CYRUS CASSELLS, POET AND TRANSLATOR

Cyrus Cassells read today, 22 March 2011, at the luncheon gathering of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco.  He spoke about and read his translations from the Catalan language of poet Franscec Parcerisas, and from his own poetry.  I do not like much contemporary poetry, but at first glance knew that I was going to love his poetry.

Cyrus read most of the Parcerisas verses in Catalan after reading his English translations.

With a wealth of experience around the globe, Cassells is also currently working on a book with various Europeans about youths in World War II.  Then, as now, some of the young can be touched by idealism and incredible courage.  The book will be called THE CROSSED-OUT SWASTIKA, in honor of Hans Scholl who went about in World War II, crossing out any swastikas he saw posted on public walls.  You may know that Hans and his sister Sophie, and others involved in non-violent action against the Nazis, at the University of Munich were part of a group called The White Rose.  Eventually all were executed by the Nazis.  At least one film has been made about them, which is probably accessible for viewing on the Internet, SOPHIE SCHOLL:  THE FINAL DAYS.

In a very circular fashion, The Center for the Art of Translation has directed people to this entry on my blog, and I, in turn, now provide you a link where you may hear Mr. Cassells' presentation at CAT -- low volume for those introducing him, but you can hear Mr. Cassells speak of and recite his translations and some of his own poetry:  http://www.catranslation.org/blogpost/cyrus-cassells-on-francesc-parcerisas

Finding an Old Valentine

I came across this.  A long while ago a local San Francisco station ran a contest in which 4 or 6 people might win a competition for writing about their valentines.  Each of the winners would have a segment on their station, with video of the writer and his or her valentine, as the writer read the text that had won.  I was chosen as one among the six, and I had to prepare for a camera to intrude on a certain still shy person -- In my place I created Tiger Face which I posted on my wall to safeguard me and my valentine.  

My Valentine

"Our love story began fourteen years ago when she left the person she was living with and came to my house.  We were both very strung‑out – not a good place to begin to learn how to love, but we taught each other; it would require a very long book to describe the ups and downs by which we have come to the place we are now; it’s much less dramatic, but this is where the greater love story begins.

"You would hardly think it romantic that she is dying of leukemia.  Dying heroines excite love in movies and operas, but in our everyday lives we don’t think of sickness and dying as attractive.

"Yet it has been affection that has grown, not any feeling of dread or disgust.  Draped in my arms, her body growing lighter and lighter, it’s as if she were not dying but turning into a silk scarf.  This is the end that should be terrible, but it’s like a long last act of La Traviata with brave Violetta singing her last song over and over,

but never really letting go.  I will go on being suspended in her song even when she is gone.

"A greyness and a whiteness is being cast over her color as if she will disappear under snow.  But the love she has given me will remain, better than words, a big red rose like a cardinal jumping down a snowbank.  You wouldn’t think this was romantic either, but I know I will always smile, after I cry, when I remember the brush of her whiskers against the corner of my mouth.  She does that when she’s hungry for petting, affection, or food.  Love is love, you know, no matter who teaches you, even someone like my dear cat Cirrus."

I suppose you found "the hook" in this piece, that probably assured its acceptance, by the second paragraph, if not right away.  It was a sweet video, I think, but the video played on what I had counted would also cause it to win:  the image of the pathetic old gay guy, lonely, with no friend but his "great love," his cat.  Well, it was not all cunning and ego, and I DID learn to love from my cat, as all cat lovers know.

Sophia Shows You How to Ice a Bruised Cheek, as She Happens to Have One

A Verse by Victor Gonzalez Perez (AKA Victor Gonzalez)

Victor Gonzalez Perez was born in Aibonito, Puerto Rico.  His parents immigrated to San Francisco, California when he was a child.  His family later moved to Brooklyn, New York. From New York they moved back to Puerto Rico, and then back to San Francisco, California where he spent the major part of his life. He is now retired and resides permanently in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. He wrote this verse in San Francisco in 1971.

