Poetry and Knowledge (1)

from ‘Poetry [compared with intellectual] Knowledge‘..(1944)… by Aimé Césaire….

Poetic Knowledge is born in the complete silence of Scientific Knowledge.

By reflection, observation, experience, a man, at a loss when faced with facts, eventually comes to master them. And from now on, he can find his way in the forest of phenomena. He knows how to handle the world, how to turn it to his advantage…

But king of the world he is not!

Sensei in class…

verycenteredkindofdialogue(2)

3

Poetic knowing is when you endow an object with the complex and changing riches of all its potentialities.

4

If emotional energy can be credited with making things happen, as Freud showed, then it makes no sense to deny that it can make/render things understood/comprehensible. It is perfectly possible only to think that the unheard of mobilization of your abilities which Poetry requires/demands and that the drive/elan/ of all these abilities together is irresistible

nothing can resist / stand against/ stand up to

he music tha…a very centered kind of dialogue(5)…

Poetry [compared with intellectual] Knowledge‘..(1944)… by Aimé Césaire….

Corollary

The music that is in poetry cannot be imposed on it. The only acceptable music comes from a more distant place than sound itself. Seeking this music too hard is a crime against the music of poetry, which can only be the waves of the mind beating against that rocky outcrop that is the world.

…Buddha held up a flower!!!…

…seekers all(13)…

— by Kimbal Anderson Sensei

Once this part of me is lined up and heavy, my foot adjusts and my arm adjusts, and now it’s moving in that flow again.

Easy.

Effortless.

I invite you to play with it. Also you don’t have to set down your sword, you just be heavy. That’s it. Gravity lines it up. You just learn not to oppose gravity, so you always have reppaku. Then It isn’t an effort, it’s just the way you function.

And there’s a a stage when you function from reppaku all the time, and if you find yourself somehow knocked out of it, you say ‘that’s funny,’ and you just put it back.

I want you to be able to micro-adjust your body using ‘heavy’. It will help your shoulder. It will help all of you, your back… everything wil be ‘mo’ better’; you’ll sleep better, your life temperature will be warmer… It’s all good, right? Also your organs will align in gravity. One thing that happens in the West is – that’s really a thing – everything’s so controlled it doesn’t fit in gravity any more, it’s all an artificial posture.

This will work so easy. It works so easy. And once you’ve played with it a bit, you just watch some video of Sensei move, and go, ‘okay, if you just do that, what happens?’

It looks like this.

And all this stuff, I’m going ‘what the f***!’ This stuff, and this stuff… he’s not off balance. But we are. But watching him, when the movement happens, this becomes heavy and it adjusts. This becomes heavy, and it adjusts…

He’s always doing that.

…garden…

…Alana and Angie with jo!!!…

…for the celebration of Midsummer’s…

…So let’s not forget that the solstice is due on June 20 this year…

And we also celebrate Midsummer’s and its Eve on the 24th and 23rd: the next Monday night and Sunday.

The imagery for Midsummer’s is easy: people in a ring, dancing round the fire, sun-wise, arms raised, on top of a hill… driving their cattle through the fire, jumping through the blaze, and rolling flaming wheels down a steep hill…

Gold AND yellow…

The Sun becomes the Questing Knight, the same as the Green Knight…

Oak leaf wine, golden green… honey cakes, local fruit… and crumble some onto the earth as an offering.  Maybe add pink rose-petals to the wine…

Simple things: like laying on the grass…

Decorate the house with birch twigs and roses, and hang fennel over the door…

Garlands of St. John’s Wort, fern seeds, golden mistletoe. Angelica, marigold, camomile, chervil, marjoram, calendula, sun-flowers yellow-faced…

"Beans and peas and lettuces, 
radishes and beet
Rise up soon and make for me
a garnish for my meat.
Blessings once and blessings twice
do I give to thee
Something given, something gained,
Blessed shalt thou be."

Make an incense of frankincense, cinnamon, red sandalwood and oak leaves.   

Poetry and Knowledge (4)

from ‘Poetry [compared with intellectual] Knowledge‘..(1944)… by Aimé Césaire….

There is, in Aldous Huxley’s essay, Do What you Will, an amusing page: ‘We think we know everything there is to know about a lion. A lion is the color of the desert, with mane and claws and an expression like Garibaldi’s. But there are also, close by, in Africa, antelope and zebra and as a consequence, indirectly, all the grass that is there… If there were no antelope and zebra, there would be no lion. When the amount of game becomes minimal, the king of the animals becomes thin, and is starved. If the game disappears completely, it dies.

It is the same for Knowledge. Scientific knowledge is a lion without antelope or zebra. In itself it is eaten away. Eaten away by hunger: a hunger to feel something, hunger for life.

And so, unsatisfied, a man looks elsewhere for salvation, which is here a certain sense of completeness.

And little by little, man has realized that along with this half-starved Scientific Knowledge, there is another sort of Knowledge. A Knowledge that grips one entirely.