Toad-imp whispers

26 April 1826. Wednesday Night. This Morning a little before three suffered one of my most grievous and alarming <Scream->Dreams—and on at length struggling myself awake found just such a focus of Ferment just above the Navel as if the Dæmon of Aqua Fortis had just closed in with the Genie Magnesia, or as if a Chocolate Mill were making a Water-spout dance a reel in dizzy-frisk.—It is strongly impressed on my mind, that I shall imitate my dear Father in this as faithfully as Nature imitates or repeats him in me in so many other points—viz. that I shall die in sleep […]
    Since I first read Swedenborg’s De Coelo et de Inferno ex Auditis et Visis, every horrid Dream, that I have, my thoughts involuntarily turn to the passage […] (indeed to the whole Book I am indebted for imagining myself always in Hell, i.e. imagining all the wild Chambers, Ruins, Prisons, Bridewells, to be in Hell)—Sunt Spiritus, qui nondum in conjunctione cum Inferno sunt: illi amant indigesta et maligna, qualia sunt sordescentium Ciborum in Ventriculo*—Swedenborg had often talked with them, and driven them away, & immediately the poor Sleeper’s frightful Dreams were removed, they being the spiritual Linguifacture of these Toad-Imps’ whispers. 

 

Entry 5360, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

 

* There are spirits that are not yet conjoined with Hell: they love things undigested and malignant such as befouled victuals in the belly.

Privy matters (4)

Quænam in mundo admiranda?

 

Resp. Quod omnes cornices sint nigræ; quod ratti æque cito currant ac mures; quod canes ossa arrodant et duglutiant; quod rusticus armaturam induat, galeam capiti imponat, hastam arripiat ad defendendum pullos gallinaceos, cum singulis diebus tam diligenter observentur a vulpium orphanis. Mirabile quod feles nequam post cœnam, densis existentibus tenebris, sine lumine, sine gladio, sine pileo, nudis auribus pedibusque, absque crepidis calopodiisque audeant aggredi ingentem exercitum honestorum murium et glirium. Mirabilius quod hiems nunquam ita caleat sicuti æstas; uti legitur apud Quinquarillam,* sine perspicillo† in libro per omnia albo, in illis verbis pata, pata, pon.§ Mirabilissimum omnes fœminas hoc vitio laborare, ut per unum idemque foramen mingant et cacent, cum (scilicet) latrinæ podicem obverterint.

 

Nugæ Venales, sive Thesaurus Ridendi et Jocandi. Ad Gravissimos Severissimosque Viros, Patres Melancholicorum Conscriptos. Anno 1689. Prostant Neminem; sed tamen Ubique. 

What things in the world are to be marvelled at?

Answer. That all crows are black; that rats run as fast as mice; that dogs gnaw and suck bones; that the peasant dons armour, puts a helmet on his bonce, lays hold of a spear to defend his hens’ chicks, as noted by orphaned fox cubs every day. It is a marvel that rascally cats, emerging in post-prandial pitch darkness, without a light, without a sword, without a cap, their ears and feet bare, dispensing with sandals and clogs, dare to attack the vast army of noble mice and dormice. More marvellous still is that winter is never as hot as summer, as may be read in the Quinquarilla, without eyeglasses, a book completely blank, worded tappity-tappity-tap. Most marvellous of all is that all women labour under the fault that they micturate and defecate through the same orifice, as is obvious from the fact that in both cases they turn their rump to the privy .

* Quinquarilla (fem. sing.) - ‘Five-Basket’, a hapax legomenon, derived from quasillum, the diminutive of qualus ‘wicker basket’, and perhaps with an echo of Quinquatria (neut. pl.), a Roman festival of Minerva thus named, according to Varro, because it began five days after the Ides of March. The anonymous author of the Nugae Venales (first published in 1632), a work steeped in the Latin-speaking student (sub)culture of the German universities, here provides an inventive translation of the phrase ‘the first Shrove Tuedsay basket’, found in Bruscambille’s ‘Autre prologue & discours’ (Fantaisies, 1612): ‘Comme li se lit sans lunettes au premier pannier de Mardy gras en ces mots pata, pata, pon.’ On borrowings from Bruscambille in the Nugae Venales, see: Annette Tomarken, ‘Borrowed Nonsense: The Nugae Venales and the Prologues of Bruscambille’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, Vol. 64 (2015).