Right Now Boxed Into Walls

      by Victor Gonzalez Perez

                 A thin veil bars

                 -- mine and theirs -- 

                 And yet miniscule glimpses

                 -- eyes blinking

                 Gasping for an answer beyond now.

                 Recuerdos (memories)

                 Upon the tiny plaza where

                 sleep the dead heroes

                 the fountain stands

                 eternal vigil.

                 Fire tree leaves

                 -- el flamboyan --

                carpet the promenade

                a lovers' nest.

                Recuerdos (memories)

red faced roofs and balconies like embroidered

mouths where grandma sat on her sugarcane

throne counting the seasons

her eyes of spanish tiles watching green mountains

dangling from the clouds

while the tiny insect troubadors lulled the night

to sleep in its satin hammock

                Ahora (& now)

                The day swallows

                the rainbow garden's

                frail butterfly

                The arch of thorns

                crumbles on its halo

                -- and you and i struggle on

                perched on the brink

                of yesterdays.

                               [November 1971]

Sarah Patten's work

You might look at Sarah Patten's collages -- her website added to my "Links to Friends" section at the lower right:  http://www.sarahpatten.com/collages.html

Out of the Old Boxes: Lot Two

Opening old storage boxes, more fragile butteflies fly up and into the ether.  On the way, they often go through transformation as they pass through Photoshop.  Click on the title above if you care to see a slide show of Lot Two from the old Boxes.

With apologies to all architects, my fantasy plan...

 I had this notion -- a pyramid ziggurat form.  Whether an earthen pyramid or a building in a pyramid shape, people could walk up and down the outer ramp.

But it could also be a sluice for water to irrigate a green cover or gardens along the pyramid.

But I also imagine (represented by plastic tubing) a walkway where people could walk through the sky.  Or it could be a water chute.  Or...

 ...perhaps this could just be a format for a variety of structures.  Needless to say my "model" is primitive and not professional, but then it is just a fantasy not an actual building plan. 

Click on the title of this entry if you want to see a slide show of the stages of making this model.

Doing Tai Chi in a Picture Postcard

 Some friends and I do tai chi in what is equivalent to a picture postcard, on a pier next to San Francisco's Ferry Building, with the Bay Bridge in sight, with our rhythms and motions in tandem with the rhythms of nature, the ever-changing waters and weather by the Bay.  Sometimes all six of us are present, but sometimes we are as few as two, such as here with Dana Weisshaar and Martha Hubert.  At this ideal location we do tai chi, then one or the other may have a chai tea, and should anyone sneeze while doing the form, we do not speak aloud, but we may be thinking, "tai chooo!"

Jo Ann Mischler

When I was about 13, with money saved from orchard and bakery work (60 cents an hour, as I recall), I bought my Kokak Panda camera that took square photos, and you looked down into a square viewfinder before taking the photo.  I felt compelled to make "portraits" of a little neighbor girl, Jo Ann Mischler.  I see that in one of the photos I requested that she wear some "cape" over her Hopalong Cassidy sweatshirt.  Her mother lived somewhere else, and she was living two houses away with a Mennonite woman who wore a plain dress, of course, probably fastened with pins, buttons being forbidden, and wearing the standard gauzy white cotton bonnet, strings dangling free.  She was undoubtedly one of the Mennonites whose labors small town citizens could enjoy at minimal wages.  Many years later, I met Jo Ann when she had become a young adult, and she was beautiful and chic, retaining a quick spirit that had appealed to me.  She remembered how being photographed had affected her in some way.    Sadly, I believe she did not live long after that, struck down by some illness.  Click on the photo to expand it -- Isn't that a Mona Lisa smile?:

Haiku for the Egyptians

A Peaceable Kingom

Paul Heidt sent me a sweet example of interspecies harmony.  It felt in accord with a verse (whether good or bad) that I was working on presently (below).  The video from Paul probably easier to access by clicking on the title line above, "A Peaceable Kingdom" (the name over time for portraits of all animals lying in peaceful harmony), but here is the link also:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d79ArrL8VRg

Gail Horvath's Nexus Gateway to Others' Blogs

Gail has created a site that is a gateway to blogs she follows.  I suppose she will continue to add sites as time passes.  I have added her site to my "Links to Friend's Sites" on my opening page(s):
http://eyesoftheheart.squarespace.com/other-peoples-blogs/

Sophia and Eduardo Have Turned Three...It's Written in Chocolate on Their Faces

Louise Nayer Reads at the Cafe Royale, San Francisco, in January 2011

 Louise Nayer reading from her great book, BURNED, at the Cafe Royale, Post and Leavenworth, San Francisco, in January 2011.

