Taken some new portraits of me as a poetaster, and making images as part of general renovations to the ‘poem library’ and other parts of this site. Tortured or disgruntled? On the red chair in the blue room. With books. Do I look poetry enough? Too Lord Byron?
I recently had a clear out of my notebooks which i took when traveling in 1997-8-9 and filled with poetry and drawings (most are not publishable – but some of the o.k. ones are in the ‘poem library’ part of this site). The ‘little red notebook’ and Schrÿfbloks. Schrÿfblok scribblings. The “little red notebook” which … Read more
Thank god for spring break. So i can come here with some wine and finish or continue the thought i started ten years ago. It has got busy around here with the house full to the brim with kids and lots of uni work to do and also real work and then things to get … Read more
ONE The first number is really all the numbers. It is the infinite one. Indivisible, or infinitely divisible. One way of conceiving of it is a bright light, streaming in all directions, with no shape and no source. It is also like pure being, pure certainty. TWO By introducing two, we divide the one infinitely … Read more
After holding onto my old nokia for a long time I finally gave in and got a phone with a shiny screen, and noticed that my blog isn’t suited to devices. So i changed it for a while there, to make it easier to read on a tiny screen. But i’ve just changed it back … Read more
new poems.. like new leaves on trees soon to be felled. the darkness the darkness.. what is the simplest path now? the straightest path leads into emptiness .. the vast gasp of new verbiage heaping onto blogs, spilling from pages into vacant minds, pictures pouring into eyes. the heart like a tickertape machine, printing painful … Read more
Life is suffering, said the Buddha. This seems to me to be true much of the time, and what is also unavoidable is that our aliveness causes suffering for other living things. Even the most careful of us will unfortunately step on a few ants and swallow some gnats (unless we follow very particular ascetic … Read more
Update: I’ve written a few words about my primary years which precede the high school ones. I went to two high schools which gave me two completely different perspectives. The first two years were at a fairly rough local public. At this place there were many individual teachers who were highly engaged with their students, … Read more
Last semester I spent a lot of time enjoying Jason Grossman’s and Dayal Wickramasinghe’s brilliant course ‘philosophy of the cosmos‘ (previously ‘poetry’ of the cosmos). This course spans a lot of material that I have been privately reading about for years – but the new and really interesting stuff for me was the detail on … Read more
I am an idealist. So for me, metaphors are not just literary phenomena, they actually have a reality of their own. They have a physicality too, and can encapsulate a truth just as well as any logical structure of language. Early Sanskrit poets understood this. For instance, a space with negative curvature is best described … Read more
