stubborn tiny lights

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, ’cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

- John Donne

‘Most of us imagine that we are travelling in a straight line, whereas the truth is that we are moving in circles. We change direction almost without thinking. Headed for Mexico, we land in China. (And like as not, without the slightest loss of face.) The ambitious ones set out to storm the world, only to end up like so many dead leaves scattered by the wind.’

- Henry Miller

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”

- Hélène Cixous

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou , dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.

- Chuang-tzu

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

- Louis MacNeice

It all began with a completely fantastic event. To be exact, the great king of the jungle, the lion, was dead drunk. He stumbled around on all four paws and toppled over on his side. This was a complete catastrophe.

The lion was a student at Leningrad University, and also served as an extra at the ballet theatre. In today’s performance, dressed in a lion skin, he was supposed to stand on a cliff and wait until he is cut down by a spear thrown by the heroine of the ballet. Then the murdered lion falls off the cliff and onto a mattress off stage. At rehearsals, everything went perfectly. And suddenly today, on the day of the premier, an hour and a half before the curtain was to go up, the lion pulled such a swinish trick! There were no extra extras. They couldn’t cancel the performance–a commissar from Moscow was coming. An emergency meeting was held in the office of the “red director”.

There was a knock on the door, and the theatre’s fireman, Petya Zherebyakin entered. The “red director” (he was in fact, at the moment red–from anger), shouted at him, “What do you want? I don’t have time! Go to hell!”.

“Comrade Director…I’m here about the lion,” the fireman said.

“Well, what about the lion?”

“Well, I mean, our lion’s drunk. So I want, Comrade Director, to play the lion.”

I don’t know if bears have freckles and blue eyes. If they do, then the large Zherebyakin, in boots like cast iron, more resembled a bear than a lion. But could he, by some miracle, play the part of a lion? He swore that he could, that he’s watched all the rehearsals from the wings, and that when he was in the army he played in “Emperor Maximilian”. And in defiance of the crookedly smiling stage manager, the director ordered Zherebyakin to get dressed and give it a try.

In a few minutes, the musicians on stage were already softly playing the “march of the lion”. The Lion Petya Zherebyakin performed in the lion skin as if he were born not in a Ryazan village, but in the Libyan desert. But at the last moment, when he was to fall from the cliff, he looked down and hesitated.

“Fall, damn it, fall,” hissed the stage manager at him with a furious whisper.

The lion obediently came crashing down. He fell hard on his back and lay there, unable to get up. Don’t tell me that he can’t get up! Don’t tell me that again, at the last moment, it’s a catastrophe!

They picked him up. He crawled out of his skin and stood there, pale, holding his back and smiling sheepishly. However, he was missing an upper tooth and his smile seemed somewhat sorrowful and childish. (On the other hand, there’s always something childish about bears, isn’t there?”)

Fortunately, he wasn’t seriously hurt. He asked for some water. The director ordered that they bring him a cup of tea from his office. When he finished the tea, the director started to hurry him up. “Well, comrade, you made yourself a lion. Put on the skin. Put it on, put it on. We’re starting soon.”

Someone obligingly ran up with the skin, but the lion didn’t want to put it on. He firmly declared that he absolutely had to leave the theatre. What his special need was he refused to say; he only smiled sheepishly. The director boiled over with rage. He tried to order, he tried to remind Zherebyakin that he was a candidate-member of the Party, a shock-worker. But the lion-shock-worker firmly stood his ground. In the end, the director had to give in. And, beaming with his gap-tooth smile, Petya Zherebyakin hurried off somewhere outside the theatre.

“Where has the devil taken him?” asked the director, again red with rage. “What kind of secrets does he have?”

No one could give an answer to the red director. The secret was known only to Petya Zherebyakin–and, of course, to the author of this story. And while Petya Zherebyakin is running somewhere through the autumn Petersburg rain, we can go back in time to that July night when his secret was born.

There was no night that night. It was day, lightly dozing off for a second, like a marching soldier dozes off, not stopping his march and getting mixed up between reality and dreaming. Slumbering in the pink glass of the canals were overturned trees, windows, columns, Petersburg. And suddenly, with a light breeze, Petersburg disappears. To replace it appears Leningrad, the red flag over the Winter Palace awakening in the wind, and by the grill work of the Aleksandr Garden, a police officer with a rifle.

A cluster of night tram workers gathered closely around the police officer. From behind all the shoulders, all Petya Zherebyakin could see was the police officer’s face–round like a Ryazan apple. Something strange is going on. They are grabbing the police officer by the arms, the shoulders; and finally, one of the workers, puckering up his lips, gently kisses the officer on the cheek. The police officer turns red and furiously blows a whistle. The workers disperse. Petya Zherebyakin remains alone, face to face with the police officer. And the police officer disappears just as suddenly as did the mirrored Petersburg, frightened by the wind. In front of Zherebyakin was a girl in a police officer’s hat and tunic, the first policewoman placed on the Nesky Prospect by the Revolution. Her black brows came together over the bridge of her nose. From her eyes, sparks.