† perspicillus - the word for telescope used by Galileo in the Sidereus Nuncius (1610) and which in subsequent early modern texts was also used in the sense of ‘eyeglasses’.

§ pata, pata, pon - onomatopoeic. ‘Mot inventé pour exprimer le bruit d’un tambour’: Philibert-Joseph le Roux, Dictionnaire Comique, Satyrique, Critique, Burlesque, Libre et Proverbial. Avec une Explication très-fidèle de toutes les manières de parler Burlesques, Comiques, Libres, Satyriques, Critiques & Proverbiales, qui peuvent se rencontrer dans les meilleurs Auteurs, tant Anciens que Modernes. Le Tout Pour faciliter aux Etrangers, & aux François mêmes, l’intelligence de toutes sortes de Livres (Lyon, 1735).

Privy matters (1)

 

Privy matters (2) 

Privy matters (3)

Une maison onirique

La poésie, dans sa grande fonction, nous redonne les situations du songe. La maison natale est plus qu'un corps de logis, elle est un corps de songes. Chacun de ses réduits fut un gîte de rêverie. Et le gîte a souvent particularisé la rêverie. Nous y avons pris des habitudes de rêverie particuliere. La maison, la chambre, le grenier où l'on été seul, donnent les cadres d'une rêverie interminable, d'une rêverie que la poésie pourrait seule, par une œuvre, achever, accomplir. Si l'on donne à toutes ces retraites leur fonction qui fut d'arbitrer des songes, on peut dire [...] qu'il existe pour chacun de nous une maison onirique, une maison du souvenir-songe, perdue dans l'ombre d'un au-delà du passé vrai. 

Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l'espace, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957

The great function of poetry is to restore to us the situations of the dream. The house of our birth is more than an embodiment of home, it is an embodiment of dreams. Its every corner was a refuge for reverie. And often the refuge placed its distinguishing mark on the reverie. It was here that we acquired the habits of distinctive reverie. The house, the bedroom, the attic where we were alone furnished the frameworks of endless reverie, of a reverie that only poetry, through a poetic work, would otherwise be able to accomplish, to attain. If we grant to all these refuges their function of having arbitrated dreams, we may say that there exists for each of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, lost in the shadow of an otherworld of the real past.

Quis nasus est optimus?

Quis nasus est optimus?

R. Magnus. Vide catalogum Imperatorum Romanorum, omnes fuerunt nasuti. Numa secundus rex Romanorum sesquipedalem nasum habebat, ideoque nominatus fuit Pompilius, quasi dicas, nasus in superlativo gradu. Lycurgus et Solon habebant insignem nasum, si fides sit adhibenda Plutarcho. Summa omnes reges Italiae fuerunt nasuti, excepto Tarquinio superbo, qui ideo etiam urbe et regno pulsus fuit. Quisque apprehendat nasum suum, et videat, num possit fieri Imperator. Qui habent magnum nasum cæteris sapientiores sunt, et melius exercent animi functiones, quia melius excrementa exeunt. Unde Homerus quia era sapiens nasutus dicitur. Et proverbio illi dicuntur prudentes qui e longinquo odorantur, et de stupido dicitur, non habet nasum. 

Nugæ Venales, sive Thesaurus Ridendi et Jocandi. Ad Gravissimos Severissimosque Viros, Patres Melancholicorum Conscriptos. Anno 1689. Prostant apud Neminem; sed tamen Ubique.

Which nose is best?

Answer. Big. See the list of Roman Emperors: all had big noses.* Numa, the second king of the Romans, had a one-and-a-half-foot nose, on which account he was named Pompilius,† as if to say 'nose in the superlative degree'. Lycurgus and Solon had prominent noses, if that which Plutarch reports is reliable. In the main, all the kings of Italy were big-nosed, with the exception of Tarquin the Proud, who for that very reason was expelled from the city and kingdom. Whoever can grasp his own nose in his hand, whoever can see the end of his own nose, might be made Emperor. Those who have big noses are wiser than anybody else and better able to exercise the mental faculties, because they are better able to pass mucus. Whence Homer was said to be big-nosed because he was wise. Also, the intelligent are proverbially those who can smell from afar, whereas it is said that the stupid have no nose. 

 

* Cf. Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 7, where, in listing the late-repentant negligent rulers, Sordello dwells on their nasal appendages: Philip III of France is 'quel nasetto', or 'the snub-nosed one' (Purg. 7, 103), Peter III of Aragon is 'colui dal maschio naso', or 'he of the manly nose' (Purg. 7, 113), Peter, son of Charles I of Anjou, is 'nasuto', or 'big-nosed' (Purg. 7, 124).

† Pompilius, the name of a Roman gens, derives from the Greek πομπίλος, the pilot-fish (Gasterosteus ductor), a term sometimes also applied to the nautilus, but here it is humorously taken to derive from the early modern Dutch pompe or Middle Low German pompe, pumpe, a wooden water pipe or ship's pump.

Privy matters (3)

 —then the fantastic puppet-old-man that threw himself in my way and under my feet where ever I went—my intreatng some one to take him away—and a huge bloater fat fellow came & sat on him, saying, there was no other way—I went it—and a villainous little dog contrived to fly at me & bit me, with a sharp nip (the nearest imitation of proper pain, that I have found occur in sleep—Some one of the half-friendly Inhabitants of the Sleep-world observed, that the little old man had contrived to let the dog slip in the moment, the fat fellow sate on him—then the Drama of Puppets—& that I must stay it out before I could go to relieve myself—but I grew angry—& stole away down a hollow lane that led to a river, on the other side of which was a field or plot with a number of rather pretty yet fear-inspiring Child-men, with sheaves, as in a harvest field, of dry exceedingly light <Bean> Halms or the dried out Rushes in a dry summer ditch/ —I was on a sloping hillock or bank of the River—& said to myself—These are Tieck’s Fairies / alluding in my mind to the exquisite tale of the Girl who passed from Childhood to Womanhood among the Fairies & supposed she had been only a few hours / —and then a white-faced Boy came on the left of the harvest field but the other side of the Stream, as if to watch what I was about to do—and as I thought, to bring the natives about me, should I persist in profaning the place by letting down my small clothes— —& in this uneasy feeling I awoke—.. P.S. I had deferred taking my regular quantity of Mustard Seed till the moment, that I was undressing—three hours later than my wont—& in consequence, had to undergo all the process in sleep / But from these dreams (and no week occurs in which I have not one or two; always originating in the Kidneys, or Bladder, or Intestinal Canal) I derive convincing confirmation of the diversity between Reason & Understanding. The latter we retain in Dreams—it is “I” still, & the Understanding belongs to “I”—but Reason is a Loan, a Light.—The memory is lost: for it is objectivity that differences Memory from Fancy—and Objectivity, the offspring of Reason, is by divine ordinance connected with the Senses in our present fallen state—We have not God within; but must look out of ourselves for him.

 

Entry 5641, November 1827,  The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 5: 1827-1834, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding, Routledge, 2002

Untitled

 

An somnus mortis frater sit

As for Sleep, which the dying Philosopher called the Brother of Death,* I do not see how it argues the Soul’s Mortality, more than a man’s inability to wake again: but rather helps us to conceive, how that though the stounds† and agonies of Death seem utterly to take away all the hopes of the Soul’s living after them; yet upon a recovery of a quicker Vehicle of Air, she may suddenly awake into fuller and fresher participation of life than before. But I may answer also, that Sleep being only the ligation‡ of the outward Senses, and the interception of motion from the external world, argues no more any radical defect of Life and Immortality in the Soul, than the having a man’s Sight bounded within the walls of his chamber by Shuts, does argue any blindness in the immured party; who haply is busie reading by candle-light, and that with ease, so small a Print as would trouble an ordinary Sight to read it by day. And that the Soul is not perpetually employ’d in Sleep, is very hard for any to demonstrate; we so often remembring our reams merely by occasions, which, if they had not occurr’d, we had never suspected we had dream’d that night.

Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), Book III, Chap. xiv

* ὁ ὕπνος θανάτου ἀδελφὸς. Aelian, Var. Hist. lib. 2, cap. 35. With reference to pre-Socratic philosopher Gorgias Leontinus.

† stound - state of stupefaction or amazement

‡ ligation - condition of being bound, suspension (of the faculties)

The deities of dream

Offenser la pudeur des divinités du songe. (...) S'entretenir d'idées pures et saines pour avoir des songes logiques. Prenez garde à l'impureté qui effarouche les bons esprits et qui attire les divinités fatales. Quand vos rêves sont logiques ils sont une porte ouverte ivoire ou corne sur le monde extérieur.

Gérard de Nerval, feuillet détaché

To offend the modesty of the deities of dream. (...) To have to do with pure and healthy ideas in order to have logical dreams. Beware the impurity that frightens away the good spirits and brings down the fatal deities. When your dreams are logical they are an open portal of ivory or horn to the exterior world.

Au cœur du rêve

Au cœur du rêve, je suis seul. Dépouillé de toutes mes garanties, dévêtu des artifices de langage, des protections sociales, des idéologies rassurantes, je me retrouve dans l’isolement parfait de la créature devant le monde. Plus rien ne subsiste du moi construit ; c’est à peine si, en cet instant où je ne suis plus que moi-même, j’ai encore la conscience d’être quelqu’un. Je suis un être humain, n’importe lequel, semblable à mes semblables. Mais il n’y a plus de semblables dans cette solitude. Il ne reste de moi que la créature et sa destinée, son inexplicable et impérieuse destinée. Avec stupeur, je découvre que je suis cette vie infinie : un être dont les origines remontent au delà de tout ce que je puis connaître, dont le sort dépasse les horizons où atteint mon regard. Je ne sais plus autour de quelles pauvres raisons j’ai organisé la petite existence de cet individu que j’étais. Je suis seulement que m’apparaissent maintenant les raisons de ma vie véritable : elles demeurent innomées, mais présentes ; elles sont ce que j’éprouve, l’immensité de mon étendue réelle. 

 

 Albert Béguin, L’Ame romantique et le rêve, 1939

 

At the heart of the dream, I am alone. Stripped of all my guarantees, disrobed of the artifices of language, social protections, comforting ideologies, I find myself in the perfect isolation of the creature before the world. Nothing more remains of the constructed self; in the instant when I am no more than I myself, barely am I aware of being someone. I am a human being, any human being, a fellow to my fellow men. But there are no more fellow men in this solitude. All that is left of me is the creature and its destiny, its inexplicable and imperious destiny. With bewilderment, I discover that I am this infinite life: a being whose origins go back beyond all that I am capable of knowing, whose fate extends farther than the  horizons of my gaze. I no longer know the paltry reasons around which I organised the petty existence of the individual that I was. I have being only because it is now that the reasons of my true life appear to me: they dwell unnamed, but present; they are what I experience, the vastness of my real expanse. 

 

Hypnolatry / psychology

Once was a god whose lovely face,

Wan as the poppy and arched in wings,

So haunted a votary with his grace

And the still wonder that worship brings,

That, having sipped of Helicon’s springs,

He cast his beauty in bronze. And now

Eternal slumber bedims his brow —

Hypnos: and Dream was his dear son.

Not ours these follies. We haunt instead

Tropical jungles drear and dun,

And see in some fetish of fear and dread

Our symbol of dream — that brooding head!

And deem the wellspring of genius hid

In a dark morass that is dubbed the Id. 

Walter de la Mare, from ‘Dreams’, The Fleeting and Other Poems, 1933

Worlds concealed

En värld är varje människa, befolkad
av blinda varelser i dunkelt uppror
mot jaget konungen som härskar över dem.
I varje själ är tusen själar fångna,
i varje värld är tusen världar dolda
och dessa blinda, dessa undre världar
är verkliga och levande, fast ofullgångna,
så sant som jag är verklig. Och vi konungar
och furstar av de tusen möjliga inom oss
är själva undersåtar, fångna själva
i någon större varelse, vars jag och väsen
vi lika litet fattar som vår överman
sin överman. Av deras död och kärlek
har våra egna känslor fått en färgton.

Som när en väldig ångare passerar
långt ute, under horisonten, där den ligger
så aftonblank. – Och vi vet inte om den
förrän en svallvåg når till oss på stranden,
först en, så ännu en och många flera
som slår och brusar till dess allt har blivit
som förut. – Allt är ändå annorlunda.

Så grips vi skuggor av en sällsam oro
när något säger oss att folk har färdats,
att några av de möjliga befriats.

 

Gunnar Ekelöf, Färjesång, Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, 1941

 

Every human being is a world, peopled

with blind creatures in dark revolt

against the self, the king that rules over them. 

In every soul a thousand souls are imprisoned,

in every world a thousand worlds are concealed

and these blind, these nether worlds 

are real and alive, albeit unfulfilled,

as genuinely as I am real. And we kings

and princes of the thousand potential creatures within us

are themselves subjects, themselves imprisoned

in some vaster creature, whose self and being

we understand as little as our master

does his master. Their death and their love

imbue our own feelings with their tint.

 

The same as when a huge steamer passes

out at sea, below the horizon, which spreads

so evening-bright. — And we know nothing of it

till the swell reaches us on the shore,

first one wave, then another and many more,

which breaks and crashes, till all returns

to what it was before. — Yet all is different.

 

So too are we shadows seized by a strange unrest

when something tells us that they are on the move,

that some of the potential creatures are set free.   

An epitaph

Son of man, tell me,

Hast thou at any time lain in thick darkness,

Gazing up into a lightless silence,

A dark void vacancy,

Like the woe of the sea

In the unvisited places of the ocean?

And nothing but thine own frail sentience 

To prove thee living?

Lost in this affliction of the spirit,

Did'st thou then call upon God 

Of his infinite mercy to reveal to thee

Proof of his presence -

His presence and love for thee, exquisite creature

    of his creation?

To show thee but some small devisal 

Of his infinite compassion and pity even

    though it were as fleeting

As the light of a falling star in a dewdrop?

Hast thou? O, if thou hast not,

Do it now; do it now; do it now!

Lest that night come which is sans sense,

    thought, tongue, stir, time, being,

And the moment is for ever denied thee,

Since thou art thyself as I am.

 

Walter de la Mare,  ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’ (1936)

Tenebrae exteriores

‘. . . that we mortals should dread the tomb—that’s only natural. And it’s when we are nearing the end that what may be called the real takes on another colour, sir. You look at those about you and can’t any more so surely rely on what they are, if you take me. As you once could. There is so thin a crust, sir, in a manner of speaking, between being awake and asleep—very fast asleep indeed. A sip of a doctor’s drug, and not only the lantern goes out but everything it shone on. I had that experience myself not more than a month or two since—only a decayed tooth, sir: outer darkness, and then the awakening. If that comes. It is like as if we were treading a flat fall of untrodden snow and suddenly it is thin ice—cat ice, as we used to call it when we were boys—and we are gone. Not, mind you, that the waters of death, however cold they may be, are not—well, the waters of life. Faith is faith. . . .’

 

Walter de la Mare,  ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’ (1936)

The mind of Nature

© Alistair Ian Blyth

"Language is the means of human communication. In human awareness, it is language that limns the outer and the inner world to an equal extent. It is with the help of language that I talk to people. Outside of human communication language loses its meaning, it becomes dispensable.

 

"I am a human being, a part of the world, a product thereof. I am the mind of Nature, its understanding. I am a part of human society, a unit thereof. With my help both Nature and Humanity transform themselves, perfect themselves, improve themselves. But just as the understanding has not yet grasped all the secrets of the microcosm, in the domain of the macrocosm it is still only a talented child embarking on its first marvellous discoveries.

