"I watched graceful, transparent fish move through the water, some below the others, between the rocks. Suddenly they all gathered at the same level. This, I thought, is also the way of the sentence in those fraternal moments when word lines up with word for the same chance destiny while death besieges the sea."
"Language thus resonates between two subjects. It opens or closes their bodies to its implicit ideals and offers a possibility (not without risks) of psychic as well as physical life…"
During the last period of Raymond Carver’s life, he and his partner, Tess Gallagher, used passages from her reading of Chekhov to extend the form of his final collection of poems and also to address some of their unexpressed fears and anxieties relating to his cancer. She started typing passages from Chekhov into the computer and rearranging them into into a more open, poetic form. These ‘hidden’ poems in Chekhov began ‘calling’ to some of Ray’s poems, tugging at the structure of his final collection…
Matthew Fox, a leading figure in contemporary Christian thought, has written a book in which he ‘interviews’ the thirteenth century theologian, Thomas Aquinas, as a way of rescuing him from the outmoded language of scholasticism and allowing him to speak to the twentieth century. And the book is called ‘Sheer Joy’…
A Tibetan woman writes of her journey through realms beyond death. Its gentle hallucinatory mixture of images combines ritual, suffering, conversation, prayer, darkness, architecture…
Dogen’s definition of giving includes such examples as offering flowers from distant mountains, giving away treasures from one’s past lives, entrusting flowers to the wind and birds to the season, being born and dying…
A student asked Soen Nakagawa during a meditation retreat, ‘I’m very discouraged. What should I do?’ Soen replied, ‘Encourage others’…
This is what I mean when I say that poetry - poetic writing, poetic speech - is the most tactful, the most generous way of making sense of the world. Society becomes competitive when it loses its ‘voice’, its artistic dimension.
"As I, the girl Dawa Drolma. continued on my way, a yogin dressed in white, with long flowing locks of hair, approached, surrounded by a host of dakas and dakinis. He turned a prayer wheel with an elaborate brocade cover, and his feet did not touch the ground. He passed by me on the way to the hells. When I asked him where he was going he replied, "To the lower states of rebirth. I’m going to lead away all those who have shared food with me. I am a master guide of beings, Togdan Pawo, whose very name means ‘hero of spiritual realisation’." As he chanted the mani mantra three times to a melody the houses of burning iron became palaces of crystal, and all the beings there were transformed into bodies of light. He headed off, taking them to the sublime pure realm of Potala mountain, like a flock of birds startled by a stone from a sling."
In Ibuse’s novel about the bombing of Hiroshima, ‘Black Rain’, Shigematsu carefully writes out his ‘journal of the bombing’, keeping strictly to the facts of what happened. The reason? In order to prove to would-be suitors of his niece, Yasuko, that she wasn’t in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing and so is not an A-bomb victim destined to sicken and die.
And so one of the great unwritables of history becomes writable through an uncle’s concern for his young neice’s well-being and happiness. Or, letting it drift one frame further, we could say: within the tenderness of Ibuse’s fantasy of an uncle’s concern for his niece, his fantasy of happiness for anyone anywhere…
In Dawa Drolma’s book, a lama journeys through hell to rescue all those who have made a connection with him. As he chants a mantra, houses of burning iron are transformed into palaces of crystal and all the beings there escape along pathways of light. In Ibuse’s novel, the ‘written voice’ of the uncle fails to transform the smouldering ruins of Hiroshima into a wedding hall: the suitors come and go, unconvinced, and towards the end of the novel Yasuko does indeed show signs of radiation sickness. In this sense the uncle’s voice is a failure, but Ibuse’s fantasy of a failed voice allows the writing of the disaster to take place. A fantasy of failure, lovingly undertaken, can thus become the basis of immeasurable good fortune: a fantasy of failure absorbed within a fantasy of happiness… Perhaps everyone should try to discover within themselves a fantasy of happiness for anyone anywhere and, from this, trace a line back to a disaster that allows them to speak.
I wanted to draw a line, from a blind woman's consideration for her neighbours to an imaginary translator lost in a six line poem… a line passing through Tarkovsky gazing at trees in Sweden… and you and me of course, in the time that we went through together… A simple line, about forty pages long. And I wanted to write on that line. Why was it so difficult?
Tonight I’m going to see a movie about Ryokan, a Japanese zen poet of the eighteenth century. But I would rather describe it like this: a film about a man walking in the snow, who writes. I think this is where biography - human identity itself - is heading: out beyond personal history, into a realm where the radiance of details and infinite space come together, a realm of ‘occasional’ texts, ‘postcard’ biographies… postcards of illimitable size, containing paragraphs of illimitable size…
I’m trying to imagine a language,: spacious and perfect, permeated by order, almost nothing, repetitive, recitative, complete…
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