've not been reading as much, hardly at all through April, had some ill health and even then hardly at all, lots of challenges. I have read parts of things, I read some more chapters of Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. That and reading Heaney refer to Peter Levi in a poem as a poeta doctus led me to connect to some of Levi's work, a philhellene, whom I was losing touch with -- but I started reading The Hill of Kronos and realise that first chapter was with me as I first walked around Athens, a long time ago, and too early - I must have heard him interviewed at the time. I also read a little of his the art of poetry, his Oxford lectures.

Speaking with a friend led me to try some Modiano, not with Dora Bruder as above, but with In the cafe of lost youth. And that conversation also led me to try the first few pages of Swann's Way again, which I have put aside but which I hope to come back to soon. Those pages on sleep very lovely. In a way Modiano touches something different but similarly slow and fond, so far but he's on hold, maybe as that tone changes a little. In a way also reading bits touches this tone too -- allowing myself this, and no need to finish a whole book. In fact not reading for a while was fine. I've started to learn to play the piano too, which maybe connects to this sense. Refreshes some playfulness with reading. I watched this interview with Red Pine yesterday and am very taken by his comments, some way in, of how he enjoyed translating without a deadline, without a goal and how he has decided not to sign contracts for his books now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do3d-ADt5kQ .

I was on track for my biggest year of completeds, but the last month or so has changed that, but that, that number is not the point, that seems my fate, and not such a bad one. There's been other partial bits, not important to say right now, just reflecting on where I am, what it's all about - I may start posting more on bits of reading.

The Skeleton's Holiday by Leonora Carrington

A short collection of Carrington's stories I was drawn to having read Down Below. I like them very much. I've read them over a period - it's tempting to think they started more apparently naively but there is a tone present in all of them that is sometimes that, though I am not sure naive is the right word, I'm not sure I have a word for it. There are times I start to read what I've seen lucidly, it connects somehow to something, may even seem a bit allegorical, but she consistently breaks this to go somewhere else -- some of that is related to that tone at times, but I need to think about this more, or more likely feel about it more. Having read Down Below I can connect these to some harsh experience - harsh things may happen, amongst harsh people and situations - but playful in showing this whilst connected to something more. It's not fitting to try to pin them down. Nor is it fitting to just enjoy playfulness, perhaps. Somehow, beyond their content they seem to help me connect to something not apprehendable, something to be cautious and respectful with -- and cautious as to what happens to those that are not, and cautious of those that are not.

This collection had seven stories (very short) - White Rabbits, Uncle Sam Carrington, The Debutant, The Oval Lady, The Seventh Horse, My Flannel Knickers and The Skeleton's Holiday -- and maybe they really took off for me from the third onwards. There is a possibility of some autobiographical content to them, but I didn't search too hard for that, and maybe it was a voicing of feeling, born of that suffering above. I'm not sure how many more she wrote but I am eyeing her complete short stories and I have ordered The Hearing Trumpet. I wonder if that is more direct (I doubt it) in what in some ways sometimes feels a critique of powers and ways known too well, that must only be approached very very carefully, and theres a great richness and freedom in this approach, and not trapped in the sense even of their shadow, free and present to something more.

Emily Dickinson's anniversary today, a day her garden must have been starting to come into summer:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

(Fr 1779)

edit -- and then I read this again, later in the month

There is a morn by men unseen—
Whose maids opon remoter green
Keep their seraphic May—
And all day long, with dance and game,
And gambol I may never name—
Employ their holiday.

Here to light measure, move the feet
Which walk no more the village street—
Nor by the wood are found—
Here are the birds that sought the sun
When last year's distaff idle hung
And summer's brows were bound.

Ne'er saw I such a wondrous scene—
Ne'er such a ring on such a green—
Nor so serene array—
As if the stars some summer night
Should swing their cups of Chrysolite—
And revel till the day—

Like thee to dance—like thee to sing—
People upon that mystic green—
I ask, each new May Morn.
I wait thy far, fantastic bells—
Announcing me in other dells –
Unto the different dawn!

(Franklin 13)

Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits

Something drew me to buy this book and read it at this time, though I had another of Bill Porter's lined up next, this one fit. Bill Porter is also known as Red Pine for his translations, but this is more one of his travel books. I've been watching interviews with him on the net and reading and that may have mentioned this book, which fits in a way, earlier in is career, with having read Finding them Gone previously. Weirdly I wonder if a long time ago I saw him on tv on these themes, or heard him on radio, there were elements at times that if I did not see him present then I have since seen others, for example a very special visit to Lintung museum to see the relics there of the Buddha.

In a way the book is a life giver.

In the late 80's Porter was living in Taiwan and when the mainland Chinese allowed people to visit family again on the mainland. He decided to go with his co-author/photographer Steven R. Johnson to see if he could find whether any of China's famous hermits were still there. He struggled at first, but then began to find them and made more visits - this is the story of those meetings. Meetings with Taoist masters, with Buddhists, with some others, the survivors of a tradition that goes back thousands of years but threatened in the last century. In the course of it we learn so much of Taoism, Buddhism, Chinese history and the history in those mountains - and the best bit the words of some of these wise men and women surviving in this Chinese heartland, south of Sian (Xian) in mountains home to Taoist immortals. An inspirational book, but one full of people aware of the limitations of books, but it helps us turn again to the issues of our own paths, our way. I'm very grateful I have read this at this time in my life and heartily recommend it. I've since found a documentary online made by someone inspired by the book to go to China and train in these ways, learn Chinese and find a wise master. I can understand such a reaction.

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

I'm not sure how enthused I am to try and write on my reading, that last I haven't even tried to capture much of the book. Read it though, read this too. This is a wonderful novella - a southern (British) war veteran whose wife has left him pitches up in a North Yorkshire village for a job. He's a world war one veteran, has a facial twitch from shell shock, told it may change with time. He's there to uncover a whitewashed over wall painting int he church. And being there he starts to allow everything to drop away, the work inspires him, the landscape, the village, the people, a glorious summer of weather. He's looking back on it all - is it nostalgia? Carr an admirer of Housman has a complex view of such things I think. It's a lovely book. Love rears it's head, but again complex, wounded.

"For me that will always be the summer day of summer days – a cloudless sky, ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars. And we rumbled along through it, turning away from a finger-post to Sutton-under-Whitestone Cliff and made for the pantile roofs of Kilburn where a joiner in his yard called to and was answered by an acquaintance in the cavalcade."

Carr, J.L.. A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics) (Kindle Locations 1294-1297). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

I think in a way it takes you back to individuals and the subjective, validates that experience -- in our protagonist's (Mr Tom Birkin) experience - also somehow with the perspective of the painting he uncovers, dwelling on the experiences of the medieval people who saw it, especially of the master who painted it. And that necessarily implies a slightly different perspective on life, from their own, for Tom too and then also for ourselves -- relating back to ourselves as selves and within the narratives of the times, but not just defined by those huge forces sweeping us all. They do an interesting thing when the archaeologist who is also working in the village keeps something to himself, I suppose they guard the privacy of the individual. An interesting thought in our own times. It's quite a magical book, to me, but then:

"Well, we all see things with different eyes, and it gets you nowhere hoping that even one in a thousand will see things your way."

Carr, J.L.. A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics) (Kindle Locations 992-993). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

And I suppose it has a message within it, in recognising the validity of this subjectivity of then what is important to us within the larger stories of life we sit in -- how and what we may wish to grasp for, that has a real meaning maybe, and that meaning may most be love in all its aspects. A book I am also very glad to have read at this time.

>66 tonikat: Sounds wonderful! I can’t think why I’ve never read that, though — I spent a lot of time walking and cycling in that corner of Yorkshire when I lived in York. On the TBR list it goes...

>67 thorold: Mine too, and I actually own it, so that's half the battle...

>67 thorold: it is. And that is lovely country. Carr was born near Thirsk I think.
> 67 > 68 it's also short, can be read in a few hours. A very good Sunday afternoon.

Back to those thoughts about why post my thoughts - even when I typed that in I had not thought as clearly about the book as I came to do by the end of the post (and have had further thoughts since of people trapped in narratives and what they sought -- mostly this is not directly addressed in the text, and not pondered on as openly, but seems to be marvellously imbuing it, and then you think of the painting . . . )

>66 tonikat: A Month in the Country was a five star read for me in 2015. The writing was lovely.

>70 NanaCC: thanks - I just enjoyed your review. It feels an important book for me.

>69 tonikat: Wednesday afternoon in my case. Read it mostly under an oak tree on a country estate in the Achterhoek, partly on the train coming home. Once again the "instant gratification" feature of the e-reader pays off. Thanks for putting Carr on the radar for me again!

Amongst many other things, I loved the way Carr made Birkin over-observant of details - all that supposedly-irrelevant stuff about the church stonework and the complex stove as well as the more obvious fascination with the details of the painting and how it was made. And even there, he gets right down to the painter's beard-hair stuck in the paint...

>72 thorold: I'm very glad if I have enthused you. I saw you'd started to reply earlier and just now enjoyed your review. It is a story of wonderful detail like that, and of respect for living beings. I'll have a think before a reply on your thread.

I want to read more of Carr now. It's also given me a taste for such delicious short reading.

A couple of years ago I read Jerome Charyn's book of biographical essays on Emily Dickinson and got thoroughly enthused -- or even more thoroughly enthused. I read Adrienne Rich's essay on her (loved it). I read some other criticism and biography. I'd read a selected of her work a couple of times but I decided to read her collected, and as I read I fell in love I suppose, having read a few I knew I must read all.

I was reading the Johnson Collected put together in the 50's. I got to around number 250, when in some reading round and also looking at the more recently edited Franklin edition I learned more of the ways it further restored her own original versions of poems and spelling. (Especially then about her spelling of Opon as such for so long, and some other issues - I was thinking a lot of her dashes at the time.) So I bit the bullet and restarted but with Franklin. However it disrupted my flow, it didn't seem quite the same.

I've had a lot of interruptions in life ever since. But recently I made a start again and am a (very) little way in. And given the length of this book, also how at times I felt like writing about the poems as I went and also the likely amount of time it would take to read through, I thought I'd post updates as I go. I think a good way to do this may be to refer my progress to Emily Dickinson's Fasicles - the booklets of her poems she sewed together.

