From logic to feeling..

I've mentioned that October is a difficult month for me. During student-in-progress-critiques I talked about having a hard time with how temporary our experience here on earth is by calling it "the problem of life." I do, I have a problem with it, which I am just beginning to realize. Because of this, more and more of my artwork this semester has been based around the words, "light, darkness, dust." A progression of our short time spent here. An observation of the terrible, horrible things we can do to one another as human beings. The pain and strangeness of loss. The capacity to endure life, only to have it at some point end.

Cheerful, right?

So, since octubre is an uncomfortable and sad month for me, I am going to post some quotes from different pieces of poetry and writing that I found myself reading over and over again.

The first is a book in the Bible. The book of Ecclesiastes. The Hebrew word that is used for "vanity" in the beginning of the text can be translated as "meaningless." For whatever reasons, translators chose vanity-maybe because it's easier to say. It helps to have a little bit of background in Hebrew culture to understand the context in which this book is written. I'll let you guys do the research, should you choose to. The writer essentially says, "I have tried everything 'under the sun' and it all means nothing. It turns to dust. It's temporary." In many ways I find myself comforted as I read through it, and in many ways still struggling. As I'm learning more and more Hebrew, I'm finding how amazingly beautiful their literature is. There are things we miss out on in translation (not always necessary things, the important information is there), such as the play on words the Hebrew language uses in their poetry. But since I am only in Biblical Hebrew 1, my knowledge is limited and that's all I can offer so far.

The second is a poem a friend gave to me when I was going through some really dark stuff. I will say that I never experienced a time when so much hope was absent-I'll let the words speak for themselves. This is from T.S. Eliot's Quartet No. 2:

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark, And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors, And cold the sense and lost the motive of action. And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away— Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing— I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth. The Quartet in it's entirety is fantastic. I'd suggest reading it all. The last is a Japanese peasant song which I mentioned a few blogs back, but I wanted to post the words of the song. Don't worry, it's much shorter. It's the reason for the umbrella on my arm: Kasa No Hone (The Umbrella's Bones) (Translation from the Japanese) The ribs of the umbrella Have fallen apart; The paper is also torn, But with bamboo Tied together. Do not throw it away. Though I Also am torn, Don't forsake me.