The Telling Itself: Recent Episodes
Steve Tell
There’s a bird crying outside, or maybe calling, anyway it goes on and on without stopping."
-Kim Addonizio
“If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that, to tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere."
-Anne Carson
"For me, the central question in art is that of the ego."
-Caveh Zahedi
"What is the language using us for?"
-W.S. Graham
Contact info: thetellingitself@gmail.com@gmail.com
The Joy of Gullibility | This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=48785
Digging My Own Gravy is a year-long, durational project where I record a couple of minutes of material each day in which I am able to stay present, let go, and enjoy something happening to or around me.
--
This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem: INCANT AGAINST SUICIDE
Buy neither gun nor blue-edged blade.
Avoid green rope, high windows, rat
poison, cobra pits, and the long vanishing point
of train tracks that draw you to horizon’s razor.
Only this way will another day refine you. (Natural death’s
no oxymoron) Your head’s a bad neighborhood:
Don’t go there alone, even if you have to stop
strangers to ask the way, and even if
spiders fall from your open mouth.
This talk’s their only exit. How else
would their scramble from your skull
escape? You must make room first
that the holy spirits might enter. Empty
yourself of self, then kneel down to listen.
-Mary Karr
Digging My Own Gravy is a year-long, durational project where I record a couple of minutes of material each day in which I am able to stay present, let go, and enjoy something happening to or around me.
This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem:
THE WAY
the way I could tell
today
that yesterday is dead
is that
the little gray bird
that sat
in the empty
tree
yesterday is gone:
yesterday and
bird are gone:
I know there's no use
looking
for either
Of them, bird
running from winter,
yesterday
running downstream
to some ocean-pocket of
rest
whence it may sometime
come again (changed), new
as tomorrow:
how like a gift
the memory
of bird and empty tree!
how
precious
since we may not have
that configuration
again:
today is full of things,
so many,
how can they be managed,
received and loved
in their passing?
-A.R. Ammons
This is a telling about me examining my conscience.
--
TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON
I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020!
The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now.
Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.
--
Today's Telling is Proudly Sponsored by This Poem:
GRAMMAR
Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:
some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,
we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.
—Tony Hoagland
A telling about the delay to the next instalment of Together In Electric Dreams/The Twelve Daze of Christmas.
TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020! The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now. Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.
This is a telling about how (un)enlightened I am.
--
TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON
I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020!
The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now.
Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.
--
Today's Telling is Proudly Sponsored by This Poem:
ENLIGHTENMENT
“It’s all empty, empty,”
he said to himself.
“The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.”
So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,
thinking maybe that would help.
He taught a little kid to build a kite.
He found a cure,
and then he found a cure
for his cure.
He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather
his umbrella, even though
icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
He settled a revolution in Spain.
Nothing worked.
The world happens, the world changes,
the world, it is written here,
in the next line,
is only its own membrane—
and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
your compassion for our kind.
VIJAY SESHADRI
--
CREDITS:
The Twelve Days of Christmas (Performed by the Pudding Symphony TV Orchestra, featuring Uncle and The Bacon [seriously, I'm not making this up!] . Arrangement by Ulf Langsrud: https://youtu.be/ARu71XKZ3KM
Piano cover of Electric Dreams: https://youtubetomp3music.com/en5/download?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTQMlpab5A2w%26ab_channel%3Dstevechristiepianist
Haunting music for poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DKiPY6w8rE&ab_channel=LukeFaulkner
Uncle Caveh (Zahedi) talking about Steven Forrest's The Inner Sky and then dancing to Pavement's In The Mouth A Desert :https://youtu.be/2PlpN_5GKTI?t=2427 (from the film In The Bathtub of The World)
The Enlightened Beings Quiz: https://www.enlightenedbeings.com/quiz/
This is a telling about my beloved soulmate Max, and his recent quixotic adventures with a pine cone.
--
We have no choice in the bodies that hold us
Thing of dirt and water and oxygen marked by thinking
and reacting and a couch
one may or may not be permitted
to sleep on. He may not permit me
to touch him or to take the bone
from his mouth, but he does, and that’s a choice
based on many factors, not the least of which
is his own desire to let me
do these things. How I could ever
think or feel myself more
deserving of a single thing than
this being, whom I call by a name the same way
my parents chose a name for me. The same way my genes
went expressing themselves to make my face exactly
my face. This isn’t special. Or this is special. But it’s one
answer, the same, for us both.
