The Rock Blogger

Vivid, lyrical catharsis. Damn, I love this song!

-Caspar David Friedrich “The Watzmann”

Within the Alps it is still bright night and the cloud,
Composing poems full of joy, covers the yawning valley within.
This way, that way, roars and rushes the playful mountain breeze,
Steep down through the fir trees a ray of light gleams and vanishes.
Chaos, trembling with joy, slowly hurries and struggles,
Young in form, yet strong, it celebrates loving strife
Amidst the rocks, it seethes and shakes in its eternal bounds,
For more bacchantically morning rises within,
For the year grows more endlessly there and the holy
Hours, the days, are more boldly ordered and mingled.
Yet the bird of the thunderstorm notes the time and between
Mountains, high in the air he hovers and calls out the day.
Now in the depths within, the little village also awakens and
Fearless, familiar with the high, looks up from under the peaks.
Divining growth, for already, like lightning flashes, the ancient
Waterfalls crash, the ground steaming beneath the falls,
Echo resounds all about, and the immeasurable workshop,
Dispensing gifts, actively moves its arm by day and night.

-Holderlin Homecoming

Drawing by Marc Ngui

“In rupture, not only has the matter of the past volatised; the form of what happened, of an imperceptible something that has happened in a volatile matter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible and clandestine in a motionless voyage. Nothing can happen, or can have happened, any longer. Nobody can do anything for or against me any longer. My territories are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary, but the opposite, because I am in the process of drawing them. Wars, big and little, are behind me. Voyages, always in tow to something else, are behind me. I no longer have any secrets, having lost my face, form and matter. I am now no more than a line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the void. Absolute deterritoralisation.”

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus

Ivan Shishkin.

The First Snow. 1875.

“Ordinarily we speak of letting be whenever, for example, we forgo some enterprise that has been planned. “We let something be” means we do not touch it again, we have nothing more to do with it. To let something be has here the negative sense of letting it alone, of renouncing it, of indifference and even neglect. However, the phrase required now — to let beings be — does not refer to neglect and indifference but rather the opposite. To let be is to engage oneself with beings. On the other hand, to be sure, this is not to be understood only as the mere management, preservation, tending, and planning of the beings in each case encountered or sought out. To let be — that is, to let beings be as the beings which they are — means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which every being comes to stand, bringing that openness, as it were, along with itself”.

-Martin Heidegger. On the Essence of Truth

To the Fates

Grant me just one summer, powerful ones,
And just one autumn for ripe songs,
That my heart, filled with that sweet
Music, may more willingly die within me.

The soul, denied its divine heritage in life,
Won’t find rest down in Hades either.
But if what is holy to me, the poem
That rests in my heart, succeeds —

Then welcome, silent world of shadows!
I’ll be content, even though it’s not my own lyre
That leads me downwards. Once I’ll have
Lived like the gods, and more isn’t necessary.

Friedrich Hölderlin

photos by Sorina Dragusanu

Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Pictures

What has become of all of us, all ceilings, all skies
is that, the stars can swim a thousand dark miles
before they ever see the floor again
with their backs against the wall on these last days
but then, we knew that would happen anyway
you drop that pitch-black pall
over us, one and all, again
to propel your national machines
giving us all the disease, but not the vaccine
a thousand tiny lives
disappear into the black depths
I guess I thought I’d feel something but I didn’t
yes, that’s a myth
I would give anything
for a cool glass of water
without this poisonous oil
no
it’s never going to be good enough
there’s no air anywhere
it’s all money now
wouldn’t you do the same?

- Have a Nice Life “Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail” Deathconsciousness 2008

Having just finished my last exam for my first year in law school, its time to revel in the mist.
I’ll be heading to NYC for a few days, hoping to see Mogwai and The Twilight Sad while I’m there.
I hope everyone is doing well as spring slowly (ever so slowly) turns to summer.
Seeing that I’ll be on hiatus for the next week, here are some tunes to enjoy.