Nigel Kennedy & Richard Galliano

Beat.

All rise.

Shinyribs, "Country Cool"

Bring 'em to me two at a time ...



The dance mix is here.

Thank you, Jessica!

Unobstructed.

 

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Thomas Jefferson

Ray Wylie Hubbard, "Count My Blessings"

Gratitude.

 

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

G.K. Chesterton

Bach, "We thank you, God, we thank you," BWV 29

Stewart W. Foster performs the Sinfonia ...

George Winston, "Woods"

Rises.

van Gogh, Poet's Garden, 1888

Hear the voice of the Bard!

Who Present, Past, & Future sees 

Whose ears have heard, 

The Holy Word, 

That walk'd among the ancient trees. 

Calling the lapsed Soul 

And weeping in the evening dew: 

That might controll, 

The starry pole; 

And fallen fallen light renew!

O Earth O Earth return!

Arise from out the dewy grass;

Night is worn,

And the morn

Rises from the slumberous mass.

Turn away no more: 

Why wilt thou turn away 

The starry floor 

The wat'ry shore 

Is giv'n thee till the break of day. 

William Blake

Shinyribs, "Sweet Potato"

Expel.

Let us help the hydra expel its mist.

Stephane Mellarme

World.

On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind. If one doesn't have the greatest violinist around, then it is well the most beautiful pleasure to simply listen to its sound in one's mind.

Johannes Brahms, on the Bach Chaconne

CONNECT

Viktoria Mullova performs Partita No. 2 In D Minor, Chaconne, BWV 1004

Jerry Jeff Walker & The Gonzo Compadres, "Hill Country Rain"

Comforting.

Eldin, Beyond the Sky, 2013

All the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.

Gaston Bachelard

Steadying.

Welsh Rarebit, from Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating 

To feed six

Ingredients


A knob of butter


1 tbsp flour


1 tsp English mustard powder


½ tsp cayenne pepper


7 oz. Guinness


A very long splash of
 Worcestershire sauce


1 lb. mature strong Cheddar
, grated


4 pieces of toast

Method

Melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour, and let this cook together until it smells biscuity but is not browning. Add the mustard powder and cayenne pepper, stir in the Guinness and Worcestershire sauce, then gently melt in the cheese.

When it’s all of one consistency, remove from the heat, pour out into a shallow container and allow to set. Spread on toast 1cm thick and place under the grill. Eat when bubbling golden brown. 

This makes a splendid savoury at the end of your meal, washed down with a glass of Port, or a steadying snack.

Balanced.

Snyder talks about the ‘long view’. The vision of Pacific America from the high peaks. He was, from the start, a skier, climber, trail walker. These activities took precedence, when he was a schoolboy and young student, over academic work. At the age of 15, in 1945, he completed the ascent of Mount St Helens: ‘Step by step, breath by breath – no rush, no pain.’ The newspaper he read when he came down from the hike, on 13 August, was a day-old copy of the Portland Oregonian. It carried a photo spread of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From early on, after seeing Chinese scroll paintings in the museum in Seattle, Snyder adopted a linear continuity of narrative, with everything happening at once: the pilgrim with his staff on the mountain, the bridge over the stream, the forest and the ocean. Diary fragments, named persons, conversations in roadside cafés, bars, truckstops, prayers, chants, native shamanic lore, myths of place: they all enjoyed an equal status and emphasis. The delivery was crafted to move like natural speech, with a leavening of slow-burn humour. This was a country-smart poetry, beautifully balanced between frontier transcendentalism and the long gaze of Asia.

CONNECT

Paper.

Love Paper.

A tree gave its life for what you are about to attempt. Don’t let the silicon chip or computer monitor cause you to forget this. That ex-tree material stacked in your printer is so dead as you begin to write that its bark-skinned, earth-eating, oxygen-producing, bird-supporting, squirrel-housing body has been reduced to an inert blank expanse of white. To find the life of language and lay that life down on the paper is to redeem the sacrificed life of the tree.

In order to do this, we must see paper as clearly as Inuits see snow. Our language is the second greatest living proof (actions being the greatest) of what we do and do not see. Listen to how Inuit people see: apun (snow); apingaut (first snowfall); aput (spread-out snow); ayak (snow on clothes); kannik (snowflake); nutagak (powder snow); aniu (flat, hard-packed snow); aniuvak (packed snowbank); natigvik (snowdrift); kimaugruk(snowdrift that blocks something); perksertok (drifting snow); akelrorak (newly drifted snow); mavsa (snowdrift overhead, about to fall); kaiyuglak (the rippled surface of snow);pukak (sugar-like snow); pokaktok (salt-like snow); misulik (sleet); massak (snow mixed with water); auksalak (melting snow); aniuk (snow for melting into water); akillukkak (soft snow); milik (very soft snow); mitailak (soft snow that covers an opening in an ice flow);sillik (old hard crusty snow); kiksrukak (glazed snow in a thaw); mauya (snow that can be broken through); katiksunik (light snow); katiksugnik (light snow that is deep for walking).

Love paper. Paper is writer’s snow (apun).

Paper is the blank white element we live upon: element that receives and records our every step. The receptacle of our lives and nuances deserves an Inuit depth of respect. I lack names for the many kinds of pages I see here in my study, but looking through drawers, shelves, wastebasket, manuscript boxes, I find: virgin paper, still in the ream. (Apingaut—first snowfall.)

I find paper at which I stare long, unable to write a word. (aniuvak—packed snowbank.)

I find a scrap of paper upon which, in the middle of the night, I write down an urgent message from the heart, but leave the light off so as not to wake my wife, only to find in the morning that after the words, “And when a prayer fails to...” my pen ran out of ink. (auksalak—melting snow.)

I find paper at which I am staring when, between the words, a door opens, and inside is an imaginary Room, and inside the Room are People; I find paper on which I write what the People are doing in the Room, and paper in which the People lure me clear into the Room, addressing me now as one of their own. (mauya-- snow that can be broken through.)

I find paper upon which, in the midst of an intimate disclosure from an elegant Room Woman, a phone rings (my phone, not hers), and then a neighbor stops by (my neighbor, not hers), and I am so long distracted that when I return to the paper and Room Woman I begin to spill my own thoughts, not hers, failing to notice that for hours I have not only cut her off in mid-disclosure, stood her up, treated her terribly, I have lost the way back to her wonderful Room. (kimaugruk—snowdrift that blocks something.)

I find paper on which I write so stupidly, aimlessly, roomlessly and unimaginatively that at the end of the day I wad it up and throw it across my study, then wad and throw a few blank sheets for good measure. (mitailak—soft snow that covers an opening in an ice flow.)

I find blank sheets unwadded in shame, and spoken to rather than written upon, paper I audibly promise that—during the hours and in the place foresworn to the People of the Imaginary Room—I will spill only their thoughts, not my own. (aniuk—snow for melting into water.)

I find paper at which I stare long and stupidly, unable to write a word—paper that at day’s end leaves me filled with shame even though, by not writing upon it, I have kept my solemn promise to the Room People. (aniu—flat, hard-packed snow.)

I find the dismayingly small stack of computer-printed pages on which I earlier wrote with self-effacing skill of the Room People, pages I begin to idly edit, after the People once again refuse to appear. (sillik—old hard crusty snow.)

I find, on these same computer-printed pages, a space between two words—a space no wider than the head of an ant—yet as I trying to smooth an awkward phrase in that space(kannik—snowflake), two tiny hands rise up out of the paper, a new Room Person climbs into sight, and this Person begins singing—to the glorious ruin of my earlier draft—the true and living story hidden behind everything I had written and not written so far.

I find paper on which I have so faithfully written not what I want but what is there to be told (be it ayak, nutagak, or akillukkak) that when I read it again days later its doors still open, the People in its Rooms still laugh/struggle/shout/hate/love/die, and a silent voice hidden in the next sheet of white tells me as I touch it whether it is kiksrukak or auksulakwe must watch for now.

Addenda:

A straight line in the right place can bring you to tears. 

Frederick Sommer (as overheard by Emmet Gowin)

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix ‘inter-’ with the verb ‘to be,’ we have a new verb, inter-be. 

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step

David James Duncan

CONNECT

Pens.

INTERVIEWER

Do you reckon you’re the last writer to be using dip pens in the United States?

FOOTE

There’s probably some other nut somewhere out there doing it.

CONNECT

Happy birthday, Dorsey.

Tommy Dorsey was born on this date in 1905.

Song of India ...



Thanks, Dad.

Shadows.

Shadows in the Water

In unexperienced infancy

Many a sweet mistake doth lie:

Mistake though false, intending true;

A seeming somewhat more than view;

         That doth instruct the mind

         In things that lie behind,

And many secrets to us show

Which afterwards we come to know.

Thus did I by the water’s brink

Another world beneath me think;

And while the lofty spacious skies

Reversèd there, abused mine eyes,

         I fancied other feet

         Came mine to touch or meet;

As by some puddle I did play

Another world within it lay.

Beneath the water people drowned,

Yet with another heaven crowned,

In spacious regions seemed to go

As freely moving to and fro:

         In bright and open space

         I saw their very face;

Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine;

Another sun did with them shine.

’Twas strange that people there should walk,

And yet I could not hear them talk;

That through a little watery chink,

Which one dry ox or horse might drink,

         We other worlds should see,

         Yet not admitted be;

And other confines there behold

Of light and darkness, heat and cold.

I called them oft, but called in vain;

No speeches we could entertain:

Yet did I there expect to find

Some other world, to please my mind.

         I plainly saw by these

         A new antipodes,

Whom, though they were so plainly seen,

A film kept off that stood between.

By walking men’s reversèd feet

I chanced another world to meet;

Though it did not to view exceed

A phantom, ’tis a world indeed,

         Where skies beneath us shine,

         And earth by art divine

Another face presents below,

Where people’s feet against ours go.

Within the regions of the air,

Compassed about with heavens fair,

Great tracts of land there may be found

Enriched with fields and fertile ground;

         Where many numerous hosts

         In those far distant coasts,

For other great and glorious ends

Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.

O ye that stand upon the brink,

Whom I so near me through the chink

With wonder see: what faces there,

Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear?

         I my companions see

         In you, another me.

They seemèd others, but are we;

Our second selves these shadows be.

Look how far off those lower skies

Extend themselves! scarce with mine eyes

I can them reach. O ye my friends,

What secret borders on those ends?

         Are lofty heavens hurled

’Bout your inferior world?

Are yet the representatives

Of other peoples’ distant lives?

Of all the playmates which I knew

That here I do the image view

In other selves, what can it mean?

But that below the purling stream

         Some unknown joys there be

         Laid up in store for me;

To which I shall, when that thin skin
Is broken, be admitted in.

Thomas Traherne

Transported.

Suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be.

Maybe such experiences are rarer now than they were in the eighteenth century, when the poets and philosophers lighted upon them as a new avenue to religion. The haste and disorder of modern life, the alienating forms of modern architecture, the noise and spoliation of modern industry—these things have made the pure encounter with beauty a rarer, more fragile, and more unpredictable thing for us. Still, we all know what it is to find ourselves suddenly transported, by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation.

CONNECT

Dr. Roger Scruton, author of "The Aesthetics of Architecture and Beauty", delivers his keynote address entitled "Beauty and Desecration."

Matthias Loibner, hurdy-gurdy

I will start somewhere, and I will end somewhere ...

Shimmer.

When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.

Just as I meant “shimmer” literally I mean “grammar” literally. Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind.

The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.

It tells you.

You don’t tell it.

Joan Didion

CONNECT

Turbulence.

In 2004, using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists saw the eddies of a distant cloud of dust and gas around a star, and it reminded them of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” This motivated scientists from Mexico, Spain, and England to study the luminance in Van Gogh’s paintings in detail. They discovered that there is a distinct pattern of turbulent fluid structures close to Kolmogorov’s equation hidden in many of Van Gogh’s paintings.

The researchers digitized the paintings, and measured how brightness varies between any two pixels. From the curves measured for pixel separations, they concluded that paintings from Van Gogh’s period of psychotic agitation behave remarkably similar to fluid turbulence. His self-portrait with a pipe, from a calmer period in Van Gogh’s life, showed no sign of this correspondence. And neither did other artists’ work that seemed equally turbulent at first glance, like Munch’s ‘The Scream.”

While it’s too easy to say Van Gogh’s turbulent genius enabled him to depict turbulence, it’s also far too difficult to accurately express the rousing beauty of the fact that in a period of intense suffering, Van Gogh was somehow able to perceive and represent one of the most supremely difficult concepts nature has ever brought before mankind, and to unite his unique mind’s eye with the deepest mysteries of movement, fluid and light.

CONNECT

Beyond.

The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.

J.D. Salinger

Heart.

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

Rebecca Solnit 

Heartily.

And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them).

J.R.R. Tolkien

Marxism.

The greatest ten minutes in the history of cinema ...

Rush, "La Villa Strangiato"

Rejoice.

It’s so important for poetry to leave enough gaps and silences for readers to fill in the blanks. I hoped that What Matters would offer a message of encouragement and hope while giving readers room to map out their own places in the poems.

No form of survival is ever a “sudden epiphany.” Survival is a slow process, a measured progression that requires nearly impossible determination (read “understatement” here). It’s definitely a spiritual journey—sounds kind of trite, but this trip we call life is about spirit.

