Tonight, with words, I construct a diagram of what I experience: the quiet of night deepening, a full stomach, voices in sharp discussion in the street.
Language is the form, words the shape, the signs and symbols we have all agreed indicate one thing.
In fact, I
am only an image, a drawing, as Yves Bonnefoy wrote in a study of Giacometti, by which I deprive myself of being fully present to myself and to the whole.
Everyone and everything is a drawing I make.
To not do so – to step back from simply harnessing the descriptive power of words and forms – is to recognize self and other as more than a simple image.
That’s why I drew two trees in my notebook yesterday, their bare branches throwing long shadows onto the sidewalk outside the window in the brilliant sunlight before noon. The study of dark and light revealed everything unraveling in the meanwhile.
Unraveling in the Meanwhile
About the Author: zenscribe
Enseignante Zen et poète, Sensei Amy “Tu es cela” Hollowell est née et a grandi à Minneapolis, aux Etats-Unis. Arrivée en France en 1981 pour étudier la littérature et l’histoire, elle y est restée, s’installant à Paris, où elle élève ses deux enfants et gagne sa vie en tant que journaliste.
The Zen teacher and poet Amy “Tu es cela” Hollowell Sensei was born and raised in Minneapolis, but came to France in 1981 to study literature and history and has lived in Paris ever since, raising her two children and making a living as a journalist.
I know –
bad joke
but even bad jokes only exist by grace of reality
When someone is drawing a face – ofcourse there are eyes, ofcourse there is a mouth, a nose, ears…
But when you want to draw them you have to see whats’s there.
And to see what’s there you have to froget the names, the gestalts, you just have to see (step into the dark – the unknown )
Ofcourse there is a nose , ofcourse there are eyes, … that’s why we call them nose, and eyes (Pessoa)
It is so safe to recognise – to play in the field of our memories,
and this way to confirm ourself.
How difficult it is realy to be naked and see
but everything comes from somewhere – so everything is perfect as it is…
there are no categories.
when life doesn’t fit into the categories…
life urgently has to be adapted…?
In a short poem entitled ‘The problem of describing trees"
Robert Hass states
‘it is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us’ :
now isn’t that a wonderful statement of modesty.
The word ‘image’ (Bonnefoy) is exactly what it is.
We ‘recognise’ images (storylevel).
We don’t just see what’s there (abstract level) – nature of things –
fresh and new and full of wonder