Ellen Bass, from 'Relax.' Found thanks to Poet's House.
Showing posts with label tigers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tigers. Show all posts
gifts for writers and readers
Walker Evan's copy of The Waste Land from Honey & Wax Booksellers / Annina Vogel signet ring engraved with an Edith Wharton quote / gold and linen journal by paperiaarre / Redecker book brush / Biblioteca de Babel Agua de Perfume by Fueguia 1833 Patagonia / Olympia SM3 typewriter / walnut bookmark at Alder & Co. / flats for the Borges fan / pen case from Kaufmann Mercantile / Carl Aubock magnifiers for fine print.
Also: a week-long class on Paradise Lost, a subscription to the NYRB classics book club, and a membership at The New York Society Library.
this weekend
Last weekend was a bit of a bust. Thunderstorms meant that my parents' flight got grounded, then cancelled. Then there were no more flights to be had, so no visit. This weekend is going to be better.
- Pimm's in a park uptown (or Peau d'ane in a park downtown)
- boro
- longtime companion
- there's so much I want to say to you
- bloody bulls
- the river and exquisite corpses
And on Monday: the wheel printer. Happy weekend.
Photo from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History: Museum staff at work on the Tiger Diorama in the Hall of Asian Mammals, February 1934. ©AMNH Library/Image #281096.
the outward course of my life has been the common one, but in my dreams i always saw tigers
A few favorite fragments of Borges:
A famous poem by Blake paints the tiger as a fire burning bright and an eternal archetype of Evil; I prefer the Chesterton maxim that casts the tiger as a symbol of terrible elegance. Apart from these, there are no words that can rune the tiger, that shape which for centuries has lived in the imagination of mankind. I have always been drawn to the tiger. I know that as a boy I would linger before one particular cage at the zoo; the others held no interest for me. I would judge encyclopedias and natural histories by their engravings of the tiger. When the Jungle Books were revealed to me I was upset that the tiger, Shere Kahn, was the hero's enemy. As the years passed, this strange fascination never left me; it survived my paradoxical desire to become a hunter as it did all common human vicissitudes ... The outward course of my life has been the common one, but in my dreams I always saw tigers.
From 'Blue Tigers', translated by Andrew Hurley.
***
My childhood passed and my passion for tigers faded, but they still appear in my dreams. In the unconscious or chaotic dimension, their presences persist, in the following way: While I am asleep, some dream or other disturbs me, and all at once I realize I am dreaming. At these moments, I tend to think to myself: This is a dream, simply an exercise of my will; and since my powers are limitless, I am going to dream up a tiger.
Utter incompetence! My dreaming is never able to conjure up the desired creature. A tiger appears, sure enough, but an enfeebled tiger, a stuffed tiger, imperfect of form, or the wrong size, or only fleetingly present, or looking something like a dog or a bird.
From 'Dreamtigers', translated by Alastair Reed.
***
All the other overwhelming colors,
in company with the years, kept leaving me,
and now alone remains the amorphous light,
the inextricable shadow and the gold of the beginning.
O sunsets, O tigers, O wonders
of myth and epic,
O gold more dear to me, gold of your hair
which these hands long to touch.
From 'The Gold of Tigers', translated by Alastair Reid.
***
Evening spreads in my spirit and I keep thinking
that the tiger I am calling up in my poem
is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows,
a set of literary images,
scraps remembered from encyclopedias,
and not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel
that in the sun or the deceptive moonlight
follows its paths, in Bengal or Sumatra,
of love, of indolence, of dying.
Against the tiger of symbols I have set
the real one, the hot-blooded one
that savages a herd of buffalo,
and today, the third of August, '59,
its patient shadow moves across the plain,
but yet, the act of naming it, of guessing
what is its nature and its circumstance
creates a fiction, not a living creature,
not one of those that prowl the earth.
From 'The Other Tiger', translated by Alastair Reid.
Postcard of a tiger in the Leningrad Zoo found here.
wildlife
Karolina Sobecka: Wildlife:
At night a projection from a moving car is shone on the buildings. The car projects a video of a tiger whose movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the tiger runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the tiger stops also. The framerate of the movie corresponds to the speed of the wheel rotation, picked up by a sensor.
The viewers are elevated from the everyday reality through this element of fantasy into a world with more dimensions, possibilities and perhaps beauty.Every city should have tigers like this.
spiced groves of ceaseless verdure
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure.Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Chapter 119.
*
The artistic individual is nonetheless permitted to pace up and down, like a tiger, in his cave of artistic creation, mad with desire and worry over achieving some output of beauty. As no one sees this, there is no one to hold it against him.Robert Walser, Berlin Stories. Translated by Susan Bernofsky (found here).
*
Rousseau tiger print found here.
Related: 'Exit, Pursued by a Tiger'
anointed
The Royal Bengal tiger is solitary and “secretive”—the last attribute regularly appears in the language of even the most sober field manuals. A group of tigers—should one be so fortunate to see one—is called a streak. A male tiger can be as large as ten and a half feet in length and weigh more than five hundred pounds. The tiger’s coat is deep amber, the lines of its characteristic black shadow-stripes abstract and sophisticated. Its claws retract, like those of a domestic cat; it “prusts,” or chuffs, rather than purrs, as well as roars. The iris of the tiger’s eye is amber-yellow. The tiger is one of the few anointed animals commonly referred to as “charismatic”; “Nature’s masterpiece of the creation,” to cite a recent book; or, as Kushal put it, “something to look up to,” both beautiful and powerful ...Carolyn Alexander, 'Tigerland', The New Yorker, April 21, 2008.
(I would like to heard a tiger chuff ... from a distance.)
fearful symmetry
William Blake (1757–1827): Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794/ca.1825.
Plate 42: The Tyger
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