Category: Quotable

Caveat: Falling Around Ilsan

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / My Photos / Quotable

Walking from work yesterday, I had my camera. I took some pictures of fall-colored trees. The weather was humid and overcast but summer’s heat is gone. It drizzled a little bit.

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“It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming… Multitude, solitude: identical terms.” – Charles Baudelaire.

The picture below is a redwood tree growing in the Juyeop Park esplanade.  It’s a Chinese-origin dawn redwood, that loses its leaves (needles) in the winter.  A strange plant, but seeing them (they’re all over Ilsan) always make me think of my childhood in Humboldt.

A dawn redwood tree (metasequoia) in a park in suburban South Korea, with its striking red bark and some of the deciduous needles already changing to brown

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Caveat: No More Jobs

Banalities & Journaling / Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Internet & Blogging / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.” – Steve Jobs

pictureOnce upon a time, I was a huge fanboy of Apple Corp in its first incarnation (see left) – my uncle’s Apple ][, which entered our household when I was still in junior high in the late 70’s, was my first and most excellent exposure to computers, both as tool for writing and for learning programming. Not to mention killing vast amounts of time with games like space invaders.

Frankly, I’ve always felt that Apple Corp in its second incarnation, post-Jobs-exile, was less thrilling or impressive. I found the latter-day, closed-garden design philosophy personally repugnant (I think this is the open-source programming geek, in me), and I felt the products were over-priced and excessively hyped. More marketing than engineering, basically. I have so far managed to get past 10% of the new century without owning or interacting with an Apple product.

Nevertheless, I believe that Steve Jobs was undoubtedly a Thomas Edison type figure for our age. His passing is premature.

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Caveat: The Right Time

Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

In general, I’m contentedly expatriated. But in some moments, I’m proud that my residual US address is the city of Minneapolis. e.g. My congressman from Minneapolis, Keith Ellison, on the issue of Palestinian statehood, quoted Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The time is always right to do what is right.” He wrote an editorial in the New York Times.

pictureI know there are serious issues between the Palestinians and Israel, and that the problems cut deeply both ways. But denying a people a sovereign state (or, alternately, denying them full rights as citizens) can never be the “right thing to do.”

Personally, I find the so called “one state solution” (latterly espoused by Qaddafi, of all disrepeutable people) to be the most ethically appealing, but I recognize that this is the least likely from the facts on the ground. Then again, who would have predicted in the 1980s that apartheid would have been utterly abrogated less than a decade later, in South Africa? Things change fast once change takes root.

Remember the hundredth monkey? Probably not.

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Caveat: divine-self-gnostic-perception

Buddhism & Zen / Quotable

If you see that your eyes have never been removed, that is seeing your eyes.

Again, there is not even a mind that wants to see, so how can there be a thought of not seeing?

Just so, the divine-self-gnostic-perception is already your own mind.

Again, how can you possibly want to perceive (your mind)?

Although you want to perceive (the mind),
Yet it will never be perceived.
While comprehending what is not-to-be-perceived
Suddenly this is the seeing Self-nature.

– Myo Vong, Cookies of Zen (p. 284).

Ah, now I see.

Picture, below shows detail from a quilt my mother made, which I saw when visiting with her at her friend’s in Kuranda, Queensland, in January.

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Caveat: Our Potemkin Planet

Buddhism & Zen / Internet & Blogging / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

I'm not even close to agreeing with everything blogger IOZ writes, but this little summary in a recent post really captures a lot of information and ideas in a very compact bit of prose.  I must quote:

The problem is in fact not that people need jobs but that people need money, and hobbling them to a desk or factory floor is the only moral and legitimate means of funneling currency into their empty jugs.  We need to have fuller employment so that more people are getting paid so that the consumer economy expands ad inf[initum] and repeat as necessary.  There are, if you consider it even briefly, a half million or so unexamined assumptions underlying all of this.

He goes on to declare that both democrats and republicans are silly, which I can marginally agree with, but also that Barack Obama is a murderer (which I will grant is provisionally true, but only in the same sense that every modern American president trying to manage an empire ultimately beyond his control has been a murderer).  I'm less comfortable with such rhetorical flights.  But the preceding thought about jobs cuts to the core of the limitations of life on our increasingly Potemkin Planet. 

His conclusion:  "Beyond the merely pecuniary and the venial: what does your life mean to you beyond your paystub and your appetites?"

I'm working on the answer to this, and feel I'm making only a little progress.  But I agree it needs to be sought.

Caveat: Dream Deferred

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Quotable

 

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–
And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

– by Langston Hughes

I don't know. My dreams are feeling deferred, today. So I wondered.

Caveat: la tristeza hecha verso no parece

Banalities & Journaling / Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Quotable

Poesías.

TRÁNSITO DE LA ESPINA A LA ROSA

Labré el aire, y en cárcel de sonido
eché a volar el corazón sediento;
triste jilguero, al parecer contento,
que canta entre palabras oprimido.

Tejí la estrofa cual si fuere un nido;
incubé mi dolor, le di alimento,
y al trocarse un alado pensamiento,
emprendió un largo vuelo hacia el olvido.

Así libra el dolor quien lo embellece.
En la magia verbal de hechicería
la tristeza hecha verso no parece;

siempre el vuelo semeja una alegría;
¡y es el rosal una ascensión de espina
en tránsito a la rosa en que termina!

– Pedro Prado, en No más que una rosa, 1946.

Llevo cerca de mi corazón una ilusión de que sea un escritor, pero la verdad es que no escribo, sino sólo leo.  Ayer, en frente de una clase, dije que escribo novelas y poesías – pero ¿cuando fue la última vez que esribía más que en este blog?

TRÁNSITO DE LA ESPINA A LA ROSA

Labré el aire, y en cárcel de sonido
eché a volar el corazón sediento;
triste jilguero, al parecer contento,
que canta entre palabras oprimido.

Tejí la estrofa cual si fuere un nido;
incubé mi dolor, le di alimento,
y al trocarse un alado pensamiento,
emprendió un largo vuelo hacia el olvido.

Así libra el dolor quien lo embellece.
En la magia verbal de hechicería
la tristeza hecha verso no parece;

siempre el vuelo semeja una alegría;
¡y es el rosal una ascensión de espina
en tránsito a la rosa en que termina!

No más que una rosa, 1946.

Caveat: Picassism

Quotable

picture“Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” – Pablo Picasso.

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Caveat: And so, the sad farce continues

Found Online / Quotable

picture“What is the nature of Grape-Nuts? They are neither grapes nor nuts. And so, the sad farce continues.” – Hans Beinholt, German Ambassador to the United Nations.

Really, he said this. He was visiting the Colbert Report, on July 11th, and doing stand-up comedy. Apparently, he’s done this before. I thought he was very funny, in a kind of dark, nihilistic way.

Embedded below is the clip from the Colbert Report that includes his routine – it’s pretty short. It starts at around 3:15 in the clip. [UPDATE: The original link rotted, but I found the German’s part as a youtube post.]

I laughed at all his jokes.

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Caveat: Poetry is not a civilizer

Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

One of my favorite poets is Robinson Jeffers. He’s not much loved in the literary establishment. Here’s a possible reason why. He wrote:

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. It is not necessarily a moralizer; it does not necessarily improve one’s character; it does not even teach good manners. It is a beautiful work of nature, like an eagle or a high sunrise. You owe it no duty. If you like it, listen to it; if not, let it alone.

pictureThe picture is of Tor House, near Carmel, California. Jeffers built the house as his home, by hand (i.e. medieval style), over many years.

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Caveat: Joke

Found Online / Quotable

pictureQ: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Two – one to paint the giraffe orange, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools!

Obviously, I don’t have much to say today. So I’m not saying much. But that was a funny joke. So.

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Caveat: X on debate

Quotable / Teaching & Methodology

picture“Standing up there, the faces looking at me, the things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate – once my feet got wet I was gone on debating. Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I’d track down and study everything I could find on it. I’d put myself in my opponent’s place and decide how I’d try to win if I had the other side; and then I’d figure out a way to knock down those points.” – Malcolm X, 1965

I found this quote while looking for quotes about debate. There’s something both ingenuous and ingenious in the quote.

