"A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he'll never crow. I have seen the light and I'm crowing."
-Muhammad Ali

Be Drunk

Be Drunk
by Charles Baudelaire Translated by Louis Simpson
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it--it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Discovered Baudelaire

I mean it's not as though I wasn't aware of existence. But I didn't realize how much I liked his poetry until I read the Nikopol Trilogy.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire
... If rape or arson, poison, or the knife
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas we accept as life—
It is because we are not bold enough!

(Roy Campbell's translation)

"To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."
-Walter Pater

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Wasp

Wasp

Hammer, hammer, hammer, the wasp
has been banging his head on the window for hours;
you'd think by now he'd be brain-dead, but no,
he flings himself at the pane: hammer, hammer again.

I ease around him to open the sash, hoping
he doesn't sting me because then I'd be sorry
I didn't kill him, but he pays me no mind:
it's still fling, hammer, fling, hammer again.

I'm sure his brain's safe, his bones are outside,
but up there mine are too, so why does it hurt
so much to keep thinking—hammer, hammer—
the same things again and, hammer, again?

That invisible barrier between you and the world,
between you and your truth ... Stinger blunted,
wings frayed, only the battering, battered brain,
only the hammer, hammer, hammer again.

C. K. Williams

Till We Have Faces

"Die before you die. There is no chance after."
-C.S. Lewis