“You should be ashamed, comrade!” is all she said to Petya Zherebyakin, but, oh, how she said it! He got confused and started mumbling guiltily.

“I swear to God, it wasn’t me! I was just walking home….”

“Eh, you….And a worker!” The policewoman looked at him, but, oh, how she looked!

If here on the pavement there had been a trap door, like they have on the theatre stage, Zherebyakin would have sunk down through it, and that would have been his salvation. But he had to slowly walk away, feeling the burning look piercing his back.

The next day, it was again a white night and again comrade Zherebyakin was walking home from his work at the theatre, and again by the grill work of the Aleksandr Garden was the policewoman. Zherebyakin wanted to sneak past her, but he noticed her looking at him. Confused, guiltily, he bowed. She nodded. The dawn was reflected on the mirrored-black steel of her rifle. The steel seemed pink. And before this pink rifle, Zherebyakin grew more timid than he did before all the rifles that were shooting at him for five years on various fronts.

He dared to speak with the policewoman only after a week. It turned out that she, too, like Zherebyakin, was from the Ryazan province and she still remembers their Ryazan apples. Sweet and a little bitter. You can’t find apples like that around here.

Every time, coming home from work, Zherebyakin stopped by the Aleksandr Garden. The white nights went crazy–the green and pink and copper-colored sky didn’t grow dark even for a second. Couples embracing in the park, like in the daytime, sought out shadows so they might be unseen.

On such a night, clumsy like a bear, Zherebyakin asked the policewoman:

“And so, for example, can you, policewomen, during the performance of your duties, get married? That is, not during your duties, but in general, with your job being like the military.”

“And why married?”, asked Katya the policewoman, leaning on her rifle. “Nowadays we’re like men; we want, we love.”

Her rifle was pink. The policewoman raised her face to the aflame-with-fever sky, then she looked somewhere past Zherebyakin and said:

“For example, if such a man who wrote poetry…. Or an actor who stepped out and the whole theatre began to applaud….”

The Ryazan apple is sweet and bitter. Petya Zherebyakin understood that it is better for him to leave and return here no more. His affair is finished.

However, that’s all behind us. Now, through the autumn rain, he was rushing along Glinka Street. It’s fortunate that this street is near the theatre, and it’s fortunate that he found the policewoman Katya at home. Now it wasn’t a policewoman; it was simply Katya. With her sleeves rolled up, she was washing a white blouse in a basin. On her nose and forehead appeared beads of perspiration, and she never appeared more dear than now, being domestic.

When Zherebyakin placed a theatre pass in front of her and said that today he was performing in the show, she didn’t believe it. Then, she got interested. And then, for some reason, she got confused and pulled down her rolled-up sleeves. Then she looked at him (oh, how she looked!) and said that she’ll definitely come.

The bells in the theatre were already ringing in the smoking room, in the corridors, in the foyer. The bald commissar in his box, squinted through his pince-nez. On the stage, still hidden behind the curtain, ballerinas straightened their skirts with the same motion that swans, dipping in the water, clean their wings. And behind the cliff, next to the lion Zherebyakin, the stage manager and the director were worrying.

“Remember, you’re a shock worker! Look, don’t mess this up!” the director whispered into the lion’s ear.

The curtain rose, and beyond a bright row of footlights, the dark hall opened up before the lion, filled to the top with the white spots of faces. Long ago, when he was still Zherebyakin, he climbed out of a trench. In front of him, shells exploded. He shuddered, crossed himself as is the village custom, and nonetheless rushed forward. Now it seemed to him that he would not be able to make a single step. But the stage director shoved him from behind, and he, moving his legs and arms, which had suddenly become someone else’s, slowly crawled onto the cliff.

At the top of the cliff, the lion raised his head, and he saw, very close, in a box on the second tier, leaning over the railing, policewoman Katya. She was looking right at him. The lion’s heart beat loudly, one two…and stopped! He was shaking all over. Now his fate would be decided; already the spear was flying toward him. Boom! It hit him in the side. Now he must fall. And if again he should fall the wrong way, all would be ruined. He became more terrified than ever before in his life. It was far more terrifying than when he climbing out of the trench.

In the hall, people had already noticed that something strange what happening on stage. The fatally wounded lion stood motionless on the top of the cliff and was looking upward. In the first rows they heard as the stage-manager, in a terrible whisper, yelled, “Fall, damn it, fall!” And then, everyone saw something completely fantastic. The lion raised his right paw, quickly crossed himself, and fell like a rock off the cliff.

A second of general stunned silence; and then, in the hall, like a death-dealing shell, laughter exploded. Policewoman Katya laughed so hard she was crying. The murdered lion, sticking his snout in his paws, cried.

- Evgeny Zamyatin

Every day I go to the little station to meet someone. Who that someone is, I do not know.