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Caveat: Happy Bloomsday

Life is a Dream / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

pictureToday is Bloomsday. Hope it’s a good one. 

His (Bloom’s) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?

That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its probable spectators had entered actual present existence.

A Utopia. See? And Joyce’s Ulysses ends: “…and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

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Caveat: Ἐν ἀρχῇ

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / Quotable

picture“Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.” – ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΗΝ 1:1

In keeping with my apparent theme for the week: random languages that I studied long in the past. Above – the opening of the most interesting of the four Gospels (in my opinion), John. As found in my mother’s old Greek New Testament, which I acquired in January when visiting her, when she showed me a box of books she was getting rid of.

My ability to read Greek is very poor (maybe slightly better than my ability to read, say, Welsh – see previous blog post – mostly due to the more accessible plethora of cognates). I did take a semester (or two? I don’t remember) of Ancient Greek in college. But the translation of this phrase is nevertheless quite easy because it’s such a commonly known phrase: “In the beginning was the word…” – see? You can complete it yourself.

Shall I attempt to read this book? Probably not. But Greek (and especially ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, “the common dialect” [koine] such as found in the New Testament) is pretty high on the list of languages that interest me. The Bible makes a great text to revisit when learning a language, because it is so meticulously translated into each language. I saw a trilingual edition in a bookstore a while back: Greek, English, Korean. I should have bought it. Then I could mess with koine guiltlessly, having the Korean staring me en face.

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Caveat: Goddaith

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Language & Linguistics / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

I’ve been in a weird state of mind, lately. I keep revisiting random poetry and random languages I studied in times long past. I guess I’m trying to live up to the “unrepentant language-geek” part of my blog’s header (see above [UPDATE: Obsolete information – no longer in header. Still true, though.]).

So… I was mucking around at wikisource.org (a place where public domain texts can often be found). I began browsing Medieval Welsh poetry. I took a course on Medieval Welsh in 1988. I loved it – despite (or because of) it being one of the most intense academic undertakings I’ve ever tried. I remember struggling to translate bardic love poetry, as well as, most memorably, the legend of Pwyll and Rhiannon from the Red Book of Hergest. I remember Pwyll blindly chasing Rhiannon down into Annwn (the Otherworld) vividly.

When I found a four-line poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym, I decided to “figure it out.”  I won’t go so far as to say I “translated” it – I got the gist of it by using google translate, but also had to surf to some Old Welsh dictionaries, because google translate is based on the modern Welsh language, and the program doesn’t know what to do with the obsolete vocabulary and grammatical forms of 15th century Welsh. I have no idea how accurate my little translation might be – I was unable to find any “official” translation online.

pictureGoddaith a roir mewn eithin,
Gwanwyn cras, mewn gwynnon crin,
Anodd fydd ei ddiffoddi
Ac un dyn a’i hennyn hi.
There’s a wildfire among the gorse,
Parched by Spring, withered kindling,
It will be difficult to put out
and [to think] a lone man caused it.
[Picture at right: Welsh Summer Landscape Painting]

I actually find the tone of the poem strikingly “modern” in its sensibility – but perhaps that’s a reader’s projection.

The negative aspect of this “mucking about” with other languages: I’m still trying to reignite my former passion for learning Korean. My heart hasn’t been in it. I’m plateaued.

A parting thought:

“I did not learn any Welsh till I was an undergraduate, and found in it an abiding linguistic-aesthetic satisfaction.” – J.R.R. Tolkien said this. But it’s precisely true for me, too – I could have said exactly the same. But I didn’t quite end up so creatively productive as Mr Tolkien.

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Caveat: la tristeza inmortal de ser divino

Banalities & Journaling / Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Quotable

"Soneto a Cervantes"

Horas de pesadumbre y de tristeza
paso en mi soledad. Pero Cervantes
es buen amigo. Endulza mis instantes
ásperos, y reposa mi cabeza.
Él es la vida y la naturaleza,
regala un yelmo de oros y diamantes
a mis sueños errantes.
Es para mí: suspira, ríe y reza.
Cristiano y amoroso y caballero
parla como un arroyo cristalino.
¡Así le admiro y quiero,
viendo cómo el destino
hace que regocije al mundo entero
la tristeza inmortal de ser divino!