Happy 3rd Birthday, Sophia and Eduardo

Anti Mubarak Demonstration, San Francisco, 29 January 2011

To see a slide show of this demonstration, click the title above.

Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins

Click on the title above to see a documentary on the insidious SOA (School of the America), the U.S. government's school to train assassins.

Fred Goldsmith's Photography Website Launched

To see Fred Goldsmith's newly launched photography website, click on the title above -- but it will also join other friend's websites, ever available in the list to the right on my blog page -- and I hope I gave proper fanfare introduction for each of them.
Fred's design for his website, you will find, is very restrained and elegant.  

Fifty Nests and the Birds That Built Them

For lovers of art and nature photography -- and for the photographers I know who ought to publish a book of their work -- have a look at Sharon Beal's new book -- Click on the title above, NESTS:  Fifty Nests and the Birds That Built Them

The Chinese Character for Tao (Dao), "the Way"

I suppose there may be copyrights on the three representations of the Chinese character for Tao (the Way) shown at right of this text, but I simply want to show them as examples before presenting my new version of the character:  I am prepared for anyone who wishes to call my new version the "comic book" version!

In "The Spirit of the Chinese Character" (Barbara Aria with Russell Eng Gon), the character, "tao," is said to have originally meant a "course of action," perhaps a military one, as the character combines "foot" or "to follow" with "the leader" -- a "head" topped with two plumes (in ancient days signifying the rank of general."  To Confucius (the law-giver type), tao is the "way" of life rules and moral rectitude, while to Lao-tzu (the intuitive type) "Tao" is the fluid truth of the universe.

Just as its meanings were being transformed in the beginning, friends and I see still other images in the character.  For instance, it is a ladder to one; to me, a ladder with broken rungs, suggesting how the Way is not straight and narrow and easy -- One sometimes goes into cul-de-sacs (one rung may break under foot), and one must take a leap or back out, having lost the main way (as Dante says in the first lines of his Divine Comedy) and continue the search to find the true Way, the search, constantly refined, that IS the Way -- Don't you think?  Two ways of coloring my version -- just for the fun of it:

Finding the Origin of Names

Paul Harmon has provided me a website you can access by clicking on "Finding the Origin of Names," above, where the meanings of names can be found, and where they originated on earth.

What follows will be of no interested except to my relatives:

It has verified what I had always heard in my father's family, that the Eilers came from a part of northern Germany that borders with the Netherlands.  I could not find the name "Niehaves" (a variation of Neuhaus or Newhouse, perhaps), which was the name of my great grandfather, whose widowed wife and sons were taken in by the Eilers in Michigan and given that family's lat name.  According to this site, the Eilers outside Germany settled mostly in the U.S. and Canada.

Other people, researching my mother's family, the McColleys, have established that they were in the U.S. before the Revolutionary War -- I have wondered if they came as bonded servants, but there is no reason to think so.  They were among the Scots who  came down to northern Ireland, coming to be known as the Scots-Irish -- some say, an immigration arranged by the English to dilute Irish national identity -- that too I cannot verify.  But the odd thing is that any connection with Ireland, or even Scotland, is not indicated on their map; whatever McColleys are still in the British Isles seem to be almost entirely in the lower and mid part of England.
But most McColleys are in the U.S.A., and, according to those who researched the family, were first in New England, but now are concentrated in about ten states, especially Montana and Minnesota.  In my native Indiana, the largest concentration is in Wabash and Owen Counties; next, in level of concentration of McColleys, and where my mother's people lived, was Lake County, and Porter County next to it.  McColleys were also in the counties St. Joseph, Kosciusko, Tippecanoe, Shelby, Rush, and Henry.