There is (are?) now work/s that further restores her work to how she had it - but for now I need to stay with what I have. I'm reading Franklin's reading edition. And I'm using several internet resources, the Emily Dickinson lexicon (superb), the Emily Dickinson archive (which lists the poems in each Fasicle (well almost each, and I see now no listing for a fasicle 2, so I need to research that).

I'm really interested in reading her from the beginning of the Collected to notice her development. I know that the datings are imprecise, and think I am over trying to read them too precisely. But I guess this may give a general sense. Partly that is in her thinking - but also in how she writes. I have read several essays on her use of dashes for example and in their case I am partly wondering if her use of them developed, how in having them she may have come to use them in certain specific ways over time. I suppose I wonder this as a developing writer - and just with a view of the human, I think we all too often assume writers have it all worked out when in fact they are working it out themselves (and sometimes are lucky). I had an idea on her dashes (and some other idiosyncrasies) I'd like to see if I can develop - but I also see that they have a wider meaning than a specific resonance I was picking up, maybe one day I'll be able to try it.

You can actually read Fasicle 1 here - http://inamidst.com/dickinson/ - at least in it's Johnson versions for the poems I think. It is interesting looking through it to note how some poems separated by Franklin seem to make up one poem here and there. Of course it is interesting to look at all her work that way. They've given it the name "The Little Rose Book", which does refer to roses in her poems, I'm not sure how it got that title though - I mean whether that came from her.

Interestingly it follows Johnson's numerical progression of poems (almost), whereas in Franklin's order it begins with later poems (a sequential run) before a step back (or two) (mostly) for other runs. So, for me that spoke to my experience of having read Johnson struggling again when I had started to read Franklin, and interesting to see Johnson was maybe at least a bit more in line with her own sequencing. Though unlike Johnson, Franklin is able to date one poem to 1853 whilst the rest seem to be from 1858.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Charyn's book was the sense of learning of Emily Dickinson as a young woman. A lot of his book has the benefit of liberating her from some of the one dimensional views of her that had arisen. Of course this is in large part also due to the benefit of others' work, Rich, Lyndall Gordon for example. I started to appreciate her setting and her in her setting better. Her routines and loves. Her garden, her walks (yes she crossed her father's ground when younger), her dog Carlo (with his literary resonances and not). And for me the early poems often sing with youth and love, summer, flora and fauna, hope. Though in this fasicle she has already introduced awareness of death, and fascination with the beyond. I was very moved to realise (see above) that she died in May and having read "There is a morn by men unseen -- ".

There is also one poem ("I had a guinea golden - ") which seems to mourn a loss, and yet ends with a wish of no consolation for a traitor. I'm sure such thoughts have attracted a lot of speculation. It definitely reminds me of being young.

The connection to nature in these poems I really love - and is something I missed most from the film A Quiet Passion (In the way I sense it here and in its zest and life in life). I watched it again last week and liked it much better, but it seemed to miss some of this side of her reverie and even freedom to me, yes, there is a great sense of freedom even as she starts to contemplate the axes of life. Even then there seems also freedom in embracing those axes and confidence, faith.

The fasicle ends with two poems that again refer to the rose, which I suspect may have had much written about this theme. Whilst I have a sense of love from the fasicle it knows challenge and loss. So this rose really feels like it knows what it is doing. Ordained is an interesting word -- and there is a great sacredness amongst all this. Yes, I spoke of youth but it is a sacredness appreciated of that and of life. As a writer, and knowing she wrote very early in the morning, I find the poem "Morns like these - we parted -" very interesting and aware. Overall it feels a privilege to be reading these poems, sitting with her working in these ways.

I hope this is not all too much to say here - it may be obvious to those better read of her than me. It's trying to capture some of my thoughts and also mark this quest, hopefully spur it on. Who knows when I will be able to say more.

oh my goodness -- and then I found this, which seems to have different poems in fasicles -- http://www.emily-dickinson.net

I'm confused and need to get my head around different currents in her scholarship.

Also probably to invest in the Dickinson poems as she preserved them book.

edit - well, I have had to order it, haven't I.

I also keep thinking of the rose references - and "the rose ordained", it makes me think of rosicrucians, which does have a reference in Webster (the dictionary she used -- and where I also learn the 'ros' was dew which was the most power dissolvant of gold (and crux was a symbol of light). Under the entry on rose there is also comment on the idea of sub rosa -- which also seems quite relevant. I have a feeling in these poems (see last post) that there is a lot of recognition going on in her, of life, of also herself as poet...you may look at it and wonder at things we'll probably never know, are there references to others...or I may look at that and think of the coniunctio...the thee in the rose ordained poem may be sacred, it may be many things. So the zest she has in these early poems also very serious - it makes me wonder about them as a working out of a process that may have been earlier, there are few earlier poems in existence, were there others, or a working out of workings she had done for some time. Here I want to be cautious, as only an interested reader, interested developing reader. But also a starting point for a serious journey.

Two pieces of reading I have enjoyed immensely (the second right now not quite finished):

http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/port-townsend-translator-of-chinese-poets... (Boom)

https://www.scribd.com/document/380644158/William-Blake-and-Jacob-Boehme-Imagina...

>74 tonikat: Enjoyed your Dickinson post and agree about the Charyn book. I am a more casual reader of Dickinson these days. However, it might inspire me to drive down and tour the house again (it's not terribly far from me).

>77 avaland: thanks. That sounds a wonderful prospect, I'm more than a bit green. I'd be interested to know if Dickinson meadow is still a meadow or has been developed (I now there was at least one house built on it). I also think they were hoping to restore the garden, I don't know how far that went, or am I dreaming that? I have Charyn's novel to read too - but other Dickinson reading to do first.

edit - I suppose I could even find out about the meadow, and obvious tol all around, it may even be mentioned in Charyn.

Charyn's got a new essay collection coming out in August, In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song. It's part of an essay series from Bellevue Literary Press, and they always make super interesting choices, so I'm looking forward to it. Also his Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, which I've had for a while but haven't read yet—as a Bronx resident I'm a sucker for stuff with my sadly under-literary borough in the title.

>79 lisapeet: very interesting thanks - silence and song, right up my street. Under literary? just another space for flowers to grow?

Another most interesting article - actually a lecture by Arundhati Roy, the W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation.

http://raiot.in/in-what-language-does-rain-fall-over-tormented-cities/

>79 lisapeet: Flowers growing is a nice way to look at it. The Bronx actually currently has NO bookstores, not even chains, although one brave woman is in the process of opening up an indie here. Great libraries, including a big and busy main hub, but it's still an overall poor borough and has a pretty pallid cultural life compared to Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan.

>82 lisapeet: good luck to that brave lady. The libraries sound interesting. I know little of the Bronx, of the states, of NYC. Was Lacey from Cagney and Lacey from the Bronx? Isn't it often a go too accent to suggest not very flattering things, often of movie stars transitioning from the silent era. I don't know I may be mixed up. I just had a quick look at Wiki -- I liked the movie Finding Forrester.

aha -- I learn more - Queens via Boston for Lacey - http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/candl/scott4.html

(I can be quite random, or is it worse.)

a reminder for me

https://findingblake.org.uk/my-streets-are-my-ideas-of-imagination/

and also this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RnauQqTG-g

and this

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/my-friend-bob/

Palimpsest by Rima Handley

A beautiful collection of poems by someone who came to write them later in her life - she'd been a scholar and teacher of medieval literature and then later a homeopath (about which she wrote) and psychotherapist. I was prompted to read this by her passing and as she was a friend of a friend. As I read the collection came to life, it started as good, interesting, but with poems on her own loss and later it really took off, a true collection of poetry, moving, singing with a clear view of experience. I'm typing without my copy to hand - here is a link to one poem at her publisher's website http://diamondtwig.co.uk/books/palimpsest.html. I recommend it.

Hope Against Hope by Nadezdha Mandelstam

A truly excellent book, as Clarence Brown suggests with the first words of his introduction. It tells the story of her life with her husband Osip especially in the 1930's as he was persecuted by Stalin's government, by Stalin. Already he was distant from it, not trusted - and then he wrote his famous Stalin epigram poem that led to his first arrest (speaking of the "Kremlin mountaineer" and "slayer of peasants"). The book begins on the night of that arrest, with Akhmatova visiting at the same time. It is a book full of personal recollection and close observation. We follow what happens and as she can reconstruct it from Osip's interrogation and then their exile - and the miracle as she rightly says that he is not shot or sent to Siberia, well he was on the way there (not sure if Cherdyn is exactly Siberia, near enough maybe) but then was allowed to resettle in Voronezh for three years. We follow their life in these straits - and how they go up and down and worsen again with the purge of 1937 and until his second arrest and exile to Siberia and death in a transit camp (apparently).

An account of such suffering in an ocean of suffering - helpful to be aware of, for me, and in such a way. I love her story telling style, confident she'll tell what she needs, never boring, it is a real page turner.

In telling this story we have her wonderful first hand account - she draws vivid portraits of Osip (I especially enjoyed her thoughts on poetry, how he saw it and especially her observations of him in writing it, seeming to tune into something he heard) - she shares her values, some of his, her experience in the face of oppression and terror. We also learn more of Akhmatova, her friend as well as Osip's (since youth - they delighted to read poetry to each other - I loved the observation of Anna Ahkmatova bowing her head on her long slender neck when Osip said something true to her) and many many encounters with writers and artists living with the Revolution and after. It contextualises which also helps explain some of his poems and also some of Akhmatova's. A wonderful book - Clive James in Cultural Amnesia is right to laud her achievement, I must think her husband would have been proud. A wonderful book for her exacting memory and witness to those times -- she speaks of the events of her husbands death and the difficulties with certainty around this still intimately but also with the steady eye for facts of a historian. I don't agree with James when he praises her rationalism - I think throughout the book she is clear at how much she felt was done wrongly in the name of rationalism - she speaks of humanism and the threat to humanism of the regimes she lived under. Astoundingly she is confirmed in the strength of humanism in the end, simply as humans survived. Sadly reading this now, in much less terrible times, but in times challenged, the story of how humanism and writers were marginalised and silenced resonated for me with some of what seems to be happening today.

