Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki is said to have taught his students: the ideal Japanese translation for “I love you” is “Tsuki ga tottemo aoi naa” (The moon is so blue tonight).
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Category Archives: lit
Lionel Lark was an alchemist by profession but he loved to quest. Li and Mole were a romantic pair. Li, with his many-coloured zodiac coat flapping about as he rode the dawn wind. Rubbing his rimless spectacles, he lectured Mole in his larkish manner about the mythical Lily Pond and its latitude and longitude, and goofing sometimes, and mentioning the Hyperboreans, the frozen folk who lived behind the North Wind.
At eight o’clock he scribbled little spells and directions on a dried mushroom parchment and Moley got proudly into his pigs-bladder balloon. Lionel took off, at first a little shakily, but soon as swift as the lordly eagle, the Emperor of the Sky-Skinned Airships.
Bopping through the morning clouds, Kingsley rocked to and fro, now and again straightening his course by adjusting the misty spider’s-web rope which was harnessed around Lionel’s little puffed-out chest. They made a wonderful sight, these animal Wright brothers.
A lonely elf crunched the autumn leaves and solemnly dictated to his mouse scribe long, winding spirals of wonderful runes which, in our heavy translation would awaken Ra at midnight, or un-hibernate a legion of poley albino-eyed hedgehogs or even cause a chasm on the deeply swirl of Fox Necks to drown a blessed water lily. Pan be praised for elfish ability to know about wisdom and to use it wisely.
The elf’s autumn feet hidden in rose-petal, pointed shoes walked into The Mighty Grove and his never-ending stream of merriment soared and gushed Niagarally through the Wonderful Kingdom. But even as quick as it came, it had ceased. His wise eyes became beacons of true light.
As the piggy bundle tumbled from the blessed heavens, the leaping elf hastily harnessed his beloved, tame nightingale and made for the point of ejection with a heart of many carats. Entangled in thorns and briars was Kingsley Mole, his snout sticking high in the splendoured air; tents of zodiac folds cascaded over Lionel’s larkish dome. De-spectacled, he moaned into Kingsley Mole’s eyes and cursed all flying machines doomed to rely on the ficklety of piggish bladders.
The two saddened creatures trundled from their rose-bush prison and lay scarlet and fatigued in the escaping afternoon. The handsome, elfin figure soared through dusking skies and upon landing, kissed the proud brow of his sky steed and called a greeting to Mole and Li.
After tea from acorn cups and slices of blueberry pie, the handsome elf told all the large legends that he knew about the perilous pond and its scaly protectors. Also of its healing ability and how one draught of pond dew could put forests of tangling tufts on the baldest badger or field mouse’s heads.
After glow-worm talks and plans for the quest, the elf led the tired companions through the foreboding fairy wood until they reached a large, beautifully-worked leather fencing boot, which had a door in its heel.
“My great grandfather,” the elf said, as Lionel commented about image engraved on the door knob.
“An alchemist you know,” said the fairy one.
“Mmmmm,” said Li suspiciously.
They were made very comfortable in beds of great expanse, spider web sheets, and towers of warm, woolly moss blankets and, as always in an elvish abode, dreams of the gentlest texture.
Man and Camel – Mark Stroud
On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me-
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
“You ruined it. You ruined it forever.”
A Performance At Hog Theater – Russell Edson
There was once a hog theater where hogs performed
as men, had men been hogs.
One hog said, I will be a hog in a field which has
found a mouse which is being eaten by the same hog
which is in the field and which has found the mouse,
which I am performing as my contribution to the
performer’s art.
Oh let’s just be hogs, cried an old hog.
And so the hogs streamed out of the theater crying,
only hogs, only
hogs . . .
There Doesn’t Have to Be Blood
Splintering syllables slide into the night.
Persistent effort is so often a blight
on the souls of the many who
seek comfort and delight; who
trade away their light for a future
whose possibility is so slight.
At the end of their seeking
after they’ve burned and destroyed
the land, the people, any
competition in sight, they
are left empty as the possessions
they sought — those same things that
all those years ago had promised
them the fullness for which all
these years they have silently wept.
