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…Into the dialectic

a corner for the curious

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Nik
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The One

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou can’st not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never never can’st thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Keats – Ode on a Grecian Urn

WINTER: In the darkness, gestation.
Until the Phoenix rises, once more, exultant, free
to love and love again, soaring across
the ancient white peaks, the dazzling, clear blue
skies… Read More

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Nik
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Letting go

This evening

the burgeoning crescent moon hovers low 
over the western pacific
a veil of ocean mist rising up 
to kiss beyond 
the mountains – where I lay
in these steaming waters –
earthly aromas
rose geranium, thyme
rustling bamboo leaves
quiet cricket’s trill… Read More
Posted on October 22, 2014 by Nik
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ship in the night

(ghazal)

I called to my lover pining, under the moonmoon
yet alone I remain waiting, under the moon

Searching heavens deep, she is sailing
mid silent stars, scintillating, the moon

Bold round gate, to silver garden framing
ferny path to heaven, calling, the moon

Sublunary torment – fruit of desiring
sweet, gravitas – gratifying, the moon Read More

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Nik
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Manhood Rescued

“A helping Hand-book for victims of Follies of Youth”

Manhood-rescuedA numinous gem found in the library of the Maha Mantra Meditation Hall – a Hare Krishna temple in Penang, Malaysia, where I stayed for a brief spell back in 1990. At that time, this was a marvellous place to meet wild, free spirited travellers looking for free board and lodging on the ragged roads of the East – the only requirement being to get up before dawn and chant Hare Hare for a bit – yet the characters and curry were exceptional.

In Manhood Rescued, we find the quietly hysterical, delusional, if righteous conceit of man, demonstrating the dazzlingly pompous nature of the opinionated.

Read More

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Nik
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Love’s Philosophy

Endymion - George Frederick Watts (1872)

Endymion – George Frederick Watts (1872)

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle–
Why not I with thine? Read More

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Nik
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Fruit Gathering

padmasambhava

Padma Sambhava, by Nicholas Roerich, 1927.

Rabindranath Tagore, timeless poetic meanderings after my own restless heart (forsooth)

“Where roads are made I lose my way.
In the wide water, in the blue sky there is no line of a track.
The pathway is hidden by the birds’ wings, by the star-fires, by the flowers of the wayfaring seasons.
And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way…

Read More

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Nik
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cupid on the wing

psyche_01

Edward Burne-Jones: Cupid Finding Psyche, 1865

As a moon struck writer and mad surfer of consciousness, it  surprised me how insightful and self reflective a tool okcupid turns out to be! An intelligent and compelling, new(ish) paradigm of social networking for potential lovers, whether casual shag or serious spouse! We’re all looking for a potential mate at times and I have indeed met some unique and wonderful persons, shagged a few in fact, and fallen in love at least once (unrequited) …

Read More

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Nik
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I live my life in growing orbits…

Screen shot 2013-11-21 at 12.36.00which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

Rainer Maria Rilke ~ from A Book for the Hours of Prayer

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Nik
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Veteran’s day?

Dulce et decorem est pro patria mori.warrior

Oh yeah – that Hallmark holiday where we pay lip service to the duped warriors of the nation sent out as fodder to feed the military industrial complex and protect corporate interests at large (America – global arms dealer #1, America – consumer of oil #1, hmmm)

Yet the returning warriors or their remaining families, instead of being honored and supported in a meaningful way Read More

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Nik
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My Garden

shroudby Mehdi Akhavan-e Salis (M. Omid)

Holding its sky tightly in its arms, the cloud,
wrapped in its cold, damp sheepskin.
The garden of leaflessness, is alone,
day and night, with its pure, forlorn silence.
Its instrument the rain, its anthem the wind.
Its clothe is the cloak of nakedness. Read More

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Nik
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Burning Man and the evolutionary principal

truth_is_beauty-thia_konig

truth is beauty

After a meteorologically and sociologically intense week working at the airport, helping to build out the framework of the city before the event “begins,” the collective switch is thrown that last Sunday of August, and the living beauty emerges, fleshing out the body of Black Rock City like a complex luminescent bloom on some other worldly plane. The wild and magical kingdom arises out of the dust once more, with more than one jolt of lightening, coming alive with wonder and excitement, not so very unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein…

It’s 2013 and my 1st “early arrival” of 9 burns since 1998. A lot has changed in this time, yet Burning Man remains one of the greatest expressions of human creativity, play, ingenuity and celebration of life, love and art on the planet today. Perhaps not for the faint, but wild of heart and free of spirit (or maybe just lunatic.) Read More

