April sea

©mcassapidis 2018

A note as from a single place...

©m.cassapidis, 2014

A note as from a single place,  
  A slender tinkling fall that made  
Now drops that floated on the pool  
  Like pearls, and now a silver blade.

Robert Frost 

from Going For Water

Jove in the clouds...

©fourteenth

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

Wallace Stevens
from Sunday Morning

inner harmony

rocks and grass, ©fourteenth

But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.

Edward Witten

ΠΑΛΙΝΤΡΟΠΟΝ: Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

rock and thorns, ©fourteenth

ΠΑΛΙΝΤΡΟΠΟΝ

Θάρρος: ο ουρανός αυτός είναι
Και τα πουλιά του εμείς

                όσοι αλλού δε μοιάζουμε



Καταποντισμένη μέσα μας

Θάλασσα δημητριακή με γαίες και αχανή βουστάσια

Μόνος απ' όξω απόμεινε ο ηλίανθος

Αλλά ποιος είναι αυτός που περπατάει στον ήλιο
Μαύρος όσο το φως πιο δυνατό;

Θάρρος: ο άνθρωπος αυτός είναι
ο Κύων που λένε άλλ'

                  ο παραλίγο Αρχαλκυών

Άπλες αμάλαγες του Ιουνίου νομάδες άνεμοι
Χαρακωμένα καστανά χώματα που ανεβήκαμε

Διψασμένοι για λίγη λάμψη όρους Θαβώρ

Αλλά τι να 'ναι αυτό που χαμηλά περνάει κι ανατριχιάζει
Σαν άλλου κόσμου που έφτασε αεράκι;

Θάρρος: ο θάνατος αυτός είναι
Στην παπαρούνα την πλατιά

                   και στο λιανό λιανό χαμομηλάκι.


Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

ΤΟ ΦΩΤΟΔΕΝΤΡΟ ΚΑΙ Η ΔΕΚΑΤΗ ΤΕΤΑΡΤΗ ΟΜΟΡΦΙΑ

(1971)

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you : T.S.Eliot (from Four Quartets)

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you 

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, 

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed 

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, 

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama 

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away— 

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations 

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence 

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen 

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; 

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing— 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope 

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, 

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith 

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. 

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: 

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets.

On the nature of space and the image: Plato

©fourteenth

And there is a third nature, which is space, and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is hardly real; which we beholding as in a dream, say of all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space, but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence. Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them. For an image, since the reality, after which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and it exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another [i.e. in space ], grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason, vindicating the nature of true being, maintains that while two things [i.e. the image and space] are different they cannot exist one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same time. 

from Timaeus

O Little Root of a Dream

©fourteenth

                        O little root of a dream 
                        you hold me here 
                        undermined by blood, 
                        no longer visible to anyone, 
                        property of death.

                        Curve a face
                        that there may be speech, of earth, 
                        of ardor, of
                        things with eyes, even
                        here, where you read me blind,

                        even 
                        here, 
                        where you 
                        refute me, 
                        to the letter.

                        Paul Celan