Memory

(EC 2/20 '11)

it is when feeling some life not my own, a view from a moment in the past and into the future, like a dream is, or a memory that brings say, with a glass of wine a fear, that is not to say -    what?  that the future is made up of past moments?  That a dream is never life because a dream is neither succeeding nor failing but simply is, a dream - thread out of what was.

And value is put on this dream.  Why?

    simply put it has no value
    but is valuable,
    just like it is to say
    when two sides to a given
    motion are unveiled,
    we sit beneath it,
    neither bowed to it
    nor standing over,
    that is the dream
    and so I think
    is dreaming.

"you need a form to dream"  - Bei Dao

hence, the necessity for poetry, music, etc.

good night. 

2/20  '11.

René Char - "Seuil" ("Threshold")

Seuil (Threshold)

          When it gave way, the barrage of man, sucked in by the great rift of the abandonment of god, of the divine, words in the distance, words that wished themselves not to be lost, tried to resist the exorbitant push.  There was decided the dynasty of their meaning.
          I have run to the very end of this diluvian night.  Planted in the trembling dawn, my belt full of seasons -my friends, I wait for you.  Already I can make you out behind the horizon's black.  My hearth never tires of wishing your houses well, and my cypress stick laughs, for you, with all its heart.


                        from Fureur et Mystère
                           Trans.  Eliot Cardinaux