Tuesday, September 22, 2009

I've been thinking often lately of breathing...

...and I think there's some pretty essential stuff going down with the whole respiring (is that the right word? can I just make it so anyhow?) process, more on my thoughts on it later. But for now, check out Rainer Maria Rilke's take on the matter, or one of his takes, potentially: (translated, incidentally, by Karl H. Siegler which definitely makes some type of difference in the matter)

II-I

Breath, you invisible poem!
Recurrent about what is its own
being pure exchange of spaces. Counterweight,
in which rhythm I appear as the event of myself.

Singular wave, whose
gradual sea I am;
most frugal of all possible seas, -
attainment of space.

How many of these snares of the spaces are a place
surrendered from where it was within me. At times the winds
are like my son.

Do you know me again, air, full still of what were once my sites?
You, at once smooth rind,
curve and leaf of my words.

(from Sonnets to Orpheus)

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