 

"I, the poet, live in a world of enchanting mysteries. They everywhere surround me. Plants in all their multiformity—grass, flowers, trees—the mighty realm of primitive life, the foundation of all living things, my brothers, feeding me with both their flesh and their air—all of them live alongside me. How can I reject kinship with them? The variability of the vegetal landscape, the combination of leaf and branch, the play of the sun on the fruits of the earth—all these are a smile on the face of a friend bound to me by ties of blood kinship."

Nikolai Zabolotsky, 1957

 

Слово есть средство человеческого общения. Слово рисует в чело­веческом сознании мир внешний и мир внутренний в одинаковой степени. С помощью слова я обращаюсь к людям. Слово вне челове­ческого общения теряет свой смысл, оно делается необязательным.

 

Я — человек, часть мира, его произведение. Я — мысль при­роды и ее разум. Я — часть человеческого общества, его едини­ца. С моей помощью и природа и человечество преобразуют самих себя, совершенствуются, улучшаются. Но так же, как разум еще не постиг всех тайн микрокосма, он и в области макрокосма еще толь­ ко талантливое дитя, делающее свои первые удивительные от­ крытия. 

 

Я, поэт, живу в мире очаровательных тайн. Они окружают меня всюду. Растения во всем их многообразии — эта трава, эти цветы, эти деревья — могущественное царство первобытной жизни, основа всего живущего, мои братья, питающие меня и плотью своей, и воз­духом, — все они живут рядом со мной. Разве я могу отказаться от родства с ними? Изменчивость растительного пейзажа, сочетание листвы и ветвей, игра солнца на плодах земли — это улыбка на ли­це моего друга, связанного со мной узами кровного родства. 

 

Н. А. Заболоцкий.  «Почему я не сторонник абстрактной поэзии» Метаморфозы / Николай Заболоцкий; сост., подгот. текста, вступ. статья и коммент. И. Е. Лощилова. — М.: ОГИ, 2014. С. 606

 

 

Lodeinikov

 

В краю чудес, в краю живых растений,

Несовершенной мудростью дыша,

Зачем ты просишь новых впечатлений

И новых бурь, пытливая душа?

Не обольщайся призраком покоя:

Бывает жизнь обманчива на вид.

Настанет час, и утро роковое

Твои мечты, сверкая, ослепит. 

(...)

И в этот миг жук в дудку задудил.

(...)

И постепенно превращалось в пенье

Шуршанье трав и тишины.

Природа пела. Лес, подняв лицо,

Пел вместе с лугом. Речка чистым телом

Звенела вся, как звонкое кольцо.

(...)

Николай Заболоцкий, Лодейников, 1932-1947

 

 

In the land of wonders, land of living plants,

Exhaling a wisdom as yet imperfect,

Why do you seek fresh impressions

And fresh tempests, inquisitive soul?

Be not deluded by the phantom of peace;

Life is outwardly deceptive betimes. 

The hour will come, and the fateful morn

Will blaze out, blinding your dreams.

(...)

 And just then the beetle blew his pipe.

(...)

And the rustling of grasses and silence

Little by little were transformed into song.

Nature sang. The forest, lifting her face,

Sang with the meadow. The pure-bodied river

Chimed forth like a ringing bell. 

(...) 

Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-1958), Lodeinikov, 1932-1947

 

 

 

   

 

 

Hiddenness

The hiddenness of perfect things; a shrinking delicacy and mysticism of sentiment (...) the fatality which seems to haunt any signal beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something illicit and isolating; the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in the vulgar--these were some of the impressions, forming as they do, a constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan sentiment, from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old story [the Metamorphoses of Apuleius] enforced on him. A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident ranks with us for something more than its independent value.

Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885)

Die Selbstsprache

Gerade das Eigentümliche der Sprache, daß sie sich bloß um sich selbst bekümmert, weiß keiner. (...) Wenn man den Leuten nur begreiflich machen könnte, daß es mit der Sprache wie mit den mathematischen Formeln sei – Sie machen eine Welt für sich aus – Sie spielen nur mit sich selbst, drücken nichts als ihre wunderbare Natur aus, und eben darum sind sie so ausdrucksvoll – eben darum spiegelt sich in ihnen das seltsame Verhältnisspiel der Dinge. Nur durch ihre Freiheit sind sie Glieder der Natur, und nur in ihren freien Bewegungen äußert sich die Weltseele und macht sie zu einem zarten Maßstab und Grundriß der Dinge. 

Novalis, Monolog, 1798

Precisely what is peculiar to language, the fact of its being concerned only with itself, is known to no one. (...) If only one could be made to understand that with language it is the same as with mathematical formulae – they make up a world of their own – they play only with themselves, express nothing but their own wondrous nature, and this is why they are so expressive – this is why the strange interplay of things is mirrored in them. It is only through their freedom that they are elements of Nature, and only in their free movements does the World-soul manifest itself and make them a delicate measure and outline of things. 

After rain

Lars Gustafsson

(1936-2016)

After rain

Summer rain's sky like an X-ray film

where light and shadows mingling show through.

Silent forest and not a single bird.

Your own eye like a droplet spilled under clouds,

reflecting the world: light and vague shadows.

And suddenly you know who you are:

a baffled stranger between soul and clouds,

only by the thin membrane of an image

are the world's depth and the eye's darkness kept separate.

 

Suis-je celui qui rêve?

Chaque créature à son tour se trouve, tôt ou tard, avec plus ou moins de clarté, de continuité et surtout d’urgence, devant cette insistante question : suis-je celui qui rêve? Question aux aspects infinis, qui touche à nos raisons de vivre, aux choix que nous devons faire entre nos possibilités intérieures, au problème de la connaissance comme à celui de la poésie. (...) Est-ce moi qui rêve la nuit? Ou bien suis-je devenu le théâtre où quelqu’un, quelque chose, déroule ses spectacles tantôt dérisoires, tantôt pleins d’une inexplicable sagesse? Lorsque je perds le gouvernement de ses images dont se tisse la trame la plus secrète, la moins communicable, de ma vie, leur assemblage imprévu a-t-il quelque rapport significatif avec mon destin, ou avec d'autres événements qui me dépassent? Ou faut-il croire que j’assiste simplement à la danse incohérente, honteuse, misérablement simiesque, des atomes de ma pensée, livrés à leur absurde caprice?

Albert Béguin, L’Âme romantique et le rêve. Essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poesie française, Libraire José Corti, Paris, 1939

 

Every being in turn finds itself, sooner or later, with greater or lesser lucidity, continuity and, above all, urgency, faced with the pressing question: Am I the one who dreams? A question of endless facets, which touches on our very reasons for living, on the choices that we have to make between our inner potentialities, on the problem of knowledge and that of poetry alike. (...) Is it I who dreams at night? Or have I simply become the theatre where somebody or something stages performances that are now ridiculous, now filled with inexplicable wisdom? When I lose control of its images, from which is woven my life’s most secret, least communicable fabric, does their unexpected assembly have any significant relationship to my fate, or else other events that are beyond me? Or am I to believe that I merely witness the incoherent, shameful, wretchedly ape-like dance of my mind’s atoms, given over to absurd whim?

The way inwards (2)

På natten

 

Ett öga rullar över golvet, jag vrider mig inåt.

    Dörren är stängda läppar, lövet är tungt att bära.

Sakta växer hår och naglar in i tystnaden.

    Dörrens läppar är stängda för omvända värden.

Ingen blixt är hemma under drömmens ögonlock,

    Men nattens åska går i det fördolda.

 

Gunnar Ekelöf, Dedikation, 1934

At Night

An eye rolls over the floor, I turn inwards.

    The doors are closed lips, the leaf is heavy to bear.

Into the silence slowly grow hair and fingernails.

    The doors' lips are closed to obverse values.