I quoted her above http://www.librarything.com/topic/278176#6283850 -- there are many sections of this book that I could have quoted. I hope to read the second volume Hope Abandoned as soon as possible. I'm also refreshed in wanting to read Osip Madelstam, Akhmatova and Pasternak and Tsvetaeva (the latter having much less said of her) - and others, Gumilev maybe. But what a woman, what a person, what a book, what a story.

let's hope they read them, and get them, in the sort of ways intended

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/09/ukip-members-bookshop-attack-bookm...

Fire in the Earth by David Whyte

My goodness. I look back to when I read David Whyte's two collections prior to this and see it was 2009, the first year of Club Read. I see I was tipped to him by Urania. I read my comments - then think about 2009 me, a bit stilted maybe, challenged whilst less challenged, but taking on things in life that really fit me less. Now more challenged by them, but as it has become more obvious and unavoidable yet maybe I'm less stilted. Also have grown further into poetry, both of others and my own. But 2009, that's like nearly a decade ago.

I like David Whyte very much, not that I know him. I think he's influenced me as he does fit with my Counselling type view of the world (humanistic and person centred) and also Buddhist influences. But I do also wonder about him a bit, the expensive walking tours, the business side -- though good on him for engaging with this central human thing and bringing poetry and humanity to it, I have to think. I think his style must have influenced my own developing one -- though at the same time know I am strongly discouraged from speaking about generalities and non specifics, he somehow manages to write about the unspeakable, and I usually find it works. Though I do wonder at times if it is poetry even - I think it is - but something about it sometimes makes me wonder that at times, that he reaches conclusions maybe, I don't know, I've thought about it quite a bit whilst reading this and I can't put my finger on it exactly, not least as whatever it is I say I think he also balances it with wonderful stuff and reaches that. I've found a curious lack of reviews of him from searches so far (TLS, LRB, Guardian). But you only have to see how many times his books are reprinted to know he is connecting to people. But maybe it is that he tends to bring me to where he is that I react to -- and that's just daft of me, oh but how the heart (mine) can be that, cutting off its own nose etc. I think having read two volumes in 2009 I needed a breather.

But this volume is lovely - quite inspirational in a way. I ordered his book about work as a pilgrimage, that being part of current challenge. I quite enjoyed this review:

http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2012/03/david-whytes-fire-in-earth-poems...

It is very much about recognition of voice, true self/selves, listening to the heart and the world the book is divided into four parts - Fire in the Body, Fire in the Voice, Fire in the quiet and Fire in the mountains. It also has an epigraph from Neruda's poem La Poesia, which is a favourite of mine (and in Whyte's own translation). You can read his poem Open from the third section here:

http://www.davidwhyte.com/fire-in-the-earth

I enjoyed his poems on Wordsworth and Coleridge and noticed that having read him in 2009 I went to Wordsworth's two book Prelude. But overall I most enjoyed his faith in listening to the heart and world and how he shared this, some of his encounters with them and their strange paths. His sharp reminders - the title poem itself, the second poem in the book, on the discomfort of revelation -- the presence in the poems, their call to presence...and no they don't do that in a way that even says what that has to be...maybe its just been hidden to me in a new way, maybe I have just avoided it, in a new way, in the same old way.

There are many poems and parts I could quote, but having just finished, let me quote from a late poem in the book:

Statue of Buddha

Your hand moves
in the gesture of welcome.
Your lips in the gestures of praise.

You believed in your own sound
and so everything you said
is still being spoken.

. . .

The rest of this poem also spoke to me very much at this time, simple, difficult, easy, honest, unavoidable, but hard not to do so. Hard.

But, another point for the benefits of keeping these reading records. And thanks again Urania. I'll read him more, think more on what it is that I struggle a bit with regarding poetry, but am not sure at all it's not a false struggle, and I get much more beyond all that anyway, who gives a fig about definitions of it really, I mean, it is beyond that. Which in fact may also speak to his epigraph.

Oh and if you're interested I also came across this -- in fact it may have prompted me to pick this collection up I think -- https://soundcloud.com/poetscafe/david-whyte-poets-cafe-kpfk-july-29-2018.

https://lithub.com/on-the-slyly-subversive-writing-of-e-m-forster/

http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/celan-reads-japanese/ --- this is so far out, perhaps at times too far, but good to read

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/17/my-withered-legs/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/17/will-self-i-read-as-many-as-50-boo... - but why limit it to fifty?

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/emily-dickinson-reading-list

The Narrow Road To The Deep North by Matsuo Basho

A famous book. I came to it as in the early summer I was lucky to attend most of a season of Japanese film -- and within that there were one or two that seemed to include something I have seen in Japanese film before and it struck me this may (must?) be a reference to something. That thing included was a journey (in the films Vengeance is Mine (what a film, not sure I have ever seen one quite like it) and Hana Bi (a wonderful wonderful film)) -- there are journeys and what stuck out to me was there was in both a journey into snow (I think) yet soon after into summer. I remember this especially in Hana-Bi - and it gave the journey an epic quality, yet also intensely personal (juxtapositions especially in Hana-Bi between personal experience and sacred spaces). I also read about Hana-Bi and read comparison with Ozu in how there could be empty shots, which may remind us of the world beyond our needs, of the world, of the world beyond, transcendent (maybe, want to be careful of that word).

This idea being something I definitely associate with Japan (and in other ways other places) - but through Ozu. And one that offers much to me.

And so Basho seemed possibly relevant - travelling to the deep north and elsewhere, and in his Zen way. (I like Zen, I like Buddhism, but I'd not connected when I tried this book in the past.) I was also caught as the deep north may also be translated as 'the interior' -- which is of course of interest to poety me.

And I think watching these films, and their tone with these journeys - that tone being quite ironic maybe in some ways, for these films, but in that irony pointing me towards what may be un-ironic, maybe gave me a way to start to get the tone of these sketches.

The translation I read, the penguin, includes four other travel sketches - these are prose essays with included poems (usually haiku) -- this form (prose and poetry) is called haibun. I still don't understand how the translations are not into 5-7-5 syllable english (and need to sort this out - it distracted me as a kinda haiku writer). But it has an excellent introduction and lots of helpful notes.

I'm struck by how his tone reminds me of that of travelling gentlemen of other times and places. His polite curiosity seems to speak across the years. But much is not spelled out -- those notes are very necessary and I think I am only at the start of my own journey in recognising the meaning of what he is saying. there seems a lot of juxtaposition between the things of man (often in history) and the things of nature still here, lending that tone of transcendent commentary that is a sort of realism, whilst not criticism, but maybe something that provokes great thought and feeling. (pathos? - more?)

Of the earlier sketches my favourite was that of the travel worn satchel - I think I remember our translator criticised it as it started to work out (in its text) what it was doing - and that is precisely why I liked it. As someone that only dabbles in zen (is that possible?) maybe I was not with the tone of his approach enough without such. I guess we see something of his style with these sketches developing, though in a way I'd like to freeze that idea with each sketch and see them each for what they are...need to do that, before letting my ideas of development . . . develop.

His opening words to the narrow road are words to love -- and i think this book will be too, but maybe also as I get to know it and Japan better. I think i do love those two films, and they too provide commentary on much in their juxtapositions. I think they show something that gives me a cue, but I think I shall have to think and reread this book much.

There was something in his late visit to a beach and the shells on it that made me think of Sebald and his herrings and pictures of them laid out (and pictures of soldiers laid out dead) - there is great subtlety and wisdom to this book I think, and I am an outsider (though perhaps so is he in a way, or making himself one). I wonder if the pictures in The Rings of Saturn take the function of poems in a haibun type form for Sebald. There is also as the postscript suggests a sense of how this journey captures a broad range of life. It is interesting what is missing from the book - the minutia of many experiences just not there as they may be in our blogging times, or has has been brought into literature, there are also visits and places he explicitly notes not talking about as to do so would betray his pilgrim status - that and idea seemingly quite strange in these times in which all can be said, apparently. And so an invitation to dwell on the spirit of his travels and these places . . . can it be that his presence calls out to me to find my own and in so doing be able to appreciate his . . . and if that is so then I believe that he knows this.

It has been bothering me my comment about David Whyte as to whether it is poetry, even though I decided it is. I mean what a thing to say - maybe what an ignorant thing to say -- and I've not even really said why and maybe even wonder why I have that dialogue over some of my reading of him. And all that despite that I concluded that it is.

What makes me wonder it exactly? Can I even say? It's possibly that he is so direct, at times that seems a bit like prose. But then Wordsworth (for example) and many poets are like that -- and I'm all for the place of plain speaking. There is also an element that seems a bit didactic sometimes. But then its maybe good he knows what he is talking about, as he clearly does. Some of my reaction to these things may also come from my own experience as to how sometimes my work is criticised. So maybe I also project a bit into all of this. I do find it strange I cannot find more reviews of him - how on earth is that? I also think that his interactions with business and some businesslikeness about his business may provoke reactions in others at times, not all positive, maybe, I'd guess. But I do like his poetry -- and I am enjoying Crossing the Unknown Sea. It's almost nonsense to say is it poetry - but then I sometimes think it is nonsense to say what is poetry at all, maybe you just know, and maybe it is what it is to you. I like his work, simple as that - it is often very beautiful and it often wakes me to myself. I'm wondering if it is something I have picked up from anyone else? I'm interested if anyone else has a view or recognises any of this.

Maybe as it is so clear, maybe that is why it doesn't seem reviewed?

Maybe this is all nonsense dug further into a comment that was obviously nonsense, it is just sometimes I do have that reaction as I read (some) of his work, and as I say I get passed that.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/04/to-work-is-to-live-without-...

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/aug/25/vincent-van-gogh-details-pe... (cf last link)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/60449/antagonism-rainer...

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68988/genius-envy

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v08/n16/christopher-reid/poetry-inc (interesting as I've seen Prater lauded as definitive -- also interesting for the Tsvetaeva/Pasternak/Rilke book)

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/secrets-of-growing-slowly/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/mist-and-mountain/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/oct/21/1

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/27/the-art-and-politics-of-wanderlus...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n09/seamus-heaney/three-poems

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/29/forget-profit-love-fun-inn...

https://www.catranslation.org/online-exclusive/theres-no-place-on-it-that-does-n...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/reviews/rilke.htm - interesting, I heard this about Freedman's biography. Also interesting as I read the preface to R. M. Rilke: Aspects of his Mind and Poetry by on Stefan Zweig, who knew Rilke, which speaks of how he lived in poverty, also of the impact he had on others when speaking, but what a shining example he was to young writers and generous with his time to them.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/03/different-sex-same-person-how-wool...

https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/art-bytes/dont-say-deleuze...

