Where the streets have no name

A whole bunch of people answered the challenge about one-word poems. The list of poems (re-ordered to make it slightly more interesting) is:

Motherless

Moist

Horsefeathers

Humbug!!!

Conundrum

Lighght

And the winner is... James Joyce, and the word "Yes".

There's a story that James Joyce was invited to dinner and spent most of the time very quiet and looking pensive. Eventually, he said:

'I'm sorry I've been so quiet, I was looking for the right word for something I'm writing, and I've finally found it.'

'Oh, please tell us, what's the word?' said the host, expecting to hear some wonderful new invented word. (Remember, this is the man that wrote Finnegan's Wake, a novel stuffed with so many invented words that it has been often described as being written in its own invented language.)

'The word is "yes".'

And if you turn to the last page of Ulysses, Joyce's masterpiece, there it is. Of all the real and invented words, that's the one he chose to finish it off.

"Yes" is also the love poem that sparkled one of the most famous and least likely marriages of the history of rock&roll: John Lennon and Yoko Ono. John first met Yoko when she was doing an art exhibition in London. Because John was a superstar at the time, he got to see it before the official opening. One of the exhibits was a ladder, and at the top of it, a spyglass he was supposed to look through to see something. He went up, looked through the spyglass, and he saw this tiny placard saying "Yes". Afterwards, John would always say that if it had said something rebellious or negative, he wouldn't have been interested, but "yes" was something he could connect with.

After single words, let's talk a little about names. Hurricane Irene has just passed over New York, and I was reminded of the lyrics of Where the streets have no name by U2:

The city's aflood

And our love turns to rust

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Trampled in dust

I'll show you a place

High on a desert plain

Where the streets have no name

Many streets in Manhattan have no name, but a number. But U2 say the song is actually about Belfast, about people not daring to say their street name because it could identify them as Catholic or Protestant. And some people note that Northern Ireland isn't known for their deserts or dust, and suspect the song was written in Ethiopia, a place they visited after Live Aid, where a lot of streets actually don't have a name.

It doesn't really matter which place U2 really meant. One of the things that make this song work is that "where the streets have no name" sounds like a magical place that doesn't really exist. We are so attached to the names we put on things that the idea of taking the name off immediately transports us to another plane. I wrote once a poem about this, and if you are really good, I may even post it later.

What are your favourite place names?

Holiday

You might be forgiven for thinking that I missed last week's post because I was on holiday. In actual fact, I was so behind on a deadline that the weekly post had to be abandoned. I have noticed that I'm the only one that seems to be crazily busy, and that everybody else is on holiday or taking things as easy as if they were.

In that spirit, I'll be minimal today. Today's picture is....

And today's poem is a one-word poem. I just haven't decided which word yet. What do you think is the best one-word poem? As an inspiration, here's a Spanish one by Miguel Hernandez:

Relampagueaste.

Which means: "You made lightning."

Do you have any better ideas? Please avoid the obvious, such as 'love', 'God', etc.

Death is before me today

There seems to be plenty of darkness in the news today, with riots in various places and the financial world panicking with the possibility of starting a new credit crunch... but bigger this time round.

My personal life is providing the perfect counterpoint: I just came back from a funeral, and I recently got the news that another relative that spent most of his life in a mental hospital has died. A starkly clear reminder that once things start to go wrong, they may well go wrong all the way.

But I can't say I'm in a dark mood. The funeral was in the same chapel as my husband's funeral, a little more than a year ago. The man that died was sitting two seats away from me on that occasion. It reminded me vividly of that time, but it wasn't a sad memory. It was beautiful. And the man that died had done his damnedest to cheer people up on his own funeral. His selections of poetry and music ranged from inspiring to enthusiastic to downright funny. That was very much like him, wanting people to be happy above all.

The best way to describe the feeling of the day was that this man clearly understood the ebb and flow of life, and was happy to go along with it. We're born and grow, the same way we breathe in, we get to whatever is our personal high point, then contract again and die, the same way we breathe out.

It reminded me of one of the oldest poems that have been recorded, from ancient Egypt:

Death is before me today:

like the recovery of a sick man,

like going forth into a garden after sickness.

Death is before me today:

like the odor of myrrh,

like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

Death is before me today:

like the course of a stream;

like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.

Death is before me today:

like the home that a man longs to see,

after years spent as a captive.

The first time I read this, it was in a comic that has Death as one of the main characters (The Sandman). And here you can see what's probably the best remembered page of the comic, perfectly suited for a day like today:

If everything goes to hell in a basket tomorrow... you still got a lifetime.

Coming out

Gay Pride Day is going to be in a couple of weekends in town. Gone are the days when people were terrified to admit they were gay, and male celebrities would be thoroughly humiliated to be discovered in flagrante with another man.

Just about everyone is comfortable talking about their sexuality nowadays, but many people are still terrified to talk openly about where they are spiritually. Somebody I know was talking about the difficulties of "coming out". As in: "I was drunk in a festival and started telling people about stuff like liberation and the ego doesn't really exist, and everybody thought drink was making me crazy."

Strangely enough, it's OK to have faith in the beliefs of just about any religion. Faith is perfectly fine. Saying that you actually know rather than believe is entirely different, though. It crosses a line. It's OK to believe, as long as we all understand there's nothing real in there. It's a story people like to tell, a nice fiction. But if you actually think the fiction is real and you know it from direct experience, you must have lost all touch with reality.

People are gradually starting to come out, but they are still very careful. There isn't any good reason to be afraid, though:

There's a barrier between us,

except that there isn't.

We are all alone,

except that we aren't.

We are all together

chained by the links of love.

Will enlightenment help me lose weight?

The news are making the world look like a rather scary place lately: A madman has been shooting dozens of people in Norway, Greece has finally defaulted and there are an unclear number of European countries ready to follow suit, the USA Congress are unable to agree on anything even if the lives of millions of Americans depend on it, and - the worst of all - Amy Winehouse has died!

In moments like this, it's when you need to focus on real-world, practical things. Like what they are doing at this forum, people are answering the tricky question: Will enlightenment help me lose weight?

http://spiritualteachers.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=misc&action=display&thread=1577

No, I'm not saying it with heavy irony. If you aren't asking this kind of practical question, you either don't believe enlightenment is real (fair enough), or you take everything way too seriously.

And it's easy to give practical questions a practical answer:

Do what you will

is the whole of the law.

Do what you will.

Know what you want,

know what they all want,

know what matters to you,

know what matters to them,

put it all in the balance,

and let it all rest,

then do what you will.

You couldn't do anything else,

so do what you will.

Duelling

Recently (only a few million years ago), life discovered duelling. Two animals of the same species, instead of fighting to death, engage in a more-or-less ritual fight, and the winner will take the mate, the food, anything else they are competing for.

Humans keep doing it, though the often join in bands for duelling. For example, politics in most countries is a constant duel between two parties. The debt ceiling argument in the U.S. is a duel taken to the point it starts getting dangerous.

Sometimes one gets engaged in a duel. And a lot depends on the eyes you use to look at it:

Through the eyes of division

you see who you're fighting.

Through the eyes of unity

you see the way life will pull.

I recently found myself involved in a duel about what is liberation on a discussion board that claims to be able to liberate people through discussions with them. I'm still surprised with myself for getting in that muddy puddle, but that's life for you. For the curious, this is it:

http://www.ruthlesstruth.com/arena/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1247

Feel free to use the comments to describe in painful detail how I don't know what the hell I'm doing and/or how I'm not following my own poetry.

Critical Incident

I did my first live poetry reciting recently, at a crazy event called Critical Incident. The proof is here:

You can try to guess who in the pic is me. That's more fun than me telling you.

It might have made more sense if the proof was in the shape of a sound recording, but that wasn't the kind of record the organisers chose to keep. I can tell you I only missed one stanza and it was well received.

Do the news ever make you feel like that? They're giving you plenty of detail... but not on what you really want to know? Until you forget what you really want to know, and you just begin to believe that what they tell you is important.

Today a paper has been published for the last time in the UK. Will you miss their news?