The Inner Valley

You can die for it- an idea, or the world. People have done so, brilliantly, letting their small bodies be bound to the stake, creating an unforgettable fury of light. But this morning, climbing the familiar hills in the familiar fabric of dawn, I thought of China, and India and Europe, and I thought how the sun blazes for everyone just so joyfully as it rises under the lashes of my own eyes, and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire. ******* ✎ Mary Oliver (Maple Heights, U.S., 10 September 1935 - Hobe Sound, U.S., 17 January 2019). ◙ Artwork: Konstantin Yuon

I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic, used tires, taverns, saloons, bars, gallons of red wine, abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves, gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets, girls who haven’t quite gone totally wild, river eddies, leaky wooden boats, the smell of used engine oil, turbulent rivers, lakes without cottages lost in the woods, the primrose growing out of a cow skull, the thousands of birds I’ve talked to all of my life, the dogs that talked back, the Chihuahuan ravens that follow me on long walks. The rattler escaping the cold hose, the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot. ******* ✎  Jim Harrison (Grayling, Michigan, U.S., 11 December 1937 ~ Patagonia, Arizona, 26 March 2016 )

I spent all my savings on a Chagall lithograph and placed it beside an oak leaf I had picked up on the road something we can put a price on and something we can’t something that human heart and hand have produced and something that Nature has. The Chagall is beautiful. The oak leaf is also beautiful. I get up and make tea, with soft afternoon sunlight falling on the table. Looking at the Chagall, those days spent with her come back to me. When I look at the oak leaf I think of the creator’s delicacy. A leaf and the Chagall both are irreplaceably precious. The sound of Ravel on the piano heightens. Today becomes one with the eternity. Heart and body melt into the blue sky beyond the window. ... Where do these tears come from? ******* ✎ Shuntaro  Tanikawa (Tokyo, Japan, 15 December 1931) ◙  Artwork: Marc Chagall

I lived in those times. For a thousand years I have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted; When all human decency was imprisoned, I was free amongst the masked slaves. I lived in those times, yet I was free. I watched the river, the earth, the sky, Turning around me, keeping their balance, The seasons provided their birds and their honey. You who live, what have you made of your luck? Do you regret the time when I struggled? Have you cultivated for the common harvest? Have you enriched the town I lived in? Living men, think nothing of me. I am dead. Nothing survives of my spirit or my body. ******* ✎  Robert Desnos (Paris, France, 4 July 1900 ~ Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, Czechoslovakia, 8 June 1945).

"For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived." ******* ✎   Milan Kundera (Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1 April 1929). ◙ Artwork: Ludwig Meidner

Select your sorrows if you can, Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile. Adjust to a world divided Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles What natural alchemy lends To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth's fabled stare. If you must cross the April park, be brisk: Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar Lest you be held as a security risk Solicit only the evening star. Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster And higgledy piggledy giggle once begun Crown a host of unassorted sorrows You never could manage one by one. The world that jibes your tenderness Jails your lust. Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk: It may be only you can understand: On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man Beat on the ocean's floor the same saraband. ******* ✎ Car

"The poem is not a slogan. It cannot advertise you. It cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a killer lady. All this junk about the gangsters of love. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. " ******* ✎   Leonard Cohen (Westmount, Quebec, Canada, 21 September 1934 ~ Los Angeles, California, 7 November 2016 ).

Zengetsu, a Chinese master of the T'ang dynasty, wrote the following advice for his pupils: Living in the world yet not forming attachments to the dust of the world is the way of a true Zen student. When witnessing the good action of another encourage yourself to follow his example. Hearing of the mistaken action of another, advise yourself not to emulate it. Even though alone in a dark room, be as if you were facing a noble guest. Express your feelings, but become no more expressive than your true nature. Poverty is your treasure. Never exchange it for an easy life. A person may appear a fool and yet not be one. He may only be guarding his wisdom carefully. Virtues are the fruit of self-discipline and do not drop from heaven of themselves as does rain or snow. Modesty is the foundation of all virtues. Let your neighbors discover you before you make yourself known to them. A noble heart never forces itself forward. Its words are as rare gems, seldom displayed and of great value. To

Something is being told in the woods: aisles of shadow lead away; a branch waves; a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its path. A withheld presence almost speaks, but then retreats, rustles a patch of brush. You can feel the centuries ripple generations of wandering, discovering, being lost and found, eating, dying, being born. A walk through the forest strokes your fur, the fur you no longer have. And your gaze down a forest aisle is a strange, long plunge, dark eyes looking for home. For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers wider than your mind, away out over everything.    ******* ✎ William Edgar Stafford (Hutchinson, Kansas, 17 January 1914 – Lake Oswego, Oregon, 28 August 1993). ◙ Artwork: Iván Ivánovich Shishkin.