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Nik
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Demeter in Paris

art_nouveau___demeter_by_sterendenn-d47v620

demeter

by Meghan O’Rourke

You can only miss someone when they are present to you.
The Isle of the Dead is both dark and light.
Henry Miller told Anaïs Nin that the only real death is being dead while alive.
The absent will only be absent when they are forgotten.
Until then, absence is a lie, an oxymoron. Read More

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Nik
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Burning Man Dictionary

BurnerDictionarycontributions to the upcoming Burner Dictionary (see Get Lit(erary) at Burning Man group on FB for more on the “Dizionario Autentica”)

  • reality vortex
    n. physics. the phenomenon created when the intentional gathering of a critical mass of free spirits causes a gravitational warp in “reality” as defined by those external to the sphere of influence of this vortex (see Playasphere)
  • playafication: the threshold crossed when a person becomes no longer distinguishable from the surrounding playascape due to a critical exposure to playa dust. Typically attained after being caught in a dust storm, or stepping off an art car whilst not in body (see “playcked“) Read More
Posted on June 29, 2013 by Nik
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12 Great Short Story Podcasts

speaker-icon-volumeyes, hand picked from an endless mire of narcoleptic short story podcasts, here’s a handful that stand out in their class. First a literary few for the discerning, then an irreverent bunch for the wicked (and discerning.)  Download, or listen in here ya hear?

From The London Review of Books.

1) Perform Small Tasks and Removal Men

by Diane Williams, read by the author.

Perhaps not for everybody, but I love this first story’s deliriously eccentric telling

Read More

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Nik
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Diving Off The Map

Turneffe atoll, BelizeI have a clear visual dropping down over Kris silently, head down, fins up, gyrating through the vast body of blue light in a cool calculated descent, until facing the hapless officer upside down and presenting her with the instrument of her elimination, while still below us, the great reef wall reaches off into the twilight of visibility and down into the crushing depths.

It’s January 1998. We’re camped at Calabash cay, a remote marine research station on the eastern rim of Turneffe atoll, 51km off the coast of Belize – a group of biologically divers sand and mangrove islands and cays, lagoons, lush seagrass beds, all surrounded and protected by a living coral reef ring. An exquisite and complex jewel of life in the middle of the Caribbean. Your archetypal desert island… Read More

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Nik
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The lady

Alright, I’m a bit out of touch, so I was looking up a celeb name for the chicken who laid my breakfast, and came across Lady Gaga – heard the name of course, but no idea who the fuck she is so I check out this great music vid – and there’s class there, art and ironic melancholy – Beethoven’s lovely Pathétique even! And then of course she starts singing the same old over-produced crap every pop singer has been singing since the dawn of crap – lovely voice though. And the bitch of it is, Read More

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Nik
Comments Off on Who knew the provenance…

Who knew the provenance…

cover-titleWho knew the provenance exactly? It probably found its way through the centuries from some old colonial town house on the distant and prosperous seaboard, but someone has dragged this handsome Victorian claw foot bathtub high into the Cordilleras to market this day, by mule, or by lackey, or by rusted truck. It sits proudly in the dust amidst a multitude of other curious repurposeable objects. The present owner of the bathtub, a raffish man with deeply lined, silver bristled, sunbaked face, a bunch of gold teeth, and a fine, if weather beaten, rufous red felt hat, has  amongst other exotic items in his possession, a battered brass telescope, various and sundry antiquated surgical instruments, a freshly re-painted blue wheelbarrow, a number of tattered volumes (including a dog-eared English treatise on masturbation titled “Manhood Rescued – A Helping Hand-book for Victims of the Follies of Youth”) an assortment of traps, pulleys and restraints, a handsome caged cockerel, a stoat and prize goat – but it was the bathtub that caught Sulleiman’s eye. Read More

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Nik
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Solar

download PDF

download PDF

…Above you and between all these celestial bodies now, hangs the moon, bold, brilliant, heavy in its proximity, gyrating imperceptibly, heaving tides and blood as it lilts in great timeless arcs across the heavens. Beyond her, the unfathomable depths of the cosmos also have their influence you imagine, and, you feel fleetingly, in moments like this, that you are not separate….

Read More

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Nik
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Transient

Sulleiman emerges from the bushes, a disoriented, quizzical look on his wizened, timeless visage. He brushes off bits of leaf and twig clinging to his brocade tunic and burgundy pantaloons, before picking himself up brightly to continue on his way. But a little girl called Lali, who is six, is standing there watching in open curiosity, with her big dark eyes that the world flows into without any resistance at all. “What were you doing in there?” She asks with irrepressible innocence and glee.
“Oh…” wiry silver eyebrows lifting with mild preoccupation, and in a layered Russian-Iranian accent he continues “a little problem I’m having with relocation.” Read More

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