Dec 19, 2015
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Dec 11, 2015
Nov 28, 2015
Pablo Neruda and Ben Okri's 'A Way of Being Free'
Below are some of Ben Okri's quotes on the artistic compulsion that resonated for me. I wanted to capture them, to revisit them whenever I needed confirmation ... or consolation? These words struck a chord in me and I linked the artist's ability to creatively and mythically transform 'reality' to Neruda's passionate love poems, particularly my favourite, Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines (see transcript below).
Excerpts from Chapter One: 'While the World Sleeps'
"The poet needs to be up at night, when the world sleeps; needs to be up at dawn, before the world wakes; needs to dwell in odd corners, where Tao is said to reside; needs to exist in dark places, where spiders forge their webs in silence; near the gutters, where the underside of our dreams fester. Poets need to live where others don't care to look, and they need to do this because if they don't they can't sing to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives. They need to be multiple witnesses around the central masquerades of reality in order to convey fully the unimaginable dimensions of the deity's terrible and enchanting dance.
"The poet turns the earth into mother, the sky becomes a shelter, the sun an inscrutable god, and the pragmatists are irritated. They want the world to come with only one name, one form. The antagonists of poets and other transformers are those who refuse to see the fluid nature of reality, who cannot perceive that each individual reality is different. Laws do not bind our perceptions. There are as many worlds as there are lives.
"Poets are set against the world because they cannot accept that what there seems to be is all there is. Elias Canetti wrote once that: "The inklings of poets are the forgotten adventures of God." Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They come with no tablets of stone, and they do not speak with God. They speak to us. Creation speaks to them. They listen. They remake the world in words [or pictures] from dreams. Intuitions which could only come from the secret mouths of gods whisper to them through all of life, of nature, of visible and invisible agencies. Storms speak to them. Thunder speaks to them. Flowers move their pens. Words [or pictures] themselves speak to them and bring forth more words. The poet is the widener of consciousness.
"... Politicians, heads of state, kings, religious leaders, soldiers, the rich, the powerful – they all fancy themselves the masters of this earthly kingdom. They speak to us of facts, policies, statistics, programmes, abstract and severe moralities. But the dreams of the people are beyond them, and would trouble them. It is they who have to curb the poet's vision of reality. It is they who invoke the infamous 'poetic licence' whenever they do not want to face the inescapable tragedy contained in, for example, Okigbo's words: "I have lived the oracle dry on the cradle of a new generation". It is they who demand that poetry be partisan, that it take sides, usually their side; that it rides on the back of causes and issues, their causes, their issues, whoever they may be.
"... If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?
"Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness. It is those who are scared of reality, of their own truths, of their own histories, those who are secretly sickened by what they have become, who are alarmed by the strange mask-like faces that peer back at them from the mirrors of time, it is they who resist the poetic. They resist the poetic with all their hidden might because if they don't, the power of words speaking in their own heads would burst open their inner doors, and all the monsters breeding within would come bounding out and crashing on the floor of their consciousness. What would hold their inner frames together then? They have to suppress the poetic, or accept it only on blurred terms, or promote its cruder imitations, for the simple reason that they have long ago begun suppressing eruptive life and all its irreconcilable shadings, its natural paradoxes.
Okri, B 1997, 'While the world sleeps' in A Way of Being Free, London, UK: Phoenix House, pp. 1–15.
(In memory of my mother)
Tonight I can write the saddest lines
Write, for example,"The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
– Pablo Neruda
Excerpts from Chapter One: 'While the World Sleeps'
"The poet turns the earth into mother, the sky becomes a shelter, the sun an inscrutable god, and the pragmatists are irritated. They want the world to come with only one name, one form. The antagonists of poets and other transformers are those who refuse to see the fluid nature of reality, who cannot perceive that each individual reality is different. Laws do not bind our perceptions. There are as many worlds as there are lives.
"Poets are set against the world because they cannot accept that what there seems to be is all there is. Elias Canetti wrote once that: "The inklings of poets are the forgotten adventures of God." Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They come with no tablets of stone, and they do not speak with God. They speak to us. Creation speaks to them. They listen. They remake the world in words [or pictures] from dreams. Intuitions which could only come from the secret mouths of gods whisper to them through all of life, of nature, of visible and invisible agencies. Storms speak to them. Thunder speaks to them. Flowers move their pens. Words [or pictures] themselves speak to them and bring forth more words. The poet is the widener of consciousness.
"... Politicians, heads of state, kings, religious leaders, soldiers, the rich, the powerful – they all fancy themselves the masters of this earthly kingdom. They speak to us of facts, policies, statistics, programmes, abstract and severe moralities. But the dreams of the people are beyond them, and would trouble them. It is they who have to curb the poet's vision of reality. It is they who invoke the infamous 'poetic licence' whenever they do not want to face the inescapable tragedy contained in, for example, Okigbo's words: "I have lived the oracle dry on the cradle of a new generation". It is they who demand that poetry be partisan, that it take sides, usually their side; that it rides on the back of causes and issues, their causes, their issues, whoever they may be.
"... If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?
"Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness. It is those who are scared of reality, of their own truths, of their own histories, those who are secretly sickened by what they have become, who are alarmed by the strange mask-like faces that peer back at them from the mirrors of time, it is they who resist the poetic. They resist the poetic with all their hidden might because if they don't, the power of words speaking in their own heads would burst open their inner doors, and all the monsters breeding within would come bounding out and crashing on the floor of their consciousness. What would hold their inner frames together then? They have to suppress the poetic, or accept it only on blurred terms, or promote its cruder imitations, for the simple reason that they have long ago begun suppressing eruptive life and all its irreconcilable shadings, its natural paradoxes.