I'm wondering about writing further about others' writing. My comment on David Whyte was not intended critically, but as part of what goes through my mind when reading him sometimes, but I realise how such a comment may be taken and used in some ways. I only ever started to comment on my threads to try and appreciate -- in a way my writing is part of recovery - ebullience and seeming to know in fact a symptom of not doing so and seeking a way towards (back towards), something whose size and quality and nature has been escaping me -- it may be that I have a faint sniff of such things that I wonder again about comments -- and if I do comment more it will be again, with a renewed flavour of just appreciation and gratitude for all of these wonderful writers with enough love to share themselves, their wisdom, their questing for it, their frustration and knowing of the ways the world thwarts this.

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I realise I knew a little of Rilke's story, it had caught me in the past - but had not got anywhere reading him. I tried his Duino Elegies in the past which seemed especially pointed too and they didn't click - I wasn't in the right lyrical frame of mind, maybe this affected by the dreaded meds, closing me off from the one thing I needed in their easy provision of something others prescribe that has nothing to do with that.

But recently I came across an article about two people's experience of http://www.thepoetryexchange.co.uk/listen/ and one used a poem from this collection, How Surely Gravity's Law, which led me on.

I don't want to say much about the poems in a way. They spoke to me. The book is made up of three books: The Book of the Monastic Life, The Book of Pilgrimage and The Book of Poverty and Death. They were written in bursts of inspiration between 1899 and 1903, informed by Rilke's life and travels and relationship with the amazing Lou Andreas Salome. In some ways they remind me of my reading of Angelus Silesius and his divine inspiration. This edition came with a nice introduction, including to where each of these translators came from and together in approach and an interesting commentary on their translation approach (and later quite detailed notes on decisions made with the poems).

It's a while now since I read it - and my later reading, as a result, of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus are more with me right now. I remember reading how Rilke prior to this volume was quite self promoting, striving in his literature. Was profoundly affected by Lou Andreas Salome and their visit to Russia and Russian spirituality -- and worked on this volume never mentioning it in his journals. It has a flavour of a profound seeking for God, for authenticity, for understanding and meaning, for seeing and so for the best song. I love it.

I think in my own writing how I'm sometimes steered, understandably, conventionally, towards concrete imagery and away from abstraction. Here he addresses abstraction well - but I am interested how in his process he seems to have come to move towards the concrete, and more apparently external (his New Poems) that came in the years after. - before of course his return to this questing in the elegies and sonnets mentioned above But the questions he asks here speak to my heart - an attempt to address such questions, to address being. And by reading this, reading more about him, I was able to jump ahead and read Duino Elegies (somewhat mystified it didn't click earlier - like some god has allowed me to level back up to myself and understand again) and the Sonnets to Orpheus which I'd not previously had a copy of, but which of course sit and I'd suggest should be addressed together with the Elegies.

There is one thing to be said for this translation, or perhaps two - first I enjoyed it immensely -- secondly, and as is quite apparent from their own comments, they've taken quite a few liberties I think. These liberties might even strangely work, but, I wonder - the collection is not a translation of all the poems (on the basis of their own rating of the poems). I'd be interested to read all the poems. They have also approached Rilke's scansion in a freer style, this may not be such a problem for me. Where I am far less certain is their certainty to edit out lines and sections they just don't like. There are also I think a couple of examples where they do this and in doing so merge two poems to somehow make them work to this direction they see. They are open and honest about it and as I say I enjoyed the book - but now I need to get to know the poems more in line with how Rilke made them (and despite any of what some may find his older patternations, say of rhyme).

Two of the translators comments also stood out to me. Of the poem that begins "But the privileged ones today refuse to fade" (III, 15) they say "In this poem is a celebration of sensory wealth rare for a Northern European." - and I am aghast. Of course Northern Europeans have had their own part in typing the world and its -isms, sometimes enforcing them. But what tosh. Speaking as a Northern European of course -- even in my sensory famine I do at least dream of heat, and images, touch, richness and life (!). It was so unexpected to read such a comment coming towards the end of this book, it makes me wary. I think there was a sense for me that there were fewer poems of the final book translated, but I wondered if I picked up a sense they connected less to this final book overall. It makes me wonder if there is more to it that they have not picked up. Earlier in the same book of III, 11 they comment - "We have spared the reader Rilke's images about men being pregnant." -- and again I am aghast, for several reasons: first they extol the book but would do this? I mean maybe those images were important for Rilke, I think of Wordsworth on Shakespeare's sonnets 'with this key he unlocked his heart' and wonder if this collection was similar for Rilke, and if so then all of his lines are relevant to understanding him and no matter how much I am enjoying their selection then simply omitting those you don't like I find really strange. Secondly the whole question of a sacred marriage seems somewhat related to the quest of these poems. Of course only (some) women can be so easily dismissive of men's quest to understand them or their experience (and to some degree understandably so), but can we/would we so easily dismiss a woman's lines considering a male experience? And maybe, just maybe, such wonderings, naive or inappropriate from their point of view, were somehow important for him to allow in getting to where he needed, are important in addressing this path of being. Perhaps I am, of course sensitive to such a comment. Maybe there is more to it. But I am wary of all of this and must now look at other translations. I wonder if they drifted later in their task, but who knows maybe they translated the third book first. And maybe those lines are awful, it'd just be nice to see them. I read somewhere this is a bilingual book, but is not, each poem is entitled in German, no more. But here is another reason to hope to learn German, but then that is unlikely given time available, all of what I have to learn and all.

But I am grateful to this book - it opened up Rilke for me. I like the translations for all my questions above and need to go on. Its allowed me to go on as I explained - and so has filled a gap for me in many ways. I've had a number of reads this year that fitted where I am and what I needed and this and what it has led to have done this very much.

>94 tonikat: Wonderful review—thank you.

>94 tonikat: Agreeing with lisapeet on this one. Lots of thought here, and I'm always interested in comments on translation. Unfortunately I haven't read any Rilke, which I should correct, but for some reason I am at times afraid of poets and their work, and never know how to approach them.

>95 lisapeet: thanks :)

>96 SassyLassy: I can understand that being afraid of poets thing, and their work. Though really if they are good its due to their humanity I suppose, and how that resonates with our own? (maybe? is that too broad a generalisation?) But I do understand the feeling - in fact the Duino Elegies seemed a bit beyond me for quite a while, sadly, I was reading them the wrong way (has happened to me before). The Book of Hours started to open him up as a person a bit to me -- and I find this, and I know in poetry many people find, that knowing something of a poet helps in connecting to their poetry. It might seem a bit non-purist, but it makes a huge difference to me to know a little of their biography, and their personality and the context of a poem. This is why I am reading so much about poets. Its very enjoyable too. I also wonder if it also helps me to read earlier work by poets sometimes, that then gives me a sense of the questions they are setting up earlier on and then responding to or developing, that is probably true of this book and helped me then approach the elegies again. I also think the more I read poetry and learn I can get it, do get it, practice doing so, that that also makes it easier to turn to new poets and reading poetry - that you do gain with practice (and get to know of the sorts of ways poetry works, questions it addresses, voices it takes). I also think that old nugget can be helpful, of reading aloud - it's happened to me many times that I am stuck with a poem and getting it, but on reading aloud it just slips by, without a problem. I think, as with me and the Duino Elegies, I have to sometimes put aside the sort of sense I make of prose reading, to just go with poetry -- do it get through it and then think about it, someone one said something like how true poetry can be understood before it is really fully understood as it were (Auden? a rough paraphrase), I suppose I'm not sure there is ever a fully understood with poems -- but these last points may just be me speaking to me about all this. I hope these points make some sense and may be of some use.

Maybe it is also important to go with those poets that speak to you, that you're curious about or who caught you with something you like, they may not daunt int he same way, and from that paths open up as needed. I had no plan to get so into Rilke, wasn't sure he was for me (how wrong I was), right now, in a way, I'm in love with the work. It's nice sometimes to read or hear comments from poets about other poets, how sometimes so and so's work just doesn't do it for them, or they didn't get it until - it's all a very personal thing, and ok to be so.

Edit - I’m sorry sassy I may just be talking to my version of what you said. You probably didn’t need any of that at all. i should have waited before replying, just not having a good day and poetry was something good to focus on.

>97 tonikat: No worries. I suspect reading about a particular poet is a sort of way of getting acquainted before looking at something as personal as the actual poetry.

Your comment "Maybe it is also important to go with those poets that speak to you" made me think more about something I had wondered about as an introduction to various poets, that is, whether or not someone with a similar cultural identity/background is a better place to start before branching out. That sounds really narrow, but is not meant to be. The thought was just that it might be more comfortable in the beginning.

>98 SassyLassy: or they could sit side by side, a natural process feeding each other, the poetry, the life, as you need.

It's making me think go with what is speaking to you, what is working, what animates you, what delights, what makes you want to read on whatever it is - I don't know if that'll be culturally specific - I know I've surprised myself. I do tend to poetry of the heart though, which may bias me in what I suggest to follow -- but when I do it can be an intimate thing communicating with these hearts, across ages, across cultures, meeting them in a way. And then follow the next part of the path/s.

edit - it occurred to me that what I'm saying in a way is just 'follow your bliss' - but do hope i'm not preachy or hitting the wrong tone (not just talking to my version of whatever you were meaning, not just lost in my own experiences).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/06/over-my-dead-body-booker-prize-arc... literary life?

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/sep/08/oscar-wilde-picture-of-dorian-gr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Dance_(hymn)

http://thebatterseareview.com/poems/85-back-issue-content/120-rilke-s-russian-po...

http://ascentmagazine.com/articles.aspx%3FarticleID=123&page=read&subpag...

