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Noviembre 21, 2004
Incise...
Incise, invent, file to poignance;
make your elusive dream
seal itself
in the resistant mass of crude substance.
Denise Levertov
(from Art)
Posted by sarita at 1:11 PM
Noviembre 10, 2004
Do not burn yourselves out...
Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for natural land and the west; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still there.
So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breath deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for awhile and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound men with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: You will outlive the bastards.
Edward Abbey
Posted by sarita at 8:38 PM
But why, the questioner insists...
But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love
uninhabited country so much?
Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development,
the churlish resistance to all popular improvement?
.
Very well, a fair question, but it's been asked and answered a thousand times
already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt with the
question.
.
There are many answers, all good, each sufficient.
.
Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means;
re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape;
novelty, the delight of something different;
truth and understanding and wisdom- commendable virtues in any man, anytime;
ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility
and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to
questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin
of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present --
all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead
degrading question as "Why wilderness?"
.
.
To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway:
Because we like the taste of freedom;
because we like the smell of danger.
.
.
Edward Abbey
Posted by sarita at 8:37 PM
There were always in me...
There were always in me, two women at least,
one woman desperate and bewildered,
who felt she was drowning and another who
would leap into a scene, as upon a stage,
conceal her true emotions because they
were weaknesses, helplessness, despair,
and present to the world only a smile,
an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
AnaIs Nin
Posted by sarita at 8:35 PM
Looking, Walking, Being
"The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in."
Mark Rudman
I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.
The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.
And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.
breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.
Denise Levertov
Posted by sarita at 8:34 PM
Wanting the Moon
Not the moon. A flower
on the other side of the water.
The water sweeps past in flood,
dragging a whole tree by the hair,
a barn, a bridge. The flower
sings on the far bank.
Not a flower, a bird calling
hidden among the darkest trees, music
over the water, making a silence
out of the brown folds of the river's cloak.
The moon. No, a young man walking
under the trees. There are lanterns
among the leaves.
Tender, wise, merry,
his face is awake with its own light,
I see it across the water as if close up.
A jester. The music rings from his bells,
gravely, a tune of sorrow,
I dance to it on my riverbank.
Denise Levertov
Posted by sarita at 8:34 PM
Morning (Love Sonnet XXVII)
Naked you are simple as one of your hands;
Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.
You've moon-lines, apple pathways
Naked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.
Naked you are blue as a night in Cuba;
You've vines and stars in your hair.
Naked you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.
Naked you are tiny as one of your nails;
Curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
And you withdraw to the underground world.
As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;
Your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again.
Pablo Neruda
Posted by sarita at 11:20 AM