Bordando el Manto Terrestre by Remedios Varo

Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

— Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Poem Number Two on Bell's Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love

There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.

— June Jordan

I saw no Way—The Heavens were stitched—
I felt the Columns close—
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres—
I touched the Universe—

And back it slid—and I alone—
A Speck upon a Ball—
Went out upon Circumference—
Beyond the Dip of Bell—

— Emily Dickinson

Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world. The eyes he had cut and focussed with his father's chisel showed him this. The birds dove towards gaps within the trees! They flew through the shelves of heat currents. The tiniest of hearts in them beating exhausted and fact, the way Sirissa had died in the story he invented for her in the vacuum of her disappearance. A small brave heart. In the heights she loved and in the dark she feared.

He felt the boy's concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world.

— Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

— Thomas Pynchon, V.

Vuelta de paseo

Asesinado por el cielo.
entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe
y las formas que buscan el cristal,
dejaré crecer mis cabellos.

Con el árbol de muñones que no canta
y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo.

Con los animalitos de cabeza rota
y el agua harapienta de los pies secos.

Con todo lo que tiene cansancio sordomudo
y mariposa ahogada en el tintero.

Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día.
¡Asesinado por el cielo!

— Frederico García Lorca

Seeing how many miles you have to go,
I set up a little stall on your route.
I serve a nice cup of tea, and am never
too busy to chat.

— Rumi

One of the amazing characteristics of nature is the variety of interpretational schemes that is possible. It turns out that it is only possible because the laws are just so, special and delicate.... If you modify the laws much you find that you can only write them in fewer ways. I always find that mysterious, and I do not understand the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics seem to be expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.

— Richard Feynman

The Kingfishers, III

Despite the discrepancy (an ocean courage age)
this is also true: if I have any taste
it is only because I have interested myself
in what was slain in the sun

I pose you your question:

shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?

I hunt among stones

— Charles Olson

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it.

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

That Country

This is about the women of that country
Sometimes they spoke in slogans
They said
   We patch the roads as we patch our sweetheart's trousers
   The heart will stop but not the transport
They said
   We have ensured production even near bomb craters
   Children let your voices sing higher than the explosions
                            of the bombs

They said
   We have important tasks to teach the children
   that the people are the collective masters
   to bear hardship
   to instill love in the family
   to guide the good health of the children (they must
   wear clothing according to climate)
They said
   Once men beat their wives
   now they may not
   Once a poor family sold its daughter to a rich old man
   now the young may love one another
They said
   Once we planted our rice any old way
   now we plant the young shoots in straight rows
   so the imperialist pilot can see how steady our
   hands are

In the evening we walked along the shores of the Lake
                           of the Restored Sword

I said is it true? we are sisters?
They said Yes, we are of one family

— Grace Paley

Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity by James B. Hartle

Hegel says somewhere that all great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: 'Once as tragedy, and again as farce.'

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.

— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Surah

the falling paper flower
the plastic tree branch
the plight of reminiscing
the bureaucracy of kismet
the factories empty of logic
the bins to hold what's done
the spaceship of butterflies
the video game of intimacy
the series premiere of strife
the discretion of the cosmos
the sharp wisdom of the young
O friend who reads in a cave w/o
light
the comb detangling the scars
forward is not so far away

— Tarfia Faizullah

Creación de las Aves by Remedios Varo

Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

— John Donne

Tired

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two —
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

— Langston Hughes

je n'ai rien que des jours
à t'offrir mais ensemble
ensemble
ma bouche ta bouche
dans tes mains dans mes mains
ce sont elles qui tournent
autour de l'an pas l'an
qui tourne
mais nous ensemble
la ronde de la vie

— Henri Meschonnic

Time of the Missile

I remember a square of New York's Hudson River glinting between warehouses.
Difficult to approach the water below the pier
Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier
A steel wall: tons in the water,

Width.
The hand for holding,
Legs for walking,
The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air!

Become the realm of nations.

My love, my love,
We are endangered
Totally at last. Look
Anywhere to the sight's limit: space
Which is viviparous:

Place of the mind
And eye. Which can destroy us,
Re-arrange itself, assert
Its own stone chain reaction.

— George Oppen

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

— Robert Hass

These Poems

These poems
they are things I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

— June Jordan

No one will ever know about your tragedy, and the world eluded its responsibility ages ago.

— Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile (trans. Bonnie Huie)

Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is...
we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

— Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

The Sun Rising

      Busy old fool, unruly sun,
      Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
      Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
      Late school boys and sour prentices,
   Go tell court hunstmen that the king will ride,
   Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all allike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

      Thy beams, so reverend and strong
      Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
      If her eyes have not blinded thine,
      Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
   Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
   Be where thou lefst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

      She's all states, and all prince, I,
      Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
      Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
      In that the world's contracted thus.
   Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
   To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

— John Donne

Language is and always will be an occupied territory. I have the feeling I was shackled to it the moment I was born. Only language can help you belong somewhere and make sure you don't lose your way. It's a nourishing underlayer that seems to live in the mind, migrate down to the mouth, and, spoken, melt on the lips. At the same time, language is everywhere, occupying the body's farthest-flung cells, pushing them to unimaginable places. It urges you on and turns your stomach, confuses your animal instincts, makes you human. No emotion is more indulgent than the feeling that you are intensely human. Though it can also be the most tyrannical. You are responsible for every word, and no statement is innocent.

— Eva Baltasar Sardà, Boulder (trans. Julia Sanches)

Every act of knowing brings forth a world.
— Maturana and Varela

Don`t talk to me about Matisse
the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio
where the nude style woman reclines forever
on a sheet of blood.

Talk to me instead about the culture generally
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

Imaginary Number

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are

comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is
destroyed
be compared?

Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,

like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.

— Vijay Seshadri

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping