Spring
–Elfriede Jelinekapril breathof boyish redthe tongue crushesstrawberry dreamshack away woundand wound the fountainand on the mouthperspiration whitefrom someone’s necka little toothhas bit the fingerof the bride thetabby yellow and serehowlsthe red boyfrom the gable fliesan animal hearkensin his white throathis juice runs downpigeon thighsa pale sweet spikestill sticksin woman whitelardan april breathof boyish red
Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash
Paths of the Mirror
And above all else, to look with innocence. As if nothing was happening, which is true.
But you, I want to look at you until your face escapes from my fear like a bird from the sharp edge of the night.
Like a girl drawn with pink chalk on a very old wall that is suddenly washed away by the rain.
Like when a flower blooms and reveals its heart that isn’t there.
Every gesture of my body and my voice aimed to make myself into the offering, the bouquet that the wind abandons on the porch.
Cover the memory of your face with the mask of who you will be and scare off the girl you once were.
The night of us both scattered with the fog. It’s the season of cold foods.
And the thirst, my memory is of the thirst, me underneath, at the bottom, in the hole, I drank, I remember.
To fall like a wounded animal in a place that was meant to be for revelations.
As if it meant nothing. No thing. Mouth zipped. Eyelids sewn. I forgot. Inside, the wind. Everything closed and the wind inside.
Under the black sun of silence the words burned slowly.
But the silence is true. That’s why I write. I’m alone and I write. No, I’m not alone. There’s somebody here, shivering.
Even if I say sun and moon and star I’m talking about things that happen to me. And what did I wish for? I wished for a perfect silence. That’s why I speak.
The night is shaped like a wolf’s scream.
Delight of losing one-self in the presaged image. I rose from my corpse, I went looking for who I am. Migrant of myself, I’ve gone towards the one who sleeps in a country of wind.
My endless falling into my endless falling where nobody waited for me –because when I saw who was waiting for me I saw no one but myself.
Something was falling into the silence. My last word was “I” but I was talking about the luminescent dawn.
Yellow flowers constellate a circle of blue earth. The water trembles, full of wind.
The blinding of day, yellow birds in the morning. A hand untangles the darkness, a hand drags the hair of a drowned woman that never stops going through the mirror. To return to the memory of the body, I have to return to my mourning bones, I have to understand what my voice is saying.
Original
I
Y sobre todo mirar con inocencia. Como si no pasara nada, lo cual es cierto.II
Pero a ti quiero mirarte hasta que tu rostro se aleje de mi miedo como un pájaro del borde
filoso de la noche.III
Como una niña de tiza rosada en un muro muy viejo súbitamente borrada por la lluvia.IV
Como cuando se abre una flor y revela el corazón que no tiene.V
Todos los gestos de mi cuerpo y de mi voz para hacer de mí la ofrenda, el ramo que abandona
el viento en el umbral.VI
Cubre la memoria de tu cara con la máscara de la que serás y asusta a la niña que fuiste.VII
La noche de los dos se dispersó con la niebla. Es la estación de los alimentos fríos.VIII
Y la sed, mi memoria es de la sed, yo abajo, en el fondo, en el pozo, yo bebía, recuerdo.IX
Caer como un animal herido en el lugar que iba a ser de revelaciones.X
Como quien no quiere la cosa. Ninguna cosa. Boca cosida. Párpados cosidos. Me olvidé.
Adentro el viento. Todo cerrado y el viento adentro.XI
Al negro sol del silencio las palabras se doraban.XII
Pero el silencio es cierto. Por eso escribo. Estoy sola y escribo. No, no estoy sola.
Hay alguien aquí que tiembla.XIII
Aun si digo sol y luna y estrella me refiero a cosas que me suceden. ¿Y qué deseaba yo?
Deseaba un silencio perfecto.
Por eso hablo.XIV
La noche tiene la forma de un grito de lobo.XV
Delicia de perderse en la imagen presentida. Yo me levanté de mi cadáver, yo fui en busca de quien soy.
Peregrina de mí, he ido hacia la que duerme en un país al viento.XVI
Mi caída sin fin a mi caída sin fin en donde nadie me aguardó pues al mirar quién me aguardaba
no vi otra cosa que a mí misma.XVII
Algo caía en el silencio. Mi última palabra fue yo pero me refería al alba luminosa.XVIII
Flores amarillas constelan un círculo de tierra azul. El agua tiembla llena de viento.XIX
Deslumbramiento del día, pájaros amarillos en la mañana. Una mano desata tinieblas, una mano arrastra
la cabellera de una ahogada que no cesa de pasar por el espejo. Volver a la memoria del cuerpo,
he de volver a mis huesos en duelo, he de comprender lo que dice mi voz.
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
Vierge Moderne
I am no woman. I am a neuter.
I am a child, a page-boy, and a bold decision,
I am a laughing streak of a scarlet sun…
I am a net for all voracious fish,
I am a toast to every woman’s honor,
I am a step toward luck and toward ruin,
I am a leap in freedom and the self…
I am the whisper of desire in a man’s ear
I am the soul’s shivering, the flesh’s longing and denial,
I am an entry sign to new paradises.
I am a flame, searching and brave,
I am water, deep yet bold, only to the knees,
I am fire and water, honestly combined, on free terms…
Original
Jag är ingen kvinna. Jag är ett neutrum.
Jag är ett barn, en page och ett djärvt beslut,
jag är en skrattande strimma av en scharlakanssol…
Jag är ett nät för alla glupska fiskar,
jag är en skål för alla kvinnors ära,
jag är ett steg mot slumpen och fördärvet,
jag är ett språng i friheten och självet…
Jag är blodets viskning i mannens öra,
jag är en själens frossa, köttets längtan och förvägran,
jag är en ingångsskylt till nya paradis.