For me, and I suspect for many, gratitude is a necessary part of the process. Of course, it’s hard to be grateful when you stand on the edge of crash and burn. One day you’re simply living your life and the next you’re faced with something you didn’t anticipate and aren’t sure you can deal with. It happens to all of us sooner or later, in one way or another. Surviving becomes part of the trek, but it’s a lonely walk no matter how much support you have. Faced with fear, grief, loss, or illness, where do you go? You either give into the darkness of it all, or you look for a way out. Acceptance is part of the way back up—a grace that can lead to gratitude. (Stay with me, I’m working toward rejoicing.) There’s so much for which to be grateful (one more hour, one more day). Learning how to be grateful is another instrument in the survival toolbox. If you can manage gratefulness, you can begin to move away from the damages of what you work to survive. It’s kind of like when the feeling of the subject matter becomes the poem. You remember how to live, you remember what happiness is, and that projects itself backward and forward. Slowly, you begin to rejoice in whatever happiness and love you can find. What do we live for? From the poem:

Grace is acceptance—

all of it, whatever is—as

in we live for this: love

and gratitude enough.

CONNECT

Live.

Real mystery -- the very reason to read, and certainly write, any book -- was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away -- live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else.

Explaining is where we all get into trouble.

Richard Ford

Listen to this ... the 3 x 5 cards, the precision of speech ...

James McMurtry, "No More Buffalo"

Don't chase that carrot 'til it makes you sick
What do you think you're gonna prove?
Just let it dangle 'til it falls off that stick
That's when you make your move.

Don't go chasing after shooting stars, 

Trying to make yourself a name.
You could joust at the windmills with that old Fender guitar
You'd probably do about the same.

Useless.

You can get so confused

that you'll start in to race,

down long, wiggled roads at a break-necking pace

and grind on for miles 

across weirdish wild space,

headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

Dr. Seuss

Nucleus.

MidCurrent: 

Does it surprise you, in looking back, thirty years later, at what came out of that collection of people? Maybe you have other examples of how this has happened in your life, but very few people can look back and say “These guys and I just happened to end up here and two of them became highly esteemed writers and another one became a billionaire musician and another’s landscapes are collected by art critics all over the world … that’s pretty remarkable.”

Guy de la Valdene: 
It is remarkable. And I’m sure we all think about it. I certainly do. And as I said, we need to go back to Tom. Tom brought that whole group together, and then he brought that whole group together one more time in Livingston, Montana. Jim didn’t live in Montana then, but he does now — he moved there about seven or eight years ago. But Chatham followed Tom to Livingston, and Richard Brautigan followed him there, and my wife and I, or just I, would go out there at least once or twice a year. That was just our little nucleus, our particular group. Tom was a magnet to a lot of other people as well. 

CONNECT

Already.

The image-producing forces of our mind develop along two very different lines.

The first take wing when confronted by the new; they take pleasure in the picturesque, in variety, in the unexpected event. The imagination to which they give life always finds a springtime to describe. In nature, far removed from us, they produce already living flowers.

Gaston Bachelard

Philae.

On 12 November, Rosetta’s Philae probe is set to make the first-ever landing on a comet when it touches down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

Separation of the lander is planned for about 09:03 GMT (10:03 CET), and touch down should follow about seven hours later, at 16:02 GMT (17:02 CET).

CONNECT

Happy birthday, Rodin.

Auguste Rodin was born on this date in 1840.

Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools.

Auguste Rodin

Rodin at work in 1915 ...

Sit.

Balke, Lighthouse on the Coast of Norway (detail), 1853

The Cold Mountain Poems

The path to Han-shan's place is laughable,

A path, but no sign of cart or horse.

Converging gorges - hard to trace their twists

Jumbled cliffs - unbelievably rugged.

A thousand grasses bend with dew,

A hill of pines hums in the wind.

And now I've lost the shortcut home,

Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?

In a tangle of cliffs, I chose a place -

Bird paths, but no trails for me.

What's beyond the yard?

White clouds clinging to vague rocks.

Now I've lived here - how many years -

Again and again, spring and winter pass.

Go tell families with silverware and cars

"What's the use of all that noise and money?"

In the mountains it's cold.

Always been cold, not just this year.

Jagged scarps forever snowed in

Woods in the dark ravines spitting mist.

Grass is still sprouting at the end of June,

Leaves begin to fall in early August.

And here I am, high on mountains,

Peering and peering, but I can't even see the sky.

I spur my horse through the wrecked town,

The wrecked town sinks my spirit.

High, low, old parapet walls

Big, small, the aging tombs.

I waggle my shadow, all alone;

Not even the crack of a shrinking coffin is heard.

I pity all those ordinary bones,

In the books of the Immortals they are nameless.

