soñada noche de verano austral

heavenly night amidst the austral summer
jupiter and venus escorting
the setting waxing crescent moon
while mars stumbles eastward and stammers.

Orion's witness from far above
the romance in the air that gently blows
the touch, the lovely chat, the memoir
of the elusive summer nights with astroboy
and the naughty deeds of the solar gods.

---

soñada noche de verano austral
escoltada por jupiter y venus,
la luna en el oeste se esconde
y marte celoso balbucea de espaldas.
orion es testigo
del romance en el aire que sopla dulcemente
como las caricias, las palabras, el recuerdo
de las noches de verano con astroboy
y las travesuras de los astros.

y yo extraño a mi romeo cuando me plantaron
la pirada, la veleta, la falluta y la pajera

"i should only believe in a god that would know how to dance"

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Shiva the world dancer. he's dancing on a little dwarf whose name is forgetfulness. that's ourselves, forgetful of our eternal identity with shiva.
one of his right hands holds a little drum. and the drum goes tic tic tic tic that is the tic of time which creates the world of time. and the world of time is like a veil thrown across the face of eternity. and we cannot penetrate it. eternity is not a long time, it has nothing to do with time, it is the dimension that is aclueded from our own experience by the veil of time.
his left hand holds a flame, and that is a flame to burn away the veil of time.
the lower right hand says "do not be afraid".
the other left hand is called the elephant hand or the teaching hand, it points to the lifted left foot, which means release. the right foot on the back of forgetfulness.
so this dance with creation, destruction and passing time, holds in the center the still point of the head, and this is what lives in us. we don't feel the weight of shiva, his foot on the back anymore than the little dwarf does. but he is there and his dance is to call us to that knowledge."

-Joseph Campbell

Don't be shy, dance.

follow your bliss

"there is no rules, an individual needs to find what electrifies and enlivens his own hearts and wakes him."

"and i have a firm belief in this now, not only in terms of my own experience but in knowing of the experiences of other people. when you follow your bliss, and by bliss i mean the deep sense of being in it and doing what the push is out of your own existence, you follow that and door will open where you wouldn't have thought there were going to be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anybody else. there is something about the integrity of a life and the world moves in and helps."

-joseph campbell

the passion

since both judaism and christianity are mythologically structured orders of symbols.
[the reading of the symbols] is an immediate attitude of YOU to LIFE.
for instance, the crucifixion, (...) as the zeal of eternity for incarnation in time, which involves the breaking up of the ONE into the many and the acceptance of the sufferings of the world.
-joseph campbell

on poetry

poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.
-Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996

♥ w. b. yeats

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:---
(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
---Yeats, "Magic" (1901)

When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the song of experience.
---Yeats, letter to Elizabeth Pelham, January 4, 1939

teoria sobre mitologia y religion -a draft

se me ocurre que la mitologia, y la religion dentro de esta categoria, son historias. la humanidad siempre busco eternizar los logros de grandes personalidades -heroes- en canciones, pinturas, cuentos.
y de la misma manera en que se transmite un chisme, un relato semi-extra-natural, ciertas historias fueron pasando de boca en boca, de libro en libro.
estas historias son como ondas en un lago, cuando, al juntarse dos iguales, duplican su magnitud. de esta forma estas olas de sabiduria popular, a lo largo de los tiempos, de civulizaciones, fueron magnificandose y convirtiendose en arquetipos de conocimiento.

on the idea of god:

the absolute, the origin, the beyond, the void....
toys of our minds to make sense
of the otherness in our own world.

There is no need for a father,
i might as well just call it LIFE
"on the surface and un-adorable",
the fierce force that pulls and throws
and rocks and rolls.

on frost

---Frost was the first American poet to live a considerable living exclusively through poetry, a man paid simply for being a poet (for readings, in universities; the public bard we saw images of last week). Poetry was always a mode of work for Frost, and work was a model of poetic activity. Meaning is always something made, what the poet works on and for. Frost's modernity consists in the idea that truth is concrete and contingent, not a metaphysical matter, not an ideal principle; it is only available in the act (the moment) of deriving it, or constructing it, an act that is ordinary, incompletable, and thus necessarily repeated, an ongoing task. Frost is a materialist who calls attention to the circumstances of imagination: poetry is an encounter between fact and desire, focusing the terms, or conditions, on which something can be known. Tools are in Frost an image of those enabling conditions, and they include, in poetry, meter, rhyme, and all the technical resources of verse, the materials of language.

Professor Langdon Hammer

robert frost's sound of sense

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense. Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. . . .
. . . The sound of sense, then. You get that. It is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound--pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an artist. But remember we are still talking merely of the raw material of poetry. An ear and an appetite for these sounds of sense is the first qualification of a writer, be it of prose or verse. But if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre. Verse in which there is nothing but the beat of the metre furnished by the accents of the pollysyllabic words we call doggerel. Verse is not that. Neither is it the sound of sense alone. It is the resultant from those two. There are only two or three metres that are worth anything. We depend for variety on the infinite play of accents in the sound of sense.
--Frost to John Bartlett, July 1913


My versification seems to bother people more than I should have expected--I suppose because I have been so long accustomed to thinking of it in my own private way. It is as simple as this: there are the very regular pre-established accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation. I am never more pleased than when I can get these into strained relation. I like to drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle. That's all but it's no mere figure of speech though one can make figures enough about it.
--Frost to John Cournos, July 1914