I always go there on my way home from the market. I sit down on a cold bench, put my basket on my lap, and gaze over at the ticket gate. Each time a train arrives—an up-line train, a down-line train—passengers spew out of the carriage doors and throng towards the gate. With angry faces they show passes, hand over tickets. Then, eyes straight ahead, they walk hurriedly on. They come past my bench, go out into the open space in front of the station, then scatter in their various directions. I just sit there. What if someone should smile and talk to me? Oh no, please no! It makes me feel so nervous. Just the thought makes me shudder, as if cold water has been thrown over my back—I cannot breathe. But still I wait for someone, every day. Who can it be that I’m waiting for? What kind of person? But it may not be a person at all. I don’t like people. Or rather, they frighten me. Face to face with someone, saying things I don’t want to, like ‘how are you?’ or ‘it’s getting cold’—saying these things just for the sake of it. I hate it. It makes me feel I’m a liar, as if there’s no bigger liar in the world. It makes me want to die. And the person I’m talking to, too wary of me, paying vague compliments, expounding opinions that they don’t really have: I listen to them and I feel sad, sad at their mean-minded caution. It makes me dislike the world more and more—I can’t stand it. Are people always like this—spending their whole lives tiring each other out with wary exchanges of stiff greetings? I don’t like being with people. So except in very unusual circumstances, I have never done anything like go to visit friends. I always used to feel most comfortable at home, sewing quietly with my mother, just the two of us. But then the war started and things got so tense I felt I shouldn’t be the only one to just sit at home every day. I felt uneasy. I couldn’t relax at all. I felt I wanted to work as hard as I possibly could, to make a direct contribution. I lost confidence in the way I had been living.

I couldn’t bear to sit mutely at home. But if I went out, where was there for me to go? So I do the shopping, and on my way back I go to the station and sit there on the cold bench. I want that ‘somebody’ to come: ‘Oh, if they should suddenly appear! But I’m also afraid: ‘What if they come? What shall I do?’ At the same time I’m resolved, resigned: ‘If they come I shall dedicate my whole life to them. That moment will decide my fate.’ These feelings twist strangely together—these feelings and disgraceful fantasies. My heart aches: it’s overwhelming, almost suffocating. The world goes silent; the people going back and forth at the station look distant and tiny, as though I’m watching through the wrong end of a telescope. It feels unreal, as if I’m in a daydream, as if I’m not sure whether I’m alive or dead. Oh, what can it be that I’m waiting for? Perhaps I’m just a filthy whore. All that about the war and feeling uneasy, wanting to work as hard as I possibly could, wanting to make a contribution—perhaps it’s all a lie. Perhaps I was making a fine-sounding excuse, trying to find an opportunity to make my reckless fantasies come true. I sit here with this vacant look on my face, but deep inside I think I see a flicker, a flame of some outrageous intrigue.

Just who is it I’m waiting for? I have no clear idea at all—only a vague shadow in the mist of my mind. Yet I wait. Every day since the start of the war, on my way back from shopping I’ve come to the station, sat on this cold bench, and waited. What if someone should smile and talk to me? Oh no, please no! It’s not you I’m waiting for. So who is it, then? Who is it I’m waiting for? A husband? No. A lover? Certainly not. A friend? Oh no. Money? Ridiculous. A ghost? Oh, oh no!

Something more pleasant, bright and cheerful, something wonderful. I don’t know what. Something like spring. No, that’s not it. Fresh leaves. May. Cool, clear water flowing through fields of wheat. No, that isn’t it at all. Oh, but even so I wait, my heart throbbing. People stream past my eyes. It’s not this one. Not that one. My shopping basket in my arms, I quiver. I wait. With all my heart, I wait. I ask you, please, please do not forget me—the girl who comes every day to the station to meet you and then goes sadly home. Please, please remember me, and do not laugh at me. I am not going to tell you the name of the little station. I don’t have to: you will see me sometime, even if I don’t.

- Osamu Dazai

Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse
names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the
two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forebears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they
mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil
labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias,
atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own.

- Jorge Luis Borges

And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact
Conducting, was his office all those minutes ago,
This man you never heard of. These are the bills
In the intray, the ash in the ashtray, the grey memoranda stacked
Against him, the serried ranks of the box-files, the packed
Jury of his unanswered correspondence
Nodding under the paperweight in the breeze
From the window by which he left; and here is the cracked
Receiver that never got mended and here is the jotter
With his last doodle which might be his own digestive tract
Ulcer and all or might be the flowery maze
Through which he had wandered deliciously till he stumbled
Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked
On a manhole under the hollyhocks. The pencil
Point had obviously broken, yet, when he left this room
By catdrop sleight-of-foot or simple vanishing act,
To those who knew him for all that mess in the street
This man with the shy smile has left behind
Something that was intact.

- Louis Macneice

You were my death:
you I could hold
when all fell away from me.

- Paul Celan

Not a single star will be left in the night.

The night will not be left.

I will die and, with me,

the weight of the intolerable universe.

I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,

the continents and the faces.

I shall erase the accumulated past.

I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.

Now I am looking on the final sunset.

I am hearing the last bird.

I bequeath nothingness to no one.

- J.L.B

“The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement … The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty.—We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk; so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this immanence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”

- JLB

“One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.”

- G. K. Chesterton

Priviledged moments when the word truly descends upon writing and becomes body, matter of the incarnation. Incandescent whirlpool motionless in the velocity of the centre and the very centre of stillness.

- José Angel Valente