I wanted a good place to settle:

Cold Mountain would be safe.

Light wind in a hidden pine -

Listen close - the sound gets better.

Under it a gray haired man

Mumbles along reading Huang and Lao.

For ten years I havn't gone back home

I've even forgotten the way by which I came.

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.

In summer, ice doesn't melt

The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.

How did I make it?

My heart's not the same as yours.

If your heart was like mine

You'd get it and be right here.

I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,

Already it seems like years and years.

Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams

And linger watching things themselves.

Men don't get this far into the mountains,

White clouds gather and billow.

Thin grass does for a mattress,

The blue sky makes a good quilt.

Happy with a stone under head

Let heaven and earth go about their changes.

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,

The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:

The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,

The wide creek, the mist blurred grass.

The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain

The pine sings, but there's no wind.

Who can leap the word's ties

And sit with me among the white clouds?

Rough and dark - the Cold Mountain trail,

Sharp cobbles - the icy creek bank.

Yammering, chirping - always birds

Bleak, alone, not even a lone hiker.

Whip, whip - the wind slaps my face

Whirled and tumbled - snow piles on my back.

Morning after morning I don't see the sun

Year after year, not a sign of spring.

I have lived at Cold Mountain

These thirty long years.

Yesterday I called on friends and family:

More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs.

Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle;

Forever flowing, like a passing river.

Now, morning, I face my lone shadow:

Suddenly my eyes are bleared with tears.

Spring water in the green creek is clear

Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white

Silent knowledge - the spirit is enlightened of itself

Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.

In my first thirty years of life

I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.

Walked by rivers through deep green grass

Entered cities of boiling red dust.

Tried drugs, but couldn't make Immortal;

Read books and wrote poems on history.

Today I'm back at Cold Mountain:

I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

I can't stand these bird songs

Now I'll go rest in my straw shack.

The cherry flowers are scarlet

The willow shoots up feathery.

Morning sun drives over blue peaks

Bright clouds wash green ponds.

Who knows that I'm out of the dusty world

Climbing the southern slope of Cold Mountain?

Cold Mountain has many hidden wonders,

People who climb here are always getting scared.

When the moon shines, water sparkles clear

When the wind blows, grass swishes and rattles.

On the bare plum, flowers of snow

On the dead stump, leaves of mist.

At the touch of rain it all turns fresh and live

At the wrong season you can't ford the creeks.

There's a naked bug at Cold Mountain

With a white body and a black head.

His hand holds two book scrolls,

One the Way and one its Power.

His shack's got no pots or oven,

He goes for a long walk with his shirt and pants askew.

But he always carries the sword of wisdom:

He means to cut down senseless craving.

Cold Mountain is a house

Without beans or walls.

The six doors left and right are open

The hall is sky blue.

The rooms all vacant and vague

The east wall beats on the west wall

At the center nothing.

Borrowers don't bother me

In the cold I build a little fire

When I'm hungry I boil up some greens.

I've got no use for the kulak

With hs big barn and pasture -

He just sets uo a prison for himself.

Once in he can't get out.

Think it over -

You know it might happen to you.

If I hide out at Cold Mountain

Living off mountain plants and berries -

All my lifetime, why worry?

One follows his karma through.

Days and months slip by like water,

Time is like sparks knocked off flint.

Go ahead and let the world change -

I'm happy to sit among these cliffs.

Most T'ien-t'ai men

Don't know Han-shan

Don't know his real thought

And call it silly talk.

Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease -

No more tangled, hung up mind.

I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,

Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.

Some critic tried to put me down -

"Your poems lack the Basic Truth of Tao."

And I recall the old timers

Who were poor and didn't care.

I have to laugh at him,

He misses the point entirely,

Men like that

Ought to stick to making money.

I've lived at Cold Mountain - how many autumns.

Alone, I hum a song - utterly without regret.

Hungry, I eat one grain of Immortal medicine

Mind solid and sharp; leaning on a stone.

On top of Cold Mountain the lone round moon

Lights the whole clear cloudless sky.

Honor this priceless natural treasure

Concealed in five shadows, sunk deep in the flesh.

My home was at Cold Mountain from the start,

Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.

Gone, and a million things leave no trace

Loosed, and it flows through galaxies

A fountain of light, into the very mind -

Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:

Now I know the pearl of the Buddha nature

Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere.

When men see Han-shan

They all say he's crazy

And not much to look at -

Dressed in rags and hides.

They don't get what I say

And I don't talk their language.

All I can say to those I meet:

"Try and make it to Cold Mountain."

Gary Snyder

Thank you for leading the way, Poetessa.