God, A Poem

God, A Poem


A nasty surprise in a sandwich,
A drawing-pin caught in your sock,
The limpest of shakes from a hand which
You'd thought would be firm as a rock,

A serious mistake in a nightie,
A grave disappointment all round
Is all that you'll get from th'Almighty,
Is all that you'll get underground.

Oh he said: 'If you lay off the crumpet
I'll see you alright in the end.
Just hang on until the last trumpet.
Have faith in me, chum-I'm your friend.'

But if you remind him, he'll tell you:
'I'm sorry, I must have been pissed-
Though your name rings a sort of a bell. You
Should have guessed that I do not exist.

'I didn't exist at Creation,
I didn't exist at the Flood,
And I won't be around for Salvation
To sort out the sheep from the cud-

'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact is
In soteriological terms
I'm a crude existential malpractice
And you are a diet of worms.

'You're a nasty surprise in a sandwich.
You're a drawing-pin caught in my sock.
You're the limpest of shakes from a hand which
I'd have thought would be firm as a rock,

'You're a serious mistake in a nightie,
You're a grave disappointment all round-
That's all you are, ' says th'Almighty,
'And that's all that you'll be underground.'

1983


James Fenton

O voyeur

Gosto das tuas pernas grossas a aparecerem debaixo das calças arregaçadas
Gosto da forma como os teus pés descalços se agarram ao chão

No principio vivemos em equilíbrio agarrados à firmeza das nossas convicções
Um dia resultado de um movimento natural descobrimo-nos com outro ponto de vista

Os nossos corpos são como barcos à vela navegando ventos inconstantes
Nós e a nossa doença mantemos um equilíbrio, desfeito este será a nossa morte

O teu corpo forte, a tua postura exigente, o teu humor seco
Tudo isso cai perante a finura das tuas mãos, elas traem-te…bem como uma certa luz
Que vem com o teu sorriso. Nada disto importa, tudo isto é rapidamente esquecido
Como velhas fechaduras roídas pela ferrugem, já sem portas para abrir.

This Be the Verse

This Be the Verse
By Philip Larkin 1922–1985

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.


But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.


Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse” from Collected Poems.

Rothko

I don't think that much about Rothko paintings in Summer...

Barcelona

A promessa

Reluzindo o equipamento novo, ele espera encostado à baliza o inicio do treino, vai retesando os músculos das pernas, gosta de mostrar como estão definidos, todo o trabalho de ginásio que fez para os ter assim. Vem das camadas jovens de um clube da capital, parece que teve uns apontamentos promissores e agora está aqui para rodar, ganhar minutos, experiência.
Aplica-se nos treinos de inicio de época e os adeptos atentos vão falando dele, é uma das esperanças para a época que se avizinha. O clube espera um bom desempenho neste campeonato, talvez uma promoção e conta-se com ele.
O primeiro jogo foi fora e nada correu bem…muita gente nova, pouco entrosamento, os outros foram melhores e ganharam bem.
Primeiro jogo em casa, a promessa tem entradas de leão, faz umas corridas fortes, tem mesmo um remate intencional, saiu ao lado, enfim…que pena aquela lesão pouco antes do intervalo…
Ainda vai regressar durante a primeira volta, mas a coisa não corre bem de novo, entrou nos últimos minutos de um par de jogos e quando voltou à titularidade lá se lesionou outra vez…Quando a época acaba poucos se lembram dele, a equipa teve altos e baixos, ficou a meio da tabela, para o ano haverá um novo financiador e a coisa será melhor acham os adeptos. Ele foi só uma promessa cara que não deu em nada, foi mais o tempo que passou no ginásio e no posto médico do que no campo.
Para o ano lá vai ele repetir o ciclo para novo clube, enquanto os ecos dos seus apontamentos de juventude durarem e os clubes da província ainda o queiram, a história vai-se repetindo…Até que mesmo a ele se acabe a vontade de andar a mostrar os músculos das pernas antes dos treinos, em campos cada vez mais rascas, cada vez mais longe, sítios onde os adeptos vão ao campo pelo bar, não pelos jogadores…
Então voltará ao estádio do clube original, onde tentará ser reconhecido por colegas do seu tempo, tentará contar histórias aos adeptos, basicamente passará a fazer parte da cor do local.
Os adeptos mais velhos dirão entre si quando ele chega :
“-Foi uma promessa, mas não deu em nada…”.

