‘When rhythm has become the sole and unique mode of thought’s expression, it is then only that there is poetry. In order for mind to become poetry, it must bear in itself the mystery of an innate rhythm. It is in this rhythm alone that it can live and become visible. And every work of art is but one and the same rhythm. Everything is simply rhythm.’ (Hölderlin in conversation with Sinclair, 1804.)

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road----

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

By Sylvia Plath

Le chant du styrene (literally the song of the styrene, homophone for the French word sirène meaning mermaid), is short film directed by Alain Resnais initially ordered by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics.

The text was written by Raymond Queneau in alexandrines.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find english subtitles.

Following the winding ways of the Heideggerian landscape is by no means an easy task. We fumble searchingly amongst the shapeless forms of a desert in darkness. Huffing and puffing, we are close to surrender. Then along comes the poem by Rilke and sings:

Though swiftly the world coverts,
like cloud-shapes’ upheaval,
everything perfect reverts
to the primeval.

Suffering is not discerned,
neither has love been learned,
and what removes us in death,
nothing unveils.
Only the song’s high breath
hallows and hails.
(Part I, Sonnets to Orpheus)

And off we go again, to play on this tortuous way! hurrah!

In haste, before the morning hour dissolves, a segment from The Image of Proust by Walter Benjamin and Chris Marker’s magical photo film La Jetée.

‘When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting.’

CLOV: Why this face, day after day?
HAMM: Routine. One never knows. (Pause.) Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.
CLOV: Pah! You saw your heart.
HAMM: No, it was living. (Pause. Anguished.) Clov!
CLOVE: Yes.
HAMM: What’s happening?
CLOV: Something is taking its course.
Pause.
HAMM: Clove!
CLOVE: (impatiently). What is it?
HAMM: We’re not beginning to…to…mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one!
HAMM: I wonder. (Pause.) Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough. (Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they’re at! (Clov starts, drops the telescope and begins to scratch his belly with both hands. Normal voice.) And without going to far as that, we ourselves… (with emotion)… we ourselves…at certain moments…(Vehemently.) To think perhaps it won’t all have been for nothing!
CLOV: (anguished, scratching himself). I have a flea!
HAMM: A flea! Are there still fleas?
CLOV: On me there’s one. (Scratching.) Unless it’s a crablouse.
HAMM: (very perturbed). But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!
CLOVE: I’ll go and get the powder.
Exit Clov.
HAMM: A flea! This is awful! What a day!
Enter Clov with a sprinkling-tin.
CLOV: I’m back again, with the insecticide.
HAMM: Let him have it!
Clov loosens the top of his trousers, pulls it forward and shakes powder into the aperture. He stoops, looks, waits, starts, frenziedly shakes more powder, stoops, looks, waits.
CLOV: The bastard!
HAMM: Did you get him?
CLOV: Looks like it. (He drops the tin and adjusts his trousers.)
Unless his laying doggo.
HAMM: Laying! Lying you mean. Unless he’s lying doggo.
CLOV: Ah? One says lying? One doesn’t say laying?
HAMM: Use your head, can’t you. If he was laying we’d be bitched.
CLOV: Ah. (Pause.) What about that pee?
HAMM: I’m having it.
CLOV: Ah that’s the spirit, that’s the spirit!
Pause.