point of view

'When every poet has no other goal than to create a formal language which would be only his or hers, the result can not be other than the alienation of poetry from its audience. How many different languages and personal techniques could a reader digest, no matter how welcoming and adequate he or she is? Nonetheless, poetry is not fashion; it does not need to reinvent itself every five or ten years in order to comply with the standards of consumption. Poetry is not a good to consume, poetic forms neither; we don’t really need to throw them to the waste every now and then or recycle them constantly from the very beginning.'

Incongruențe

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

(Ivan Illich)

Still remains

opposing forces

'While memory has been portrayed as an automatic system of recall, considering how it serves us in an evolutionary sense gives a more accurate picture. Memory, much like everything at its base, is adapted to help us survive. "There is only a limited evolutionary advantage in being able to reminisce about what happened to you, but there is a huge payoff in being able to use that information to work out what is going to happen next. ... Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does."'

Images

'Je ne me représentais pas alors les villes, les paysages, les monuments, comme des tableaux plus ou moins agréables, découpés çà et là dans une même matière, mais chacun d’eux comme un inconnu, essentiellement différent des autres, dont mon âme avait soif et qu’elle aurait profit à connaître. Combien ils prirent quelque chose de plus individuel encore, d’être désignés par des noms, des noms qui n’étaient que pour eux, des noms comme en ont les personnes. Les mots nous présentent des choses une petite image claire et usuelle comme celles que l’on suspend aux murs des écoles pour donner aux enfants l’exemple de ce qu’est un établi, un oiseau, une fourmilière, choses conçues comme pareilles à toutes celles de même sorte. Mais les noms présentent des personnes –et des villes qu’ils nous habituent à croire individuelles, uniques comme des personnes– une image confuse qui tire d’eux, de leur sonorité éclatante ou sombre, la couleur dont elle est peinte uniformément comme une de ces affiches, entièrement bleues ou entièrement rouges, dans lesquelles, à cause des limites du procédé employé ou par un caprice du décorateur, sont bleus ou rouges, non seulement le ciel et la mer, mais les barques, l’église, les passants.'

Larger Hope

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last – far off – at last to all,
And every winter change to spring.

Style, science and nonsense

'Thus managing cause and effect to discriminate,
The student must fruitlessly try to eliminate,
And painfully learn, that in order to do it, he
Must find the Equation of Continuity.
The reason is this, that the tough little element,
Which the force of impulsion to beat to a jelly meant,
Was endowed with a property incomprehensible,
And was "given," in the language of Shop, "inexten-sible."
It therefore with such pertinacity odd defied
The force which the length of the chain should have modified,
That its stubborn example may possibly yet recall
These overgrown rhymes to their prosody metrical.
The condition is got by resolving again,
According to axes assumed in the plane.
If then you reduce to the tangent and normal,
You will find the equation more neat tho' less formal.'