four-thirty-three

Oh do I have a chance?
You’re such a pretty girl
I’ll stay till you’re convinced -
there’s evil in this world.

Eef Barzelay (of Clem Snide), “Fight Song Melodies,” from the Rocket Science soundtrack.

(These poems were written in January 2007.  The second part was published in 2008 by Meritage Press as part of The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II [available here].  Because it’s part of a set, I’m publishing the entire long poem here for the first time.  More below the cut.)

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Work is hectic, so blogging has been deprioritized for the moment.  I’m singing Mozart’s Requiem on Saturday and Sunday, preparing for a possible John Cage performance at CalARTS  in early June (!), and contending with the end of the school year.  A few posts are in the works (subjects include Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Bataille, Robert Schumann and some original work), so more frequent posts are coming this week.

In the meantime, here’s the third movement from Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations), a choral setting of a fragment from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

Explanations Come To An End Somewhere [Steve Reich, 2004]

My fave MeFi post from the past several days has got to be this one, about the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.  All of the following links have been lifted from that thread:

Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel lecture “The Poet and the World,” is wonderful, as are the columns she wrote for the Polish magazine Literary Life, in which she dispensed advice to aspiring poets.  But my very favorite thing in that thread was Szymborska’s poem “A Few Words on the Soul,” which I shall reproduce here.

____________________

A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

Wislawa Szymborska
[translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh]

The first two tales are from John Cage’s book Silence (Cage was a practicing Zen Buddhist), and the third was spotted in a thread at MetaFilter.

____________________

I.

A young man in Japan arranged his circumstances so that he was able to travel to a distant island to study Zen with a certain Master for a three-year period. At the end of the three years, feeling no sense of accomplishment, he presented himself to the Master and announced his departure. The Master said, “You’ve been here three years. Why don’t you stay three months more?” The student agreed, but at the end of the three months he still felt that he had made no advance. When he told the Master again that he was leaving, the Master said, “Look now, you’ve been here three years and three months. Stay three weeks longer.” The student did, but with no success. When he told the Master that absolutely nothing had happened, the Master said, “You’ve been here three years, three months, and three weeks. Stay three more days, and if, at the end of that time, you have not attained enlightenment, commit suicide.” Towards the end of the second day, the student was enlightened.

____________________

II.

After a long and arduous journey a young Japanese man arrived deep in a forest where the teacher of his choice was living in a small house he had made.  When the student arrived, the teacher was sweeping up fallen leaves.  Greeting his master, the young man received no greeting in return.  And to all of his questions, there were no replies.  Realizing there was nothing he could do to get the teacher’s attention., the student went to another part of the same forest and built himself a house.  Years later, when he was sweeping up fallen leaves, he was enlightened.  He then dropped everything, ran through the forest to his teacher, and said, “Thank you.”

____________________

III.

One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”

And the student was enlightened.

This past Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of the second and final recording session for Kind of Blue; Miles Davis et al. got together to put “Flamenco Sketches” and “All Blues” down on tape.

Here’s Davis’s legendary 60s band (Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Tony WIlliams) playing “All Blues” live.

And, here’s a different and more traditionally bluesy version for solo piano by Richie Beirach, from the now out-of-print album Live at Mayfair Recital Hall (Amazon link). I love this recording.

All Blues by Miles Davis, as performed by Richie Beirach [1992] file deleted

Because, you know, fuck actually reading Das Capital, Phenomenology of Spirit or Ecce Homo in the internet age.  Some of these Twitter feeds aren’t in English.

Karl Marx: @charles_h_marx (deutsch)
Sigmund Freud: @sfreud
Friedrich Nietzsche: @nietzsche_f (deutsch) and @nietzsche_bot
Slavoj Žižek: @zizekspeaks
G. F. Hegel: @GeorgHegel
Carl Jung: @thecarljung

Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990 (an archive created by the UCLA Library)

In Opposition of 4/20 Celebration (a post from D’Alliance, a blog from the Drug Policy Alliance Network; a friend who works for the organization posted this on the twitters. Maybe don’t read it at work if your boss is touchy about drugs.)

I’m currently forcing myself to read the just-released torture memos.  I can’t even bring myself to write about them yet.

I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it? Tell me, and don’t lie!

–Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew)