the Melancholy Korean

Quoth the Crow "Like, maybe later"

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:35:25 -0500

For Kitty

Quanto più m’avicino al giorno estremo
che l’umana miseria suol far breve,
più veggio il tempo andar veloce et leve
e ‘l mio di lui sperar fallace et scemo.

I’ dico a’ miei pensier: “Non molto andremo
d’amor parlando omai, ché ‘l duro et greve
terreno incarco come fresca neve
si va struggendo, onde noi pace avremo;

“perché con lui cadrà quella speranza
che ne fe’ vaneggiar sì lungamente,
e ‘l riso e ‘l pianto, et la paura et l’ira:

“sì vedrem chiaro poi come sovente
per le cose dubbiose altri s’avanza,
et come spesso indarno si sospira.”

(Petrarch, drawing by Badges The Elder)

Reverie sur ta venue - Part 2

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:35:15 -0500

For Kitty

Dans la chambre de volupté
Où je t’irai trouver à Nîmes,
Tandis que nous prendrons le thé,
Pendant le peu d’heures intimes
Que m’embellira ta beauté

Nous ferons cent mille bêtises…
Malgré la guerre et tous ses maux
Nous aurons de belles surprises :
Les arbres en fleur les Rameaux,
Pâques les premières cerises…

Nous lirons dans le même lit,
Au livre de ton corps lui-même
- C’est un livre qu’au lit on lit -
Nous lirons le charmant poème
Des grâces de ton corps joli.

Nous passerons de doux dimanches
Plus doux que n’est le chocolat,
Jouant tous deux au jeu des hanches.
Le soir j’en serai raplapla
Tu seras pâle aux lèvres blanches.

Un mois après tu partiras…
La nuit descendra sur la terre
En vain je te tendrai les bras
Magicienne du mystère
Ma Circé tu disparaîtras…

(Apollinaire, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

Spirit Playing With Its Fingernails

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 04:49:47 -0500

“Daphne with her thighs in bark
“Stretches toward me her leafy hands,” —
Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await The Lady Valentine’s commands,

Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely the fashion
To stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;

Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine’s vocation:

Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;

A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.

***

Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
“Which the highest cultures have nourished”
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;

Besides this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.

(Ezra Pound, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

Reverie sur ta venue - Part 1

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 07:15:05 -0400

For Kitty

Mon Lou, mon Coeur, mon Adorée,
Je donnerais dix ans, et plus,
Pour ta chevelure dorée,
Pour tes regards irrésolus,
Pour ta chère toison ambrée

Plus précieuse que n’était
Celle-là dont savait la route,
Sur la grand’route du Cathai
Qu’Alexandre parcourut toute,
Circé que son Jason fouettait.

Il la fouettait avec des branches
De laurier-sauce ou d’olivier,
La bougresse branlait des hanches
N’ayant plus rien à envier
En faveur de ses fesses blanches.

Ce qu’à la Reine fit Jason
Pour ses tours de sorcellerie,
Pour sa magie et son poison
Je te le ferai, ma chérie,
Quand serons seuls à la maison.

Je t’en ferai bien plus encore!
L’amour, la schlague et coetera…
Un cul sera noir comme un Maure
Quand ma maîtresse arrivera…
Arrive, ô mon Lou que j’adore!

(Apollinaire, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

Poem Written at Morning

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:24:17 -0400

A sunny day’s complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
            By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
                                           The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
                                      The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
   Green were the curls upon that head.

(Wallace Stevens, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

The Blind

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:41:51 -0400

Contemple-les, mon âme; ils sont vraiment affreux!
Pareils aux mannequins; vaguement ridicules;
Terribles, singuliers comme les somnambules;
Dardant on ne sait où leurs globes ténébreux.

Leurs yeux, d’où la divine étincelle est partie,
Comme s’ils regardaient au loin, restent levés
Au ciel; on ne les voit jamais vers les pavés
Pencher rêveusement leur tête appesantie.

Ils traversent ainsi le noir illimité,
Ce frère du silence éternel. Ô cité!
Pendant qu’autour de nous tu chantes, ris et beugles,

Eprise du plaisir jusqu’à l’atrocité,
Vois! je me traîne aussi! mais, plus qu’eux hébété,
Je dis: Que cherchent-ils au Ciel, tous ces aveugles?

(Baudelaire, drawing by Badges The Elder)

My Pretty Rose Tree

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 06:13:55 -0400

For Kitty

A flower was offerd to me:
Such a flower as May never bore.
But I said I’ve a Pretty Rose-tree,
And I passed the sweet flower o’er.

Then I went to my Pretty Rose-tree:
To tend her by day and by night.
But my Rose turnd away with jealousy:
And her thorns were my only delight.

(Blake, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

Breakfasting

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 06:27:50 -0400

For Kitty

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
—Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.

She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, meweing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon’s milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.

—Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.

He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can’t mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.

He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for a mutton kidney at Buckley’s. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz’s. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough? To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced around him. No.

On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in a way.

He said softly in the bare hall:

—I’m going round the corner. Be back in a minute.
And when he had heard his voice say it he added:
—You don’t want anything for breakfast?

A sleepy soft grunt answered:
—Mn.

(Joyce, drawing by Badges The Elder)

The Manor Garden

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 05:20:57 -0400

The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A blue mist is dragging the lake.

You move through the era of fishes,
The smug centuries of the pig—
Head, toe and finger
Come clear of the shadow. History

Nourishes these broken flutings,
These crowns of acanthus,
And the crow settles her garments.
You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,

Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. Some hard stars
Already yellow the heavens.
The spider on its own string

Crosses the lake. The worms
Quit their usual habitations.
The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult borning.

