Letters to Rilke - Number 1

Dear R ,

Did you really know it
or was it a poetic guess?

For me it has never been so clear.

And when it became as apparent as the truth should be,
then...

But before then,

Do you have any idea how apparent the truth should be?

Have you ever felt
its coldness,
its crispiness,
its sharpness,
when it falls on you like rain on an autumn night?


You must have had it right there!

It hit me in the eyes;
my eyes burned.

And I had always assumed it would hurt the heart the most,

But no,
One should never assume about the truth; for it is not assumable.

And I was wrong about the heart,
It is the eyes that the truth hunts!

Letters to Rilke is a new sequence I am working on these days. Each piece have a parallel component from Rilke's Elegies.

Rainer Maria Rilke,
Duino Elegies,
Fragments of the First Elegy:

" But sing, when you must,
of great lovers:
their fame
has a long way to go
before it is really immortal.
...

Think of it:
the hero survives.

Even his ruin
is only another excuse to continue
a final birth.

But nature, exhausted
takes lovers
back into herself
as if she couldn't accomplish
that kind of vitality twice."

Those moments ...

And it is on those moments of desperation that one needs
And it is on those moments of desperation that one needs
And it is on those moments of desperation that one needs
And it is on those moments of desperation that one needs

That one believes
That one stretches
That one bends
That I ...

The Fool for the Full !

The moon was full tonight or it felt like it.

I saw it when walking to the churchyard.
Such a satisfying sight; full and complete.

And as I walked, I remembered, it was still a couple of days to the full moon in October.

I am such a fool for the full that I am a fool in full!

The full moon tonight was no fool;
It was carefully round, and I enjoyed its carefulness!

The Sleeping Gypsy (detail), 1897, Henri Rousseau
I took the photo in 2008 in MOMA.*

*It was hard to be far from New York and this smiling mustached moon in one of my favorite paintings.

Fatigue!

It is raining in Austin!

Another semester has started. The days of the past summer has robbed me of my energy. I was left to start school with nothing but a weak body and a tired mind. I said the past summer falsely, for I am still dragging its heated corpse with me. It is hard to write of daily matters, knowing so many things that we know and living through so many things that is happening to us. So let this post be a short update.

I am in three classes this semester: American History 1920-1941, Post-structuralism, Critical Theory, and the Visual Arts, and Biopolitics of Artistic Creation in Times of Crisis.

During the summer besides some archival studies, I didn’t work much on my own research. I audited two French classes. I gave 4 introductory lectures on the history of art from Prehistoric to Cubism for the Persian Student Society at UT. And as usual I wrote articles for the art column of Peyk, PCC newsletter. The two recent pieces are Francis Bacon: figurative in the age of Abstraction (Peyk 122) and Classical in the age of Revolution (Peyk 123). You can find their pdf version here under the English section.

It is cold; I need something that warms me up inside and out!

The Green Scroll, Austin, July 2009

The Limits of My Sphere!

Burning with the fever that multiplies my fear,
And takes away my hope to the realm of shiver;

I search for the word, but it won’t bring you here,
I look for the shine that is going to disappear,
I force my lips for a smile that is not real,
I roll the dice with alerting fear!

I know, you won’t be here,
When I force the fever to disappear.
And that, alone, breaks the limits of my sphere!

The Dot, Princeton, July 2008