Posts Tagged ‘ silence ’
Landfill workers bury all plastic except soda bottles and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon.
Laura Sullivan/NPR
Source: Is Plastic Recycling A Lie? Oil Companies Touted Recycling To Sell More Plastic : NPR
Wild geese in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York City, USA, 2017. Photo by Rebecca Norris Webb from the book Brooklyn, the City Within with Alex Webb/Magnum Photos
Our cities are filled by the hubbub of human-made noise. Where shall we find the quietness we need to nurture our spirit?
Source: Why we need an absence of noise to hear anything important | Aeon Essays
Undertow
Mid-July morning rain falls clapping among oak leaves. Woodpeckers queue on tree bark for suet cake in view. black cat cries. Watching from inside he cannot help himself. Twitterings, chirpings, staccato rasps, glissando uproar
highway drones
through morning birdsong
mournful undertow
Donna Fleischer
indra’s net, bottle rockets press, 2003
Fanny Howe (Lynn Christoffers)
In Howe’s mystic vision, we’re always shuttling between darkness and dawn. It’s within that liminal space, that place of uncertainty and confusion, that God can be found: “A burnt offering is the only one / That love has pity for. // Not rare or well done. // But burned, burned, burned.”
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In The Wedding Dress, a 2003 book that is part poetic manifesto, part spiritual biography, Howe declares that her guiding ethos, the word she’d write Emerson-style on the lintels of her door-post, is “bewilderment.” By this she means many things. As a poetic value, bewilderment suggests an acceptance of linguistic instability, a cultivation of the dreamlike and fragmented over the orderly. As a spiritual tenet, it signals an embrace of the via negativa. As a political philosophy, it indicates “devot[ion] to the little and the weak,” a refusal to accept the social and economic world as it is. More generally, bewilderment for Howe means a poetics and a theology of openness, of incompletion and continual revision.
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For decades it’s been a sure bet that every two years or so a new book from Fanny Howe would appear, and that this new book would bewilder and unsettle. But now, Howe told me, she’s through: “I really don’t have anything more to write. Done. Gone.” Her friends have told her that the mood will pass, but she doesn’t think so. Love and I, she asserts, will be her last book: “I feel like I’m working on ending things. Putting things away.” She’s putting away her pen (she writes longhand and her arthritis is painful), and she’s no longer returning to the writers—Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Michel de Certeau, Giorgio Agamben—she loves. Instead, she has decided that, from now on, she’ll just read “whatever comes by chance”: a reading suggestion from a friend, a poet sending her a manuscript in the mail. In the end, to live a life of radical openness is to put things away. True bewilderment, like true theology, ends in silence.
Source: Fanny Howe’s Ordinary Mysticism | Commonweal Magazine
by D. H. Lawrence
Because of the silent snow, we are all hushed
Into awe.
No sound of guns, nor overhead no rushed
Vibration to draw
Our attention out of the void wherein we are crushed.
A crow floats past on level wings
Noiselessly.
Uninterrupted silence swings
Invisibly, inaudibly
To and fro in our misgivings.
We do not look at each other, we hide
Our daunted eyes.
White earth, and ruins, ourselves, and nothing beside.
It all belies
Our existence; we wait, and are still denied.
We are folded together, men and the snowy ground
Into nullity.
There is silence, only the silence, never a sound
Nor a verity
To assist us; disastrously silence-bound!
Shortly before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. called for an economic revolution with protections for the poorest Americans. Half a century later, a group of religious and moral leaders are planning a revival of the Poor People’s Campaign, with a wave of civil disobedience in Washington. Rev. William J. Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, joins Judy Woodruff for a conversation.
As I was interviewing the classicist, poet, and author Anne Carson in June, 2017 via e-mail about her new translation of The Bakkhai, the question-and-answer process felt like a consultation with the ancient Pythia. Much like an ancient Greek attempting to get an answer from the priestess of Apollo, I had to go through a few layers — book publicist and agent—and the answers I received back can best be described as intriguing and esoteric; they varied in length from a few words to a paragraph to no response at all. Every reply was also written in all lower case, including the first-person singular “i,” an idiosyncrasy that seemed almost playful, and is something I usually see in the prose or text messages of a student or a younger person. Like a Greek hearing those ambiguous missives given by the Pythia, I was repeatedly surprised by the puzzling, thought-provoking answers I received.
Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate
– Leonard Cohen
And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.
— James Agee, A Death in the Family
Mythology of Blue : And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a….
word pond 