The washing never gets done. The furnace never gets heated. Books never get read. Life is never completed. Life is like a ball which one must continually catch and hit so it won't fall. When the fence is repaired at one end, it collapses on the other. The roof leaks, the kitchen door won't close, there are cracks in the foundation, the torn knees of children's pants … One can't keep everything in mind. The wonder is that beside all this one can notice the spring which is so full of everything continuing in all directions - into the evening clouds, into the redwing's song and into every drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow, as far as the eye can see, into the dusk . ******* ✎   Jaan Kaplinski  (Tartu, Estonia, born 22 January 194 1). ◙ Artwork: Richard Diebenkorn

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep, He hath awakened from the dream of life; 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. -We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. ******* ✎  Percy Bysshe Shelley  (Horsham, Sussex, England, 4 August 1792 ~ Gulf of  La Spezia, Kingdom of Sardinia, 8 July 1822). ◙ Artwork: William Blake.

"Just as I do not exist without the world, I am not myself without transcendence. … I stand before transcendence, which does not occur to me as existing in the world of phenomenal things but speaks to me as possible – speaks to me in the voice of whatever exists, and most decidedly in that of my self-being. The transcendence before which I stand is the measure of my own depth." ******* ✎ Karl Jaspers (Oldenburg, German Empire, 23 February 1883 - Basel, Switzerland, 26 February 1969) ◙ Artwork: Caspar David Friedrich

I t’s distance that makes mountains mountains. Looked at closely, they start to resemble me. Vast panoramas stop people in their tracks and make them conscious of the engulfing distances. Those very distances make people the people they are. Yet people can also contain distances inside themselves, which is why they go on yearning… They soon find they’re just places violated by distances, and no longer observed. They have then become scenery. ******* ✎ Shuntaro  Tanikawa (Tokyo, Japan, 15 December 1931) ◙  Artwork: Daniel O'Neill

  "I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary: The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations. The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last

A nightingale who happened to have no home of his own decided that he would try to settle in certain forest. The birds who were already there, however, had their own ideas about the matter, and soon drove him out.   One day, sitting disconsolately by the dusty road nearby, he was spied by another nightingale, who stopped to ask why   he looked so forlorn.   'I tried', said the first bird, 'to make my home among other birds, but they pecked, and they mobbed me, and they flapped at me until I had to leave yonder forest.'   'Perhaps you were boastful,' said the other nightingale.   'When, in a similar situation, I sought a tree of my own, all the birds first collected and asked me what I was doing, why I was singing.'   'Yes, those birds did the same with me,' said the first   nightingale.   'And what did you say?'   'I said: "I am singing because I simply cannot help it.”   'And then?'   'And

"The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their Idealism—and their assumption of Immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong -and lucky- he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile

My throat pulsates with pleasure when I see true art I am oligophrenic because I believe in nothing but poetry and oligophrenics are uninhibited and throw themselves into sex ******* ✎ Angela Marinescu (b. Arad, Romania, 8 July 1941). ◙ Artwork: Kees van Dongen

Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm. Watch the people succumb To madness With ample cheer; Let them look askance at you And you askance reply. Be an outcast; Be pleased to walk alone (Uncool) Or line the crowded River beds With other impetuous Fools. Make a merry gathering On the bank Where thousands perished For brave hurt words They said. But be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Qualified to live Among your dead. ******* ✎ Alice Walker (b. Eatonton, Georgia, U.S., 9 February 1944).

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. ******* ✍  Robert Lee Frost (San Francisco, California, 26 March 1874 ~ Boston, Massachusetts, 29 January 1963). ◙ Artwork: Odilon Redon

In a pocket of earth  I buried all the accents  of my mother tongue  there they lie like needles of pine  assembled by ants  one day the stumbling cry  of another wanderer may set them alight  then warm and comforted  he will hear all night  the truth as lullaby. ******* ✎ John Berger (Stoke Newington, London, England, 5 November 1926 ~ Paris, France, 2 January 2017). ◙ Artwork: Maurice de Vlaminck

It comes about that the drifting of these curtains Is full of long motions, as the ponderous Deflations of distance; or as clouds Inseparable from their afternoons; Or the changing of light, the dropping Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude Of night, in which all motion Is beyond us, as the firmament, Up-rising and down-falling, bares The last largeness, bold to see. ******* ✎ Wallace Stevens (Reading, Pennsylvania, 2 October 1879 ~ Hartford, Connecticut, 2 August 1955). ◙ Artwork: Andrew Wyeth

"Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way." ******* ✍  Yasunari Kawabata (Osaka, Japan,   11 June 1899 ~ Zushi, Kanagawa, Japan, 16 April 1972.) ◙ Artwork: Marianne von Werefkin.

"It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are." ******* ✎ Edward James "Ted" Hughes (Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England, 17 August 1930 ~ London, England, 28 October 1998). ◙ Artwork: Hughie Lee-Smith.