Newly Published Translations

If you would like to read my translations of four German verses, plus the biographical texts they require on the translated poets, they have just been published on-line, where you may find them by clicking on the title above, "Newly Published Translations."  It does not show the Synopsis they elicited from me as it is on their webpage introducing the new translations being featured.  The Synopsis, below, is the context in which Strauss chose these verses for his last work:

FOUR LAST SONGS:  the poems that comprise the final song cycle by Richard Strauss

Written by Hermann Hesse and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff

Translated from the German by James McColley Eilers

January 2011

SYNOPSIS:

In October 1947, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) went to London where Sir Thomas Beecham had organized a festival of his music.  The British, so soon after World War II, were still suspicious of this German who had remained silent about Nazis while surviving in the Third Reich.  A young reporter asked the 83-year-old composer his plans for the future.  “Oh,” said Strauss, “to die.” 

In this end-of-life state of mind, Strauss began work on his last work, the Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder).   He set the song cycle, which premiered only after his death, to verses written by two poets at a similar twilight stage of their respective lives, Mermann Hesse and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff.  Strauss’ inspiration began with his discovery of Eichendorff’s poem, Im Abendrot  (At Sunset).  Perhaps it was because Strauss and his wife had lived through a grim period of history over their fifty-four years of marriage that Strauss was moved by the Eichendorff verse, which describes an old couple who have survived a life’s journey through sorrow and joy.  At around the same time, Strauss received a copy of the complete poems of Hermann Hesse, and Four Last Songs cycle includes three of them –  Frühling (Spring), September, and Beim Schlafengehen (When I Go to Sleep).

Strauss composed the Four Last Songs with Kirsten Flagstad in mind, and she sang the first performance on May 22, 1950, in the Royal Festival Hall, London, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.

"The Child" In Honor of Christina Taylor Green

KEEP THE TOUCHSTONE OF THAT CHILD’S IMAGINATION

Is there anyone who did not cry at the murder of the victims in Tucson, most particularly at the death of Christina Taylor Green?  Obama, in his speech commemorating these citizens, found the greatest touchstone for political behavior:  Would your next act be worthy of that child’s imagination of how great the U.S could be?  There is a longstanding “spiritual” map for the human race:  The original Age of the Matriarchy was supplanted by the Age of the Patriarchy, and, finally, we may hope the gender war will end, and the Patriarchy be replaced by the Age of the Child.  It is a common notion that every child represents our hope for the future.  For many reasons, there is no better guide than to ask, as President Obama did, “Would this act be worthy of the vision of America in the imagination of Christina Taylor Green?”  While using That Child's name makes the most effective rhetorical flourish, for the sake of her family, I would not want to use her name like a picket sign.  Perhaps we could say, “Would this act be worthy of the vision of That Child [or a general and universal “The  Child”]?”

And we might hope that all political figures, including President Obama, would daily, hourly, keep that touchstone in mind.  Shall we address the President and all politicians with “Would the use of drone bombers be worthy of The Child?  Would The Child approve of people without jobs and money having to do without proper health care, food to eat, a place to live?  Would causing the American people to live in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity be worthy of The Child?  Would The Child approve of concealing the thousands of tragic scenes where people are turned out of their homes?  Would The Child be pleased with the food lines outside churches?  Would The Child approve of the government announcing a hit list on various people around the globe?  Would The  Child approve of continued military adventures based on U.S. notions of exceptionalism and entitlement, pressed on by messianic notions of being the purveyors of a particular notion of truth?  Would The Child want us to restore, or find ourselves, a national democracy, or would she want us to be an empire attempting to control all on earth?  Would The Child consider it worthy for the nation, through capital punishment,  to be the murderer of murderers?

If this sounds right to you, please add your own questions.  (Watching Amy Goodman daily will provide you many, many more such questions: http:/www.democracynow.org)
I intend to send this to the White House (comments@whitehouse.gov).   Perhaps you will send your own enhanced list there, and if they receive enough of the messages, perhaps one of them will be heard.

