2016-10-21
2016-09-12
October Forest
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
At the Fishhouses, by Elizabeth Bishop.
2016-01-19
January First, by Octavio Paz
The year's doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.
I opened my eyes late.
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
for the time's uncertain return
through cracks in the horizon.
But no, the year had returned.
It filled all the room
and my look almost touched it.
Time, with no help from us,
had placed
in exactly the same order as yesterday
houses in the empty street,
snow on the houses,
silence on the snow.
You were beside me,
still asleep.
The day had invented you
but you hadn't yet accepted
being invented by the day.
––Nor possibly by being invented, either.
You were in another day.
You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among appearances.
Time, with no help from us,
invents houses, streets, trees
and sleeping women.
When you open your eyes
we'll walk, once more,
among the hours and their inventions.
We'll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations.
Perhaps we'll open the day's doors.
And then we shall enter the unknown.
#Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bishop with the author
like those of language,
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.
I opened my eyes late.
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
for the time's uncertain return
through cracks in the horizon.
But no, the year had returned.
It filled all the room
and my look almost touched it.
Time, with no help from us,
had placed
in exactly the same order as yesterday
houses in the empty street,
snow on the houses,
silence on the snow.
You were beside me,
still asleep.
The day had invented you
but you hadn't yet accepted
being invented by the day.
––Nor possibly by being invented, either.
You were in another day.
You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among appearances.
Time, with no help from us,
invents houses, streets, trees
and sleeping women.
When you open your eyes
we'll walk, once more,
among the hours and their inventions.
We'll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations.
Perhaps we'll open the day's doors.
And then we shall enter the unknown.
#Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bishop with the author
2013-10-04
2013-06-30
a dialogue
The joke is that all the prostitutes go on vacation when the philosophers come to town. The reason is that the other conventioneers do it, while philosophers just talk about it.
Although this sounds like a parody to Marx's notorious thesis on Feuerbach No.11, the truth here might be the old-fashion, naive ideology cliché: While philosophers keep doing it over and over for whatever reason, they tend to invent ever obscure theories to cover it up.
However, as you probably know, the new version of ideology goes like this: philosophers would lose the ability of doing it if they don't have some theories to talk about.
Or, maybe they are just trying to escape from the overwhelming desire or fear of doing it by keep talking?
Maybe. But there is still an alternative which is far more straightforward: they do gain more pleasures, or, as economists said, utilities, from talking than doing it.
Unfortunately, the alternative is unverifiable as well.
Fortunately, we have MRI now. All we need to do is to get some philosophers, put them on the machine and check their brains to see where in the brain the activity imposes and whether the talk makes it stronger...
Although this sounds like a parody to Marx's notorious thesis on Feuerbach No.11, the truth here might be the old-fashion, naive ideology cliché: While philosophers keep doing it over and over for whatever reason, they tend to invent ever obscure theories to cover it up.
However, as you probably know, the new version of ideology goes like this: philosophers would lose the ability of doing it if they don't have some theories to talk about.
Or, maybe they are just trying to escape from the overwhelming desire or fear of doing it by keep talking?
Maybe. But there is still an alternative which is far more straightforward: they do gain more pleasures, or, as economists said, utilities, from talking than doing it.
Unfortunately, the alternative is unverifiable as well.
Fortunately, we have MRI now. All we need to do is to get some philosophers, put them on the machine and check their brains to see where in the brain the activity imposes and whether the talk makes it stronger...
2013-03-31
2013-02-10
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be, by John Keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
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