Okri, B 1997, 'While the world sleeps' in A Way of Being Free, London, UK: Phoenix House, pp. 1–15.
(In memory of my mother)
Tonight I can write the saddest lines
Write, for example,"The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
– Pablo Neruda
Oct 26, 2015
What I term the 'life-field', Levi Bryant describes as vortices.
Artists and writers - those who leave a 'novel' mark - might find this interesting.
The interconnection of the 'life-field' not as separate 'objects' but as a dyad, or vortices as viewed by speculative realist Levi Bryant. Jun 21, 2015
The Real Princess (Princess and the Pea)
I can see a new work in this with many themes around the feminine, so I'm saving the story here.
It's worth another 'adult' read for although it was first published in 1835, it has a very pertinent message for today.
Story by Hans Christian Andersen
It's worth another 'adult' read for although it was first published in 1835, it has a very pertinent message for today.
Story by Hans Christian Andersen
THE REAL PRINCESS
There was once a Prince who wished to marry a Princess; but then she must be a real Princess. He travelled all over the world in hopes of finding such a lady; but there was always something wrong. Princesses he found in plenty; but whether they were real Princesses it was impossible for him to decide, for now one thing, now another, seemed to him not quite right about the ladies. At last he returned to his palace quite cast down, because he wished so much to have a real Princess for his wife.
One evening a fearful tempest arose, it thundered and lightened, and the rain poured down from the sky in torrents: besides, it was as dark as pitch. All at once there was heard a violent knocking at the door, and the old King, the Prince's father, went out himself to open it.
It was a Princess who was standing outside the door. What with the rain and the wind, she was in a sad condition; the water trickled down from her hair, and her clothes clung to her body. She said she was a real Princess.
"Ah! we shall soon see that!" thought the old Queen-mother; however, she said not a word of what she was going to do; but went quietly into the bedroom, took all the bed-clothes off the bed, and put three little peas on the bedstead. She then laid twenty mattresses one upon another over the three peas, and put twenty feather beds over the mattresses.
Upon this bed the Princess was to pass the night.
The next morning she was asked how she had slept. "Oh, very badly indeed!" she replied. "I have scarcely closed my eyes the whole night through. I do not know what was in my bed, but I had something hard under me, and am all over black and blue. It has hurt me so much!"
Now it was plain that the lady must be a real Princess, since she had been able to feel the three little peas through the twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. None but a real Princess could have had such a delicate sense of feeling.
The Prince accordingly made her his wife; being now convinced that he had found a real Princess. The three peas were however put into the cabinet of curiosities, where they are still to be seen, provided they are not lost.
Wasn't this a lady of real delicacy?
Source: (viewed 21 June, 2015)
Jun 20, 2015
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May 20, 2015
More on DENISE GREEN ... (and Chaos Theory)
From the 1980s chaos was seen as an enemy by determinists, randomness a force to be overcome or denied... For them, chaos was death and disorder, entropy and waste. The opposing faction however experienced chaos as so benevolent, the necessary matrix out of which arises spontaneously an infinity of variegated forms — a pleroma rather than an abyss — a principle of continual creation, unstructured, fecund, beautiful, spirit of wildness. These
scientists saw chaos theory as vindication of Quantum indeterminacy and Godel’s Proof, promise of an open-ended universe, Cantorian infinities of potential... chaos as health."
(from Ong’s Hat – The Beginning)
I've linked this positive view of Chaos Theory with Green's view of her artistic practice:
Metonymy, a term coined by the ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss "... assigns no specific meaning to signs, as opposed to symbolism, which sets up a direct one-to-one correspondence between a sign and its referent, as in medieval iconography. Rather, it allows meaning to spread 'in all directions, absorbing and conjoining ever new aspects of reality (near and far, conscious and unconscious, present and past …)'. For Green, Aboriginal sand paintings—and, by association, her paintings—are less about form than about meaning; they are not about duality, but fusion and wholeness—an argument that emanates from traditional Eastern aesthetics. If [Clement] Greenberg’s formalism held that all signs point inward, namely, to the medium itself (i.e. that painting is essentially about painting and sculpture is about sculpture), Green affirms abstract painting’s capacity to evoke personal feelings from the unconscious."
scientists saw chaos theory as vindication of Quantum indeterminacy and Godel’s Proof, promise of an open-ended universe, Cantorian infinities of potential... chaos as health."
(from Ong’s Hat – The Beginning)
I've linked this positive view of Chaos Theory with Green's view of her artistic practice:
Metonymy, a term coined by the ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss "... assigns no specific meaning to signs, as opposed to symbolism, which sets up a direct one-to-one correspondence between a sign and its referent, as in medieval iconography. Rather, it allows meaning to spread 'in all directions, absorbing and conjoining ever new aspects of reality (near and far, conscious and unconscious, present and past …)'. For Green, Aboriginal sand paintings—and, by association, her paintings—are less about form than about meaning; they are not about duality, but fusion and wholeness—an argument that emanates from traditional Eastern aesthetics. If [Clement] Greenberg’s formalism held that all signs point inward, namely, to the medium itself (i.e. that painting is essentially about painting and sculpture is about sculpture), Green affirms abstract painting’s capacity to evoke personal feelings from the unconscious."
May 17, 2015
May 15, 2015
May 14, 2015
May 11, 2015
May 10, 2015
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