Shiva linga

I discovered Tantra art in Point Reyes Books today: anonymous (for the most part) mystical paintings from India.  There are lots of Shiva linga, among other things.  Shiva linga are symbols of masculine power.  Here's how the American Institute of Vedic Studies describes them:

In the Sanskrit language, the word linga refers to a ‘chief mark’ or ‘characteristic’ of something. As a term, it is not per se a synonym for the male sexual organ, as some would believe. Linga indicates what is outstanding and determinative. In this regard, the male sexual organ can be said to be the distinguishing characteristic or linga of a man at a physical level, but linga in other contexts can have quite a different meaning.

When I was painting I used to paint things similar to this and had an idea that the shape was essential.  I made hundreds of images and objects based on the shape.  I have posted a couple of my unconscious Shiva linga separately.

Unconscious Shiva linga

Thank you Nelson Mandela

Excerpt from 'Walking Swiftly' by Robert Bly

The heat inside the human body
grows, it does not know where to throw itself—for a while it knots
into will, heavy, burning, sweet, then into generosity, that longs
to take on the burdens of others, and then into mad love ...

from 'Walking Swiftly' in This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood

Raymond Saunders

I saw four Raymond Saunders paintings at Duende in Oakland today.  Here's some more.

Quote: Gregory Bateson

"It takes two to know one."

Cones

Quote: Witold Gombrowicz

"Art consists of writing not what one has to say, but something altogether unexpected."

Sand dunes

RIP Seamus Heaney 1939 - 2013

Now it's high watermark

And floodtide in the heart

And time to go...

What's left to say?

Suspect too much sweet talk

But never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind

That blew me here. I leave

Half-ready to believe

That a crippled trust might walk

And the half-true rhyme is love.


From The Cure at Troy

Little horse

Three photos by Jonas Bendiksen

I'm reading Zona by Geoff Dyer, which is packed with quotes and references to other people's work, a bit like a David Shields book (Shields did mention Dyer in his reading at Booksmith earlier this year, something about Dyer being the more handsome of the two, which isn't true, incidentally).  The book is a must-read for fans of Stalker, delightful anyway, even if you haven't seen the film, clever, funny, and studded with lovely phrases like 'the permadepths of the present' (where the still-happening past operates in Tarkovsky's Zone-time, as in Aboriginal Dreamtime).  I'm enjoying it a lot.  Here's three images from a photographer Dyer mentions on page 75, Jonas Bendiksen.  The first is apparently Bendiksen's most famous, shot in a place I had never heard of till now, the so-called spacecraft crash zone in Kazakhstan, where space debris comes crashing to earth on a regular basis, and the bits of white fluff are apparently butterflies, though they look more like anemone seeds or dandelion clocks to me ...

 

 

 

 

Quote: Kafka

"Beyond a certain point there's no return.  That's the point that must be reached."

Quote: Albert Camus

"... a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Quote: Pascal

"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness."

From 'Pensees'

A reading by Frank Bidart

I've just finished reading 'Watching the Spring Festival', again.  I always go to Frank Bidart when all else fails.  How can Frank Bidart know these states of mind and still live, I ask myself?  But he does.  Maybe he wouldn't if he couldn't write them.  I feel much gratitude.

Excerpt from a poem by Frank Bidart

"You have spent your life writing tragedies for a world that does not believe in tragedy.  What is tragedy?  Everyone is born somewhere: into this body, this family, this place.  Into the mystery of your own predilections that change as you become conscious of what governs choice, but change little.  Into, in short, particularity inseparable from existence.  Each particularity, inseparable from its history, offers and denies.  There is a war between each offer you embrace and what each embrace precludes, what its acceptance denies you.  Most of us blunt and mute this war in order to survive.  In tragedy the war is lived out.  The radical given cannot be evaded or erased.  No act of intelligence or prowess or cunning or goodwill can reconcile the patrimony of the earth.

from 'Ulanova at forty-six at last dances before a camera Giselle'

Feeling

Pelicans

Quote: Rodin

"Each thing is merely the limit of the flame to which it owes its existence."

From chapter 4 ('Sexualized Fire') in The Psychoanalysis of Fire by Gaston Bachelard

Quote: Paul Eluard

"I must not look on reality as being like myself"

Point Lobos

Indian Beach

'Winter Night' by Charles Simic

The church is an iceberg.

It's the wind.  It must be blowing
   tonight
Out of those galactic orchards,
Their Copernican pits and stones.

The monster created by the mad
   Dr. Frankenstein
Sailed for the New World,
And ended up some place like
   New Hampshire. 

Actually, it's just a local drunk,
Knocking with a snow shovel,
Wanting to go in and warm
   himself.

An iceberg, the book says, is a
   large drifting
Piece of ice, broken off a glacier.

Excerpt from Jeanette Winterson's memoir 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?'

