My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance–
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave. . .
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
When I was a kid, back in the days of the Punic Wars, my favorite cousin was my cousin Joe who lived a half a block away. We were actually the only Italian families living in that town on Long Island, both of our families having moved out of Brooklyn for cleaner air, I suppose, and more space, though it was a constant source of friction between my mother and father (he did not want to leave Brooklyn since it was just a short subway ride to work for him at The Downtown Athletic Club in Battery Park but my mother, who always got her way, moved out when he was away in the army without consulting him), but anyway I’m getting off topic here.
My cousin Joe had this habit of talking to himself. You could see him walking down the street mumbling about something, most likely baseball, which was his passion, or else singing, which was his talent. My mother and aunts would shake their heads and say that anyone who talked to themselves was either crazy or had money in the bank, and since even at an early age I knew that he was not someone with money in the bank, I thought it best not to let anyone know that I, too, talked to myself. So I was, for part of my youth anyway, a closet “crazy” person.
Later, though, when I was studying acting, I would lock myself in the downstairs bathroom late at night and practice lines since it was the only place I could have real privacy in a house with three younger brothers, a mother, an aunt, and my grandmother all living together. I would also, apart from memorizing the script, have these long conversations with myself. Soon I started talking to people I knew both out loud when alone or in my head when sitting on the subway, say, or doing laundry in some laundromat, or when stuck in traffic. It became a way for me to work out certain problems with my writing, and also to help come to decisions about choices in life.
Now I find I mostly talk to two people, who, of course, have no idea I have these lengthly conversations with them. Maybe I’m talking about some book I’m reading or film I saw recently (there aren’t very many people to talk about those topics here even though I run the English language program at an arts college) or am discussing some problem one of us is having (you know, giving advice to someone who really doesn’t want advice), or relating some story from the past (both distant & recent). But talking to myself.
I don’t know if my cousin Joe still talks to himself, and I certainly would prefer it if those two people I have conversations with in my head would actually sit down over a cup of coffee or tea or wine, and engage me in an actual dialogue, but at least this way I feel like I’m talking to someone else other than me.
A minor victory, of sorts, but having made it through the sixties in one piece (that’s the 1960s), I’ll take a victory any way I can get it.
It’s that dream we carry with us
That something wonderful will happen,
That it has to happen,
That time will open,
That the heart will open,
That doors will open,
That the mountains will open,
That wells will leap up,
That the dream will open,
That one morning we’ll slip in
To a harbor that we’ve never known.
translated by Robert Bly
While telling the story, if each eyelash does not drip with blood
You’re not telling a love story, but a tale made for kids.
A bank of fine grass and light breeze
A tall-masted solitary night boat.
Stars descend over the vast wild plain;
The moon bobs in the Great River’s flow.
Fame: is it ever to be won in literature?
Office: I should give up, old and sick.
Floating, floating, what am I like?
Between earth and sky, a gull alone.
translated by James J.Y. Liu & Irving Y. Lo
Silent, I climb the Western Tower alone
And see the hook-like moon.
Parasol-trees lonesome and drear
Lock in the courtyard autumn clear.
Cut, it won’t sever;
Be ruled, ’twill never
What sorrow ’tis to part!
It’s an unspeakable taste in the heart.
Read, read, read. Read everything–trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.
Great stories matter–
but the one who tells them
hands them on
in turn to another
who also will.
What’s in the world
is water, earth,
and fire, some people,
animals, trees, birds,
etc. I can see
as far as you,
and what I see I tell
as you told me
or have or will.
You’ll see too
as well.
i want a country
let the sky be blue, the bough green, the cornfield yellow
let it be a land of birds and flowers
i want a country
let there be no pain in the head, no yearning in the heart
let there be an end to brothers’ quarrels
i want a country
let there be no rich or poor, no you and me
on winter days let everyone have house and home
i want a country
let living be like loving from the heart
if there must be complaint, let it be of death
translated by Bernard Lewis
I just finished watching Opening Night on DVD again after having not seen it since it opened in LA sometime around Christmas in 1977.
1977. LA. Another lifetime ago.
That would be the first Christmas season at Intellectuals & Liars with Jimmy, Gordon, & Joel, before Randy joined us, or Bill. What did we sell then: the literature, the poetry: the small press editions like Black Sparrow copies of Charles Bukowski or Mulch Press books of Paul Blackburn, novels by Joan Didion, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, E.M. Forster, Tom McGuane, Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara. Barely 1000 feet of selling space divided into 2 rooms, those reminder tables in the back with hardcover copies of Scandinavian plays for $1.98 and the hardcover copy I kept of Sunflower Splendor, 3000 years of Chinese poetry, which I have here in Istanbul and periodically still lose myself in.
I loved that store, that brick wall with the barred window, the coffee urn and 2 armchairs with a can for contributions that never seemed to get as many coins put in as were taken out by various local denizens who came in not to buy any poetry but for a cup of coffee to go.
But there were the readings, the lively talks afterward fueled by our passion for the written word and Gallo Hearty Burgundy, the customers many of whom are still dear friends.
But this isn’t about the bookstore. This is about that damned film that brought these memories back, about the young woman in a black evening dress sitting in the audience next to Zohra Lampert who plays Ben Gazzarra’s wife, one of the hundreds of extras there to play audience members watching the play within the film being performed and who dreamed of being stars one day themselves. About seeing a ghost from the past and remembering the time, that first I&L Christmas, going to see that movie in Hollywood, and then the rest of the images: the bar at Tampico’s Tilly’s, Bill Mohr dancing in his seat at the Air Lane Bar across the street, Jimmy Powell having his Coke and cigarette for breakfast, Randy Signor charming the female sales reps, Vimal Duggal sharing a bean & beef burrito lunch every weekday, Ren Weschler instructing me in the fine art of seeing, Maureen Strange raving on about some Donald Barthleme story in the New Yorker, playing pool with Chuck Thegze while listening to The Police sing Roxanne, running with my dog Frodo on the beach in Santa Monica, my friends, some long gone, others still a part of my life, but not that face, not that black evening dress, not that Midwestern smile, nor that store, or those poets raging in the night, or the madness and humor and sorrow that was LA, that was part of our youth, so very long, long ago.
Movies, like music, like books, when viewed, listened to, read again, can transport us back, if we’re not careful, to places we may not wish to go. Perhaps, though, whether we want to or not, it’s best to take these journeys. It doesn’t change the way things are, but maybe, just maybe, it can change the way things will be.
And isn’t that what they say history teaches us: what to duplicate, and what to avoid, and the wisdom to know which is which, and what is what.
Being Present for the Moment
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Singer, Songwriter and Author from Kyoto, Japan.
Singer, Songwriter and Author from Kyoto, Japan.
An online activist from Bosnia and Herzegovina, based in Sarajevo, standing on the right side of the history - for free Palestine.
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Dennis Mantin is a Toronto-based writer, artist, and filmmaker.
Finding Inspiration
Off the wall, under the freeway, over the rainbow, nothin' but net.
Erm, what am I doing with my life?
Artist by choice, photographer by default, poet by accident.
At Least Trying Too
A Journey of Spiritual Significance
Life in islamic point of view
Through the view point of camera...
L'essenziale è invisibile e agli occhi e al cuore. Beccarlo è pura questione di culo
In Kate's World
Leonard Durso 