The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides. Artur Schnabel
References:
“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” ― Thelonious Monk
Photo: Vintage market at Armazém, Porto, November 18, 2017
Chego atrasado à frisa dos teus olhos.
A música violeta pestaneja na sala.
Há uma actriz transida que tirita
transita
mas não fala.
Entro no teu olhar
Sou uma seta
que te cega e nos cala.
O silêncio é o sítio onde se grita
e a noite, minha amiga,
é mais discreta
como convém ao poeta
que se veste de gala.
O Smoking, José Carlos Ary dos Santos
I am late to the frieze of your eyes.
The violet music blinks in the room.
There is a transient actress who
transits
but does not speak.
I enter your gaze
I’m an arrow
who blinds you and keeps us silent.
Silence is the place where you scream
and the night, my friend,
is more discreet
as befits the poet
who dresses up.
The Smoking, José Carlos Ary dos Santos ( my imperfect translation)
Photo: Written on the wall, Braga (November 26, 2017)
In Lijiang, the sign outside your hostel
glares: Ride alone, ride alone, ride
alone – it taunts you for the mileage
of your solitude, must be past
thousands, for you rode this plane
alone, this train alone, you’ll ride
this bus alone well into the summer night,
well into the next hamlet, town,
city, the next century, as the trees twitch
and the clouds wane and the tides
quiver and the galaxies tilt and the sun
spins us another lonely cycle, you’ll
wonder if this compass will ever change.
The sun doesn’t need more heat,
so why should you? The trees don’t need
to be close, so why should you?
How have I laboured?
How have I not laboured
To bring her soul to birth,
To give these elements a name and a centre!
She is beautiful as the sunlight, and as fluid.
She has no name, and no place.
How have I laboured to bring her soul into separation;
To give her a name and her being!
Surely you are bound and entwined,
You are mingled with the elements unborn;
I have loved a stream and a shadow.
I beseech you enter your life.
I beseech you learn to say ‘I’
When I question you;
For you are no part, but a whole,
No portion, but a being.
Ezra Pound, Ortus in The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917
Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.
I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.
I have to guess on the spot
just what this play’s all about.
Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.
Words and impulses you can’t take back,
stars you’ll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run ?
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.
If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).
You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I’ve done.
Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh
I am not, nor have I ever been a focused person. My attention is always distracted by some real or imagined connection or possibility. This obviously means that I’m the least efficient person I know. I get things done when they need to get done because I do not like to disappoint those who depend on me getting things done and because I procrastinate until I really have no other option. But, in general, inspirational quotes and sayings on how “things will happen if you stay focused” do not resonate with me. Staying focused will not make everything happen. Or, maybe it will, I just haven’t tried it.
I am not even one of those “existentialist pessimists” who thinks that all hope is an illusion. No, I do cling to hope and believe things will get better. If I just wait. They don’t. They haven’t.
You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people – which means there is no way out. Happy and judged or absolved and miserable.
Albert Camus, The Fall
And now that I realize this and that this certainty seems to occupy my mind whenever I’m awake and sometimes even in my sleep, I can’t keep on waiting because it would be absurd. Although I should, by now, be way past the age of existential crisis, it does appear that sometimes it takes too long to build up the courage to become who you are and own the mistakes you have made while trying to convince yourself that you were different.
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
Trying to stay focused on being ” my own story” seems to be hard enough at this point but it’s better than waiting or just refusing to see what went wrong.
Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.
Seamus Heaney
Photo: Words on Walls, Lisbon, September 2017 ( Running aimlessly is to wait in movement)
when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric”
I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:
to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.
we can’t cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us
it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.
A song with no end
Photo CPF (September 16, 2017). This was the last place, the exact last room where I saw O. for the last time. I don’t know if he liked Bukowski. I hope he did because I seem to be having a Bukowski moment and this poem made me think of him.
Only in time
Photo: Gianmarco and Jennifer from the Opus Ballet Compagnia rehearsing in Porto, June 2017
References: T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton (1935)
after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, 1958
Les Amants, 1958
Les liaisons dangereuses, 1959
La Notte, 1960
Jules et Jim, 1962
Eva, 1962
La baie des anges, 1963
The cliché is that life is a mountain.
You go up, reach the top and then go down.
To me, life is going up until you are burned by flames.
Life is an accomplishment and each moment has a meaning and you must use it.
Life is given to you like a flat piece of land and everything has to be done.
I hope that when I am finished, my piece of land will be a beautiful garden, so there is a lot of work.
Photos via
References
Like Acting and Loving, Honor suits Jeanne Moreau
Narcissus
Once I was half flower, half self,
That invisible self whose absence inhabits mirrors,
That invisible flower that is always inwardly,
Groping up through us, a kind of outswelling weakness,
Yes once I was half frail, half glittering,
Continually emerging from the store of the self itself,
Always staring at rivers, always
Nodding and leaning to one side, I came gloating up,
And for a while I was half skin half breath,
For a while I was neither one thing nor another,
A waterflame, a variable man-woman of the verges,
Wearing the last self-image I was left with
Before my strenth went down down into the darkness
For the best of the year and lies crumpled
In a clot of sleep at the root of nothings all
Post inspired by Eduardo Lourenço’s interview (in Portuguese)
Photo: Me, myself and I by F.M.
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, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan th‘ expense of many a vanish’d sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.
Sonnet 30, William Shakespeare
My weekend was perfect because of Tiago Rodrigues’s play “By Heart”
My world is, after all, a place of beauty.
The purple breeze
Sings through the jacaranda
And wings away,
Leaving the shadows to flower
LAmerica
Cold treatment of our empress
LAmerica
The Transient Universe
LAmerica
Instant communion and
communication
lamerica
emeralds in glass
lamerica
searchlights at twi-light
lamerica
stoned streets in the pale dawn
lamerica
robed in exile
lamerica
swift beat of a proud heart
lamerica
eyes like twenty
lamerica
swift dream
lamerica
frozen heart
lamerica
soldiers doom
lamerica
clouds & struggles
lamerica
Nighthawk
doomed from the start
lamerica
“That’s how I met her,
lamerica
lonely & frozen
lamerica
& sullen, yes
lamerica
right from the start”
Then stop.
Go. The wilderness between.
Go round the march.
Jim Morrison, The Opening of the Trunk (fragment)
Late Monday Poetry
Photo (mine) Spring Street, DTLA June 2017
Not for me a youngman’s death
Not a car crash, whiplash
John Doe, DOA at A&E kind of death.
Not a gun in hand, in a far off land
IED at the roadside death
Not a slow-fade, razor blade
bloodbath in the bath, death.
Jump under a train, Kurt Cobain
bullet in the brain, death
Not a horse-riding paragliding
mountain climbing fall, death.
Motorcycle into an old stone wall
you know the kind of death, death
My nights are rarely unruly. My days
of allnight parties are over, well and truly.
No mistresses no red sports cars
no shady deals no gangland bars
no drugs no fags no rock’n’roll
Time alone has taken its toll
Not for me a youngman’s death
Not a domestic brawl, blood in the hall
knife in the chest, death.
Not a drunken binge, dirty syringe
“What a waste of a life” death.
Not for Me a Youngman’s Death
By Roger McGough
Stories from A Closet of Errors 