A headline in Nature today reads: “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common.” Also more common: time-fires which consume hours of your life, hours that might have been for imagination, for rest, for pleasure, for family, for community. Where do these hours go, as we hurl them into the inferno of consumerism, into the conflagration of war, onto the bonfire of shallow screen culture? What cauldron are they cooking? I wrote at Delphi that all fires are holy fires, but I do not know if these time-fires are holy when they waste the life in us, waste […]
Poetry
HOAX (Translation)
HOAX No progress. Ash everywhere. Murders everywhere. Each day brings another day and the inventory of the shoe-shiners is incrementally exhausted. A few brave followers cast off their arms and wear big umbrellas in front of milky mirrors. The young women who stayed rooted in their tracks fertilize their shadows. Two fairies gasp. A stubby man perseveres. The hairs of his head are shown to be accomplished facts. — Andreas Embirikos, from ΥΨΙΚΑΜΙΝΟΣ (1935), tr. by C. A. Corbell
Poetry
WINTER GRAPES (Translation)
WINTER GRAPES They took her toys and her lover. So she bowed her head and almost died. But her thirteen roots like her fourteen years smote with sword the elusive disaster. No one spoke. No one ran to the protective ward against the deep-sea sharks who had already eyed her as a flie doth eye a diamond a land enchanted. And so this story was brusquely forgotten as by the forest ranger the lightning is forgotten in the woods. — Andreas Embirikos, from ΥΨΙΚΑΜΙΝΟΣ (1935), tr. by C. A. Corbell
Journal
Local-Culture Power (3)
By adopting local culture as the natural environment for creativity, we can— lessen the child-prodigy requirement for fine arts that can make a 17-year-old believe it’s “too late”— dismantle the teen-sensation (or its just-post-teen equivalent) fetish of pop arts and the corollary expiration dates for relevant work (in music, acting, etc.) – generally dispense with ageism in creative work, celebrating creative trajectories that can begin or resume at any age.
Essay - Journal
AIdolatry
I sometimes say that my religion is art, but this may do an injustice to art. Because I believe that art emerges first, before religion, in the conscious cosmos. When a being finds oneself alone with an inner life, with imagination, with the waking residue of dreams, with speculation, with euphoria, as well as with traumas, anxieties, awareness of death and of mysteries, what is the attempt to share this initially inexpressible awareness somehow with another, if not art? It is not simply communication in the mundane sense, not an attempt to coordinate or negotiate, but an attempt to commune: […]
Poetry
DICROTON ON STEMS (translation)
DICROTON ON STEMS Very close to the citrus evenings the proud sacrificial lambs loom. They button and unbutton the velvet treasure of their belts. They sow hazelnuts capture partridges display rags of precious filament cry out for love underneath glass domes. — Andreas Embirikos, from ΥΨΙΚΑΜΙΝΟΣ (1935), tr. by C. A. Corbell
Journal
Three dilemmas
The traveller’s dilemma: the more freely one moves, the smaller the world becomes. The saint’s dilemma: full identification with the suffering of others unveils the cruel and unjust potential of the cosmos. The meaningful dilemma: as we refine our notion of what is meaningful, meaninglessness expands.