my dripping brain?

That sounds grisly and grotesque. Certainly not dignified. It sure took a long time for me to realize that.


Further...

how preposterous for me to be writing stuff here. I'm not a published (paid) poet or literary critic or freaking philosopher. A blog should be presented and written by someone with credentials and someone of accomplishment. I'm neither of those things.

How embarrassing to come to my senses at such a late date! How wincing all the unqualified blathering I've done on this blog. A "civilian" like me should look askance at his compulsion to express himself publicly. Should scrunch up his eyebrows and frown at such uncalled-for, dilettantish inclination.

I'll continue to post links to articles and to music on YouTube that affect me. That should do no great harm to public propriety. And I'll do so with as little commentary as possible. Otherwise would be pretentious.

Carl Jung -- peculiar and interesting

I thought this article was quite good -- well-written, critically astute, and philosophically alive:

article about Jung


Though...the writer's concluding talk about God is a bit facile, a mite too edifying, and a good deal problematic.

Happy Holidays...

...to y'all folks round the globe who drop by here every now and then. I appreciate it!

THE NUTCRACKER (full-length)

BBC Royal Opera House

me, sort of outbursting

Poetry should not consist of cyber Tupperware parties, where "how wonderful" resounds amid clinking teacups of dubious discernment. Nor should poetry consist of jazzy, aesthetically immune readings in front of a microphone. Nor should poetry that is not wondrous poetry be published by editors of small and large presses.

I'm just not that interested.

But I will be patient with poems of a certain character -- those that at least remember traces of highest sensibility. Poems that have as their background the informing power of Lorca, Pavese, Milosz, Szymborska, Tranströmer, the young Kaminsky. Poems that are groping toward exemplary criteria: written art as a circumstance of the extraordinary.

I simply don't "get" poems that are indifferent to the aesthetic imperative. To that mode of saying in which craft and consciousness move within an environment of dark beauty and astonishing metaphor.

For me, poetry is at its best as a reaction to the mystery of phenomena, the eyes of others, the dreams of memory, and the implausible fact of being.


Outburst concluded.

Franck Violin Sonata (1st movement)

a vision

Sometimes, I imagine I hear a male or female voice narrating a black and white documentary. The vague scene is of a city with a lot of people. The impression has such a meta quality about it that any god also viewing this would be bemused, almost hypnotized.

Maybe the voice is in a language I don't understand. It doesn't matter at all. The main thing is the sense that something is being said, in serious tone and cadence, about the odd complexity of all these people moving about in an unknown city. 

As if conclusions have been drawn and are now being communicated about the patterns manifesting. The sense that shattered pieces of phenomena and consciousness are being shifted around by an unseen, insentient, drunken magnet and are forming into a curious significance. Or maybe forming into a composite mood merely from my "looking" into the scene. A disinterested melancholy (so to speak).

Photograph: Alberto Incrocci/Getty Images