Holly Amos
--
Burl Ives version of "I Know An Old Lady" (the version of the song I know from childhood): https://youtu.be/zQHmZMf6zwo
Video of Max that I mention in this telling: https://photos.app.goo.gl/j4eJn8qhS4QsPfkg7
Jose Feliciano singing "I Know An Old Lady" to a bunch of kids on Sesame Street (Episode 763/March 19, 1975): https://youtu.be/Ys-42_FKDDs
Cat Stevens' "I Love My Dog" (Live, 1971): https://youtu.be/ET5drt_utUY
Jane Siberry's "Everything Reminds Me of My Dog" - beautifully animated by Richard Raxlen: https://youtu.be/Y22Ityt7n6Q
COMING TO THE MORNING
You make me remember all of the elements
the sea remembering all of its waves
in each of the waves there was always a sky made of water
and an eye that looked once
there was the shape of one mountain
and a blood kinship with rain
and the air for touch and for the tongue
at the speed of light
in which the world is made
from a single star
and our ears
are formed of the sea as we listen
W.S. MERWIN
The Object of Intent Is To Get There
One lifetime meets another lifetime
in a constant lifetime of wars.
Leaning cities greet us at every station
and every wound points to the same place.
If your unique pain cancels out my unique pain
then there is nothing unique about pain.
What’s left to do
but carry your troubles to where they’re going;
once there, you stumble on the rest of us.
Luis J. Rodríguez
--
Aja Romano's fabulous doc on LGBTQ+ Harry Potter, and much much more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08y8x0s
I Love Therapy snippet from Joe List: https://youtu.be/odtAJ2kPdqc
Paulina Villarreal's cover of Creep (thank you Paulina - this is magnificent!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Y4XpBxjU0&ab_channel=TheWarning
Arlo Parks' perfect Creep cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRDbsLYSwe0&ab_channel=ArloParksVEVO
Proposition
These are the first citizens of contingency.
Far from the doctrinaire past of the old ones,
They think in their prudent meditations
Not about ecstasy (the soul leaving the body)
Nor enthusiasm (the god entering one’s person)
Nor even about sanity (which means
Health, an impossible perfection)
But ponder instead relative truth and the warm
Dusk of amelioration. The cautious
Young augurs with their family-life, good books
And records and foreign cars believe
In amelioration—in that, and in suffering.
Robert Pinsky, from “Essay on Psychiatrists”
--
We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse by James Hillman and Michael Ventura (1993).
I've Always Been Crazy - Waylon Jennings cover by Jaime Wyatt (thanks Jaime!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RBr_R5pwRQ&ab_channel=JaimeWyatt
COMPOST HYMN
A worm split in two must be
an ideogram for something.
Someone once said nothing
incomprehensible on earth can exist—
rather, one’s vantage point
obscures understanding past
the point of sanity. Yes, this world
belongs to scavengers, and yes
we are briefly a part of it. This city
could be any city alive enough
to be mistaken for an elsewhere.
Often our linear notions are nothing
more than whims: the weather carries
this thought like a balloon to the clouds,
the lake below a tiny memory
of a door boarded up from the inside.
Adam Clay
—
I’m climbing this ladder
My head in the clouds
I hope that it matters
I'm having my doubts
I'm watching the skaters
Fly by on the lake
Ice frozen six feet deep
How long does it take?