Addicted to circumstances. Rather die than change. Always. Doesn’t matter how many times you yourself have changed. Many times for the better. It must be resisted. What is it, “do not go gentle into that goodnight”? Every day I die a thousand deaths. Walking through the doors of experience, I am constantly tripping back and forth between inner and outer worlds. Coming back to myself, there is a necessary reconstitution. But surely enough, during every resuscitation of myself, something is always left behind and forgotten, some details addled, a colour changed here, a figure who didn’t exist prior there. My self has shifted. And gradually, over days, weeks, months, years, new phenomena, losses, gains…the self changes drastically. The me writing this sentence is slightly different than the one that started the paragraph, but the me writing the second half of this sentence is barely even the same person I was perhaps even a few months ago. The feeling of existing seems to change rapidly and one must always try to adjust and balance, or risk being extinguished. Perhaps if one could learn to sway, they might be able to get a glimpse over the edge.
Joanne Kyger
“The shape of the day, the words of the moment, what’s happening around me in the world of interior and exterior space — these are my writing concerns.”
The first night she heard the sound, she wasn’t sure it was sound. It went ringing and ringing down the hall. She walked down the hall in the stony twilight streaming in through the window, wondering how the body moved as it did. She felt drawn forward as a slanting cell. She had been walking for thirty minutes and none at all; for five miles she stood still. If she had to describe it as anything, hearing was the closest she could come after that first day, and she knew that it lasted less than forty minutes, if more than a moment, for she found herself thinking these thoughts, sitting in her favorite armchair, listening to her grandma drone on and on in an argument with the wizard-like elder Saphic Maco. She found herself suddenly understanding all of these things in that very moment. This feeling of her consciousness unfurling itself over her was akin to some combination of both a cold pail of water and a heavy quilt being tossed over her curled form. The feeling was electric. “The power flows heavy these days” she whispered to herself. “The white on the water,” the air sang softly.
A Couple of Poems by Murakami Chiaki and Some Thoughts by His Son Haruki
Birds migrating
Ah—where they are headed
must be my homeland
A soldier, yet a priest
clasping my hands in prayer
toward the moon
——————————————————————
They call out, singing
to bring the deer closer,
the Hitler Youth
——————————————————————
At any rate, there’s really only one thing that I wanted to get across here. A single, obvious fact:
I am the ordinary son of an ordinary man. Which is pretty self-evident, I know. But, as I started to unearth that fact, it became clear to me that everything that had happened in my father’s life and in my life was accidental. We live our lives this way: viewing things that came about through accident and happenstance as the sole possible reality.
Sous Rature in the Negative Space
So another way to frame silence is as listening to listening.
It gave our talk an unusual intimacy, as I was hearing mouths and not just voices.
It didn’t feel like death. It was quite the opposite. I thought about writing it all down.
Obfuscation and Authenticity: Some Notes
We always find ourselves in between. Physically, we are commuting, on a drive, going for a walk. Even standing still, our bodies have the ability to cover great bounds held taut within. Mentally too, we are always on our way somewhere else, on our way to becoming something else. In the past few years, I have come to feel this liminality of the self more and more acutely. I am always both at rest and moving towards something. Ideas of authenticity have come to haunt my passage through this strange land that we continue to call the everyday. Everyday I am bombarded with messages that tell me to experience the real this, the real that. The world preaches a solid truth, an authentic something at the heart of it all that we can grasp onto with our own two hands, but how am I to grab at some solid thing, when my conceptions of I constantly waver? How should I fit myself into a point, when the I (the I that I am constantly becoming and then immediately discarding) exists more as an amorphous cloud suddenly shifting this way and that? The idea of the authentic self becomes some implanted dream that we dance circles around, stick-figure skeletons shaking further and further from the neon flames.
but you can be the fire burning,
seeing the lights glinting off the landscape,
while you wisp around,
circling, the fire in those very same lights.
Ghosts of old words still shine through.
They are the garbled messages of the past made physical.