Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Posted on: March 28, 2012

Comments (0)

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.…

[More...]

Posted on: March 27, 2012

Comments (4)

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.…

[More...]

Posted on: March 2, 2012

Comments (1)

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.…

[More...]