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002851/reading-dickinson-in-shanghai

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/screens/2018-09-10/agliff-review-wild-nigh...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45510532

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/21/agnes-varda-i-am-still-alive-i-am-s... -- beware a Visages Villages spoiler

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/b0bk1pdr on Gandhi, Nietzsche and truth

Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte

I've read this over the last month, since that last collection of his I read. Work and careers being on my mind. I enjoyed it - a call to congruence in careers, that pilgrimage of identity, the need for fulfilment. I can hear that. Poetry being very good on all of this it has lots of the poetic about it, references Rilke, Dickinson, Keats. Lovely really -- and examples from his own pilgrimage that speak to me - wish I'd read it earlier, though I needed it ten years before it was published. Very good on process, what's involved with finding work and ways forward and the need to change, the challenge of the workplace too -- what it means for our core self, our feeling self, our life. In some ways a call to respect our time and what we do again, despite all the demands not to. There is something in his tone of voice I sometimes see (and this is something I recognise in myself) as yes, maybe having made a difficult step, worked through something, and then sounds too sound and knowing about it, its funny that made me think in a late part of how he speaks of us dancing around our achievements. But I like him, there is great value to this and his argument for us to put poetry into a more important place in our life, the poetic, and in the workplace. I think I must have seen something of a film of him as in the last chapter or heard him on the radio as his Spanish Steps bit seemed familiar across the years.

Sadly that last chapter on Keats, young people and hope for the future and change read strangely in these years of drift to the right, nationalisms, fear etc. But maybe its call to our hearts is more important than ever. Maybe this backlash is a response to change by those that don't want to. Maybe we can live in hope. As I suggested on the poetry thread, the poetic is always relevant, it is just that it is often ignored or silenced.

Lots of food for thought. I sometimes think in this country we're in a time that specialisms, maybe more, mean that jobs are more enclosed (like land once was). The big thing is to make change, and he is good at understanding that challenge and invitation and what it asks of us, but what it may bring. He gives a very good perspective on workplaces in the bigger meanings of our lives. It's weird but this sort of valuing of ourselves was so much of what was not encouraged as a kid, I think, or maybe lots of people I knew were busy trying to close down others. So this is positive, and we may hope, must -- and people can find they get something from their efforts that others may judge conventionally.

I don't think it was in here that I read W. H. Auden once suggested that poets of the future should make sure they get a manual trade - I don't see Auden in the index, but apologies if it was in here. I think I heard this as a young person and probably thought it a very dodgy thing to say. But now I understand it, life seems to be teaching me it.

The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell

I have another translation of just the Elegies, which I will read, but when i tried in the past they didn't wholly click. I have a dim memory I had been enthused by a South bank show or something like that. The story of him hearing the opening line on the wind seems familiar, and just the sort of thing to set my pulse going. But they didn't click, I mean I didn't - probably trying too hard, possibly medicated into woodenness. It definitely helped to have read The Book of Hours (see above), as maybe hearing about this was different from having reached it in my own reading. It was also earlier in my journey.

But I am very happy to have found my way to these now. I think it is right they should be read together and I enjoyed these translations, though I am suspicious that:

Who knows what losses the earth has suffered?
One who, with sounds chat nonetheless praise,
can sing the heart born into the whole.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition (Vintage International) (Sonnets to Orpheus 2, II, p. 138). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

might be 'with sounds that'. But as I don't speak German, who knows.

In a way I don't know where to start and in a way I have no intention of trying to start to say anything of these stupendous poems, they are too perfect in themselves, I could only spoil what is one of the greatest pleasures I have had in poetry -- pleasure? -- they have spoken to a need I knew so much I hardly knew it, an experience of understanding and beauty that is transformative, a guide, a loving, feeling, human voice.

There are so many sections I'd want to quote -- if anything I think I am even more taken with the sonnets. But both have parts that speak very much to me. I think I referred to Bill Porter's book above as a book that came along at just the right time in my life, this has been a recent theme, and this book too has been that, and I hope will continue to be so - maybe others translations too - really helpful for me at this time:

Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition (Vintage International) (Sonnets to Orpheus 2, XXIX, p. 192). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Words, and the rest of that poem, and all the poems and their recognitions, not least of the god of the title and of our own relationship with poetry, to life, that I very much need.

I can't help wonder what it would have been like to be with Rilke in this extraordinary burst of creativity in which he finished the Elegies (having tried to for ten years) and write these fifty five sonnets in what was it, ten days, two weeks? But then i think we have a sense of him, a very full sense from the poetry. I wonder if I get this from that possible documentary I saw, but I wondered, if, typical for a poet, he maybe found himself alone -- yet with all future history with him.

It also makes me think about him - it's tempting to see this as a burst of creativity and inspiration (it reminds me a bit of my Angelus Silesius reading a year or two ago) - yet maybe such a thing came from cultivation of himself and allowing himself the search that he had. Or maybe its a binary thing, happens or does not. I don't know, I could go round in circles like we do about light, wave or particle. It did strike me that some of the sonnets refer this experience of seeking and finding, and surprise even then at what it is like and describing the experience. Others will know better than me his depths. I've read this book twice now - maybe in some parallel process I tend to read it quite quickly when I do, though re-reading the sonnets has been in two chunks separated by a few weeks, the second tonight. I don't know it well from that, I have the start of some familiarity -- and I look forward to dwelling on them more. I heartily recommend both, if lyrical poetry of the highest quality is of interest. Such beautiful openness to process, yet awareness of it and perspective, gentle knowing, powerful knowing, tender, humane.

>102 tonikat: One who, with sounds chat nonetheless praise,
can sing the heart born into the whole.

Nur, wer mit dennoch preisendem Laut
sänge das Herz, das ins Ganze geborne.

Yes, obviously the translator meant “that”. But it’s a gerundive in the original, more literally it would be something like “Only, who with still praising sound / sing the heart, the born into the whole”. The verb “sänge” is in the subjunctive, which sounds strange in modern English, because we don’t really use it like that any more. And “still praising sound sing” adds an alliteration that Rilke obviously didn’t want there, or he would have put it in himself. Which I suppose is why the translator picked the unpoetic word “nonetheless”. Another way would be to use “tone” or “note” for “Laut”. Translating poetry isn’t easy!

Thanks, I google translated it to get a literal too, which made me confident to note it. It isn't easy is it, I've done very little (my dodgy French), but sometimes like to play, if only with the idea --- but when it becomes too like a crossword, no. But, in the spirit of trying, which is most fun, it gives a sense of getting to know the writing, swimming in it (which I see is a sense of sound's etymology):

Just who with still praising noise
sing the heart, the born into the whole

It's vey interesting. I see Ganze can mean a complete set, say of books, so I thought about 'completion', but that seems wrong. I went for noise for Laut. To be precise my only other translation so far had 'noise' in it, I just wanted to give it a sense of my point of view. I have a feeling a word is on the tip of my tongue that would be good.

The final phrase, on its own, google translates as 'that's the whole thing', is this a gErman turn of phrase? It gives a lovely extra sense if so, not so clear in English, kind of 'what its all about'. Maybe complete would give us some of that. I did think of 'the born into wholeness'. And also of 'sing the heart, born, into wholeness'. But wholeness is literally another word, not to mention adding commas. It could be scary to translate, possibly upset people.

Oh I see there is a difference Laut and laut. Maybe I just need 'sound' and we can play with word order for the alliteration - 'Just who with sound still praising / sing the heart, the born into the whole'.

and maybe with translations of him, they do just that:

sing the heart, the born into the whole.

Maybe that is what translation does, in every sense, with every reading.

>104 tonikat: >105 tonikat:
Yes, “das Ganze” is really tricky. We like to think that English is better than German at creative ambiguity, but those definite article plus adjective constructions in German give you a lot of room not to say which noun you’re implying, while English pretty much forces you to pick something.

I think there’s an Earth / Space thing going on - the previous poem is all about space, isn’t it? So “das Ganze” might actually mean something like universe or cosmos. And there also seems to be an important sound-link with “Glanze” (glimmer, sparkle) in line 6 of this poem, setting the transitoriness of those visual impressions against what the poet is trying to do.

>106 thorold: very interesting, thank you. Yes definitely a universe / cosmos thing happening I think, and in a fractal or maybe alchemical or gnostic way too, perhaps. I should be very very careful as i hae no German at all really - I do mean to read it alongside though, but that wont get me far. My kindle ed. very easily flips between the two, but even that not as good as facing texts which i like for Rimbaud (though even then am not even half hearted about it mostly).

Luminous Life: How the science of light unlocks the art of living by Jacob Israel Liberman

In August I had a walk one day at the beach. Walking along at the waters edge with the waves lapping I realised I was writing in my head about an experience I had quite a long time ago that I've sometimes thought about writing and how to write. When I got to the end of the beach i found a bench and sat down and wrote it onto my phone in that tone. It had to be written as prose and matter of fact. It is about presence, light and an uncanny experience when these were very full (a beautiful but powerful experience that shook me after a long time without such experience). A few weeks later I shared it with someone that suggested a magazine to me, Caduceus - because of the spiritual nature of this and some other recent writing of mine. I was quite shocked to see in their then current edition an article on presence and light by this author - you can read it here:

http://www.jacobliberman.org/read (follow the link - Connecting light, vision and consciousness Caduceus)

The article reflected aspects of my experience, which I had thought very unusual and in fact had had a doctor very strongly dismiss and question. So, that's how I came to this book.

Jacob Liberman was an eye specialist and has written before, I understand, on ways of improving sight such that glasses may not be needed, or needed less. I've not read that work, though it informs this work. This work is interested in light and how we respond to it -- just as I had in my experience, how it can bring a sense of presence. It draws on some interesting science and makes an argument that in some ways I relate to neo-platonism and Blake, and of course is also informed by quantum physics - of how all is light in different forms, matter coming from light, returning to it. It does make a person think on the nature of light - and he speaks of how light has so often been seen, including as God. I find it a very strong line of thought. He makes a very good argument for the importance of listening and following light and how light carries information, which could relate to my uncanny experience.

As the book goes on he introduces exercises that help still the mind and increase receptivity to light (to just recognise and respond to what catches our eye) and also introduces an idea of colour therapy and training the eye to focus on what is the target of both vision and mind. I've been a bad reader as I haven't really tried the exercises yet. Both seem interesting, especially colour therapy to me (as i have a particular vision problem that may complicate the other exercise). The goal of colour therapy being to help us in our acceptance of the full spectrum of light, some of whose hues in the course of life we may have become, in his words, allergic to, for very understandable reasons. It's interesting for all my enthusiasm about he book that I have not done this exercise yet, possibly a bit scared of what I may learn(?). Or have even less excsue to hide from! All of this may then improve our presence to light and hence our quality of life and so a therapy for life and connection to bing alive and the wonderful sea of light in which we live.