o momento

Quando participas num jogo, tens de te situar dentro dele, não vale pores-te de fora e colocares-te na posição de observador…o teu pensamento deixará de estar sincronizado com o jogo e as tuas jogadas serão sempre lentas e denunciadas.
Olha o jogador que em contra-ataque tem a linha de passe perfeita para isolar um colega, deslumbra-se com a antecipação do sucesso, quando o passe sai, um defesa adivinhou-lhe as intenções e intercepta a bola : - Aaaaaahhhhhh…
Perdeu-se o momento.

Death's Echo

"O who can ever gaze his fill,"
Farmer and fisherman say,
"On native shore and local hill,
Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand?
Father, grandfather stood upon this land,
And here the pilgrims from our loins will stand."
So farmer and fisherman say
In their fortunate hey-day:
But Death's low answer drifts across
Empty catch or harvest loss
Or an unlucky May.
The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The end of toil is a bailiff's order,
Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.

"O life's too short for friends who share,"
Travellers think in their hearts,
"The city's common bed, the air,
The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach,
Where incidents draw every day from each
Memorable gesture and witty speech."
So travellers think in their hearts,
Till malice or circumstance parts
Them from their constant humour:
And slyly Death's coercive rumour
In that moment starts.
A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus,
Not to be born is the best for man;
An active partner in something disgraceful,
Change your partner, dance while you can.

"O stretch your hands across the sea,"
The impassioned lover cries,
"Stretch them towards your harm and me.
Our grass is green, and sensual our brief bed,
The stream sings at its foot, and at its head
The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed."
So the impassioned lover cries
Till the storm of pleasure dies:
From the bedpost and the rocks
Death's enticing echo mocks,
And his voice replies.
The greater the love, the more false to its object,
Not to be born is the best for man;
After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle,
Break the embraces, dance while you can.

"I see the guilty world forgiven,"
Dreamer and drunkard sing,
"The ladders let down out of heaven,
The laurel springing from the martyr's blood,
The children skipping where the weeper stood,
The lovers natural and the beasts all good."
So dreamer and drunkard sing
Till day their sobriety bring:
Parrotwise with Death's reply
From whelping fear and nesting lie,
Woods and their echoes ring.
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance's pattern; dance while you can.


Dance, dancefor the figure is easy,
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.


1936

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

Federico

"Pensavo di non essere tagliato per la regia. Mi mancavano il gusto della sopraffazione tirannica, la coerenza, la pignoleria, la capacità di faticare e tante altre cose, ma soprattutto l’autorità. Tutte doti assenti nel mio temperamento. Da bambino ero un tipetto chiuso, solitario, aggredibile, vulnerabilissimo fino allo svenimento. E sono rimasto, checché ne pensi la gente, molto timido. Tutto questo come si poteva combinare con gli stivali, il megafono, l’urlata, le armi tradizionali del cinema? La regia di un film è sempre il comando sulla ciurma di Cristoforo Colombo che vuol tornare indietro."

Federico Fellini | January 20, 1920 — October 31, 1993

spooky action at a distance

"Using a variety of camera formats to affect perception and plane, Jan Groover creates complex, abstract spatial arrangements in her still-life, portrait, and landscape photography. Untitled #1308, a platinum/palladium print on luminous vellum-like paper, aptly demonstrates her craftsmanship in the darkroom with its finely-wrought delicacy. A painter by training, Groover makes reference to art history in her photographs, from Renaissance perspective drawings to Cezanne’s tabletops.

Groover was born in New Jersey in 1943. She received her BFA in 1965 from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and her MA from Ohio State University in 1970. Her work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is also the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation."

taken from here : http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/groover_jan.php

"You will think I am self-opinionated"

Salman Rushdie perspective on her here :
http://artpunjab.deviantart.com/journal/Amrita-Sher-Gil-from-Salman-Rushdie-s-perspective-223563799

uncomplicated

A Poem of Unrest

A Poem of Unrest, by John Ashbery


November 05, 1995


Men duly understand the river of life,

misconstruing it, as it widens and its cities grow

dark and denser, always farther away.

****

And of course that remote denseness suits

us, as lambs and clover might have

if things had been built to order differently.

****

But since I don't understand myself, only segments

of myself that misunderstand each other, there's no

reason for you to want to, no way you could

****

even if we both wanted it. Do those towers even exist?

We must look at it that way, along those lines

so the thought can erect itself, like plywood battlements.

From "Can You Hear, Bird" by John Ashbery. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $20; 175 pp.) 1995 Reprinted by permission.

pictures you take...

"The portrait of the corpse also had its “pictorial” stage, in line with a general trend of fin-de-siècle photography, considered by Roland Barthes as an exaggeration of a prejudice that photography had about itself. And over time, the portrait of the deceased has virtually disappeared with the spreading of photography, since we all store abundant pictures of our living relatives."

This is true...and curious.

I found it here :
http://riowang.blogspot.com/2012/01/dead-bodies-frozen-light.html

Art is difficult

"Art is difficult," says the 66-year-old firmly. "It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art – it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art."
Anselm Kiefer talking to The Guardian

a burguesia, sim senhor

Adoro a burguesia e não me via a afirmar isto publicamente nos meus heróicos e idos anos 70...aliás até esse século já se foi, como não haveria eu de ser outro ?!
Voltando à afirmação inicial : adoro a burguesia, a das luzes, a que participou na grande revolução francesa, aquela que quer queiramos quer não, ajudou a criar a Europa tal como a idealizamos, mesmo a América dos nossos sonhos…
Como andamos hoje tão longe destes valores e desta presença de espirito. Voltaremos algum dia à Terra ou continuaremos nesta vida virtual onde nos mantém ?

between heaven and hell

"Basohli Paintings evolved in the 17th and 18th centuries as a distinctive style of painting fusing Hindu mythology, Mughal miniature techniques, and the folk art of the local hills. The painting style derives its name from the place of its origin—the hill town of Basohli. . . in the state of Jammu & Kashmir."
Vinayak Razdan

I found those here :
http://50watts.com/2300847/Fourteen-Basohli-Paintings

A secret bowl of silence

A secret bowl of silence



a word you left unsaid

a kiss you decided not to give

this you kept


a gentle pang in your chest

keeps you company through the nights

this you have


a dwindling light

this you are.

CLASSIFIEDS

CLASSIFIEDS

WHOEVER'S found out what location
compassion (heart's imagination)
can be contacted at these days,
is herewith urged to name the place;
and sing about it in full voice,
and dance like crazy and rejoice
beneath the frail birch that appears
to be upon the verge of tears.

I TEACH silence
in all languages
through intensive examination of:
the starry sky,
the Sinanthropus' jaws,
a grasshopper's hop,
an infant's fingernails,
plankton,
a snowflake.

I RESTORE lost love.
Act now! Special offer!
You lie on last year's grass
bathed in sunlight to the chin
while winds of summers past
caress your hair and seem
to lead you in a dance.
For further details, write: "Dream."

WANTED: someone to mourn
the elderly who die
alone in old folks' homes.
Applicants, don't send forms
or birth certificates.
All papers will be torn,
no receipts will be issued
at this or later dates.

FOR PROMISES made by my spouse,
who's tricked so many with his sweet
colors and fragrances and sounds -
dogs barking, guitars in the streets -
into believing that they still
might conquer loneliness and fright,
I cannot be responsible.
Mr. Day's widow, Mrs. Night.

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~


(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997,
trans. by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)