I look out on peaceful lands
With no war nearby
An ocean of shaking hands
That grab at the sky
I'm singing this borrowed tune
I took from the Rolling Stones
Alone in this empty room
Too wasted to write my own
I'm climbing this ladder
My head in the clouds
I hope that it matters
Neil Young
--
LINKS: Borrowed Tune (Neil Young cover), played by Hayo van Reek (thank you Hayo!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edbu1136Dbg&ab_channel=HayovanReek
SOMETIMES
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
Sheena Pugh
--
The 72 Objects Marina Abromovic allowed the spectators of her Rhythm 0 performance piece (1979) to use on her:
1. a rose
2. a feather
3. perfume
4. honey
5. bread
6. grapes
7. a small wooden cabinet
8. an ivory tusk
9. red meat (provenance unknown)
10. wine
11. an indian pipe
12. orange lollies on silver sticks
13. slices of fish flesh on orange prongs
14. scissors
15. acetic acid in a sealed tin
16. rubber breasts
17. a rubber crotch
18. salt cod
19. a scalpel
20. a cauldron
21. a large wooden frame
22. peanuts
23. nails
24. soft rugs
25. some communion wafers
26. candlesticks
27. canvas pliers
28. 3 sighted mice
29. nitrile gloves
30. a mirror
31. a rouge pot
32. some saints relics
33. a pink plastic limb
34. cloves wedged in an apple
35. arrows (but no bow)
36. five bright brass balls
37. some kind of stopper
38. cubes of fresh yeast
39. a bottle of gin
40. honeycomb
41. lipstick
42. eyeliner
43. strips of tinfoil
44. a green helmet
45. shiny gloves
46. an oversized white suit
47. mirrors
48. flags
49. shoe-blacking
50. lime leaves
51. the branch of an elm
52. narcissi and tulips
53. an antique billhook
54. a woman’s handbag
55. and a baby’s crib
56. some fat snails (dead and alive)
57. some keys
58. some cufflinks
59. a large hessian sack
60. much unwashed laundry
61. a bowl of blackberries
62. origami figurines
63. snakeskins
64. fox fur
65. a glass eye
66. some false teeth
67. a metal bar
68. a very fine camelhair brush
69. some Japanese silks
70. a melting ice-sculpture of the artist
71. a rapidly souring pitcher of milk
72. a gun loaded with one bullet
--
LINKS:
Trump's Premature Ejaculation: https://www.newsweek.com/what-donald-trump-said-election-victory-speech-full-transcript-1544716
Can't Touch This cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK9hqQ-rKlU&ab_channel=AimTV
Reading of the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_uA8glDYvI&ab_channel=KnightOfCups
RUNNING OUT OF WORDS
A well runs out of thirst
the way time runs out of a week,
the way a country runs out of its alphabet
or a tree runs out of its height.
The way a brown pelican
runs out of anchovy-glitter at darkfall.
A strange collusion,
the way a year runs out of its days
but turns into another,
the way a cotton towel’s compact
with pot and plate seems to run out of dryness
but in a few minutes finds more.
A person comes into the kitchen
to dry the hands, the face,
to stand on the lip of a question.
Around the face, the hands,
behind the shoulders,
yeasts, mountains, mosses multiply answers.
There are questions that never run out of questions,
answers that don’t exhaust answer.
Take this question the person stands asking:
a gate rusting open.
Yes stands on its left, no on its right,
two big planets of unpainted silence.
Jane Hirschfield
--
Shirley Temple at Dancing School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEx7UgFBmoQ&ab_channel=ShirleyTemple
Animal Crackers In My Soup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNwFXLcrsbc&ab_channel=myvideosym
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
DEREK WALCOTT
"It’s time and touch, he thought. It’s these two things. It’s because we are aware of them. The draw to go upstairs and climb in next to her warm body was unbearable, but he knew he would not do it. He thought of the way he could feel right through her skin. I wonder if that’s why we get so desperate in everything. It’s like we’re touching something we weren’t ever meant to feel."
-Cynan Jones (from The Dig)
--
the way I could tell
today
that yesterday is dead
is that
the little gray bird
that sat
in the empty
tree
yesterday is gone:
yesterday and
bird are gone:
I know there's no use
looking
for either
Of them, bird
running from winter,
yesterday
running downstream
to some ocean-pocket of
rest
whence it may sometime
come again (changed), new
as tomorrow:
how like a gift
the memory
of bird and empty tree!
how
precious
since we may not have
that configuration
again:
today is full of things,
so many,
how can they be managed,
received and loved
in their passing?