It's really rather a beautiful book and idea that taps into this subject touched on in so many other ways in human history an experience, drawing things together for me from a new and interesting and powerful angle - and one that gives me much to think about and think how to recognise and respond to, very validating, especially to me whose experience had been so dismissed. I'm glad I had written my piece anyway, that dismissal and distancing from my experience part of what hindered that, and not least to write of something like that which it can be hard to own in our times, so, so validating again to come to this work which could so chime with it and recognise such an experience.

I've noticed LT tell me today would have been Rimbaud's birthday - not that he'd have been sentimental, probably. But since I noticed:

http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/GenieE.html

I like this translation as it ends with 'light' (I know the French is 'jour').

>109 tonikat: Love the evocation of the beach in winter there. Such a beautiful piece of landscape that escapes general attention, I think, because the beach is a summer thing unless you live there. But it's a wonderful sight, with the wind and whitecaps and big pillows of foam thrown up on the sand. That "frothy winter" of his—nice choice along with your terrific review above.

>110 lisapeet: yes it is rather special and fitted.
And Thanks :)

I just read this -

https://tricycle.org/magazine/six-small-meditations-desire/
(you get three articles free with this online mag, so be aware of that if you are wanting others in case this max's you out)

i'm interested in this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1999638409?pf_rd_p=855cdcfd-05d9-474f-b84d-8... and quite enjoyed this review -- http://www.keithhackwood.com/articles/an-orphan-wisdom-review-of-peter-kingsleys... -- maybe it gushes a bit, and the while thing does beg a question of rebirth and also of how what may be touched truly cannot go away (can be hidden from us in new ways maybe), but definitely seems an interesting book. I add these things here as a kind of scrap book of what interests m sometimes, an so I can find them again if i want in future. The book does make me think of Kathleen Raine quite a lot, of course, and others. But I have really to read her more thoroughly maybe before justifying buying this . . . or have I?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45963935

http://www.wuwm.com/post/wild-nights-emily-brings-thrill-back-dickinsons-life-po...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/27/how-shakespeares-blood-cult-became...

https://hemadnazari.format.com/#0

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/26/robert-plant-and-the-sensational-s...

I bought an actual book in an actual bookshop today, not unknown to me. But the book has rough edges, also not unknown to me. I've noticed this seems to have become a thing, but then as it is a thing it must have a name and history I thought, and I found out about deckle edges - https://www.abebooks.com/blog/index.php/2012/07/16/deckle-edges-or-uncut-edges-o... a fashion statement don't you know since late Victorian times, I'm thinking of them like some sort of boho hemline, not quite ruffled, like a messy ruffle, maybe one day there will be call for someone in some film to match such a book, to clothes to hairstyle, and maybe they'll be reading it in a haystack -- oh I want to see that film now. They could be eating a Cadbury's flake too. And not have their shoe laces tied. Then let's not let them obey rules of framing, of story, yes, hell, let's rebel, find something honest in a meander, it starts to rain, too far to go straight home, they shelter under a tree . . . and so the adventure begins.

My book is called Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz, as someone gave me a book token. And it seems very cool.

I have a massive mess of books to finish at the mo. I was thinking I had to do something about it. But no my deckle edge daydreams have cured me. but tell me, where, where can a person hang out with a book in a haystack, cos thinking about it hay bales are all anything but deckle edged in these parts these days, not so much stacks as cubes. let me meander on it a bit more . . .

I read The Song of Songs today, in the King James version. How wonderful. This a first response.

for my real imagined other

Their’s the earth, the world, mountain, moon. Their's not this earth, married in the sun. They are whole, whole, holy. Let us dream their path, poetry. Where now is she, where he. Where are we. What do we have. Squabbling city guards silence, always. Playing games, skimming loads, naming to contain. But we have known the leopard’s home, the riverbank at dawn and dusk. Turn, turn to green, what we've been given, passed walls, meadow flowered, field grown, stand beneath leaf, speak tree. Autumn rose, silent bloom, forgotten scent of heights long lost, seed dream -- be.

I have a few deckle edge books - I didn't know they were called deckle edges until I read >112 tonikat:. My favourite is a two volume set of The Novellino of Masuccio which were a numbered edition de luxe privately printed for the Aldus society. Two edges of the pages are deckle and the other (top edge) is smooth and edged in shiny gold. Plenty of 19 century poetry books seem to have that deckle edge.

>114 baswood: I hope finding their name doesn't spoil it. but yes, isn't it Romantic, or later iterations of that, that could even become twee in some cases, it has to have some earthiness to it too. The one smooth edge gets me interested, run out of money for the gilt do you think? Rough and smooth - does it look strangely or strangely ok? Maybe I have seen something like that myself, and forgot, never owned anything like that though.

Gilding is actually a leaf that's applied and rolled over to adhere it, so it can't really be done to a deckle edge. Or rather, it can, but not that way--gilding deckle edges involves brushing on gold paint (big floofy brush like a makeup brush), which is much more of a one-at-a-time, labor-intensive process.

Are you familiar with fore-edge painting? That's a cool thing... talk about a labor of love.

Kat - I really enjoyed your walk through Rilke. I don’t like deckle edges, though. They look nice, but too hard to flip through pages.

>113 tonikat: for my real imagined other - Thanks for this.

>116 lisapeet: but can you apply it to a flat edged finish on that one side?

I think I’m liking the idea of fore-edge painting, but could see it getting kitsch and too much.

It reminds me I learned of some library somewhere in Europe I think where the books were always kept since ancient times with the spine inwards and the open pages facing. They were also all covered in white. I could have nightmares about finding a book there. I guess they either had a ban on fore edge painting, or hadn’t thought of it. (Hoping I remember this place right. I think whatever I saw or read suggested all libraries used to work this way. But maybe my facts are a bit mixed up.)

>117 dchaikin: thank you :)

>118 tonikat: The book on the bookshelf is a mine of information on that sort of thing. Apparently spines inward was normal in medieval libraries. They had titles or numbers written on the fore-edge, or paper tags with the titles. And the books chained to the shelf, of course. We had a late (1694) example of a bookcase like that in our library at school, but it was only opened on special occasions.

https://www.boltonschool.org/senior-boys/general-information/facilities/local-sp...

>118 tonikat: Yes—it's like a strip of tape applied to the book's edge, and probably saved a little money on the production side with just the one edge gilded.

Deckle edges and french flaps were practically fetish items at Readerville, my former lit forum (now reincarnated as Bookballoon here at LT). I've never cared for deckle edges much, for the same reason as Dan—I find they make page turning harder. But they sure do look nice.

>120 thorold: thanks for that recommendation. I think I must have known but had entirely forgotten about the turning of the fore-edge like that -- something about it strangely appeals, equalising texts, forcing engagement -- but then its also a bit fearful, the possibility of being lost, all at sea in the sea of texts, not to mention lost texts, the library as labyrinth, Jorge of Burgos watching me. Borges always beyond me.

I'm not sure if we had a bookcase like that, maybe - I really didn't engage with our library(ies) properly beyond the odd game of chess, another symptom of my past wrongheadedness.

>121 lisapeet: - gilded on the cheap? an advertising strategy to draw a buyer in? Who knows.

I can see deckle edges as almost fetish -- I also see what you and Dan are saying about the edges as barriers, but there is something about them I quite like, a sort of organic feeling, but also, and regarding this particular book of poetry, they slow me down, force me to consider turning the pages, they really fit this book, and falling in love with this writing (so far - Hafez).

Woods etc. by Alice Oswald

May two fields be bridged by a stile
And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance

And may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,
Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing

- from Hymn to Iris, Alice Oswald Woods etc.



I'll only aim to stop myself from shovelling these glimpses into the ditches of what each one means.

There is so much to love, those lines and that poem above one of those that comes so close you might wish you'd written it yourself, as you (I) talk myself out of a ridiculous, pointless jealousy I don't even really have, just deep respect.

This collection begins with some more sea poems, wanders through woods, stoniness, nature, various stuff and then turns to the stars, all the time human. There are many poems I love.

She gives me much food for thought in her poems, how she drifts within them, knowing, not having to show, knowing you'll know to follow her, at home not just a first discovery but exploring beyond a beachhead. I suppose a bit like how I may see a drama inhabiting what it speaks of, so it is not just a first sketch but has become known and then just so good it simply is, brought to life. And beyond that also she makes me think of how she deepens her themes within the book, again not simply in a dull linear way, but more organically -- the difference between stodgy cake and light angelic sponge. This makes me want to review my own mix. It seems her way is both a gift and a craft within that gift to work towards those heights, part of which is I think bringing that sight to bear on the work itself. And all this lightness maybe relates to that quote above, and more, and in fact also to something solid, breathing, real, honest.

I love also her view, her macro-micro-scope that telescopes in between and dissolves borders.

So many poems, in my final reading 'A Star Here And A Star There' especially stood out towards the end, but it is silly just to pick that out. It doesn't seem to be available online, you'll just have to buy the book. I shall link to her Poetry Foundation page, which includes two of the poems, 'Solomon Grundy' which didn't do it as much for me and 'Various Portents' which very much does.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alice-oswald

The Way of the Heart by Henri J. M. Nouwen

I read (at least some of) The Wounded Healer when I did a grief counselling course a long tome ago. I'm not sure now that I read it all, will have to look again. A book well known to many counsellors and others and a very good book indeed. Then last week Amazon suggested this short book and it seemed to tick all the boxes, not least on my current need. It's a book about the Desert Fathers and Mothers - early christians, though after the repression, who sought themselves and God in the Egyptian desert - Saint Anthony and many more.

I'm usually fascinated by mysticism and monastics - and yet I've read relatively little. I'm also cautious of organised religion, so haven't been getting this sort of input that way. In a way it' a lovely western balance to having read Road to Heaven about Chinese hermits earlier this year. I am aware of Carl Jung's suggestion that in connecting to the spiritual he advised people to contact the tradition of their childhood, so for westerners not simply turning east. Though Egypt is a bit east for me.

This book is not a history of narrative of these folks, beyond some stories. It considers what we can learn from their way in order to live well, honouring ourselves and God. That way is basically one of retreat from the world, solitude, silence and prayer. it may sound austere - but this book is full of life and facts of life that help us to live well. Challenging but beautiful. I hope I may learn more of these wonderful wise and holy people, even to find a drop of their integrity and approach to life.