– Rubén Darío

No me acompaña el genio Cervantes de tal modo como a Darío, precisamente.  Pero sí me acompaña – siempre está presente en la mente.  Me brinda un cierta perspectiva sobre el mundo que me rodea: un distanciamiento medio-posmoderno, digamos… o barroco.  Es igual.

Me ha introducido una melancolía este fin de semana pasado.  Pasará, seguro.  Mientras tanto… viendo dramas coreanas, y leyendo poesías al azar.

Caveat: That smell is freedom

Found Online / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

Jeffrey Goldberg (of The Atlantic’s Goldblog fame) Palinesquely channels Longfellow on the subject of Paul Revere. Brilliant. If you’ve been following the Palin-on-Paul-Revere controversy, it’s quite hilarious. An excerpt:

pictureLISTEN, my children, and you shall hear
Of the early evening ride of Paul Revere,
On the twentieth, or twenty-first, of May, or possibly June, in Seventy-six, or maybe Seventy-seven;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who refudiates that famous day and year.
…
Then I will ride a Harley, that I was pulling on a trailer behind the bus, and spread the alarm,
Man, I love the smell of that emissions
That smell is freedom, carried by horse,
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
Not horse emissions, chopper emissions.
But horse emissions are very patriotic.
And I will warn the British that the British are coming.
Which should confuse them very much.

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Caveat: Another Day Above Ground

Banalities & Journaling / Quotable

"Any day above ground is gonna be a good day." – unattributed quote seen at a blog by someone named alice on My Modern Metropolis – an arts and design blog that I've been spending a lot of time at recently.

I wish I could find the gumption to try to do more drawing and painting like I used to.  I looked all over my apartment, though, and there wasn't any gumption.  Maybe later.

Caveat: Intents and Purposes

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." — author Chuck Palahniuk.

I think this is a good philosophy.  I hope I can eventually have a more interesting legacy than a few lines of meta-code in some business's data warehousing toolset, which is the closest thing I have to having created something that might outlast me. 

Caveat: Never Satisfied

Quotable

"It's a good deal, but some poor people remain, oddly, un-fucked," Jon Stewart said in last Monday's episode.  He was pretending to be a tea-partier, speaking about the tea party's mostly-rejection of the budget agreement emerging in Washington.

Caveat: Virtuous Reflectivity

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

I've been rereading fragments of Terry Eagleton's philosophical/critical masterpiece, Ideology.

He talks about Aristotle's surprisingly still-relevant (almost post-modern) ethics (at least as he chooses to interpret them, in the context of a critique of what he calls neo-Nietzscheanism):

"Part of what is involved for Aristotle in living virtuously – living, that is to say, in the rich flourishing of one's creative powers – is to be motivated to reflect on precisely this process.  To lack such self-awareness would be in Aristotle's view to fall short of true virtue, and so of true happiness and well-being.   The virtues for Aristotle are organized states of desire; and some of these desires move us to curve back critically upon them." – p. 172 in my edition

I'm not really going anywhere with this.  Just thinking "out loud," I guess.

Caveat: The Consecration of Class Interest

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

Well some of you know, there was a point in my last career (in database design and business systems analysis) when I came very close to applying for business school.  I took the GMAT in 2005, and scored quite well.  I had filled out applications for several high-powered business schools in Europe, and had written some essays, for entrance to International MBA programs.  Why was I thinking this?  Well, before I realized that I needed a job/career that was more humanly (and humanely) fulfilling, I was working hard to find the more "human" side of my last, computer-related job.  And that seemed a logical direction to take it – I was interested in project management, management consulting, that kind of thing.

