From Williamsburg Bridge (Hopper 1928)

The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote.) Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of ‘large contexts.’  The same method applies, in essence, to the consideration of great things from the past–the Cathedral of Chartres, the temple of Paestum–when, that is, a favorable prospect presents itself: the method of receiving things into our space.  We don’t displace our beings into theirs; they step into our life.

–Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (p. 206)

One Fall Night

Now that we’ve run the edge of a perfect circle,
we become recurrence.  From within its own absence,
the wind has picked up now—how sudden the advance
of this scheming season: doors shudder against the winds,
fields already lay bare but for those unharvested remains
still tendrilled to ideals of rotund abundance.

Once, we too were tethered to a timeless abundance,
an encompassing now which ruled our tightly drawn circle.
No movement beyond that present—nothing remained
from a yesterday, or for a tomorrow.  Time’s absence
removed us from the grief and hope that now wind
themselves tighter and tighter with each hour’s advance.

Not yet free, could we have known in advance
just how our first unthinking grasp of the abundance
would instigate time?   And evening.  And morning.  The four winds
carried us far from that primordial circle.
We drifted—evening, morning—and sculpted new absence
in our own image.  Then, discarding the remains,

we fled.  Never to return.  For us, all that remained
was rootlessness. Never to advance
beyond our love of loving.   We made absence
our god, and we lamented our emptied abundance.
And now, every circle is a vicious circle.
And now, autumn’s hour is again. Grinning winds

gorge themselves on barren fields, and other winds
still wait in the hills to claim their share of our remains.
We are safe.  Safe, we move within our warm circles,
bolstered and fortified against the winds’ advance,
repeating ourselves and others, feigning abundance—
this too shall pass, we are safe now, you know, absence

makes the heart grow there but for the grace of absence—
repeating, cowering within our wind-
struck shelters, we lean and summon abundance
back from autumn’s ambush, but find that nothing remains
after yet another thousand years’ advance
and again we run the edge of a perfect circle.

And abundance is last night’s grapes. Still chilled, they remain
in the bowl by the window, fending off dawn’s advance.
You, I, and our absence.  One fall night.  Encircled.

M. Salomon

photo: the dance of the leaves when the autumn winds blow by Joseph Brauer

…authorized personnel only…

Image: Ellen Barbara Segner

HEAVEN’S EEL

A slight wrinkle on the pond.

Small wind.

A small wind and the rumpled clouds’ reflection.

Ho hum . . . What’s needed is something under the pond’s skin,

Something we can’t see that controls all the things that we do see.

Something long and slithery,

something we can’t begin to comprehend,

A future we’re all engendered for, sharp teeth, Lord, such sharp teeth.

Heaven’s eel.

Heaven’s eel, long and slick,

Full moon gone, with nothing in its place.

A doe is nibbling away at the long stalks of the natural world

Across the creek.

It’s good to be here.

It’s good to be where the world’s quiescent, and reminiscent.

No wind blows from the far sky.

Beware of prosperity, friend, and seek affection.

The eel’s world is not your world,

but will be soon enough.

–Charles Wright

————-

SOURCES:

Text– New Yorker (10 October 2009)

Image–based on Ripples by polaroid667 (licensed Creative Commons 2.0)

Was uns
zusammenwarf,
schrickt auseinander,

ein Weltstein, sonnenfern,
summt.

–Paul Celan

What tossed us
together,
startles apart,

a worldstone, sun-distant,
hums.

——————–
SOURCES: Text: Lichtzwang.
Image: Based on Liverpool Street station crowd blur by victoriapeckham (Licensed Creative Commons by 2.0)

Last night we attended the Synetic Theater’s vital staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which I found to be about as faithfully original as any adapted work I can remember. Max will be encountering Shakespeare’s text later this semester, and I’m wondering how that experience will stack up against Synetic’s extraordinary performance. Well, needless to say, we’re hooked, and looking forward to Dracula.

…more…MORE…

Enormous stores of potential energy always seem to be lodged at the sanctuary gates. Further evidence: mended things’s intensely felt report, which begins with frisson at the church door, then sparks, flares, and mushrooms into in an absorbing vision of a future wherein the mud, praise god, will finally have been flung.

Last Saturday, the first day of the Jewish civil year, I struggled with a similar incident at the gates of another sanctuary that directed my thoughts toward (and diverted my anger from) “prayer” and “community.” In the process, I stumbled across this little tale.

THE MASTER AND THE UNLAVED ONE
Once, it is said, the Master prayed so deeply that he lost track of his surroundings and walked for three days and three nights until he found himself in a deserted region far from home. A large frog appeared and revealed that in a former life he had been a Torah scholar but had fallen under Satan’s influence through neglecting the obligatory ritual of hand washing. The punishment for this transgression was to spend five hundred years as a frog, far from the paths of Jews who might inadvertently bless him by thinking good thoughts as they passed by. The Master prayed over the frog-man until his soul went up to heaven, leaving only a wrinkled amphibian shell behind.

SOURCES:
Text: P & C Zaleski, Prayer: A History. Apart from adding a title, I’ve made one other change to the version cited by the Zaleskis–in their version, the “Master” is identified by his honorific, the Besht, a momentous historical figure, particularly renowned for the powers of his ecstatic prayer. Image: prayer at night by mrehan

videokudos: Poetry Foundation

Celebrate Ms. McHugh’s news and try her e-poem.