A Poet Reflects

elina-astra:

“Your duty is to be and not to be this or that.  ‘I am that I am’ sums up the whole truth.  The method is summed up in the words ‘Be still.’  What does stillness mean?  It means destroy yourself.  Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble.  Give up the notion that ‘I am so and so.’  All that is required to realize the Self is to be still.  What can be easier than that?” 

—Ramana Maharshi

Translation

Though there’s no such thing as a “self,” I missed it—
the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly
like a book an old love sent with an inscription
in his hand, whatever it meant,
After such knowledge, what forgiveness …

—the script of it like the way my self felt
learning German words by chance—Mitgefühl,
Unheimlichkeit—and the trailing off that happened
because I knew only the feelings, abstract
and international, like ghosts or connotations
lacking a grammar, a place to go:

this was the way my self felt when it started
falling apart: each piece of it clipped
from a garden vaguely remembered
by somebody unrecognizable—
such a strange bouquet that somebody sent
to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.

—Deidre O’Connor, from Poetry (September 2001)

cliqmo:

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

—Franz Kafka

(Source: wordpainting)

hsaptus:

“My dear, I don’t know what to do today, help me decide.  Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages?  Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me afterall.  Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down?  Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage.  Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self?  Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but? …

— Albert Camus

(Source: seabois)

huong1952:

“Don’t depend too much on anyone in this world because even your own shadow leaves you when you are in darkness.”

—Ibn Taymiyyah

Position without a Magnitude

As when someone
You haven’t noticed before
Gets up in an empty theater
And projects his [or her] shadow
Among the fabulous horsemen
On the screen

And you shudder
As you realize it’s only you
On your way
To the blinding sunlight
Of the street.

—Charles Simic, from Choron’s Cosmology (George Braziller, Inc, 1977)

journalofanobody:

“I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breath.”

—Franz Kafka (via codien)

journalofanobody:

“It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it’s as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time.”

—Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay,” London Mercury (January 1922) 

(Source: katherine-mansfield)

coquettesfancy:

“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.”

—Hermann Hesse

(Source: moon3)