0-Epigraphs (cafe/notebook)

The instant of composition keeps the memory alive, raw. He will walk forward, with pain and difficulty, into the past and make it cohere. The church spire is a needle to his pole.
           Memory Maps: 'The Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's
          'Journey Out of Essex'' by Iain Sinclair http://www.vam.ac.uk/

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calligraphy (John Brewster)

if I could write you
you would not be a poem
or a story
or a drama of dark romance
you would be the pen
not the word
the ink
not the letter
if I could write you
you would be a flourish
a long curl
a delicate eternal
stroke of my heart’s
calligraphy 

*****

she talks to him and he talks to himself. Like two soliloquists just within earshot of one another they seem sometimes to fall into dialogue and at others to be taking part in completely different dramas.
                       Written out of Revenge - Rosemary Hill- LRB Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen & Charles Ritchie Letters and Diaries 1941-73 edited by Victoria Glendinning, with Judith Robertson

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'The virgin finds pleasure in her rising desire,
The young tiger finds pleasure in his consummation,
The old man finds pleasure in his fertile memory:
           Drukpa Kunley’s “Sutra of Sex” (redux)
           Translation from Bhutanese by Keith Dowman and Sonam Paljor

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I suppose the ‘font’ of ambition is the desire not to be forgotten—I would like to right [sic] poems for you that will make you the subject of thought and dreams, years after we are gone—Abellard and Eloise [sic] have never been forgotten—Dante’s Beatrice is still alive—Why not my lover, who will be remembered for his services to his country, why should he not be known too, because of me?
           Mary Borden (letter)

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"Time wakens a longing more poignant than all the longings caused by the division of lovers in space, for there is no road back into its country.  Our bodies were not made for that journey; only the imagination can venture upon it; and the setting out, the road, and the arrival:  all is imagination."

Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (The Hogarth Press 1954), page 224.

*****

 “What I said before about you & me perhaps is what really applies: we met on top of a mountain & should leave it at that”. For all his newspaper-reading, pub-going, and hymning of the ordinary life, a significant part of MacNeice remained in residence on that mountain top, and it was on its difficult heights that he was able to reveal himself more fully and humanly than ever before or afterwards. Jonathan Allison, editor LETTERS OF LOUIS MACNEICE

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Reading and writing as a magical ploy to get closer to a loved one after his death, and to discover oneself. Writing, which she refers to in another part of the book, as "the food of the gods", offers the chance to break out of the confines of daily life and on the wings of language, to intoxicate oneself with thoughts, and reveal oneself stripped bare.

What is indispensable is the opening of all flood-gates while maintaining the strictest standards and exercising ruthless discipline and rigour’. There is wildness in the first and second drafts, she has said, but the iron fist comes in with the third and fourth.    Friedericke Mayrocker

it must end in silence

*****

If one sees music as a spiritual journey, as I do, then it must always go forward, and I think it must eventually end in silence. I never understood that with Stockhausen: why it didn't end in silence. Perhaps it will [...] I think it must end in silence, and go on to prayer, which is a higher form of creativity. (Paul Griffiths, New Sounds, New Personalities. British Composers of the 1980s, London: Faber, 1985, 111)

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music of love

magic melody
dangerous dissonance
baroque being
senile silence

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The Arrival of Poetry - by Manash Bhattacharjee

And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived
in search of me . . . I don't know where
it came from ~ Pablo Neruda

The arrival of poetry is catastrophic. You are seized by indescribable wonder and an equally incomprehensible terror. You face a blank page to write what no one has asked you to write, with very little idea of what you will end up writing. The absence of a commandment marks your freedom. You stray away from the familiar house of grammar, and for the first time feel lured by the forest of language. It is a fearful moment of infinite responsibility. Nicanor Parra's advice to young poets is precisely this: "In poetry everything is permitted. / With only this condition of course, / You have to improve the blank page."

But I refuse to leave the book only I can write be unwritten because of laziness or fear. http://bsailors.wordpress.com/