Month: October 2017

halloween evening party ( eleven years ago )

by experienceofthinking

halloween party two photographs by rinaldo rasa 2006

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i ask to you dear aficionados, please do not divulgate thi(e)s(e) picture(s) outside the experienceofthinking

tuesday october 31 2017

 

 

 

 

goodbye china ( by goffredo parise )

by experienceofthinking

‘ It’s my last day in China. I am walking towards the border. The formalities are fast because I am accompanied by the authorities. The railway bridge is here and I walk across it while the authorities are watching me with a waving of hands they say goodbye.
‘Come back again in the future. Not alone. We will like to see you and your wife and your children.’ But I have not children anyway.

 

I am going up in the train when I am at the end of the bridge. The railway wagon is full of Europeans that are buy now whisky, american cigarettes, chocolate bars, Coca-cola, newspapers. Our common everyday vices. Then the train goes on.
It is on Sunday : I see the bay full of small beaches when chinese girls wearing bikini and with long hair sunbathe on expensive yacths. These beaches are crowded of people listening radio broadcast Beatles songs ; I see girls in miniskirts and Chinese boys long-haired.

 

I see houses in the suburbs then passed a hill I see the skyscrapers of Hong-Kong.
Hong-Kong the city where you can buy love paying some dollars and everything whatever you wish. Everything except the ideas. We call it West, or Free World. ‘

 

[excerpt from “Cara Cina” by Goffredo Parise, 1972 ]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i ask to you dear aficionados, please do not divulgate thi(e)s(e) picture(s) outside the experienceofthinking

monday october 30 2017

 

 

 

 

a screenplay before the birth

by experienceofthinking

 

Altarwise by owl-light
Sonnet IV
by Dylan Thomas

What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper).
Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow).
What of a bamboo man among the acres?
Corset the boneyards for the crooked boy?
Button your bodice on a hump of splitters,
My camel’s eyes will needle through the shroud.
Love’s reflection of the mushroom features,
Stills snapped by night in the bread-sided field,
Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,
Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.

 

 

 

 

 

This sonnet proceeds from hopeless questioning to hopeless love (which is, after all, the big question of adolescence) and back again to despair. I doubt that the questions posed in the first few lines are remotely capable of an answer.

The last four lines do provide an answer to the question, ‘What is love?’ But it is not very encouraging.
Love’s a reflection of the mushroom growing at night features faces which are stills photographs snapped by night before birth into daylight in the bread-sided field the womb feeding and enclosing the foetus, once then close-up smiling like movie stars in the womb’s wall of pictures faces of those who will be loved, subsequently ark-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.

‘Arck-lamped’ of the periodical printing was changed to ‘arc-lamped’ in Twenty-five Poems. I suspect this was done by someone at Dent’s who was unsettled by the puns. The primary image is the one that continues the womb scene. The faces of the ones to be loved, pictured on the screen of the womb, are now arc-lamped, projected at birth like an ark on the waters that burst in a flood from the sac in the birth process, which also involves the cutting of the umbilical cord. but the images are thrown back, discared like film on a cutting-room floor that descends in waves of celluloid.

For anyone who thinks that the idea of future loved ones pictured on the wall of the womb is an impossibility far-fetched interpretation of these lines. In Edith Sitwell’s copy of Twenty -five Poems now deposited in the Texas library Thomas wrote a marginal note.

Love is a reflection of the features (the features of
those you will know and love after the womb) which are
photographed before birth and the wall of the womb
the womb being surrounded by food; a field being its
own field, and the womb being its own food.

To have one’s future loves as pin-ups in the womb is a striking way of saying that we are fated in our loving by genetic disposition. We love because we had an image given to us before we were born. It is something we can do anything about, any more than we can answer all the other questions that plague our existence in adolescence and beyond. Love, like doubt, comes as an overwhelming flood, and when this becomes a ‘cutting’ flood, as it does in the last line of the poem, everything is thrown back; we are cut off the promised happiness.

 

[excerpt from where have the old words got me? by ralph maud]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i ask to you dear aficionados, please do not divulgate thi(e)s(e) picture(s) outside the experienceofthinking

 

sunday october 29 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

jokes that kill poets

by experienceofthinking

 

Monty Python in the seventies did a tv sketch called “The killer joke”. Now I wish remembering that the jokes are a long habit in ancient Greek culture.

The danger of jokes has been subject of essays by Sigmund Freud in the modern western culture. But not anything like what happened to Homer the old Greek poet.

Here it is the joke:

It was sunset and Homer was sitting to the edge of the promontory looking at the boat of the fishermen coming back home.
‘How is the fishing?’, said Homer.
‘The things that we caught we thrown overboard. But we bring with us the things that we have not caught ‘, said the fishermen.
Homer the poet was brooding thinking about the solution of the conundrum. Days after days but no solution. Finally Homer the poet was so shocked and disappointed not being able to solve the puzzle that he died.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i ask to you dear aficionados, please do not divulgate thi(e)s(e) picture(s) outside the experienceofthinking

monday october 23 2017

 

not less than six

by experienceofthinking

Hard times for British Monarchy. The crow of the Tower of London is dead. He was the legendary guardian of the Monarchy and from initial reports it seems that a anti-drug dog has killed the crow.

 

This is a serious crime because the number of crows in the Tower must be six , if they are less than 6 it happens that the Tower collapses in association with the Monarchy.

 

This event happened on sunday 27 august 1995. That morning the spaniel called Charlie was on patrol near the Tower and he killed Charlie, ironically the crow had the same name as the dog. In a hurry the dead bird was substituted but not before some hours. Hence for some hours the crows in the Tower of London were five.

 

A spokesman for the royal palace with aplomb said,’We have two replacement crows. Quickly we have promoted one of them as guardian’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i ask to you dear aficionados, please do not divulgate thi(e)s(e) picture(s) outside the experienceofthinking

sunday october 22 2017