Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Lost in a Chinese Night


Yesterday, I had an actual reverie. An official daydream, approved and stamped by a shadowy bureaucracy in charge of dubious precincts of time.

I keep thinking about that reverie. I think it lasted for only a few moments, yet those moments were stretched into a different form or quality of duration. Those few moments seemed to last an incredibly long while.

I was afoot and moving at night through a town or village somewhere in China. This night was dynamic and clangorous with bodies, faces, trumpets, dogs, chimes, flags, leashed monkeys, and neon signs buzzing unknowable ideograms.

But the faces! Everywhere faces. Peculiar, probing, insinuating, alarming faces.

The streets (some paved) were coming and going at odd angles and refuted any possibility of destination. The houses and other buildings were close to the streets and were all built in the old Chinese manner, with curving, sweeping roof lines. Asian trees spread their perfumed branches. Traditional lanterns glowed here and there, like the pale heads of forlorn ghosts.

The sense of utter and bedazzled alienation took my daydreaming breath away.

Those faces! People swerving up to me, close to my nose, wide-eyed, gesticulating, staring with the expression of vaguely threatening hieroglyphs. Faces that were, in contrast to my own, completely at home in this world.

There was no point to this reverie. It was simply a divergent moment stretched out into forbidden space. If Carl Jung was still alive, perhaps I'd drop in on him, to ask about this dark tumbling into a town or village of my subconscious hysteria. To find out the reason why I tumbled there. To discover what form of psychological ruin this episode was a foreboding or what form of spiritual talent this episode was a possible presentiment. 


~ TB (2013)

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Dylan cover by Cat Power


“Like a Rolling Stone” (Live at the Royal Albert Hall)



Sunday, October 8, 2023

“A human being is here”

A poem by Jon Fosse, the new Nobel Prize Winner for Literature.

I seem to detect a written atmosphere or resonance that reminds me of Beckett and of Tranströmer. I find this poem to be astonishing, but further commentary by me would be annoying and superfluous.

https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-17534_A-HUMAN-BEING-IS-HERE




Monday, July 17, 2023

Taylor Swift…

 …is the most startling, high-quality songwriter since Bob Dylan, Lennon-McCartney, Joni Mitchell, John Fogerty, and Elvis Costello.

This is jaw-dropping excellence. What an amazing musical creator (lyricist and melodist) and what an admirable soul this young woman possesses! 

I’m in a kind of quiet, appreciative awe about this remarkable musician. 




Monday, June 19, 2023

Sunday, August 7, 2022

Intuition


I've felt it wandering through the darkness between old memories and beneath maps

blown in from nights of endless dreams.

It's as elusive as the fragrances of colors.

I've almost seen it as a kind of palimpsest

on which time inscribes a baffling beauty.

It sometimes appears when I think of a place

that doesn't exist, where evening comes deeply and austere shadows are winged in by swallows. It's like the dim flowing of chemicals in poppies. I've almost known a word floating from trances, similar in valence to “significance.” It quivers

as a hesitant disclosure or like the fractal irises 

of a strange curator's eyes. Something like hope is gathering quietly in the fantastical tangents.



~TB