No flash of lightning finds a home under the dream's eyelids,

    But night's thunder rolls in the hiddenness.

    

Jiří Šalamoun's Tristram Shandy (5)

 

I had now the whole south of France, from the banks of the Rhône to those of the Garonne to traverse upon my mule at my own leisure——at my own leisure——for I had left Death, the lord knows——and He only——how far behind me——“I have followed many a man thro’ France, quoth he—but never at this mettlesome rate”——Still he followed,——and still I fled him——but I fled him chearfully——still he pursued——but like one who pursued his prey without hope——as he lag’d, every step he lost, softened his looks——why should I fly him at this rate?

 

Vol. VII, Chap. XLII

 

——Bon jour!——good morrow!——so you have got your cloak on betimes!——but ’tis a cold morning, and you judge the matter rightly——’tis better to be well mounted, than go o’foot——and obstructions in the glands are dangerous——And how goes it with thy concubine——they wife——and thy little ones o’both sides? and when did you hear from the old gentleman and lady—your sister, aunt, uncle and cousins——I hope they have got better of their colds, coughs, claps, tooth-aches, fevers stranguries, sciaticas, swellings, and sore-eyes.——What a devil of an apothecary! to take so much blood—give such a vile purge—puke—poultice—plaister—night-draught—glister—blister?——And why so many grains of calomel? and such a dose of opium! periclitating, pardi! the whole family of ye, from head to tail——By my great aunt Dinah’s old black velvet mask! I think there was no occasion for it.

Vol. VIII, Chap. III

 

—— “And drink nothing ?—nothing but water?”

——Impetuous fluid! the moment thou pressest against the flood-gates of the brain,——see how they give way!——

In swims Curiosity [zvědavost], beckoning to her damsels to follow——they dive into the centre of the current——

 Fancy [obraznost] sits musing upon the bank [břeh], and, with her eyes following the stream [řeka], turns straws and bulrushes into masts and bowsprits.——And Desire [touha], with vest held up to the knee in one hand, snatches at them, as they swim by her, with the other——

O ye water-drinkers! is it then by this delusive fountain that ye have so often governed and turned this world about like a mill-wheel,——grinding the faces of the impotent,—bepowdering their ribs—be-peppering their noses, and changing sometimes even the very frame and face of nature——

Vol. VIII, Chap. V  

 

——No; I shall never have a finger in the pie (so here I break my metaphor)——

Crust [kůrka] and crumb [střída]
Inside [dužina] and out [slupka]

Top and bottom——I detest it, I hate it, I repudiate it——I'm sick at the sight of it——

’Tis all pepper,

        garlic,
        staragen,
        salt, and  

        devil’s dung——by the great arch-cook of cooks, who does nothing, I think, from morning to night, but sit down by the fire-side and invent inflammatory dishes for us,I would not touch it for the world——

Vol. VIII, Chap. XI

In love !——said the Corporal,—your Honour was very well the day before yesterday, when I was telling your Honour the story of the King of Bohemia—Bohemia! said my uncle Toby - - - - musing a long time - - - What became of that story, Trim ?

We lost it, an’ please your Honour, somehow betwixt us—but your Honour was as free from love then as I am——’Twas just whilst thou went'st off with the wheel-barrow—with Mrs. Wadman, quoth my uncle Toby——She has left a ball here—added my uncle Toby, pointing to his breast——

Vol. VIII, Chap. XXVIII

Though the Corporal had been as good as his word in putting my uncle Toby's great Ramallies wig into pipes, yet the time was too short to produce any great effects from it: it had lain many years squeezed up in the corner of his old campaign trunk; and as bad forms are not so easy to be got the better of, and the use of candle-ends not so well understood, it was not so pliable a business as one would have wished. The Corporal, with cheery eye and both arms extended, had fallen back perpendicular from it a score times, to inspire it, if possible, with a better air——had Spleen given a look at it, ’twould have cost her ladyship a smile——it curl’d every where but where the Corporal would have it; and where a buckle or two, in his opinion, would have done it honour, he could as soon have raised the dead. 

Vol. IX, Chap. II