Runeway

Listen to E.E. Cummings poem  “I carry your heart with me”

Continue Reading

Sohrâb Sepehri (سهراب سپهری )

(1928-1980), a Persian poet from the Iranian city of Kashan¹ whom practiced a poetic style with neither meter or rhyme known as ‘New Poetry’.

His poetry is full of humanity and concern for human values. He loved nature and refers to it frequently.

Water ²

“Let’s not muddy the brook
Perhaps a pigeon is drinking water at a distance
Or perhaps in a farther thicket a goldfinch is washing her feathers
Or a pitcher is being filled in a village

Let’s not muddy the brook
Perhaps this brook runs to a poplar’s foot
To wash away the grief of a lonely heart
A dervish may be dipping dry bread in the brook

A beautiful lady walked to the brink of the brook
Let’s not muddy the brook
The lovely face has been doubled”

Many have mentioned that Sohrâb had great love for Buddha, and apparently Sohrâb has admitted to be a Moslem, a Buddhist and a Christian. He have said that “eyes must be washed” and “things must be seen in different ways”, in 1961 he visited India and became familiar with the ideology of Buddhism.³

I am Moslem
My Mecca ‘s a red rose
My altar’s a spring
My holy stone’s the light
My prayer mat’s the flat meadow

Every river was a sea
Every human being was a Buddha

I first heard about Sohrâb Sepehri while hunting down norwegian translations of Persian poetry by Rumi⁴ and Hafez⁵. One of the anthologies that I brought with me to Iran was the Norwegian “Fra vinhus til moské” (ISBN:9788256013586) where I first read the poem “Sedaye paye aab” by him translated into Norwegian by Erling Kittelsen. I mention it here because I think it is a very good translation and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in poetry or who is going to Iran. The reason I recommend it to anyone going to Iran is that poetry is such a big part of Iranian culture and life.

At his mausoleum in the city of Shiraz I saw men and women laying down on the stone slabs pressing their forehead against the Hāfez tomb with tears in their eyes while moaning and praying to this long gone poet. Later – as the stars came out – they where sitting in the adjacent tea house listening to poetry being recited in Persian by a young girl from Kuwait dressed in a full length Chador (Persian: چادر) whom had a incredible beautiful voice.

There were sighs, applauding and cheering as certain areas of the poem was recited. Poem-wise, I have never experienced anything like it before or after. Several times during my stay I experienced that people came up to us with decks of Hāfez cards with poems written on them in the old Persian language, you were supposed to ask a question and the poem was going to give you an answer. This is special for the poet Hāfez, whom is famous for predicting amongst others his own death. I wanted to mention Hāfez here since he is one of Sohrâb Sepehri’s sources of inspiration.

It is said that the poetry of Sohrâb Sepehri bears great semblance to that of the American poet Edward Estlin Cummings (1894 – 1962). Perhaps the poem “My father moved through dooms of love”, first published in 50 Poems (ISBN: 0448000660) in 1940, was an influence for a young Sohrâb Sepehri whom according to one of my favourite poems “Sedaye paye aab” (Water`s footsteps) ⁶ also lost his father at an early age?

My father died before twice migrating swallows
Before twice snows,
Before twice sleeping under the moonlight
The sky was blue when my father died
Unaware my mother jumped from sleep, my sister grew prettier,
When my father died, the constables were all poets
The grocer asked me, “How much melons you want to buy?”
I asked him, “How much is the price of one once of contentment?”

My father used to paint
He used to make tars, played the Tar too
He was a calligrapher

I also see some similarities in text and style with the American folk-singer Robert Allen Zimmerman, whom – inspired by the Welsh poet Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914 – 1953) – took the name “Bob Dylan”.

To prove my point I have created a remix of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”⁷ first recorded by Bob Dylan in Columbia Records’ Studio A on 6 December 1962, where the lyric structure is based on the question and answer form of the traditional ballad “Lord Randall”, Child Ballad No. 12, with Sohreb Sepehri’s “Water`s footsteps” first published in 1965.

‘

صدای پای آب – “Sedaie paie aab” (Water`s footsteps) by Sohrâb Sepehri & “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan REMIX
[Bob]
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
[Sohrâb]
I saw a beggar who hardly begged
for the song of the swallow
And a garbage man who was praying
by the skin of a melon
[Bob]
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’,
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
[Sohrâb]
I saw a woman pounding light in a mortar
I saw a book whose words were all made of crystal
[Bob]
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
[Sohrâb]
I saw the bed of a disappointed theologian, a picture full of questions
I saw a poet addressing the lily as “your highness”
[Bob]
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

Sohrâb Sepehri published his final book called ‘Hasht Ketab’ (Eight Books), which was the collection of almost all of his published poems in one volume – 1976.

Click “Continue Reading” to read references and also see video’s related to this article that I recommend.

Continue Reading

xkcd - Code Talkers

Continue Reading

I really like the parable by Søren Kierkegaard where a man tries to decipher a letter that contains information about his life’s happiness.

‘

Either/Or: Part I (1843) – ‘The illegible letter’ by Søren Kierkegaard

To what shall we compare the pathos of grieving loneliness?

If someone possessed a letter which he knew or believed contained information concerning what he had to consider his life’s blessedness, but the written characters were thin and faded, and the handwriting almost illegible, he would read it and reread it, with anxiety and disquiet certainly, but with passion. At one moment he would get one meaning out of it, the next another. When he was quite sure he had managed to read a word, he would interpret everything in the light of that word. But he would never pass beyond the same uncertainty with which he began. He would stare, more and more anxiously, but the more he stared the less he saw; sometimes his eyes filled with tears, but the more that happened, again the less he saw. In due course the writing became weaker and less distinct; finally the paper itself crumbled away and he had nothing left but eyes blinded with tears.

It reminds me how hard it can be to communicate, or understand what other people wish to convey. One time in Lijiang Old City (Chinese: 丽江市; pinyin: Lìjiāng Shì) in northwestern Yunnan province in China I stayed at a local family in the old city and showed them a teapot which I had bought in a Beijing teashop, because I wanted them to translate the Chinese letters.

The family told me that it was an old chinese poem about birds being startled by the rain and as they fly away their wings are so close to the surface that they create ripples on the water. When I asked for the meaning of the poem they replied that I had to be chinese to understand its meaning because there was so many nuances and subtle meanings when putting together certain chinese characters. He also said that most chinese people knew this poem by heart.

When the rain suddenly falls, the birds fly away¹
The radicals are “rain” and “bird” far left 3-4000 y.o, the middle  200 b.c and far right is the modern version.

Later when reading ‘The book of Tea’ by Okakura Kakuzo I read about a way to decide when the tea-water had reached its correct boiling point and one of the signs was that the bubbles formed on the water surface in a similar fashion as if birds were creating ripples on the water with their wings. So maybe it was exactly this that the poem was referring to.

The conclusion that I wanted to arrive at is that learning a new language and all its nuances, cultural significances, history etc. seems to me an impossibility when as Kierkegaard portraits there is so hard to get meaning out of ones own language.

For instance when translating persian poetry into english, you have to put aside everything you know about metaphores we use in the western world. Consider a poem in farsi going like

clouds darkened the sky
and an owl fell of its branch

Clouds darkening the sky might sound gloomy from a western perspective, but remember that if the poem was written by Saadi or Hafez they would most likely consider the clouds as a relief from the scorching sun and in Iran the owls are not representing wisdom, but something evil. So perhaps the poem is trying to say something about good and evil?

When creating poetry you sometime create a bridge between reality and the pseudo reality we perceive through our senses, it also often has historical and cultural references. In addition to all this we put a linguistic encryption on the poem through our language. To be extreme, see the following example:

‘

48 6f 77 20 49 20 48 61 74 65 20 74 68 65 20 4e 69 67 68 74 20 28 4d 61 72 76 69 6e 27 73 20 6c 75 6c 6c 61 62 79 29 0d 0a 0d 0a 4e 6f 77 20 74 68 65 20 77 6f 72 6c 64 20 68 61 73 20 67 6f 6e 65 20 74 6f 20 62 65 64 0d 0a 44 61 72 6b 6e 65 73 73 20 77 6f 6e 27 74 20 65 6e 67 75 6c 66 20 6d 79 20 68 65 61 64 0d 0a 49 20 63 61 6e 20 73 65 65 20 62 79 20 69 6e 66 72 61 2d 72 65 64 0d 0a 48 6f 77 20 49 20 68 61 74 65 20 74 68 65 20 6e 69 67 68 74 0d 0a 0d 0a 4e 6f 77 20 49 20 6c 61 79 20 6d 65 20 64 6f 77 6e 20 74 6f 20 73 6c 65 65 70 0d 0a 54 72 79 20 74 6f 20 63 6f 75 6e 74 20 65 6c 65 63 74 72 69 63 20 73 68 65 65 70 0d 0a 53 77 65 65 74 20 64 72 65 61 6d 20 77 69 73 68 65 73 20 79 6f 75 20 63 61 6e 20 6b 65 65 70 0d 0a 48 6f 77 20 49 20 68 61 74 65 20 74 68 65 20 6e 69 67 68 74

Unless you know hexadecimal notation, and are able to translate it, it doesn’t tell you much. So you may be able to find an online translator if you google “translate from hex” and end up at some random address like http://home2.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/ where you paste in the hex sequence and ends up with the following poem:

‘

How I Hate the Night (Marvin’s lullaby)

Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won’t engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night

Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night

Now, that will get you a long way, perhaps as long as I got with the poem on the teapot, but still you would miss out a lot unless you are familiar with Phillip K. Dick novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, which btw inspired the movie “Blade Runner”, or unless you know the story from Douglas Adam’s “Life, the Universe and Everything” when Marvin the android gets stuck walking in circles with one leg on the planet of Squornshellous Zeta talking to the mattress Zem for several million years.

When in addition, if you assume this poem was originally created in binary or hex notation (which is probably true since it was created by an android) we have already missed a big part of the poem just by translating it into english. Imagine if the androids have a special symbolic meaning putting the characters 73 6c 65 65 70 (“sleep”) next to eachother or if the fact that they translate to 01110011 01101100 01100101 01100101 01110000 in binary notation is quite fun. It might reference a significant historical event in the android world for all that we know.

This is what I like about poetry, it can be so plain and simple, but still carry hidden meanings that maybe just a few people are able to single out. I especially like poetry written in languages like mandarin or persian, because it adds some extra dimension. To finish off this post, I would like to present my improvised chinese haiku poem with a touch of shanghainese dialect and modern japanese influence. And yes, I know it is all wrong.

‘

我  夢  闪电
德律风/德律風  人
电话/電話

Wo meng shandian
télífon ren
diànhuà

I dream of lightening
telephone people
electric speach

¹ http://www.zein.se/patrick/chinen9p.html

Continue Reading

Did the invention of the alphabet make us wiser? This question leads me into the philosophy of Epistemology ¹ (from Greek ἐπιστήμη – episteme-, “knowledge, science” + λόγος, “logos”) or theory of knowledge. How is knowledge acquired and what IS knowledge anyway? How is knowledge stored as text in a language and are some languages better at storing knowledge than others. What do we lose in the transition between reality and language?

Sanskrit was considered a sacred language and when you spoke it, you spoke reality as it was. It was not considered a language in the sense that a language describes reality, it was reality! ‘Translation’ means to explain in simple terms, how do you translate what life is?

I find the written language and the added complexity it adds to how human civilization a very interesting topic. How would society work without the existence of an alphabet? How would society function if we lost the ability to speak to one another? I would like to introduce this topic and discuss it over a series of blog-posts, but since it is such a vast topic I though I might start it off by going back to the western roots by presenting the view of one of the founders of western philosophy, Socrates.

Read this excerpt from one of Plato’s dialogues (Phaedrus 14 274c-275b) in which Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the invention of the alphabet.

The ancient God Theuth, who – according to this dialogue – invented the letters, claims that they will make Egyptians wiser and improve their memories. Thamus, the king of Egypt, claims the opposite.

‘

“You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”

Click Continue Reading to read the dialogues.

Continue Reading

Neil Gaiman wrote this to remind me what it takes to become a writer (thanks T!).  This is what the note says:

1. Write. Don’t fuck around. Just Write.
2. Finish things.
3. Repeat 1.
   Trust me.
   Neil Gaiman

Continue Reading

For the impatient, I hereby present a short summary of present and all future content of this blog (scramble and repeat)

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z ø æ å
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Continue Reading

01010100 01101000 01101111 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01110101 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110010 01110011 01110100 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00101110

42 75 74 20 6f 6e 6c 79 20 74 68 65 20 72 65 61 6c 6c 79 20 73 6d 61 72 74 20 6f 6e 65 73 20 63 61 6e 20 64 65 63 69 70 68 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 6e 65 78 74 20 6d 65 73 73 61 67 65 2e

QW5kIGlmIHlvdSBhcmUgVEhBVCBzbWFydCwgaSBhbSBzdX
JlIHlvdSBnZXQgdGhlIHBvaW50IG9mIHRoaXMgY29taWMgYW
JvdXQgUGF1bHQgRXJkb3MgdG9vIGh0dHA6Ly94a2NkLmNvbS81OTkv

Continue Reading