Analects 2.583x

30 September 2009. Gray light over hills, how many ways...

Two Polish girls, on the hard side--Hotel Polonia--armed in black, rayon... The pose revealing more than the pose--a kind of tough vulnerability--clutching purses--or maybe not even so tough, the veneer thereof...

And within? Mokotów, Praga, the farms beyond...

Childhood of dreams, ads, enticements--the bounty of the west, crashing down... An unsuspecting populace--muddy fields, Częstochowa, the Pope...

A hidden unity, half-remembered--named in ritual--Body of Christ...

Solidarność...

Analect 2.582x

29 September 2009. Pearl clouds with intermittent sun, wash of grays, whites, pale blues...

Two Indian gentlemen in pool changing room, conversing in the old way, a morning in Delhi, the Jumna, despite all...

And a violist, whose autumnal sound, deep voiced and calm, soars in middle register, straight to the heart...

We have no word for this. The quality of tan in Taoist thought... "A semblance of impoverishment...should conceal an inner richness, serve as a plain garment which covers the embroidered robe."

Reb Zusia...

Analect 2.581x

25 September 2009. Sun at this moment pouring through gray--early fall.

Wyspianski's Wesele--The Wedding Party--in Wajda's film of 1973. Bronowice, a village near Kraków. The poet who marries a peasant girl, Lucjan and Jadwiga. Rachela. the young Jewish woman who appears unexpectedly at the celebration--"a victim of her own euphoria"--inviting in the chocholy (bound grain sheaves in the fields after the harvest) and thereby an opening to the mysteries of the Polish past.

Wyspianski's painting--figures of grain, in an autumn landscape. Van Gogh's space, Van Gogh's trees... Night, and a sense of distance...

They become real...

Analect 2.580x

24 September 2009. Gray morning, gray gull over pool, glimpsed for an moment...

Marcello Mastroianni, bringing his charming Italian je ne sais quoi to the wintery environs of Torino--the Fiat factory strike, sometime after 1900... Image of the worker as Genovese extra--the café faces, clenched fists, worry and doubt, but a willingness to listen, maybe even follow. His narrow-rimmed university specs--the student--better with Schiller under his arm than Plekhanov or Marx...

François Noël-Babeuf--a society of equals...

Mourant de faim, mourant de froid...

Analect2.579x

23 September 2009. Sun like always...

Scabbard and standard, prepare for battle. Dark woods and dripping stream, Lancelot du'Lac--Bresson's vision, where the knights appear only as a sudden flash amidst the undergrowth--glint of armor and braised cuff... Or, a peasant girl from the east of France--the Maid of Orleans, as in the song...

Limousin, d'Auvergne...

Analect2.578x

22 September 2009. Sun over hills, all promise. Young woman from last week--Sondra--on bus bench with her daughter, Sisiki. "Tiene un nombre indigeno..." Small,wild curls in morning light...

The lute player, musician of the court, M. Charles Mouton, with ever so slight a smile, esconced in winter wig and thick brocade, from 300 years in the past. A draughty hall, inattentive hosts...Couperin...

Glassy waves at dawn, salt ocean air, single gull grazing the crest...

Analect 2.577x

21 September 2008. Mist against hills at dawn, Campenile's ghost. Single runner, turning for an moment, then gone...

Candombe, in the Barrio Sur, Montevideo, a century past. Recorded by Pedro Figari--who began these paintings only in his sixth decade. From childhood memories--the Bakongo Kings and Queens, crowned on new shores, in hidden rooms... Later, drawn from life--in friendship--his skills as a lawyer, marshalled in their defense...

A people's past, revealed in the sweep of the dance. A hand held just so--palm down, in peace, or raised to the brow--a warding off. Incorporated, in the most literal sense. Lives re-lived--remembered and wished for...

Legacy of earth...

Analect 2.576x

18 September 2009. Sun-filled pool, golden and blue, California...

Hills overlooking the bay--San Diego, Convair plant and eucalyptus, Mission Brewery in brick, curve of water towards North Island, Point Loma and the sea... This same time, ten years back--a September morning, Avery and Peter, in a kind of repose... Their two forms, in life and after...

And today: a mother and daughter waiting for the bus, again September, with a gathering of fresh flowers in an open green bag, tucked in between. Their luxurious curls, an ebony ring, Minerva's scroll...

Song...

Analect 2.575x

17 September 2009. Gray skies, gray pool. Gray guard, gray wall. High, to the west, a single line of reddish brick, set side-by-side, in a wave. A motif...

The recurrence of the Baroque-- Age of Watteau, same dress, same song. But no, not at all his age, rather a brilliant kind of pretend--the ruff, the starred rosette, the arched thumb, the flowers and shoes... a kind of seeming...as if...

Where veracity reveals only the truth of longing...

Analect 2.574x

16 September 2009. Sun through morning clouds. Tall and gloomy swim coach, with notepad and pen--a racing form, perchance, or the morning's ve-ge-ta-bles...

As in a play--Twelfth Night, where Malvolio makest sense of things that be, a lady's wish, prediposed o'er parchement gold...a letter, indeed, and all it might reveal...

"By my life, this is my lady's hand these be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's. It is, in contempt of question, her hand."

Analect 2.573x

15 September 2009. Sun light in the fall, blue pool waters, silent swimmers seen from afar...

The University in crisis--a forum in 160 Kroeber--my own room, filled to the brim with Berkeley faces--students in the main, eager to hear Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Tim Clark, George Lakoff, Charlie Schwartz and Laura Nader each hold forth with a personal overview of what the institution--at its best--continues to represent. Education as a public good, not a commodity. Producers of doubt--of questions--to broaden our sense of the world. Not the narrow interests of class--a maintenance of privilege--but the dreams and the aspirations of a much broader class--the children of the people of California--more than a million of them, over the years, graduates of this public institution...

The threat: "a warping and closing down of intellectual horizons." (Tim Clark) * Question of "who is going to be educated? Those with the most money--or (pointing to the audience) you?" (George Lakoff) * Thorsten Veblen got it right in 1908: a public good. "Society's conscience." (Laura Nader). * Accountablity to this vision on the part of the administration--and the Regents (Charlie Schwartz).

Whom do we serve?

Analect 2.572x

14 September 2009. Voluminous clouds on blue, remnants of last night's storm. An early fall?

Young woman from Clean Living Cleaners, out in the parking lot with dust pan and broom, her desultory swipes at this and that, scattered across asphalt after yesterday's Stroll. Merchant's holiday, towards an imagined wherewithall.

Prayers for rain...

Analects 2.571x

11 September 2009. Beauty morning.

Even by email, with sun-dappled sidewalks just outside. Right down to a slanted Free Chips sign--and the Come and Get Me iced-coffee banner across the way. "I'm good...," an American response...

Anoche. Smiling and singing--a bird on the branch of a tree--el zorzal criollo, made real in wobbly blue pencil on thin sheets of trace. A nest. Importante. And two narrow footprints, as in Indian classical dance--and just behind, a pair of shoes made entirely from gathered husks of corn--rustic and imposing, "aquí estamos..." Set within a ring of leaves and clay.

To know the earth... Canción de la tierra...

Analect 2.570x

10 September 2009. Foggy streets at dawn, swimmers in the mist, sun pushing through to blue-gold.

Some days like this, as when bevy of high school kids crowd into the Eritrean 7-eleven on Stockton. Get-ups and gear--flowing curly black hair over dark-gray top, hugging one girl's narrow shoulders. Sparkly something-or-others on the straps of her shoes.

Two lonely bottles on the dark-green top of recylcling can. Wrap-around label in transparent blue--a washier version of the sky, now that it's cleared--and a puffy orange lid. The civilization that can produce such--a focus of commercial energies...

Tejon Ranch, high in the Tehachapi's, soon to become Tejon Village. Luxury homes and a pool--the beautiful barren hills...

Analect 2.569x

9 September 2009. Gray becomes gold. That's how it works, sometimes. Girl from distant lands in lane alongside--the emperors Yao and Shun--her skimpy suit slips sideways, and she swims with breast revealed, a mother in churning strokes...

Face at the window of a bus--for an instant, all that can be known...

Analect 2.568x

3 September. Sun pushing up over the hills at dawn, pool figures in blue-green, watery elixir.

Last night --the Maude Fife Room, early evening, poems, anticipation. Each new reader a unique voice--offerings of worlds--plaintive, instructional, insistent. The sky right after--dark Wheeler trees against cobalt blue, a jumble of tender clouds--up, down, sideways--scattered across the heavens. Cell phone shot records the instant--a read on the universe, at that moment, at that point in time and space. Always so. Walking back to Wurster, the grass route up faculty glade--a hill, basically, covered by a field--and then at the top, through the archway, a new full moon in the east, rising, rising...

Cecil--Dayton--his mother and his father...

Analect 2.667x

2 September 2009. Milky fall light--beginning of the season. Clunk and creak of recycling truck--spanning almost the entire street, silhouette of driver, one finger in the air, making a circling motion, urging us to pass...

Custom and accomodation. Jorge Cafrune on horseback, "...de a caballo," somewhere in the countryside of Argentina. That was his want--to encircle the land--la tierra querida, bringing song. A passionate act so outside of time--fuera de su tiempo--a reliving in the being, just as each note...

And it must pass, in strength, in tenderness...in love...

Analect 2.566x

1 September 2009. Another veiled morning--gray skies. Emory bundled up high on the lifeguard stand, red jacket, scarf, stocking cap--a Santa Claus of the waters...

High school kids collecting in front of Stocton 7-eleven, The El Cerrito High contingent--smiling girl with flowing dark hair, gray tights, glancing up quickly at her diffident companion--all times in one.

Or the painter Prilidiano Pueyredon--son of a general from the days of the Independencia--his studies in Europe--the Barbizon School, Corot--returned to the Pampas as a kind of ethnographer from the Rive Gauche... As with Watteau--a vision of one world becomes another...but where Watteau's tenderness, or the grace of loss? Maybe more the figures in Renoir's the Cabaret of Mm. Anthony--the white table cloth, rumpled apron, pinch of tobacco, stack of cups and plates--rough country shoes and a resting dog...

Always the dance...