Sometimes, therefore, I return to surfing management-theory-related texts and blogs online.  Not very often – my interest in this stuff has definitely faded.  But now, and again, I go looking around.  For some reason, a line by Matthew Stewart has struck me as rather insightful – and ties into my interests in epistemology and philosophy and marxism, too.  In an article entitled "The Management Myth" (from The Atlantic, June 2006 issue), he writes, "Much of management theory today is in fact the consecration of class interest—not of the capitalist class, nor of labor, but of a new social group: the management class."

I suppose this struck me, too, in my thinking about how Korea as a society "works," who the vested interests are, that kind of thing.  Although what passes for management in Korea is radically alien to what happens in the "West," it still ends up working the same way, from a sociological standpoint.

…

Unrelatedly, two developments. 

1) With two weeks remaining at Hongnong, I have discovered that my blog's admin website is no longer blocked on my school's network.  Lucky me.  Hence this post, on a slow Thursday morning of desk-warming.

2) I am not so narcissistic as to assume every person likes me.  Or even respects me.  I suspect I have aspects of my personality that grates on a lot of people.  But I nevertheless feel depressed and dismayed when I get evidence that someone whom I have grown to respect and even like in fact doesn't seem to think very highly of me.  I wonder what I'm doing wrong.  Well… I'm not going to go into details.  But life is full of these revelatory negative social epiphanies, I suppose.

Caveat: You need more robots on your t-shirt

Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Quotable

Over at the Atlantic – probably my favorite website – Alexis Madrigal blogs about what he calls "the Gold-Plated Age of Web Design" (namely, the mid 1990's).  He does this under the guise of a rant about April Fool's day, which I am mostly too earnest to enjoy.

I, myself, was guilty of making websites of the sort he describes – most notably, the website I made for the AP Spanish class I was teaching in the fall 1997, which I wish I still had the materials for, as it was awesomely bad from a design standpoint, although I remain marginally proud of the content (it was, thematically, meant to be a sort of "internet of fictional places from Latin American literature" – I had called it Macondonet). 

Madrigal's blog entry includes the following quote, which I simply must reproduce.

This was also back when designers still mostly made fancy chairs and clothes, so web page design was a little like a bunch of nerds getting together to critique each other's tucked-in t-shirts and faded black jeans. It wasn't, "Maybe you should wear a suit;" it was, "You need more robots on your t-shirt."

For some reason the nerd-critique, such as he describes it, made me very very LOL.

Caveat: Right now is sometime!

Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

picture“Me get it, cookie is sometimes food. You know what? Right now is sometime!” – Cookie Monster, after a lecture by some other character, urging moderation.

I miss Cookie Monster. And I love surfing the tvtropes.org website. I can find quotes like that, and spend hours and hours surfing a deeply ironical, often very well-written (mostly by vaguely anonymous volunteers a la the wikithing), pop-culture semiotician’s paradise.

It claims, “This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction.” No, it’s not that – it’s much more. It’s a tool for navigating pop culture, and a database of semiotic trivia. I can’t recommend it more highly.

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Caveat: 삼일 운동 – “the whole human race’s just claim”

Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

pictureHappy Independence Day.

We herewith proclaim the independence of Korea and the liberty of the Korean people. We tell it to the world in witness of the equality of all nations and we pass it on to our posterity as their inherent right.

We make this proclamation, having 5,000 years of history, and 20,000,000 united loyal people. We take this step to insure to our children for all time to come, personal liberty in accord with the awakening consciousness of this new era. This is the clear leading of God, the moving principle of the present age, the whole human race’s just claim. It is something that cannot be stamped out, stifled, gagged, or suppressed by any means.

– from the Korean Declaration of Independence (from Japan), March 1, 1919.

I was thinking this pertinent especially in relation to recent events in the Arab nations. My understanding is that the leaders of the March 1st movement in Korea were at least partially inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s “Fouteen Points.”

