Between silence and silence
Le Guin, Hanh, de Waal, Merton, cummings, Plath, Snyder, MacFarlane, Montgomery, Martinson, Fenollosa, Byatt
This is the second installment of Cairns, a monthly shortlist of titles (with quotes) that form auspicious piles on Perelandra’s desk. Like the stone mounds with which people have marked landscapes for thousands of years, these cairns marks mysterious points and paths of human interest.
How many hands have touched—have sought and held—these works, for how many reasons, and to what measureless effects? Where do the cairns suggest we are headed? Always somewhere together.
Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
“I chose to mould myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel. I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don’t know who the dancer is.”
No Death, No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh
“You are what you are looking for. You are already what you want to become. You can say to the wave, ‘My dearest wave, you are water. You don’t have to go and seek water. Your nature is the nature of nondiscrimination, of no birth, of no death, of no being and of no non-being.’
“Practice like a wave. Take the time to look deeply into yourself and recognize that your nature is the nature of no-birth and no-death. You can break through to freedom and fearlessness this way. This method of practice will help us to live without fear, and it will help us to die peacefully without regret.”
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal
“I once trained a female chimpanzee named Kuif to bottle-feed an adopted infant of her species. Kuif acted in every way as the infant’s mother but lacked sufficient milk of her own to nurse her. We would hand her a bottle of warm milk, which she would carefully give to the baby ape. Kuif got so good at this that she’d even briefly withdraw the bottle if the baby needed to burp. This project required that Kuif and the baby, which she kept on her body day and night, be called inside for feeding during the daytime while the rest of the colony remained outside. After a while we noticed that instead of coming in right away, Kuif would make a long detour. She’d do the rounds on the island, visiting the alpha male, the alpha female, and several good friends, giving each one a kiss, before she’d walk toward the building. If the others were asleep, she’d wake them up for her goodbyes.”
Thoughts In Solitude by Thomas Merton
“Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.”
20th Century Poetry & Poetics ed. by Gary Geddes
“Like all obsessions, the Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagra Falls) that my ‘poems’ are competing.”
— e. e. cummings, from the foreword to is 5
“I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.”
— Sylvia Plath, “An Interview with Peter Orr,” from The Poet Speaks
“To live in the ‘mythological present’ in close relation to nature and in basic but disciplined body/mind states suggests a wider-ranging imagination and a closer subjective knowledge of one’s own physical properties than is usually available to men living (as they themselves describe it) impotently and inadequately in ‘history’—their mind-content programmed, and their caressing of nature complicated by the extensions and abstractions which elaborate tools are. A hand pushing a button may wield great power, but that hand will never learn what a hand can do. Unused capacities go sour.”
— Gary Snyder, from “Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on poetry as an ecological survival technique”
The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane
“The snow was overwhelmingly legible. Each print-trail seemed like a plot that could be read backwards in time; a series of allusions to events since ended. I found a line of fox pugs, which here and there had been swept across by the fox’s brush, as if it had been trying to erase evidence of its own passage.”
Anne of the Island by L. M. Montgomery
“She forgot lovelorn youths, and the cayenne speeches of malicious neighbors, and all the problems of her girlish existence. In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of ‘faëry lands forlorn,’ where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart’s Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
Aniara by Harry Martinson
“I invented, with the utmost difficulty,
a screen composed of two sorts of rays,
and found a way of hanging this as it were
out in space, some miles from the goldonda,
and towards this space-screen then I could send
a third sort of ray which transmitted pictures.
In this way I contrived to establish
the illusion of a wall in space—a kind of frieze
stretched out there and made up
of pictures and forests and moonlit lakes,
mountains and cities. Sometimes I introduced
a mighty army of people carrying banners
of victory—all to make a seeming wall
which could shut out the intolerable void.”
*
“If I can endure, be patient,
if in silence I repent,
perhaps, some far-off evening,
I may see the end of all my memories,
reach the limit of my wanderings,
and scrubbed clean and labeled worthy
of the noble Star of Kings,
settle, like a bird in foliage,
deep in the Karelian woods.”
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa
“The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transference of power. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this.”
Possession by A. S. Byatt
“Think of this—that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.”