-A.R. Ammons
--
Penn and Teller trick by Xavier Mortimer on Fool Us Season 7, Episode 13
I well up, not telling
if I die in this wave there is no such thing
as dying, because
there’s this wave, or surge and not
so powerful, except for
as much as needed
all that I am, as
much as that
ALICE NOTLEY
--
All you ever wanted to know about The Default Mode Network (but were afraid to ask): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network#:~:text=In%20neuroscience%2C%20the%20default%20mode,cortex%2Fprecuneus%20and%20angular%20gyrus
My faded zafu cushion: https://photos.app.goo.gl/u7B4ASqist8Udmmw8
There is the question
of bearing witness, of being yourself seen
by yourself, & seen clearly, cleanly,
without weapon or bible in hand;
as this was the wish,
the sturdy & not-so-secret wish
of those who named us—
our parents wanted us to be
known to ourselves without confusion:
without judgment,
sans suffering. Never force it,
they said, always find it.
OK, strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true.
My particular, sole, insistent, moody mother & father
probably never thought much about it at all.
Those two anxious citizens,
they were never exemplars of patience.
The weightlessness of detachment & acceptance
as I think of it now
would have frightened them—
for good reason.
If you could see these words
I’m speaking to you tonight printed on a page
as typeface & magnified x 500
you would feel just how ragged & coarse
they really are, heavy.
Well, playing the part of a butterfly
must be tiring, right?
I’m happier being the old ox, right?
On some plane of existence
these two scraps are all my news:
where the mess is
that’s where my heart is.
DAVID RIVARD
“I think the telling itself must be the inclusion
of everyone. It isn’t about technique, it’s about
inclusion. I don’t want to be included, but
I can’t refrain from speaking. I know I sound
plaintive. I sound desperate. I sound happy,
even though the world is a frightful dream.
I am standing somewhere underground, in
an underworld, with all the others. I never
wanted this. I am one of many, but I am
unique. Saying “one of many” and saying
“unique” hurts me. I am just a record player now.
I am the dead. Or, I am a dead man. I
have never been words, but words have never
been words. In language I combine my flesh
with yours, and you with mine; my flesh
is tender, my skin aches from knowing you,
my hand can’t really touch you, but if you
say “I” I’ll say “I.” I want to say “we” but I can’t.
I can; but I think that I won’t do that here.
I take a word like “morals” and try to weigh it
in my mind. It has no weight today. I think
it has, I just accept it. I don’t ever want to leave.
ALICE NOTLEY (from Certain Magical Acts)
--
Seth Godin's Akimbo podcast: https://www.akimbo.link/
For more on graphomania & hypergraphia, check out Alice W. Flaherty's excellent The Midnight Disease.
SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension—though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.
DENISE LEVERTOV
--
Notes:
-Gateway to Heaven quote: https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/podcasts/
-Other audio quotes from Richard Holloway'sStories We Tell Ourselves
-Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings (PDF): https://bookos-z1.org/book/960274/09138f
-José Ortega y Gasset quote from: “The Self and the Other,” in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 178.
-Second reading of the poem: https://vimeo.com/269056790
-"This Must Be The Place" covers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCxrEUEO43M&ab_channel=HaleyBlais
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nahv3rqguDs&ab_channel=BartonStrings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNsgMqgi2pg&ab_channel=SureSure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7s38Lwk7T4&ab_channel=Myndset
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
-Louise Glück
NOTES:
"As to future pharmaceutical approaches to major mental health problems, there is nothing on the horizon – most of the large drug companies have abandoned the search for new drugs to treat conditions such as depression or anxiety, considering that both the costs and the risks are far too great. This situation is not surprising – if we do not yet properly understand the functioning of even the simplest animal brains, there does not seem much prospect of responding effectively when things apparently go awry in our own heads. " (Matthew Cobb, The Idea of The Brain)
“I’m more like a cow. Cows move at their own pace.” from "Many A Little Makes" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum: https://www.newyorker.com/books/novellas/many-a-little-makes
Sunny Prestatyn by Philip Larkin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwF7-suGD4&ab_channel=Music%2CSpokenWordandMiscellanea
Modest Mouse Lampshades on Fire (cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zulpm_YOaec&ab_channel=Gabrielle
every little meth
runt crouched in
the dark part of the culvert
every sugar road
half a bag shy
of the flour roads
every here we go crow
spoiled at the touch
of gun holes in signs
love is inside
light wet seeds
nailed into
the crawlspace
between eyetooth
and barred goon
-Abraham Smith
(Music by Bailey Pelkman)
For caressive calling or homophonous hiccoughs, transpose the laugh. Let them suppose that tears are snowdrops or molasses, or anything than human insufficiences.
MINA LOY
I have dreamed
of accomplishment.
I have fed
ambition.
I have traded
nights of sleep
for a length of work.
Lo, and I have discovered
how soft bloom
turns to green fruit
which turns to sweet fruit.
Lo, and I have discovered
all winds blow cold
at last,
and the leaves,
so pretty, so many,
vanish
in the great, black
packet of time,
in the great, black
packet of ambition,
and the ripeness
of the apple
is its downfall.
MARY OLIVER
--
Pronunciation of on Forvo.com: https://forvo.com/word/%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%B9%CE%B5%E1%BF%96%CE%BD/
How to make (and pronounce) Kolokythokeftedes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Krujpbi8Sg&ab_channel=Dimitra%27sDishes
SAFETY BEHAVIOUR
The thoughts, I’ve been told, to put somewhere else.
So I put them on the roof. I put them in a box
and post them. I put them in shoes I never wear.
I split them up from each other and put each one inside
a stranger’s pocket, to be taken home and washed so
the thoughts drown in several different washing machines.
I put them on the wing of an aeroplane. Inside a hollow
bit of wall. I tie them to balloons and they fly off.
I put them in the ocean and they swim away. I hold
them over a candle and they evaporate. I hide,
no, bake them, inside an enormous, delicious cake,
seven tiers high, and I give a piece of it to everyone.
EMMA JEREMY
Hello, then, you at the front, yes you
With the puzzled blinkers. If you like
I’ll make arrangements for you to sit
Here with me on the other side
Of language for a spell. In a way
You’ll see it from the inside and as
The quick stations of silence slide
Past our ears, we might, I might
Slip you a message to take back.
…
You are with me here behind the alphabet
Silence has raked and chosen us from.
W.S. GRAHAM (From Aimed at Nobody)
Other guilts as far as a life away turn up to mourn me back over into early outworn linens of fear. Over a time again gathering up the old sore Self house and servants, the far parts send their name.
I am not that man now as I read the rowan and make a book of a tree.
Better I’d make some new guilt shine?
W.S. GRAHAM
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
NOTES:
How racial inequalities contributed to Darwin's evolutionary theories: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00gbf2g
Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture (by Elise Aaltola): https://book4you.org/book/2687438/e43ff7
Jo Jo's Jacket (Stephen Malkmus): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS90RLeWILY&ab_channel=Hubadaeus
Eliot reading Four Quartets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga8tQrG4ZSw&ab_channel=vinyhilist
POCKETS
Emptied of coins and keys and pulled inside out, they are unformed wings, sad nubs downy with lint and frayed threads at the seams; twin wind socks flagging the still air; sails limp in the horse latitudes; dingy guidons of a solitary company.
But from the other side they are pockets for the first time, a place for the inner man to store his few essentials-a quark for luck, a moment beyond time, the extra breaths a diver takes before he ducks his head and plunges to the bottom.
-Neal Bowers
KEEP A POEM IN YOUR POCKET
Keep a poem in your pocket, and a picture in your head, and you'll never feel lonely at night when you're in bed. The little poem will sing to you. The little picture bring to you - a dozen dreams to dance to you - at night when you're in bed. So keep a picture in your pocket, and a poem in your head; and you'll never feel lonely, at night when you're in bed.
.-Beatrice Schenk de Regniers
Poem read by Oisín N (5th class - Room 7, 2012-2013, in preparation for the Christmas 2012 Recital)
Back Pocket Clavinet cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od-S_tyeBhs&ab_channel=MartinSalemi
The word
is bear: you give and give, you empty yourself
into something or someone. And you survive
the automatic loss. Against inhuman landscape,
the tree remains a figure for grief; its form
is forced accommodation.
Louise Glück (from Autumnal)
Notes:
Psychological reactance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
RE: STACKS (Bon Iver Piano Cover) played by Klara Louise
Glück reading from The Garden: https://voca.arizona.edu/content/louise-gl%C3%BCck
“I’ve always had this sense that it wasn’t my voice that I was wanting to speak, but there was this other voice that was trying to get through, that came from somewhere else, and wasn’t me personally.”
TOM PAULIN
AUTUMN DAY
Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the
evening,
and wander the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (Translation: Stephen Mitchell)
-Film excerpt in closing from Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)