David Kanigan
Notes:
But words light up in the head
To take their deep place in the darkness,
Arcing quickly from image to image
Like mica catching the sun.
~ James Dickey, from “A Letter,” Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems
Notes:
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.
~ Isak Dinesen, from Out of Africa
Notes:
In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky … This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. “Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light – full of light!”
– Peter Matthiessen, from The Snow Leopard
Notes:
In theory, for example, sleep is a negative thing, a mere cessation of life. But nothing will persuade me that sleep is not really quite positive, some mysterious pleasure which is too perfect to be remembered. It must be some drawing on our divine energies, some forgotten refreshment at the ancient fountains of life. If this is not so, why do we cling to sleep when we have already had enough of it; why does waking up always seem like descending from heaven upon earth? I believe that sleep is a sacrament; or, what is the same thing, a food.
— G.K. Chesterton, Lunacy and Letters
Quote: WhiskeyRiver. Art via Mennyfox55
Peggy Noonan, excerpts from wsj.com: What’s Become of the American Dream? Part of the problem is definitional. It isn’t just about houses, cars and material prosperity:
I want to think aloud about the American dream. People have been saying for a while that it’s dead. It’s not, but it needs strengthening.[…]
The American dream was about aspiration and the possibility that, with dedication and focus, it could be fulfilled. But the American dream was not about material things—houses, cars, a guarantee of future increase. That’s the construction we put on it now. It’s wrong. A big house could be the product of the dream, if that’s what you wanted, but the house itself was not the dream. You could, acting on your vision of the dream, read, learn, hold a modest job and rent a home, but at town council meetings you could stand, lead with wisdom and knowledge, and become a figure of local respect. Maybe the respect was your dream…
How did we get the definition mixed up?
I think part of the answer is: Grandpa. He’d sit on the front stoop in Levittown in the 1950s. A sunny day, the kids are tripping by, there’s a tree in the yard and bikes on the street and a car in the front. He was born in Sicily or Donegal or Dubrovnik, he came here with one change of clothes tied in a cloth and slung on his back, he didn’t even speak English, and now look—his grandkids with the bikes. “This is the American dream,” he says. And the kids, listening, looked around, saw the houses and the car, and thought: He means the American dream is things…But that of course is not what Grandpa meant. He meant: I started with nothing and this place let me and mine rise. The American dream was not only about materialism, but material things could be, and often were, its fruits.[…] [Read more…]
What I see in dreams
makes me breathe
shallow
like golden trout
floating just beneath
the skin of water
warmed by
late autumn’s
ticklish light
~ M.J. Iuppa, opening lines to “Something Brief, But Bright,” Small Worlds Floating: Poems
Notes: Art Source: mennyfox55. Poem Source: Memory’s Landscape
Not the bald image, but always –
undulant, elusive, beyond reach
of any dull staring eye
– lodged
among the words, beneath
the skin of images: nerves,
muscles, rivers of urgent blood,
a mind
secret, disciplined, generous and
unfathomable.
– Denise Levertov, excerpt from Williams: An Essay from Selected Poems
Notes:
And then there were the poets, those unbelievable people so different from other men, who told anyone who would listen that a wish is more important than a fortune, and that a dream can weigh more than iron or steel. What nerve they had, those poets, but how right they were! Everything, they said, comes from inside us, passes through things outside and then goes back in. And that to them is the meaning of life, feeling, understanding, love.
~ Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
Notes: Photograph: philippe conquet with Pas 5. Related Posts: Jacques Lusseyran
All afternoon I have been walking over the dunes, hurrying from one thick raft of the wrinkled, salt roses to another, leaning down close to their dark or pale petals, red as blood or white as snow. And now I am beginning to breathe slowly and evenly – the way a hunted animal breathes, finally, when it has galloped and galloped – when it is wrung dry, but, at last, is far away, so the panic begins to drain from the chest, from the wonderful legs, and the exhausted mind.
Oh sweetness pure and simple, may I join you?
I lie down next to them, on the sand. But to tell
about what happens next, truly I need help.
Will somebody or something please start to sing?
~ Mary Oliver, “The Roses” from Blue Iris: Poems and Essays
Notes:
