……..Quel démon a doté la mer, rauque chanteuse
……..Qu’accompagne l’immense orgue des vents grondeurs,
……..De cette fonction sublime de berceuse?
……..[*]
* * *’
Phillips curve — trempés de boue — Où par les longues nuits la girouette s’enroue, la girouette s’enroue (o) “My soul spreads wide its raven wings/ More easily than in the warm springtide.”
what Beckett said of a coincidence he’d encountered (the second volume of his letters) (Translation from the French, George Craig):
It is odd, the way time (yes, yes) works in little tight groups of associated things. Here in the loft I find an old copy of transition (1938) with a poem of mine, the wild youthful kind, which I had quite forgotten, and an article (also by me) on a young Irish poet (young then) who had just published a volume of poems in the same series as Echo’s Bones. The next day I get a card from the bloke in question, from Paris. Have not seen or heard of him for four years.
In French the first sentence reads:
C’est curiex, la facon du temps (mais oui) de proceder par petits paquets de choses associees.
ἣ μὲν γάρ θ᾽ ὕδατι λιαρῷ ῥέει, ἀμφὶ δὲ καπνὸς
γίγνεται ἐξ αὐτῆς ὡς εἰ πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο
*
Iliad 22.149-150. Butler. Wikipedia: In Iliad XXII (149ff), Homer states that the river had two springs: one produced warm water; the other yielded cold water, regardless of the season. (These lines concern the first of the springs).
A topic we’d never broached before, I’d asked him if he’d dreamed at all recently and he said — No fortunately not. “Why ‘fortunately’?” I said — did he have bad dreams? No, he did not have bad dreams, he replied emphatically (emphatically, as if he thought that only a bad person could have a bad dream, I thought). He then gave me to understand that all dreaming was something bad in his view, or certainly a sign of something bad, he had said. But could they not be delightful and interesting, I’d said? I’m glad I do not have dreams, he affirmed without answering that question directly. —But why again? I insisted. Because they’re not there, he said, as if it were obvious. Seeing things that aren’t there? No thank you, he said: I’m glad that I do not have any dreams. (I was struck by this characterization of dreams as “things that were not there”: as if having dreams were like believing in ghosts.)
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 