I remember you as you were, Pablo Neruda

I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.

Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.

I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off:
Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
Towards which my deep longings migrated
And my kisses fell, happy as embers.

Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.

Pablo Neruda

Lost in the Forest, Pablo Neruda

Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig
sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance
climbed up through my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood---
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.

Pablo Neruda

A book I now REALLY want to read

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach

From one reviewer (accessible via above link):

I had just taken a shower and washed my hair and I sat down to read the chapter about how filthy astronauts become after weeks or months in space with no access to personal hygiene. Disintegrating underwear! Toxic BO! E coli bacteria that migrates INTO THEIR EYEBALLS. I'm not kidding, I had to get up and take another shower.

The blogs I read

Ghostinthewire asks in his entry on ideology and sinthomatic critique:

Can there be a thinking or a performance of criticism that does not repeat itself? Can we analyze and critically engage the social codes around us without participating in them?

Now I mention this not because I'm going to comment on his ideas. I actually don't know enough to make even a vaguely intelligent comment.

But I love reading posts with words like 'sinthomatic' and 'Lacanian' and 'metastasis'. I love these words to bits. They're like word-length poetry; there're so many ideas and concepts and histories (and many many books) squeezed into these few letters that they're quite overwhelming. They're tonnes of thinkers and books and other words cobbled together to form a word. They're such wonderfully delicious words! So many many many things in one! *delirious*

Yeah, and well, you get to learn something from posts like these too. I love all these intelligent people out there. They open doors that I never knew existed to worlds that I never knew existed. I get all excited and stuff. *strikes bimbo pose*

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet

Hmmm. Sinthomatic critique eh...

Oh, and one of my favourite poems (have I posted this before?):

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

- e.e.cummings

And... (indulge me) one of my favourite quotes:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through
the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all
the living and the dead.
- James Joyce

Imagination

Sometimes I really get tired of the rigour of academic research and writing. I re-read a few pages of Lord of the Rings just now, and it feels like a breath of fresh air. I keep feeling as if I have been neglecting something, and perhaps I've been forced to concentrate so much on rationality and logic that I've neglected the other forms of 'thinking'.

It's so wonderful to be able to let loose and not gnaw away at consistency and methodological precision and unstated assumptions etc. Even humour/wit has become a strain. And listening to good music is strenuous these days too, cos good music tends to short-circuit my brain into a state of frenzied ecstacy. The great thing about LOTR is the colours and songs that you can immerse in, and there's an unapologetic, gentle beauty about the textures of the story that is so different from the stuff I usually have to read. And I keep using the word 'texture' when describing LOTR, because I don't know what other word to use. 140pgs and it feels better than a nap. That's saying something.