Jag är en flamma, sökande och käck,
jag är ett vatten, djupt men dristigt upp till knäna,
jag är eld och vatten i ärligt sammanhang på fria villkor…
Photo by Luis Graterol on Unsplash
A Vacancy Instead of You
–Elena Kostyleva
Photo by Dmitry Mashkin on Unsplash
The Meaning of Simplicity
I hide behind simple objects so you may find me,
if you do not find me, you will find the objects,
you will touch those objects my hand has touched,
the traces of our hands will mingle.
The August moon gleams like a tin kitchen kettle
(what I am telling you becomes like that),
it lights up the empty house and silence kneeling in the house
silence is always kneeling.
Every single word is an exodus
for a meeting, cancelled many times,
it is a true word when it insists on the meeting.
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
Definition of Attraction
On a fully broken-in animal’s back
a fully broken-in animal rides.
Photo by Alfredo Mora on Unsplash
Films Begin with a Funeral
–Mala Malanova
Photo by Rhodi Lopez on Unsplash
I Have Dead People
I have dead people, buried in the air.
–Yehuda Amichai
I have a bereaved mother while I’m still alive.
I am like a place
At war with time.
Once, the green color rejoiced
Near your face in the window.
Only in my dreams
Do I still love hard.
“While our coming migrations may not proceed fast enough to keep pace with our shifting climate, a growing body of evidence suggests they may be our best shot at preserving biodiversity and resilient human societies.” – Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
Previous book reports: 2021 – February, January. 2020 – December, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2019 – December, November, October, September, May, April, March, February, January. 2018 – November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February and January.
A lackluster month in many ways – overly long, filled with churning through the process of just trying to get things done. Reading hasn’t been the priority, and I feel its loss when I don’t have the time to indulge.
Still, I read quite a few things, but nothing really stood out.
“…people do not become ill despite their lives but rather because of their lives. And life includes not only physical factors like diet, physical activity, and the environment, but also the internal milieu of thoughts and unconscious emotions that govern so much of our physiology, through the mechanisms of stress and the unity of the systems that modulate nerves, hormones, immunity, digestion, and cardiovascular function. Much disease could be prevented and healed if we fully understood the scientific evidence verifying the mind-body unity.”
Can stress kill you… or contribute to your early demise?
“The dynamics of repression operate in all of us. We are all self-deniers and self-betrayers to one extent or another, most often in ways we are no more aware of than I was conscious of while “deciding” to disguise my limp. When it comes to health or illness, it is only a matter of degree and, too, a matter of the presence or absence of other factors—such as heredity or environmental hazards, for example—that also pre-dispose to disease.”
Dr Gabor Maté, well-known for his work on addiction, argues that stress and trauma, particularly that which has been repressed and never dealt with, can be fatal.
“A U.S. study, for example, found that women who are unhappily married and do not express their emotions have a greatly increased risk of death compared with similarly unhappy women who do not repress their feelings. Canadian research has shown that people abused in childhood have a nearly 50 percent increased risk of cancer in adulthood. Such data are manifestations of what the psychiatrist and author Daniel Siegel has termed “interpersonal neurobiology,” or what, going a small step further, we may call interpersonal biology. Our relationships help shape our physiology.”
One of the salient points in the book is one that emerges from discussion about human health more generally: we ignore the whole in favor of the part, specializing in or focusing on one thing, only to end up without insight into the bigger picture. The human body can suffer most of all from this short-sightedness and perceived lack of connection between the mind and body.
“The more specialized doctors become, the more they know about a body part or organ and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that part or organ resides.”
Additionally, dealing with stress or trauma also requires understanding what to do with the absence of stress: after a life lived under the weight of the burden of it, the lack of stress itself can cause another type of stress.
“For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, Hans Selye observed. To such persons stress feels desirable, while the absence of it feels like something to be avoided.”
So let’s start by saying that I am not a developer and even though I work in a tech environment, these kinds of books aren’t part and parcel of what I need to do or know. They are not designed for me. Not at this level of hands-on or specific depth anyway. But it’s still interesting following along passively as technology and application development change shape.
“Human migration is not exceptional. Long isolation did not differentiate our species into separate races. Feats of navigation are not the sole province of “white gods” from the West. The oceans can be crossed by canoe. And humans aren’t the only ones who move across the landscape, leaping over continents and oceans. Plants and animals do, too.”
Migration is nothing new – it has been done forever.
“By describing peoples and species as “from” certain places, we invoke a specific idea about the past. It traces back to the eighteenth century, when European naturalists first started cataloging the natural world. Assuming that peoples and wild creatures had stayed mostly fixed in their places throughout history, they named creatures and peoples based on those places, conflating one with the other as if they’d been joined since time immemorial. Those centuries-old taxonomies formed the foundation for modern ideas about our biological history. Today a range of fields from ecology to genetics and biogeography allude to long periods of isolation in our distant past, when species and peoples remained ensconced in their habitats, each evolving in their separate locales. This stillness at the center of our ideas about the past necessarily casts migrants and migrations as anomalous and disruptive. Early twentieth-century naturalists dismissed migration as an ecologically useless and even dangerous behavior, warning of “disastrous results” should migrant animals be allowed to move freely. Conservationists and other scientists warned that human migration, too, would precipitate biological calamity.”
Sonia Shah tells the story of migration – of animals, plants, people, explaining its additive rather than disruptive or negative force.
We tend to think of the United States as an always-united concept apart from the horror of the Civil War. But the idea of disunion and secession has always been woven into the ethos of the American experiment. It continues now, particularly during the turbulence of the last few years (the lead-up to and during the Trump presidency).
“Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known.“
Amen.
Image (c) 2021, S Donaghy
