T. S. Eliot said:

"Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is pefectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

(courtesy of friend Zach S.)

Knowledge is POWER!!!!

"MRI" stands for "magnetic resonance imaging." Your body is exposed to radio waves while in a magnetic field, and a picture is created by energy emitted from hydrogen atoms in the body. Cool!

The mridanga is a drum from India that is shaped like an elongated barrel and has tuned heads of different diameters.

The msasa tree is a small shrubby tree from Africa that is flat-topped; it grows in savanna forests of South and Eastern Africa (Tanzania, Mozambique, etc).

Also, did you know Tanzania is The United Republic of Tanzania, made of Tanganyika (the mainland) and Zanzibar (an island)? Except Zanzibar isn't a very good republic, because it's more of a theocracy that kills a lot of people. Ah! And Tanzania's first president was actually a widely respected literary figure--he translated some Shakespeare into kiswahili.

Bon Anniversaire

Happy Birthday to Chaim Potok, who was born on this day in 1929. He wrote The Chosen.

I have a question for you.

How do you define fear? Is it an inherently rational or irrational thing (if either)? How do we as individuals and cultures deal with fear?
I've written a speech that claims many fears are driven by very basic fears--fear of pain, rejection, judgement, love, etc. And these are what keep us from living full lives. I want someone to disagree with me!
Any responses welcome and desired.

Paragraph, 5 February

Part of an attempt to flesh out a character for a story:

"Ms. Plank grew purple wisteria across the front of her house. The women who owned the house before her wore down everything to the cleanest of bones; now the flowers hung their violet petals in heavy sighs around all the windows, draped over each other, growing fat in the sun. Ms. Plank wore gray flannel pencil skirts and primly patterned cardigans. In the mornings, before a mirror, she ran a fine-toothed comb through her wet hair and ribboned it at the nape of her neck. She wore shoes to conceal her slender feet. Her arms, too, were shaped like willow limbs.
Ms. Plank owned a hat with a broad brim, which she was forever adjusting with agitated fingers. In the late afternoon she stood on the wide porch, poised before three men in rocking chairs."

Paragraph, 1 February

(Maybe best read as a prose poem?)

"Everyone smells of the earth, barefooted, walking from the water with the sun doming us a yellow hemisphere washed over the bright blue half-globe, and behind them the water groans at the loss of enthusiastic limbs laughing in its waves and spilling red canoes from its banks to tip in the kelpy, fishy center like hilarious thieves--everyone smells of the earth, breathless and barefoot and drying as we move through the coarse sand paths, grass between our toes and laughter smeared on our faces."

"Oh, Troxel!"

To explain Avana's and my laughter, here is the first paragraph in full. A sequel will be coming later tonight:

As her feet pressed into the plush purple carpet and the silk robe slid from her shoulders, and Luigi purred into her ear, Tafoyla threw back her long, silky red ravishing hair and cried out, "Never! You shall never have my father's diamond mines, although you have most cruelly killed my former lover Troxel with your vicious knifefighting skills, I will never love you!" Luigi grasped her arm and hissed menacingly into her ear, "You will love me! and I will have your father's fortune even if I have to kill another hundred men to get it!" "No, no, no!" cried Tafoyla breathlessly, "I refuse most categorically!"

Faulkner, dude.

I've been reading and analyzing Faulkner's "Barn Burning" for a few days, and I have to admit, I like the guy. For me, his sentences require multiple reads, but it's worth it. In the spirit of exercise, I wrote a long sentence for my paragraph.

"I burned myself--scalded with boiling tea so that my skin's been smudged into ridges and boils and stained with the scent of peppermint, almost pungent and sharp, its already-scarred thickness further purpled and roughed by heat, which makes my fingers twitch at sight of a mug of steaming liquid."

So it wasn't very long. Oh well.

Words to drink

Not my words--recent paragraphs have been unbeautiful struggles to finish sentences.

Here is a sonnet by John Donne, one of my favorite poets. If I am not mistaken, this is one of his Holy Sonnets, some of my favorite poems. Altogether, he seems a pretty nifty guy, and certainly handles the English language very well.
If you are so inclined, I recommend reading it aloud. I know I like to.

"Death be not proud, though some have called thee"

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and souls delivery.
Thou are slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

I also love especially this one.