For my birthday, 80 degrees.
Light wind. Windy light.

*

“Develop your legitimate strangeness.”

—René Char, “Formal Share,” XXII (trans. Mary Ann Caws)

*

“To be a poet is to have an appetite for discomfort whose consummation, among the whirlwinds of all things existing and foreseen, stirs up, at the moment of closure, happiness.”

—Char, “Formal Share,” XLII

*

“We belong to no one except the golden point of light from that lamp unknown to us, inaccessible to us, that keeps awake courage and silence.”

—Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 5 (trans. Nancy Kline)

[The studied nature of the above translation sent me back to the one below, which has a more natural feel.]

“We belong to no one, unless to the golden flame of that lamp which—unknown to us, inaccessible to us—keeps our courage and silence awake.”

—Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 5 (trans. Jackson Matthews)

*

“Know the blood, ignore the celestial.”

—Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 16 (trans., here and below, by Nancy Kline]

*

“The man who sees only one wellspring knows only one storm. The chances within him are thwarted.”

—Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 208

*

“The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.”

—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

*

“Know the blood, ignore the celestial.”

—Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 16

*

“The time will come when nations on the hopscotch board of the universe will depend as closely on each other as the organs of one body, unified in its structure.
       Filled to bursting with machines, will the brian still be able to safeguard the existence of our think rivulet of dream and escape? Man marches at a sleepwalker’s pace toward murderous mines, led on by the inventor’s song…”

—Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 127

[The above was written in 1943 or ’44, less than a decade after 1936—the year that saw the summer Olympics take place in Hitler’s Berlin, the release of Charlie Chaplin‘s Modern Times, and the publication of Alan Turing’s article positing a theoretical machine that laid the foundation for developing the computer on which I am typing this post. Char foresaw where it would all lead: to us, today, when the rivulet of dream has vanished into the sewage networks of the “industrialized world.” Will it be like the ancient Helicon? (For Pausanias on Helicon, click here and scroll down to paragraph 8.) A stream disappearing into the earth only to emerge again 2-1/2 miles or so on with a new name and a depth significant enough to make it a navigable river? I don’t imagine the dream will disappear forever, though I’ll surely not live long enough to know for sure….]

*

I can’t help thinking
that poetry should—at least
now and then, between fancy
flights and the flint-struck
symbols, between fey allusions
and grad-school in-jokes,
the syncopations and busted
syntax—touch the Real.
And what if they’re right,
the LangPoBizAvants,
the neurolinguistic theorists
and philosophers weaned
on computer science? What if
Unreality is really the new Real?
Still. And yet. Nevertheless…

*

Something to aspire to—at any age.

*

“The man who sees only one wellspring knows only one storm. The chances within him are thwarted.”

—Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 208

*

This one migrated from my notebook into the comment stream of an earlier post. The “bespectacled professor” is an imaginary Charles Bernstein. Apologies, of course, to Gwendolyn Brooks….

ME REAL COOL

       The Bespectacled Professor.
       Alone at the Bar at the White Dog Cafe.

Me real cool. Me
teach school. Me

flip quip. Me
très hip. Me

dig “Bob.” Me
hack job. Me

pro quo. Me
LangPo.