Of course it also has a title that draws attention to the heart - something it also shares with the approach of Red Pine / Bill Porter in his book on chinese poets and I think in the travel book above. This is not though the heart without thought (not that those other books are either), it seems to me the fullest awareness of being, perhaps poetic certainly spiritual. It is something I gain very much from and suffered greatly when I did not follow or allowed to be challenged - it speaks very specifically about how this approach may work and is well worth reading for that. His words are very well chosen, profound, but not off putting in approach - and sitting within the traditions of the west.

A short book, but wonderful. I will seek out more of his work.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/riddle-like-a-shot/

The Book of Images by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Edward Snow

He's such a lovely writer - I've only read it through once -- but lovely lovely -- was a bit more challenged by the longer ones in the second book part one, but they were also lovely just different -- and just love him to bits. My life has largely missed him, he so hits so many of my buttons, tender, lyrical, wise, thoughtful, beautiful. Yes readers, he's a favourite. But let me try to gather myself to some sense.

I like these translations too, by the way. I'm reluctant to link to other versions of them, as those aren't what I am talking about, whether I may like them better or worse or just differently. So, I shall dare to quote one fully, unlike myself but I think within those guidelines on such sharing - I recommend this book (a bilingual edition by the way). This from the start of that second book, and a short poem:

INITIAL

Let your beauty manifest itself
without talking and calculation.
You are silent. It says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
comes at long last over everyone.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Book of Images (German Edition) (p. 107). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. Translated by Edward Snow.

And maybe it is then appropriate to leave comments and quotes at that. Give his beauty a chance.

He's a writer that makes me glad. Happy to know someone else has been here and left these markers of his being and its struggles in the big picture and in its smallest senses, shows we may understand.

So, maybe I'm not talking really about Rilke much - I read this just now, I think I've read it before - https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/reviews/rilke.htm

It mentioned Snow and also Mitchell. I liked the Mitchell Sonnets To Orpheus and Duino Elegies, but find the selected expensive and without many of these poems and the New poems.

But the article talks more of Rilke - I don't fancy the bio discussed - i'd like to read the Ringing Glass biography, forget the author right now, but also expensive in this country.

But the article mentions the line from the sonnets "O tall tree in the ear!" he says:

"Rilke's poetry has always been easier to love than to understand. It is abstract, religiose, difficult to translate, solemn, obsessed with death, and sometimes unintentionally ludicrous. Only the most Teutonic soul would fail to laugh at the second line of the first sonnet to Orpheus: "O tall tree in the ear!" Any English major could interpret the phrase's significance -- phallic imagery, echoes of the Annunciation, etc., but the words themselves remain essentially ridiculous."

and I feel sad - it can kind of sound like that, it is so unusual a thing to say, but I think its so in line with what he's saying - in a way i think of the ear canal literally blooming in a tree like brain, but also a tree of life, and that inner outer thing he loves is there, linked growing in the ear, where we hear -- and so away from such literalness, it opens the imagination linked to words, 'o tall tree in the ear!', it says it all and I quite quite beyond the prosaic - he's said it, he stands for it, its poetry, defiantly, ridiculously more than simple sense -- it is exactly poetry on poetry. Its so obvious its often hidden from us. I don't think he'd say it if he did not mean it - I've wondered if it is there deliberately to make us wonder, for him to ask in that early sonnet, do you get it.

Or am in just in love with his words?

And we can all talk no end of nonsense about poetry to the end of time - especially me?

But I don't think i have. And I just get frustrated by things said like that.

(and phphphphphallic? ppppplease!)

Hmm. Sounds as though the old Leppman biography I read is still a better bet than Freedman. At least he actually seems to admire Rilke, even if he doesn’t approve of the way he treated wife and child.

It would probably be fun to have a look at Lou’s memoirs.

I've not heard of Leppman - i have a recent book about his time with Rodin lined up You must change your life.

Yes her memoirs would be good to read, I'll get there - more poems first.

The A Ringing Glass biography is by Donald Prater.

I quite enjoyed this - will have to think about it - https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/11/10/translation-mitchell-rilkes-snow/

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/dec/29/21-uk-winter-walks-with-the-wow-f...

Happy Christmas readers who may celebrate this

and for everyone best wishes of this season

Writing my intro for the new CR made me think about my unfinished reading this year. I have loads of it these days, year on year snowballing out of control into a huge Gordion knot in my learning. Then immediately I thought I could hardly remember what exactly it consists of. One book sticks out - early in the year I was enjoying reading a chapter (or most of) of Jane Eyre every night before going to sleep. This was lovely, but then I realised it was lovely, which may have put me off. Its not like I'd got far, I was about two weeks into doing this. But then I got ill, also the weather started to change, the habit got lost. Of course I was also at the point where she's just gained employment, a change in her life, maybe that's part of why it was hard to go on with then. I got thrown. Its another I have no idea why I've not read it before - but then reading bits I definitely have read some of it.

And speaking of that I'd have sworn I'd never read Twelfth Night, but I read Act one in the autumn and I've definitely read that before - then I remembered we read it at school as a first year and got a load of vivid memories of that (not all good, and wishing I'd remembered better of Sir A. Aguecheek, who was an anti role model for my teens). Have it to finish, maybe this holiday, maybe. Sometimes the spell that sits over me when I'm especially enjoying reading something just seems to get broken, or I allow it to get broken, or maybe I don't allow myself to heal it and stay with it.

Recently I read about twenty pages of The Lily of the Field and Bird of the Air by Kierkegaard when I had a free hour waiting for something in a cafe. A nice cafe. A wonderful book - I was so sorry I had to go when the car was ready. Another must finish. But who knows when given me.

My current reads has some long time unfinisheds on it, and stands at 15, thanks to moving a load off to part read and also 'started but on hold' categories (this last basically means part read I think, as I can't remember the last time I took anything off it). So many of these books I totally love and then seem to hit a dead end with. Though I was going right off the male characters of A Confederate General from Big Sur before I drifted from it, whilst at the same time wondering at how it took me back to the tone of so much from the sixties and seventies, especially some films and tv.

The Heart Sutra and also The Upanishads on my current reading I have not looked at for a long time - with both I was flying along and loving and just hit a wall. I have a feeling with The Upanishads that they just should not be devoured so quickly. And the Heart Sutra too, whilst short, but I suddenly hit a block with the commentary (also short).

My book of German Tales, much as I love it, gets read at a rate of about one tale per year. Kafka's stories, again, I flew long with until I got derailed somehow. Part of that may be due to having read In the Penal Colony -- part of this is due to a classmate having told me about it when I was 15 or 16, and this half memory just bothers me a bit (did I say I'd read it when I clearly had not? or why on earth did I not read it thereafter instead of waiting all these decades to); but part of it is due to the story, immense yes, so good, almost too good, too complete, is part of me is rejecting it for being so good? Something about it feels closed and complete and that makes me want to cry almost. I don't know it well really and maybe should reread - its not that I'd defend what it criticises, heavens no -- need to think on it more, it hurts. But anyway, that was last year, I don't think I've picked him up this year, well I did take him home for Christmas this week, but did not read him.

Not Always So I was enjoying -- I love Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and I think I was reading it hoping to recapture the wonderful time I had with that a few years ago, when I was also reading Tolstoy's Wise Thoughts for every day -- anyway, I think I was chasing something with it, and of course the more I chased the less it was there. So I haven't been touching it - then I picked it up last week and read the piece I was up to, where the title 'Not Always so' comes from and it totally connected for me and I plan to read it as its predecessor in a rhythm to the end now.

It's also made me think of going back to the Tolstoy. I've had a very challenging year, not even really relating to obvious change I've made. The rhythm of a monastic type of life is very appealing, and not living by such a calling seems to generate so much confusion.

I've read a little of The Bible, I never seem to make it all the way through Matthew. I've also loved a bit of reading from the Pali Canon, in the Sutta Nipata and translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (which is public domain) - the parts I read are some of those oldest and most attributed to the Buddha, I think. They set off some dim memories, I am sure for example I had heard of the difficulties of translating about the Rhinoceros and sword-horns before.

But then writings such as these seem to work at a very deep level, the deepest (?), so true they almost seem familiar, or maybe that is not it, so true they welcome you to be as familiar as anyone within them, not holding any airs or graces or excluding, waking me back to me. Truth. And truth still open to truth. I've always related such a feeling in great writing to that Platonic idea that life is a forgetting of where we're from, and they remind us. Maybe they take us on too, forwards.

The anthology is called Handful of Leaves and begins with a quote I've just reread of the Buddha speaking of what he knew as much more than what h taught, but that he focused on what he taught:

"Once the Blessed One was staying at Kosambī in the siṁsapā forest. Then, picking up a few siṁsapā leaves with his hand, he asked the monks, “What do you think, monks? Which are more numerous, the few siṁsapā leaves in my hand or those overhead in the siṁsapā forest?”

“The leaves in the hand of the Blessed One are few in number, lord. Those overhead in the forest are far more numerous.”

“In the same way, monks, those things that I have known with direct knowledge but haven’t taught are far more numerous (than what I have taught). And why haven’t I taught them? Because they aren’t connected with the goal, don’t relate to the rudiments of the holy life, and don’t lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to stilling, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding. That’s why I haven’t taught them.

“And what have I taught? ‘This is stress … This is the origination of stress … This is the cessation of stress … This is the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress’: This is what I have taught. And why have I taught these things? Because they are connected with the goal, relate to the rudiments of the holy life, and lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to stilling, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding. This is why I have taught them.”"

(Siṁsapā Sutta)

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. Handful of Leaves: An Anthology from the Sutta Piṭaka (Kindle Locations 7-17). Metta Forest Monastery. Kindle Edition.

And unintentionally I start to wonder at my reading habits, what does connect and what does not connect - not that all of it is connecting to the highest, not by any means, but to something I need. And then wondering at how I disconnect from some of this very best as I'm explaining, what I most need - how that may fit with living, modern living and challenges and also from diving into to much of it all at once and needing to digest. So, again a call for a certain rhythm.

I was reading today of the passing of Sister Wendy Beckett whom I didn't watch much myself really, but like everyone was taken with her. Again thinking of those that live in such ways. I half heard a story that she was asked what the other nuns thought of her travels and tv work, and that she said they felt sorry for her. Now, that's what I think I am talking about.

