(via crashinglybeautiful)
(via crashinglybeautiful)
Read:
Nous avons tous éprouvé cela. L’humanité est comme une mêlée de masques.
Pourtant—et vous en avez fait sûrement l’expérience,—parmi ces
enveloppes mortelles, il y en a chez qui nous sentons ou croyons sentir
une âme, une personne—peut-être parce que cette âme a quelque
ressemblance intime avec la nôtre. Mais, par contre, ne vous est-il pas
arrivé, en présence de tel homme obscur ou célèbre, de sentir que vous
êtes bien réellement devant un masque impénétrable dont l’intérieur ne
vous sera jamais révélé? J’ai eu souvent cette impression gênante. Il y
a des hommes que j’ai rencontrés et à qui j’ai parlé vingt fois, et qui,
j’en suis certain, me resteront toujours incompréhensibles. Il me semble
qu’ils n’ont pas de centre, pas de «moi», qu’ils ne sont qu’un «lieu» où
se succèdent des phénomènes physiologiques et intellectuels. Je perçois
chez eux des séries de pensées, d’attitudes, de gestes; mais, quand ils
me parlent, ce n’est point une personne qui me répond, c’est quelque
merveilleux automate. Je pourrai les admirer; ils me communiqueront
peut-être ou me suggéreront des idées, des sentiments que je n’aurais
pas eus sans eux; mais j’ai, du premier coup, la certitude que je ne les
aimerai jamais, que je n’aurai jamais avec eux aucune intimité, aucun
abandon, et qu’ils seront éternellement pour moi des étrangers.
General Petraeus, when the death-count of American
troops
in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‘The sad truth is you
never do get
used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with
holes,
And sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties
again’.
leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long
story
involving one soldier who in the course of his street
patrol,
tweaked the antenna of the TV in a bar hoping for
baseball,
but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle
talking,
all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned
out to be
reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a
bag of flour
thrown through the wind and into thorn bushes.’ Then
‘No, no’, he said,
correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a
hopeless man.’
—Andrew Motion
Crawfish with pincers (Phillipines); Worm from depths of ocean (Japan);
Snail from a hydrothermal spring (Japan), and hairy crab (Easter Island)
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.
-- W. H. Auden
Bikram says, “When you encounter a stressful situation, you have three choices
What is your choice?
They smell your mouth
Lest you’ve told someone ‘I love you.’
They smell your heart
These are strange times, my dear
Love,
they drag out under lampposts
to thrash.
Love must be hid in closets at home.
In the cold of this blind alley
They keep their fires ablaze
burning our anthems and poems.
Do not venture to think.
These are strange times, my dear
He who pounds on the door in the nighttime
Has come to kill the light.
Light must be hid in closets at home.
Lo! the butchers
stationed on roads
with chopping-board and cleaver soaked in blood
These are strange times, my dear
They slit smiles off of lips
And song from the throat.
Joy must be hid in closets at home.
Canaries are being roasted
on a spit of lilacs and jasmine
These are strange times, my dear
Satan, triumph-drunk
Feasts at a table spread with our mourning
God must be hid in closets at home.
This poem was written shortly after the 1979 revolution.
Translated by Saya Ovaisy in Tehran, Summer 2009
Purple-rumped Sunbird, Bangladesh
Photographer: Sirajul Hossain
