pity this busy monster,manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
--electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born--pity poor flesh
and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if--listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go
~ E E Cummings
born 14 October 1894
died 3 September 1962
Friday, October 14, 2011
Saturday, October 08, 2011
9th blog-o'-versary!
The occasion falls today. Hurrah etc., let joy be unconfined.
And here is the initial post of Dark Speech upon the Harp, which was called Tenebrae back in 2002 -- the post is of a poem by Theodore Roethke. Enjoy!
And here is the initial post of Dark Speech upon the Harp, which was called Tenebrae back in 2002 -- the post is of a poem by Theodore Roethke. Enjoy!
Monday, September 26, 2011
Msgr Massimo Camisasca
Even the weight of your sins would lead you back to me, God says. The whole of Christian wisdom is summed up in this sentence. For in becoming man, God chose to communicate himself, not only in spite of fragility, but "through" it. If we agree to this divine method without reservation, we can stop looking at our limitations as a reason for discouragement or frustration, and so as something to forget, to censor, and can start looking at them as stones to build with. The whole of our lives, with all their lights and shadows, exists in order to manifest the glory of Christ (Jn 9:3). If we refuse this logic, life will always be a burden that sooner or later we will find unbearable.
We are frequently tempted to censor difficulties, to hide them even from ourselves. When we do that, we are diverging radically from the way that God acts with us: every detail is a matter of importance for him. This kind of censorship is a diabolical act, which is often born of a fear of another's judgment, of the fear of losing the positive image that others have of us. But our stature before Christ has nothing to do with his image, nor can it be measured in terms of the mistakes that we may make or avoid making. Rather, it is decided by Christ himself and by our belonging to him. So to hide your own limits, your own problems, really doesn't make any sense. You do not find freedom from your own miseries by censoring them, but by handing them over to Christ, which is to say, by letting him embrace them. This embrace is like the one with which the mother enfolds her child in her arms, with which the lover takes the beloved into his. Indeed, it is infinitely more affectionate than these other gestures. Within this embrace, everything is taken up and directed to the one goal that makes life exciting: the glory of Christ on earth.
(via Magnificat, September 2011, meditation for the day, Sunday the 25th)
We are frequently tempted to censor difficulties, to hide them even from ourselves. When we do that, we are diverging radically from the way that God acts with us: every detail is a matter of importance for him. This kind of censorship is a diabolical act, which is often born of a fear of another's judgment, of the fear of losing the positive image that others have of us. But our stature before Christ has nothing to do with his image, nor can it be measured in terms of the mistakes that we may make or avoid making. Rather, it is decided by Christ himself and by our belonging to him. So to hide your own limits, your own problems, really doesn't make any sense. You do not find freedom from your own miseries by censoring them, but by handing them over to Christ, which is to say, by letting him embrace them. This embrace is like the one with which the mother enfolds her child in her arms, with which the lover takes the beloved into his. Indeed, it is infinitely more affectionate than these other gestures. Within this embrace, everything is taken up and directed to the one goal that makes life exciting: the glory of Christ on earth.
(via Magnificat, September 2011, meditation for the day, Sunday the 25th)
Friday, September 23, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
To a Pet Cobra
To
A Pet Cobra
by Roy Campbell (1901-57)
With breath indrawn and every nerve alert,
As at the brink of some profound abyss,
I love on my bare arm, capricious flirt,
To feel the chilly and incisive kiss
Of your lithe tongue that forks its swift caress
Between the folded slumber of your fangs,
And half reveals the nacreous recess
Where death upon those dainty hinges hangs.
Our lonely lives in every chance agreeing,
It is no common friendship that you bring,
It was the desert starved us into being,
The hate of men that sharpened us to sting:
Sired by starvation, suckled by neglect,
Hate was the surly tutor of our youth:
I too can hiss the hair of men erect
Because my lips are venomous with truth.
Where the hard rock is barren, scorched the spring,
Shrivelled the grass, and the hot wind of death
Hornets the crag with whirred metallic wing --
We drew the fatal secret of our breath:
By whirlwinds bugled forth, whose funneled suction
Scrolls the spun sand into a golden spire,
Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction,
Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire.
Dainty one, deadly one, whose folds are panthered
With stars, my slender Kalihari flower,
Whose lips with fangs are delicately anthered,
Whose coils are volted with electric power,
I love to think how men of my dull nation
Might spurn your sleep with inadvertent heel
To kindle up the lithe retaliation
And caper to the slash of sudden steel.
There is no sea so wide, no waste so steril
But holds a rapture for the sons of strife:
There shines upon the topmost peak of peril
A throne for spirits that abound in life:
There is no joy like theirs who fight alone,
Whom lust or gluttony have never tied,
Who in their purity have built a throne,
And in their solitude a tower of pride.
I wish my life, O suave and silent sphinx,
Might flow like yours in some such strenuous line,
My days the scales, my years the bony links,
That chain the length of its resilient spine:
And when, at last, the moment comes to strike,
Such venom give my hilted fangs the power,
Like drilling roots the dirty soil that spike,
To sting these rotted wastes into a flower.
+ + + + + + + + + +
from The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry, ed. Dame Edith Sitwell (Little, Brown, and Company, 1958), pp. 924-5.
by Roy Campbell (1901-57)
With breath indrawn and every nerve alert,
As at the brink of some profound abyss,
I love on my bare arm, capricious flirt,
To feel the chilly and incisive kiss
Of your lithe tongue that forks its swift caress
Between the folded slumber of your fangs,
And half reveals the nacreous recess
Where death upon those dainty hinges hangs.
Our lonely lives in every chance agreeing,
It is no common friendship that you bring,
It was the desert starved us into being,
The hate of men that sharpened us to sting:
Sired by starvation, suckled by neglect,
Hate was the surly tutor of our youth:
I too can hiss the hair of men erect
Because my lips are venomous with truth.
Where the hard rock is barren, scorched the spring,
Shrivelled the grass, and the hot wind of death
Hornets the crag with whirred metallic wing --
We drew the fatal secret of our breath:
By whirlwinds bugled forth, whose funneled suction
Scrolls the spun sand into a golden spire,
Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction,
Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire.
Dainty one, deadly one, whose folds are panthered
With stars, my slender Kalihari flower,
Whose lips with fangs are delicately anthered,
Whose coils are volted with electric power,
I love to think how men of my dull nation
Might spurn your sleep with inadvertent heel
To kindle up the lithe retaliation
And caper to the slash of sudden steel.
There is no sea so wide, no waste so steril
But holds a rapture for the sons of strife:
There shines upon the topmost peak of peril
A throne for spirits that abound in life:
There is no joy like theirs who fight alone,
Whom lust or gluttony have never tied,
Who in their purity have built a throne,
And in their solitude a tower of pride.
I wish my life, O suave and silent sphinx,
Might flow like yours in some such strenuous line,
My days the scales, my years the bony links,
That chain the length of its resilient spine:
And when, at last, the moment comes to strike,
Such venom give my hilted fangs the power,
Like drilling roots the dirty soil that spike,
To sting these rotted wastes into a flower.
+ + + + + + + + + +
from The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry, ed. Dame Edith Sitwell (Little, Brown, and Company, 1958), pp. 924-5.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Francisco de Quevedo
The blogger at Laudator Temporis Acti gives us a sonnet by the Spanish poet, translated by Willis Barnstone. A somewhat negative view of "The Ages of Man": not for the prudish!
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