Publication of the verse "Father"

My verse, "Father," will be published fairly soon on the 2010 on-line collection of 100 verses called "The Poetry Ark."  It is very likely that you have read it before, but, if not, you can see it by clicking on the title line.

Women Muralists in 1980

I want to share with the muralists at Precita Eyes in the Mission these images from 1980.  Click on the subject line above "Women Muralists in 1980" to see a brief slide show of images women artists painted on the side of the Galleria de la Raza in 1980.

Veterans For Peace

Photographers captured the passion of the die-in staged by Veterans For Peace/Veterans Against War at the U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco on Thursday, 16 December 2010, the bodies of veterans and their supporters blocking doorways.  On the milder side, for a few photos of people, and a review of the wonderful signs at the preliminary demonstration, click on the title above "Veterans For Peace."

In Washington, D.C. (as reported on the Democracy Now website), "an estimated 135 people were arrested outside the White House in an antiwar protest led by the group Veterans for Peace. The protesters were detained after chaining themselves to the White House fence. Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner urged continued civil disobedience to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mike Prysner: "They’re not going to end the wars. And they’re not going to do it because it’s not our government. It’s their government. It’s the government of the rich. It’s the government of Wall Street, of the oil giants, of the defense contractors. It’s their government. And the only language that they understand is shutting down business as usual. And that’s what we’re doing here today, and we’re going to continue to do until these wars are over. We’re going to fight until there’s not one more bomb dropped, not one more bullet fired, not one more soldier coming home in a wheelchair, not one more family slaughtered, not one more day of U.S. imperialism."

"Among those arrested were the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley."

EAT -- or TAX THE RICH

I joined some friends -- and strangers with signs -- outside the S.F. Federal Building on Seventh Street, San Francisco, waiting to see if the U.S. House would follow the U.S. Senate's approving of giving tax breaks to the rich.  A Homeland Security man found some way to scold us, but we were grateful then to have his vehicle to hold up one of the signs:

Happy Autumn

December 2010

Happy Autumn: Anthem for an Altar to the Seeming Dead


This year the falling of leaves is a celebration –
swatches in burgundy, amber, umber, yellow,
scarlet – the warm colors of antique tapestries.
These leaf shapes, everyday and ancient, are each
a vowel or word in the deeper text we live.

In this happy time, Sherrill, Michael, the two
Roberts, and the one Bobby – my beloved dead
never truly departed – hunger for reviving speech.
The falling leaves are not notes from the dead.
The only language we share now is in a place
beyond sadness where bright leaves laugh.

Random Thoughts, and Pictures from the Oakland Museum

While too much energy is being absorbed by the issues of establishing civil rights for gay men and lesbians in regard to marriage and service in the military, it may be fully warranted by the positive effect this "distraction" would have on all those more life-threatening issues, by causing one more change in those rigid, strangling defintions that are nonsense venerated only because they are ancient. Any clear mind would see through these unquestioned habits of thought. Even those who mouth those prejudices stumble in trying to make the irrational sound rational. If the state really lived by their definitions of heterosexual marriage, most heterosexual marriages would be declared illegal. According to their definition, men and women only marry to propagate the herd, not for any feelings of intellectual rapport or emotional attachment.


In a negative form of the Golden Rule -- the more common Leaden Rule -- they did Saddam Hussein as he would have done. He understood death by hanging, having known the world as cruel form his birth. The U.S. showed him nothing new while they pretended to be different from him. And via film, the population was able to gather at his gallows as a sick entertainment. Where vengeance rules, the most heinous villain begins to seem pathetic; his conquerors, seem, in their own right (wrong), butchers of the butcher. As my old college mentor used to say in farewell greeting: "Onward and downward."

The Film, "127 Hours," and the book, "The Fall of the US Empire -- And Then What?"

On this New Moon evening...


