Posted on: March 28, 2012
Academy
(after the painting by Cy Twombly)
Scrawls on the hide
of a whale
almost words
more than scrawls
almost more than words
a kind of history
of victories & defeats
rough encounters
in dangerous seas
mad love
crawling syllables
ampersands
asterisks
slashes
coherent by half
call out
wounded
its migration done
it crawls to land
to teach its young.
Invasion of the Night
(after the painting by Roberto Antonio
Sebastián Matta Echaurren)
Time, times, and a half
the wicked judged
you and I
our bodies
chased and caught
invaded by the night
and crushed
upon a darkling sky
as stars burn out
flames from a lick
chaos in a jar
an absence of civility
and light
in our final hour.…
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Posted on: March 27, 2012
Samsara. Date and Artist unknown
All religious scripture speaks on many levels, in a multitude of ways. Some who read scripture believe them to be literally true, while others see them as poetic, symbolic, allegorical. They see metaphors where others see history. And all writers of scripture no doubt realized this vast sea of difference. They all realized that their work would be interpretated differently, given the context, the culture, the times, the levels of literacy and education. The best of them wrote in such a way that multiple interpretations could live harmoniously and effectively, side by side, for centuries.
Buddhist scripture was, of course, no different.
The concept of “rebirth”, for instance, lends itself to a great many interpretations. For me, as a Western novice, as one who views Jewish, Christian and Moslem scripture as literature, not history or fact, the Buddhist concept of “rebirth” carries the weight of metaphor, not physics.…
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Posted on: March 2, 2012
Edvard Munch’s The Scream. 1893
There is no real relationship between a word and what it represents — outside our minds, outside our desire to forge that relationship. Outside the web of communication between one mind and the next, beyond the catalog of accepted naming conventions, there is no natural connection, correspondence or exact match. It is, in a word, arbitrary, empty, functional. The word “dog,” for instance, tells us (rather, demonstrates) nothing, really, about the actually existing animal, and the actually existing animal exists with or without our language, with or without our rather lame attempt to name it and describe it.
Many great writers felt the crush of this, this realization that they were condemned to forever fall short in what they did, what they loved to do.…
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