#731 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday August 18)
Good morning,
POETRY
Something simple, yet beautiful, this morning. Two poems, both speaking of fragments, one about being beloved and connected to this Earth and life, the other a contemplation about an unfinished Rodin. In the second, Rilke notes this headless, legless remnant of Apollo, noting that, although the head is unseen, based upon the strength and beauty of the torso, it must have been remarkable. Rilke suggests that this sculpture is looking back at the viewer, judging him/her, and suggesting room for change:
Late Fragment
By Raymond Carver
And did you get what
You wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the earth.
Archaic Torso of Apollo
By Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
AND, FINALLY, SOME MUSIC—CARTOON THEMES, REDUX
From the sublime to the ridiculous…Courtesy of Mark DiMaria, in honor of my sister Gale:
Underdog
And, of course, the great Super Chicken, who reminds us that you “knew the job was dangerous when you took it…”
BASEBALL ERRATA
And, as Howard Kroll and David Lash have reminded me, Fernando Valenzuela was not the first non-Hall of Fame member to have his number retired by the Dodgers. The first was Jim Gilliam, the great Dodger infielder from the glory years in Brooklyn and Los Angeles from 1953-1966.
Have a wonderful day,
Glenn