December 2010

Those involved with the film, “127 Hours (director, Danny Boyle),” must surely receive the honors they deserve. (James Franco was finally given a great and demanding role, and I suppose he was selected as co-host of the next Academy Awards in anticipation of a Best Actor nomination.) The film is a perfect mate to the recent film “Into the Wild (director, Sean Penn),” that many of us felt should have received that year’s Best Picture Oscar.
While meaningful in its own terms (enduring and surviving the most dire circumstances – a portrayal of the incident when hiker Aaron Ralston, his arm pinned down by a fallen boulder, had no choice finally but to cut off his own arm), the film takes on other meanings, some of them epic.
The biographical characters in both “127 Hours” and “Into the Wild,” one surviving, one dying, mature and arrive at the same insight, expressed in their own words, that the “individualism” that is part of the U.S. “faith” is a dead end delusion: Humans survive and thrive because of a blessed interdependence.
Seeing “127 Hours,” while reading Johan Galtung’s “The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What?,” the film became another in the thousands of current phenomena seen, from Galtung’s analysis, as symptoms of the death (we hope) of the American Empire. Aaron’s rash, self-absorbed behavior mirrors the current American collective myth.
While respecting Mr. Galtung’s copyright, which forbids me quoting him at length, I have to believe he would not mind my quoting his Dedication:
“To a country I love, the United States of America: You will swim so much better without that imperial albatross around your neck. Drown it before it drowns you, and let a thousand flowers blossom!”
I hope everyone will read his book – I have not reached the “And Then What?” portion of the book yet, but from what I have read so far I recognize what many know about our current U.S.A., that as the central “faith” of U.S.-as-Empire dies, those on the periphery, losing touch with that foundering center, begin to form coalitions with the others on the periphery in what might possibly be outposts for the possible post-Empire U.S. – The U.S. as a republic, for Mr. Galtung spells out the convincing facts that the U.S. position on the earth is already that of the latest dying empire, with all the conditions of previous dead empires.
Many of us know that the best comes from extragovernmental people-to-people responses to human needs. (I think of organizations like that of friend Gregg Biggs’s World Neighbors – organizations that help the underdeveloped set up microeconomies, etc.)
After the recent election, which seemed to fragment both the political right and the political left, leaving rational and compassionate people with no national leadership, I suggested to Dan Beam in the Crossroads Café that the pockets of progressive compassion and rational planning that exist in many separate places across the “red” and “blue” states might feel less helpless and hopeless (confronted by a bizarre electorate, and feeling under assault) if they reached out to each other and formed a bond and, perhaps, a common vision.
Those at the table came up with various progressive sanctuaries, naming “Austin,” “Boulder,” and probably most university towns. Dan suggested that such a concord of disparate “colonies” be called an archipelago (“a chain or cluster of islands”). For me it would be the Archipelago of Earthumans. A way to feel human solidarity.
I immediately fear that any such construct would become static and moribund in its own way, torn apart by inner dissensions, like all other constructs so I thought the first principle of that archipelago should be a frequent reminder, from Groucho Marx: “I would never belong to any group that would be willing to have me as a member.”
I might hope, however, that with religion being an automatic source of conflict that religious talk be carried on outside, and that those in the archipelago would limit its ethical code to the Golden Rule, an easy touchstone that conveys empathy, compassion, equality, fairness.
The intent is only to imagine or begin to create the post-Empire republic, or to begin to think in non-Empire terms, pan-human terms.
I thought I would ask people to add to the comments on this blog their own list of possible “islands” in the “archipelago,” understanding that sometimes that would be only part of a city, and keeping in mind that any individual in any obscure place in the US who looks forward to an end to Empire-thinking should not be excluded from such an archipelago.
Your sites for such an archipelgo in the Comment sections, please, and then perhaps following this fantasy notion, maybe someone would actually begin to form those links.
Mr. Galtung has been interviewed on several of Amy Goodman’s Democracy now programs, if you go to http://www.democracynow.org and search for "Johan Galtung"
or possibly paste this in your search engine:
http://www.democracynow.org/search?query=Johan+Galtung&commit=Search