" ... when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy.  A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.  That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.  It isn't a hiding place.  It is a finding place."

Quote: Virginia Woolf

"Here is life given us each alike, and we must do our best with it.  Our hand in the sword hilt - and an unuttered, fervent vow!"

from the last entry in her diary for 1897.  She was 15 years old.

SFIFF 56: Me and You

This production from Bernardo Bertolucci shows the master's touch in all departments, including, and this surprised me a bit, his deft evocation of youthful ennui, which was subtle, intimate, confident.  Even the 80's sounds (Bowie, The Cure) had a contemporary retro-hipness about them, and the rewritten lyric to Space Oddity was for me the perfect moment in the film, so beautiful was it and so pertinent to the characters in their present predicament.  But there was something missing nevertheless - a feeling of whatever at the heart of things - again, not inappropriate given the (youthful) subject, but not in the end what I look for in films.

SFIFF 56: A Hijacking

A taut, well-paced, absorbing drama about ordinary men caught up in an extraordinary situation - the hijacking of a merchant vessel by Somali pirates - this award-winning Danish feature had a sort of documentary exactitude about its details, especially its characterization, that raised the stakes emotionally and left me completely wrung out, but impressed. The scenes in the boardroom between the CEO of the Danish shipping firm and the British negotiating team he hires to help him are superb, nail-bitingly tense and realistic.

SFIFF 56: Marketa Lazarova

It's been a while since I've seen anything as gorgeous as this film, but the absurdly wooden plot cranking away in the background with its stereotypical medieval characters brawling and feuding over issues I could care less about spoiled things a bit for me.  I want to take the luxurious surfaces of the film, which are as beautiful as any I have ever seen, and eliminate the dialogue altogether (or the subtitles anyway), replacing it with bits of Shakespeare or any other playwright worthy of the cause - then it would be the truly extraordinary thing it was destined to be.

SFIFF 56: Leviathan

This phenomenal film was the highlight of the festival for me and I can't wait to see it again!  It's in a category of its own, the documentary-as-pure-art-object category, and I was appropriately ravished and amazed by its deep sensuality, both visual and aural.  No special effects, only unusual perspectives and powerful lighting, the footage is raw, direct, and dazzlingly poetic all at once, a wordless vision of reality as dream or nightmare, depending on how you feel about waves, blood, fish, flight, nets, chains, winches, and men wielding steel hooks and sabers in the middle of the night.

SFIFF 56: Shepard and Dark

A quiet, slightly oddball documentary about old friends Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark attempting a joint project and derailing their relationship in the process, this film raises some interesting points (about creativity, responsibility, and self-knowledge) but doesn't pursue them, perhaps because they only emerge when the two men are apart and commenting on one another in absentia.  Together they make an odd, uninspiring pair whose glory days of deep connection are long gone.  I can't decide whether I'm intrigued or perplexed by the unanswered questions left in their wake, but there is definitely a sense of wanting more.  It might just be the lingering after-effects of proximity to the troubled, troubling figure of Sam Shepard, who seems to be more than usually lost and uncertain, and in a strangely domesticated way at that.

Quote: Martin Buber

'We cannot avoid using power, so let us love powerfully'

Sally King 'A Tale of Two Heads'

This is good news, my book of poems came out in December and is available through Small Press Distribution.  Here's the link http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780985977306/a-tale-of-two-heads.aspx?rf=1 if you want to get one.  It's published by IFSF, which is a local small publishing company run by Brooks Roddan.  Design, including the beautiful cover, is by Eda Goksel.  I wrote about 5 different introductions to it, none of which we used, but it was an interesting exercise in trying to describe what the poems 'are about'.  I'm completely torn between wanting to dilate and wanting to present the poems intact, without explication.  If I do the latter there is a sense of standing behind the material as being complete in itself, which is the hero's path I think.  But being a hero is hard work, especially when your natural inclination is to analyze the hell out of books.  Plus, my introductions flew off into all sorts of exotic locations I've never quite visited before, not on this site anyway.  I think I will dig them up and put them in another post.  I'll post a poem here instead.  Actually I will post the first poem, which begins with the word if, and the last, which ends with the word redeemed.  They frame the question pretty well I think.  The book is definitely more of a question than an answer - but it's written like a straightforward answer to a vexing, because forgotten, question.  This is what happens when I start to write about my book.




The Desert

If the desert was the dream of wolves,
the language of rocks, the ear
of the wind rimed with salt,
the taste of blood, the desiccated beehive
and inverted beehive pueblos,
it was also the end of distinctions
like dead or alive and therefore
poetic.


Lady Macbeth

In my dream I redeem you
on account of my deep understanding of your name.
Lucifer is a bright translucent type
of red, a type of red
flower, Lucifer
is a flower
which seeks the nitroglycerin of my desire
and sucks on it -
but I give suck, like
Lady Macbeth, redeemed.