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Caveat: Atentado Celeste

Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

LA POESÍA ES UN ATENTADO CELESTE

Yo estoy ausente pero en el fondo de esta ausencia
Hay la espera de mí mismo
Y esta espera es otro modo de presencia
La espera de mi retorno
Yo estoy en otros objetos
Ando en viaje dando un poco de mi vida
A ciertos árboles y a ciertas piedras
Que me han esperado muchos años

Se cansaron de esperarme y se sentaron

Yo no estoy y estoy
Estoy ausente y estoy presente en estado de espera
Ellos querrían mi lenguaje para expresarse
Y yo querría el de ellos para expresarlos
He aquí el equívoco el atroz equívoco

Angustioso lamentable
Me voy adentrando en estas plantas
Voy dejando mis ropas
Se me van cayendo las carnes
Y mi esqueleto se va revistiendo de cortezas
Me estoy haciendo árbol
Cuántas cosas me he ido convirtiendo en otras  cosas…
Es doloroso y lleno de ternura

Podría dar un grito pero se espantaría la transubstanciación
Hay que guardar silencio Esperar en silencio

– Vicente Huidobro, 1948

He estado meditando sobre poesía, sobre permanencia, sobre silencio.  Por eso…  y ¿qué hago, acá?

Caveat: Knowledge governs ignorance

Quotable

"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." – James Madison

Caveat: el regalo de su color fogoso

Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Food & Drink / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Quotable

picture

Oda al tomate

La calle
se llenó de tomates,
mediodia,
verano,
la luz
se parte
en dos
mitades
de tomate,
corre
por las calles
el jugo.
En diciembre
se desata
el tomate,
invade
las cocinas,
entra por los almuerzos,
se sienta
reposado
en los aparadores,
entre los vasos,
las matequilleras,
los saleros azules.
Tiene
luz propia,
majestad benigna.
Devemos, por desgracia,
asesinarlo:
se hunde
el cuchillo
en su pulpa viviente,
es una roja
viscera,
un sol
fresco,
profundo,
inagotable,
llena las ensaladas
de Chile,
se casa alegremente
con la clara cebolla,
y para celebrarlo
se deja
caer
aceite,
hijo
esencial del olivo,
sobre sus hemisferios
   entreabiertos,
agrega
la pimienta
su fragancia,
la sal su magnetismo:
son las bodas
del día
el perejil
levanta
banderines,
las papas
hierven vigorosamente,
el asado
golpea
con su aroma
en la puerta,
es hora!
vamos!
y sobre
la mesa, en la cintura
del verano,
el tomate,
aastro de tierra,
estrella
repetida
y fecunda,
nos muestra
sus circunvoluciones,
sus canales,
la insigne plenitud
y la abundancia
sin hueso,
sin coraza,
sin escamas ni espinas,
nos entrega
el regalo
de su color fogoso
y la totalidad de su frescura.

- Pablo Neruda 
  (Chilean poet, 1904-1973)

En México, su país de orígen, se lo dice jitomate, palabra azteca. Es la fruta perfecta, en mi opinión. En Corea, es fácil encontrar tomates locales de invernadero en cualquier mes del calendario, y aunque no son muy buenos, son mejores que los muy bien “viajados” (digamos californianos o mexicanos o chilenos) que suelen encontrar en gringolandia en época de invierno.

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Caveat: …entre o céu e a terra

Language & Linguistics / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

My entry earlier this morning started me thinking about Leonardo Boff. He is one of the most charismatic humans I have ever met in person – that was 24 years ago. From his website, a compelling quote is easy to find:

"Hoje nos encontramos numa fase nova na humanidade. Todos estamos regressando à Casa Comum, à Terra: os povos, as sociedades, as culturas e as religiões. Todos trocamos experiências e valores. Todos nos enriquecemos e nos completamos mutuamente. … Vamos rir, chorar e aprender. Aprender especialmente como casar Céu e Terra, vale dizer, como combinar o cotidiano com o surpreendente, a imanência opaca dos dias com a transcendência radiosa do espírito, a vida na plena liberdade com a morte simbolizada como um unir-se com os ancestrais, a felicidade discreta nesse mundo com a grande promessa na eternidade. E, ao final, teremos descoberto mil razões para viver mais e melhor, todos juntos, como uma grande família, na mesma Aldeia Comum, generosa e bela, o planeta Terra." – Leonardo Boff. Casamento entre o céu e a terra. Salamandra, Rio de Janeiro, 2001. pg 9.

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