Now, do I post this post? Probably, after all this typing. I wasn't expecting to think on these lines. No bad thing for this little reading journal, which has given me a lot already. This one to think on, to act on.

I was just reviewing that current reading category of mine.

Emily Dickinson I make a little progress with, would like to find a good rhythm to read her more. Sometimes long periods of not.

The Jungian book I didn't complete as I was supposed to take a course on that second half that has been delayed.

Whilst I completed The Prelude I've not read all my Norton critical yet. Probably a task of years. Likewise Blake, of course.

Anam Cara I've not even really started yet - was pointed to it by that David Whyte book I read. The book on Rilke I was pointed to as one chapter got referenced a lot - but came to a halt at the moment with that as all the poetry is in German and so want to sit down and sort each into translation from wherever before I read it.

Faces of Love I was loving, just got halted, again, will get back to it. I'm still among the Hafez poems and I think with him its a process of getting to know him, as for many, any, poets. Maybe digesting and thinking about the faces of the love I'm seeing. He wrote in interesting times. From an interesting place, it made me wonder at Shiraz now and its gardens. In some ways he made me think of Shakespeare, indirectly, I'm not wholly sure why. Maybe some yearning, maybe for a rose/s, in interesting times, but more to his tone, not just sexuality, knowingness and the yearning to do with the limitations of others. Or maybe I am projecting there. And maybe, as I ever found before challenge, forgiveness is important, of self, of others.

I think that's covered that category of mine - there's probably loads else. I often don't add new books these days, sometimes have to if I finish them.

Someone famous once said that any creative person's autobiography could be called 'I was interrupted' - that quote from the Buddha seems to suggest an approach to that issue.

Electric Light by Seamus Heaney

The group I've been in reading through Heaney got to this this term and spent the whole time on it. I missed a couple of classes and the last was cancelled. So tonight I've read the few I had not read and the last few.

Sometimes I think of him as 'the student' but he was clearly also a 'master' (in a literary sense). In his dialogue with his studies and his experience he opens up so much for me to learn more of and build on -- and also to remember and remember to find -- and also to link the two. it struck me as I read his 'Sonnets from Hellas' that he was on such a firm footing in both the world and the world of learning/poetry.

A wonderful collection, as ever. Many themes and threads throughout -- especially his connecting, tradition to experience, to people, to memory, to himself, to life, to movement through life, to something electric.

Another year over (very nearly). It promised a larger haul of completeds but it turned into a seriously different year, very challenging, lots of change.

I'm most disappointed my decent start in reading more female authors fell off - partly that was discovering Rilke and partly some other reading that had to be done for one reason or another. But I am making a start and have several female authors to finish and more authoresses appearing on my map all the time.

But overall I'm not disappointed - my reading this year has felt validating and even life saving at times. I hope to build on it and more. Some very special books read, and special to me in these times.

I too have a huge pile of unfinished books from 2018—not from any lack of love or attention, but because in October I was reading short story collections for an award and was only physically able to read 1/2 - 2/3 of each. One of my goals for 2019, even though I kind of hate reading goals, is to duck back into them as the spirit moves me and finish the ones I liked best, at least.

>135 lisapeet: Happy New Year :) Good luck with that goal as the spirit moves you, yeah. I always wonder how anyone can read it all in such situations.

I did keep track of film and tv and theatre -- though lost track a bit in the autumn, so the list may yet be worked on more, or may just let that actuality disappear. Lots of highlights

tv - The OA, superb, have watched it through thee times now and satisfied each time. I also loved Killing Eve and, a bit less, but much to love, in Trust -- if both of these aren't also rather challenging. Sad they dumped Mozart in the Jungle, I enjoyed season 4, but it seemed to be playing a bit within itself.

theatre - not so much of this this year, but the NT Macbeth was excellent. Testosterone was wonderful, wrote my second theatre review for it, touching humanity and masculinity beyond trans issues.

film -- so many highlights, seasons of musicals (a revelation to me, I wasn't a musicals person before, Fred Astaire in Top Hat, but so may of them) , Japanese film (especially Vengeance is Mine, Shall we Dance and Hana-bi, al new to me) and Hitchcock (known better - but a bit of a revelation on the big screen, especilly loved The 39 Stps ,Rebecca and North by Northwest) but all these films.

Other highlights were Varda screenings and my first Bresson. Call Me By Your Name, Hell or High Water, You Were Never really Here, all wow. But others too.

And The Red Turtle.

The Rewrite re-viewing
42nd Street d. Lloyd Bacon, cinema 12/1/18
Top Hat d. d. Mark Sandrich, cinema 19/1/18
The Red Turtle d. Michael Dudok de Wit, 22/1/18
Cleo de 5 à 7 d. Agnes Varda, cinema 24/1/18 re-viewing
Meet Me in St. Louis d. Vincente Minnelli, cinema 26/1/18
Drive last hour 26/1/18
Gigi d. Vincente Minnelli 27/1/18 partial re-viewing
No Escape
An American in Paris d. Vincente Minnelli 2/2/18 Cinema
Calvary John McDonagh 2/2/18 re-veiwing
Funny Face d. Stanley Donen, 3/2/18
Belle de Jour d. Luis Bunuel, 7/2/18 Cinema
Singin' in the Rain 9/2/18 - streamed
Mozart in the Jungle season 4 16-18/2/18 tv
The Band Wagon d. Vincente Minnelli 23/2/18 Cinema
Pride and Prejudice (most of) d. Joe Wright re-viewing 2/3/18
L'Argent d. Robert Bresson 7/3/18 cinema
The River d. Jean Renoir, 8/3/18
La Ceremonie d. C. Chabrol 14/3/18 cinema re-viewing
Thoroughly Modern Millie d. George Roy Hill 16/3/18 cinema re-viewing
La Haine d. M. Kassovitz 21/3/18 cinema re-viewing
Blade Runner 2049 d. Denis Villeneuve (19/3/18)
Amelie d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet 28/3/18 Cinema re-viewing
Isle of Dogs d. Wes Anderson 2/4/18 Cinema
La Pointe Courte d. Agnes Varda 12/4/18
Cabaret d. Bob Fosse 13/4/18 cinema (partial re-viewing)
Gravity d. Cuaron 14/4/18
Star Trek: Discovery tv (march - 19 April)
The OA ( - 26 Apri) tv
Bicycle Thieves d. Vittorio de Sica, Cinema 27/4/18, re-viewing
Testosterone @ Alnwick Playhouse 2/5/18
La Strada d. Federico Fellini, Cinema, 4/5/18 re-viewing
Lancelot du Lac d. Robert Bresson, 5/5/18
Roman Holiday d. William Wyler, 6/5/18
Wild Strawberries d. Ingmar Bergman, 11/5/18 cinema, re-viewing
Elle d. Paul Verhoeven, 12/5/18
Dallas Buyers Club d. Jean Marc Vallée, 13/5/18
Aguirre, wrath of God d. Werner Herzog, 18/5/18 cinema, re-viewing
The Martian d. Ridley Scott, 19/5/18
Desert Hearts d. Donna Deitch, 20/5/18
Sans Toit ni loi (Vagabond) d. Agnes Varda, 25/5/18, cinema
I Am Not Your Negro d. Raoul Peck, 28/5/18
Call me by Your Name d. Luca Guadagnino 30/5/18
Il Ladro di Bambini d. 8/6/18 Cinema
A Quiet Passion d. Terrence Davis 9/6/18 re-viewing
The Man who Knew Infinity d. Matthew Brown 12/6/18
Regarding Henry d. Mike Nichols 13/6/18
Cloud Atlas d. Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer 14/6/18
Three Colours, Blue d. K. Kieslowski 15/6/18
Dead Man d. Jim Jarmusch 16/6/18
Aaltra d. Benoit Delépine and Gustave K/vern 22/6/18 cinema
Onibaba d. Kaneto Shindo 25/6/18 cinema - re-viewing
Locke d. Steven Knight 29/6/18 cinema
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon d. Ang Lee, 30/6/18 re-viewing
Venegeance is Mine (Fukushû suru wa ware ni ari) Shohei Imamura 2/7/18, Cinema
Ida Pawel Pawlikowski 6/7/18, cinema, re-viewing
Shall We Dance ? d. Masayuki Suo, cinema 9/7/18
Arrival d. Denis Villeneuve re-viewing (9-10/7/18 -- have watched again recently, not noted)
Hana-bi d. Takeshi Kitano, cinema (16/7/18)
The Pelican Brief d. (20/7/18) re-viewing
Hell or High Water (27/7/18)
Wind River
The Lady and the Duke d. Eric Rohmer (18/8/18)
Visages Villages Faces Places, d. Agnes Varda & JR (28/8/18) Cinema
Taking Sides (Der Fall Furtwangler) d. Istvan Szabo (31/8/18)
The Equaliser
Taste of Cherry d. Abbas Kiarostami (19-20/9/18)
Bright Star d. Jane Campion, reviewing (24/9/18)
La La Land w & d. Damien Chazelle (26/9/18)

The 39 Steps d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
Sabotage d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
The Lady Vanishes D. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
Rebecca d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
Shadow of a Doubt d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
Notorious d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
Strangers on a Train d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
Rear Window d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
Vertigo d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema
North by Northwest d. Alfred Hitchcock cinema

Hail, Caesar w & d. The Coen Brothers

You Were Never Really Here d. Lynne Ramsay (21/12/18)
Far From the Madding Crowd (23/12/18)

>132 tonikat: Such a thoughtful look at your year. We get too hung up on completion sometimes, when there are so many paths to wander at our leisure, places to which we can return and explore further after reflection. That is well worth the time. I hope you keep it up in the new year.

>138 SassyLassy: :) thank you. I'm kind of hung up on it but I've become very bad at doing it, so I'm not sure how hung up I am really. Sometimes its nice not to update on stuff read -- but I do for all completeds, in the end anyway. I was tempted to write as I read through Emily D, but just do not have the time, also a bit of a pain for some as my ideas evolve. You just cannot catch it all and it'd be nice to take a leaf from the Buddha on what to focus on. But it was nice to write that summary and yes, it did lead to something, for me anyway. These journals have been a good thing for me. Definitely trying to keep at it, see you on the '19 threads which I hop you're keeping too.