(Sylvia Plath, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

For Kitty Passer, deliciae meae puellae, quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere, cui primum digitum...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:09:15 -0400

For Kitty

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare appetenti
et acris solet incitare morsus,
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescio quid lubet iocari
et solaciolum sui doloris,
credo ut tum gravis acquiescat ardor:
tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
et tristis animi levare curas.

Imagination and the New

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 07:53:00 -0400

Creativity includes ruthlessness. It drives to develop, unfold, multiply outward. When our ruthlessness transforms into the imaginative life that operates unconsciously to wipe the slate of our perception clean so that we now and always perceive freshly… we enter a new zone of living. Objects become objective, not under our control but able to offer us real resources for living. Objects appear as durable and resilient, and they reassure us that our destructiveness does not totally destroy. The other person displays for us the secrets of a unique, independent selfhood. In long-range, committed, passionate relationships, one lover addresses the mysterious core of the other. The mystery of the beloved’s creative self opens to the lover the mystery of being…

The love between lovers protects them from attack on their creative selves, and thus they contribute to the social welfare of all of us. For creative living does evoke attack, which rears up to blunt vitality and repel original perception. We feel the threat ourselves, says Winnicott, in moments of integration. We expect attack to follow from all the elements that we repudiate as not-me while we collect together all those experiences of aliveness that integrate into me…

The anxiety of integration helps one face an interpretation of Judeo-Christian tradition that has always troubled many, myself among them. Simone Weil, for example, joined the heretic Marcion in rejecting the Old Testament entirely because of Yahweh’s bloodthirstiness. God’s command to wipe out every one of the Amalekites strikes horror in our hearts… When Saul spares the king of the Amalekites and keeps the best of the sheep and oxen, Yahweh does not spare Saul. Samuel, Yahweh’s prophet, announces Saul’s punishment: “you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel. The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.” If we read these texts through the lens of the anxiety of integration, we see that the gathering of elements of I-am-ness into a unit requires that we must repudiate whatever lies outside.

I am not reducing the text and its savagery to a psychological perception. Life and the probity with which we face it do not allow that. But depth psychology does give us access to a truth as valuable as it is ruthless: to become one, we must unite elements of aliveness at the expense of all else. We make the same harsh decision when we choose someone for a mate and renounce all others, when we embrace an actual child we have parented and destroy the fantasy children we wished for, when we pursue one idea and reject all others, at least for the moment. Such definition is the cost of finitude and its fulfillment.

(Ann Belford Ulanov, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

Best Society

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:11:49 -0400

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired - though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

(Philip Larkin, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

Ode pour l'election de son sepulchre

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 06:33:06 -0400

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

(Ezra Pound, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

Legend

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 05:06:38 -0400

As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by…

I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are, —
The only worth all granting.

It is to be learned—
This cleaving and this burning,
But only by the one who
Spends out himself again.

Twice and twice
(Again the smoking souvenir,
Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.

Until the bright logic is won
Unwhispering as a mirror
Is believed.

Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,—
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.

(Hart Crane, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

High Windows

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 05:17:25 -0400

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives —
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

(Philip Larkin, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

For Kitty Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unamplus quam se atque suos...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 05:50:38 -0400

For Kitty

Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes,
nunc in quadriuiis et angiportis
glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes.

(Catullus 58, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

Monumentum Aere, Etc

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 03:29:38 -0400

Exegi monumentum aere perennius
reglalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga tempoum.
Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam; usque ego postera
crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium
scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex.
Dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus
et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
regnavit poplulorum, ex humili potens,
princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
deduxisse modos. Sume superbiam
quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica
lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.

You say that I take a good deal upon myself;
That I strut in the robes of assumption.

In a few years no one will remember the buffo,
No one will remember the trivial parts of me,
The comic detail will be absent.
As for you, you will rot in the earth,
And it is doubtful if even your manure will be rich
enough

To keep grass
Over your grave.

(Horace 3.30, response by Ezra Pound, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

I Am Vertical

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:53:00 -0400

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them—
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

(poem by Sylvia Plath, watercolor by Badges The Elder)

The Dream

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 06:31:00 -0400

For Kitty

Image of her whom I love, more than she
Whose fair impression in my faithful heart,
Makes me her medal, and makes her love me,
As kings do coins, to which their stamps impart
The value: go, and take my heart from hence,
Which now is grown too great and good for me:
Honours oppress weak spirits, and our sense
Strong objects dull; the more, the less we see.

When you are gone, and reason gone with you,
Then fantasy is queen and soul, and all;
She can present joys meaner than you do;
Convenient, and more proportional.

So, if I dream I have you, I have you,
For, all our joys are but fantastical.
And so I ‘scape the pain, for pain is true;
And sleep which locks up sense, doth lock out all.

After a such fruition I shall wake,
And, but the waking, nothing shall repent;
And shall to love more thankful sonnets make,
Than if more honour, tears, and pains were spent.

But dearest heart, and dearer image stay;
Alas, true joys at best are dream enough;
Though you stay here you pass too fast away:
For even at first life’s taper is a snuff.

Filled with her love, may I be rather grown
Mad with much heart, than idiot with none.

(poem by John Donne, watercolor by Badges the Elder)

To Peace

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 05:37:00 -0400

Word that trembles with the glory
   Of self-conquest, mend, control.
Thirst for quickening compassion,
   Grow till craving make us whole.

Power of God, alive with glory,
   Unself-love as majesty,
Make us one, submerging hatred;
   Peace of heaven, make us free.

(Marianne Moore)