from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Trading Cities 4

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black and white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood , of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them , the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still further away.

Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider webs of intimate relationships seeking a form.

---

A treat of a book, picked up in armchair books in Edinburgh

Early Japanese Poetry from The Manyoshu

Remembrance by Anonymous (5th/6th Century)

On winter evenings when the mist hangs low
Over the reed beds and the reeds look blue
And chill,chill,chill

                                the wild ducks call each other,

I shall remember you.

A Grain of Sand by Anonymous (7th Century)

No. I shall not die for love.
I lack the discipline
To face the waves and drown in them.
My nature is to spin
Around and around like a grain of sand
Whenever a tide flows in.

Fishing Lanterns by Anonymous (8th Century)

As down behind the mountain rim
The moon begins to sink,
Across these wide dark wastes of water
Fishing lanterns blink
And, when we think ourselves alone
Far out on the midnight sea,
There comes the sound of plashing oars
Yet farther out than we.

----
translations by Graeme Wilson in 'From the Morning of The World'

Karl Ove Kausgaard - Essentialism,Fiction and Writing

What I was trying to do, and what all writers try to do - what on earth do I know? - was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are. In other words revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out...

from A Death In The Family(My Struggle 1)
Trans. Don Bartlett

30

A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty by Ogden Nash

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then--
How old is Spring, Miranda?

Song of The Seven Hearted Boy by Lorca

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not there among them.

In the high mountains, mother,
where I sometimes ran into the wind,
seven girls with long hands
carried me around in their mirrors.

I have sung my way through this world
with my mouth with its seven petals.
My crimson colour galleys
have cast off without rigging or oars.

I have lived my life in landscapes
that other men have owned.
And the secrets I wore at my throat,
unbeknownst to me, have come open.

In the high mountains, mother,
where my heart rises over its echoes
in the memory book of a star,
I sometimes ran into the wind.

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not there among them.

--
translation Jerome Rothenberg

Quote from 'Between Dog and Wolf' by Elske Rahill

It took me a long time in life to realize how rude it is to stand back from something and watch it ...  How disrespectful it it, that watching, because it can rob anything of its validity, make anything ridiculous, because a person cant gaze on life like God. God infuses meaning. This sort of looking takes meaning away.

p233

Hymn To The Drivers by Michael Symmons Roberts

Every second a child is born, a car is made;
knitted together in factory towns
by robot arms with sparks at their fingertips.
The cars wait, possessed but never owned,
left out in the rain, driven hard.

And the children wait for them, a-stagger
on their slow pins, they watch the elders
slide by behind tinted windscreens, lips
in time with the radio. Deliverance comes
as a set of keys and a card in your name.

Even at night, car power is palpable.
Under linden trees they rest on haunches,
colour indeterminate in sodium light.
Think of them as coiled, not cataleptic,
and the road as open, wet with lime leaves.


---
from Drysalter