This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in 

the icebox  

and which 

you were probably

saving 

for breakfast  

Forgive me 

they were delicious

 so sweet 

and so cold

-- William Carlos Williams

hazlet on hamlitt

Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself 'too much i' the sun', whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known 'the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes'; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady; who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparition of strange things; who cannot be well at east while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, - he to whom the universe seems infinite and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them: this is the true Hamlet.

...

"That which for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking"

--Nietzsche, 'The Twilight of the Idols'

why

"I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough"

--Harold Bloom, 'Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human'

zhongguoren

…a sort of reticence in meta-language, in the great metaphysical and/or philosophical systems… responsible, perhaps, for something in the way that ancient and modern Chinese have of explaining their problems, which often is disconcerting to us.

Rather than proceeding to an explanation which, for us, is the only logical one – which seeks the causes, makes the deductions, specifies the motivations, appearance and essences, and at the same time foresees the consequences of an event – an operation which derives from the principle of a logical, metaphysical causality – the Chinese give us a ‘structuralist’ or ‘warring’ (contradictory) portrait. Behind the event itself there appears a combination or an association that bears the seed of the overthrow of the previous order; a battle between good and evil, two-faced people, persecutions, conspiracies, sensational turns of event.

As if the causal, deterministic, metaphysical logic had crumbled before the traumatic occurrence whose advent we question, but without losing the symbolic level, the Chinese-speaking individual describes this event as if he were speaking of a game, a war, a combinatorium… an aesthetic mode of reasoning… By eliminating straight away the problem of an objective truth, it shifts people to a symbolic situation.

--Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women

Are we the victims of a language that we cannot change, that predates us, and that is primary and autonomous, constraining and predetermining the way we percieve and feel, or does language add a dimension of freedom to our existence by allowing us to reformulate our experience?

--Marie Jaans Kurrik, 'Literature and Negation'

rain-globe

But man cannot live in chaos. The animals can. To the animal, all is chaos, only there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge. And the animal is content. But man is not. Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos. Then he paints the underside of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives, and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong.

--DH Lawrence

in out in out [ask matilda]

How do you describe people who dont think - the scientist, essentially, the person who just wants to grasp the nutshell and not to lean into the infinite abyss...?  

An expansion out from from the neat confines of a perfectly epitomised meaning is the natural movement of thought. As Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness: 'The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But [...] [to Marlow] the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine'.  [....]   It is easy to misconstrue this idea of space and place, as suggested in Hamlet's words: 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space', and W.S. Graham wrote in a letter that poetry must not 'hand us out a little nutshell truth which we have pleasure in agreeing with'.  [...]  The 'bad dreams' which counteract this happy illusion for Hamlet are his awakening into consciousness, an escape into the external; in this way, poetry is like a flurry of bad dreams; brooding in the 'nutshell' that metaphor might imply, is the bad dream of instability in extended, infinite space.  Paterson's concept of metaphor as creating 'a new unity in the language' is of a unity brought about by drawing attention to the disunity of everyday literal and metaphorical language. It is an act of understanding created out of exposing the limiting enclosure of the firmament, similar to D.H. Lawrence's concept of the mind's umbrella. [...]

'Silent Love'

There's no vocabulary

For love within a family, love that's lived in

But not looked at, love within the light of which

All else is seen, the love within which

All other love finds speech.

This love is silent.

--T.S. Eliot

If you ever think a day is fine, you weren’t paying attention

--Magic Molly, 23.3.10

[ pause ]

There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: 'failure of communication' … and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

I am not suggesting that no character in a play can never say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.

--Harold Pinter, 'Writing for the Theatre'

"we talked about the nature of good until almost one!"

It seems as if the highest efforts of the most intelligent people produce a negative result; one cannot honestly be anything...

Why were the gifted people the most barren? Why were the most stimulating of friendships also the most deadening? Why was it all so negative? Why did these young men make one feel that one could not honestly be anything?

--Virginia Woolf, 'Moments of Being'

Old Bloomsbury

"No" was the most frequent reply. "No, I haven't seen it"; "No, I haven't been there". Or simply, "I don't know". The conversation languished in a way that would have been impossible in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate. Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily.

-- Virginia Woolf, 'Moments of Being'

Gemma speaks,

How to stop people in their tracks, and make them think. Only if you're starving, if it's your son lying in your arms, or you think he might be in that discarded pile of mutilated bodies, or there's no milk in your breast and the baby's crying, or the radiation is leaking into your child's lungs, or the lead or the nitrates or the, or the, or the and all the while skirts get longer, skirts get shorter, skirts get longer, skirts get shorter, poetry is written, the news is read, I buy a different butter at the store and have my hair permed, straightened, coloured, cut, lengthened, all the while my hair keeps growing, I throw away all my skirts [...] I'm on the pill, I'm off the pill, I'm on the pill, I'm off the pill. I'm listening to jazz, swing, jazz, swing, I'm getting my posters framed. I'm telling my women's group everything. Im protesting. I'm protesting. I've covered my wall with postcards, with posters, with postcards, with posters. No this. Out them. In theses. Yes those. No this. Out them. In these. Yes those. The rows. The rows with my friends, my lovers. What were they about? What did they change? The fact is, the facts are, nothing is changed. Nothing has been done. There is neither rhyme nor reason, just tears, tears, people's pain, people's rage, their aggression. And silence.

Look, already its happening here, the weight of words, the torrent, all the words seep into each other, the rage, the protest all clotting together, sit and listen to the wireless and run the wheel of the tuner, spin the dial, hear them all at it, in all languages, pouring out. This is, after all, our first punishment - Babel - saying so much to say nothing. Doing so much to say nothing. Because the power to arrest, to stop us short in our tracks, what does that? (Pause.) But the silence, listen, how rich it is, how pregnant, how full...

-- Anthony Mingella, 'Cigarettes and Chocolate'

that's it and that's that

All we're talking about, finally is what is real? What is real? There's only one reality, you know. You can interpret reality in various ways. But there's only one. And if that reality is thousands of people being tortured to death at this very moment and hundreds and thousands of megatons of nuclear bombs standing there waiting to go off at this very moment, then that's it and that's that. It has to be faced.

-- Harold Pinter, in conversation with Nicholas Hern