Haiku in English is the most accessible, democratic, and intimate of poetic forms. Accessible because on first impression, one “gets it.” Democratic because anyone and everyone can write haiku. After all, how difficult can 3 lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables be? Intimate because…well here one encounters the difficulty with haiku. Fine haiku always hides a mystery and only the very adept writer of haiku can implant intimations of this mystery in and among the words. There are rules and codes and traditions and myths, but true haiku is ever escaping these confines. And here we encounter Susan Scott’s Haiku Joy: Poems, Prayers, Photographs. Susan has been writing long enough and well enough and now free enough to be host to the true spirit of haiku, the spirit that yearns to express itself in metaphor, in simile, even allegory, with the symbolism always evoking the depth of nature to excite a resonance in the human heart. At a time when nature has been abandoned, degraded, and depreciated, there can be nothing more important than singing out a call to nature, to give voice to the impressions of nature, for the purpose of reanimating the presence of nature in the human soul. Poetry can do that. Haiku can do that. Susan Scott’s Haiku Joy can do that. Long ago, a dream told me that “a poem wants a poem.” Susan’s book will stimulate you to write haiku as a response to her haiku, to her prayers, and to her photographs. Enjoy!

—Russell Arthur Lockhart

Author of Words as Eggs and Psyche Speaks

Available at Amazon: https://cutt.ly/FhSAIuC

The Dark Gets In

The crack is wide
Yes, and widening
But there is no light
Did someone forget
To flick the switch
To light the candle
To rub some sticks?
There's still no light
"You misunderstand,"
A rough voice declares
The darkness is, yes,
The darkness is the
New light

Samuel Beckett's absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, was voted the most significant play of the twentieth century. Over the years, I have read the play several times, but I have never seen a production. With my mind full of reflections, considerations and dreams relating to the sixth extinction, as well as the contemporary geopolitical climate, I decided to watch the play. I do not wish to add to the endless commentary and critique of this work, but I want to recommend that you watch this play. A good version of it is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wifcyo64n-w Forget analysis, interpretation, or even understanding the play. None of that is the point of absurdest art. Instead, tend to what rises up spontaneously in you: thoughts, feelings, images, emotions, impulses, dreams. The play is psychoactive and that is the point. I must admit that my favorite genre of art and literature is absurdest in nature as well as its various related and ancillary forms. From what I have said already, you can see that I do not favor traditional analysis (of any sort), but favor focusing on what is engendered spontaneously on an individual basis. Like a dream, such responses may appear "absurd." This, of course, is why they take a back seat to more "rational" approaches. What faces us in the coming "collapse of everything" is not absurd. But the conscious collective response to the collapse is absurd at almost all levels and in all directions. I find, for myself, that almost all present collective conscious efforts in dealing with what confronts humanity to be absurd. Rather than falling into nihilism, I experience this as a necessary condition to develop a more radical individual effort. So what does one do from this perspective? Small, slow, simple, local, human-to-human, dwell in negative capability, create and listen to the dream and...

It is time to read Edgar Allan Poe's THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.

Here is a link:

https://poestories.com/read/masque

Conducting, as we know it today, did not come into its own until the middle of the 19th century and then with much opposition from composers. Since I began listening to music in any serious way, which was about the time I began to play the piano in earnest, I was fascinated by conductors. In the 170 years since conducting became conducting, there have been many great conductors, masters of their art. Perhaps the greatest of them all is the legendary Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache. During his decades of conducting he did not authorize any recordings to be made of his performances. His reason was that only in the live performance with orchestra, conductor and audience in the enclosed chamber of the concert hall could the potential for the transcendental experience inherent in the music be achieved by everyone. As the conductor John Mauceri makes clear in his book, Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting, the digital recordings released after Celibidache's death are "oddly exaggerated and technically unimpressive," but adding, "His concerts, however. were considered life-changing, for those who attended them." The disparity between the digital recording and the live experience is important—perhaps especially as more and more of our lives are experienced digitally. I'm thinking that the difference lies in the mystery of the live experience which becomes lost in the digital world. I'll explore this sense of mystery in a later blog post. For now, I'd like everyone to experience something digitally that only hints at the art, alchemy and mystery of conducting. This is a 1971 recording of Sergiu Celibidache conducting the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in Maurice Ravel's Bolero. What is special about this video is that it focuses entirely on the conductor, so we see him as the audience never sees him. This recording is a master class by one of the great masters of conducting. Pay attention to what you experience. Watch if possible, on a full screen.

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5Ve3338-E

Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, was published in Austria in 1971. It was not available in English until 1990, and released in a new translation (by Philip Boehm) in 2019 and published by New Directions. Bachmann is considered one of the greatest women writers of the twentieth century. She was a poet, essayist, lecturer, playwright, among other creative endeavors. Her PhD was on Heidegger which she ultimately rejected in favor of Wittgenstein. Her work contributed to feminism in major ways, particularly with the insight that Fascism/Nazism did not end with the world war, but became infused in men and became expressed in the abuse of women on a large scale in male/female relationships. She suffered from major addictions and died tragically at the age of 47. Malina was her only completed novel.

Malina, for me, was unlike any novel I have ever read. “Can a man understand this book,” asks Rachel Kushner in her Introduction. “Completely,” she answers. ‘’He doesn’t have to suffer it.” Kushner says that a woman reader will suffer it, like the burns the narrator suffers. I would add, like the burns the author suffered when her cigarette ash burned her skin which had become insensitive to pain as a result of her drug addiction. I believe Kushner is right, that a man experiences this writing from a distance, which also is one of the narrator’s complaints about both of the men she relates to in the novel.

The narrator is an unidentified female “”I” who is a writer. Malina is the man she lives with. Ivan is the man who is her lover. You can forget about all the so-called rules of the novel. None of the usual expectations are at work here. Reading Malina is like being a voyeur to the narrator’s descent ending with her disappearance into a crack in a wall as if she had never existed. The last line: “”It was murder.”

As a writer, when I read a novel, part of me reads a word, or a line, a paragraph and then muses on what I would write next. My musings are never exact, of course, but often they are in the same ball park as those of the author I am reading. Malina was difficult and jarring for me because everything was a surprise. I was constantly jolted to the point I would have to stop reading for a bit and catch my breath.

One might think of this writing as in the style of so-called “stream of consciousness” writers, all of which Bachmann noted in her various prose writings. But a stream has banks, and the water has direction, and the water flows within the banks of the stream. What Bachmann has done is to write from floodplain, as if everywhere at once. This is perhaps what is so maddening for the male mind.

But what I got from Malina was a gift. As I read, I was continually flooded with desire to write, and deluged with images of what to write. And now faced with the difficulty of writing something from what has inundated me.

Here is a very important interview with Dr. George Mecouch, author of When Psychiatry Slept: Reawakening the Imagination in Therapy (2018).

Have a listen and then read the book. If you would like a copy of my Foreword to George's book let me know.

Here is the link to the interview: