letters of the living: Who By Fire

About The Name of This Blog

My posts will be about alot of things, and I'm sure discussions in the comments will be, too. The title does not refer to the historical "Letters of the Living," of 19th century Persia. It DOES refer to those of us humans alive and kicking today.

It was inspired by 2 things:

1) A conversation with a Baha'i friend about the throngs of women we knew who had lived through abuse in the Baha'i community. And their silence.

2)How much I love being alive. And writing about it.

All writing and original images copyright 2008 & 2009 by Amanda Respess

Why We FEAST...

Dandelion Greens by Jane Flanders

You must come back, as your grandmother did,
with her basket and sharp knife, in daffodil light,
to the pasture, where the best greens spring
from heaps of dung, dark in the still brown
meadow grass. Cut them close to the root,
before they flower, rinse them in rain water
and bring them to the table, tossed
with oil, vinegar and salt, or homemade dressing.

They will be bitter but rich in iron-
your spring tonic, your antidote to sleep.
Eat them because they are good for you.
Eat them in joy, for the earth revives.
Eat them in remembrance of your grandmother,
who raised ten children on them. Think
of all the dandelions they picked for her,
the countless downy seeds their laughter spread.

This is the life we believe in-
the saw-toothed blades, the lavish, common flowers.

How to Stuff a Pepper by Nancy Willard

Now, said the cook, I will teach you
how to stuff a pepper with rice.

Take your pepper green, and gently,
for peppers are shy. No matter which side

you approach, it's always the backside.
Perched on green buttocks, the pepper sleeps.
In its silk tights, it dreams
of somersaults and parsley,
of the days when the sexes were one.

Slash open the sleeve
as if you were cutting a paper lantern,
and enter a moon, spilled like a melon,
a fever of pearls,
a conversation of glaciers.
It is a temple built to the worship
of morning light.

I have sat under the great globe
of seeds on the roof of that chamber,
too dazzled to gather the taste I came for.
I have taken the pepper in hand,
smooth and blind, a runt in the rich
evolution of roses and ferns.
You say I have not yet taught you

to stuff a pepper?
Cooking takes time.

Next time we'll consider the rice.

Kissing is like drinking salted water. You drink, and your thirst increases (Chinese Proverb)

Kisses kept are wasted; Love is to be tasted. There are some you love, I know; Be not loathe to tell them so. Lips go dry and eyes grow wet Waiting to be warmly met. Keep them not in waiting yet; Kisses kept are wasted.
(Edmund Vance Cooke)

If you are ever in doubt as to whether or not to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt. (Thomas Carlyle)
"Where should one use perfume?" a young woman asked. "Wherever one wants to be kissed," I said. (Coco Chanel)

Once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul thro' My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew. (Alfred Tennyson)

XXXIV (You are the daughter of the sea) by Pablo Neruda

You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.
Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.
And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.

Ode To Wine by Pablo Neruda

Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
or wine with topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the day,
nothing is left
of your immutable soul.
Wine
stirs the spring, happiness
bursts through the earth like a plant,
walls crumble,
and rocky cliffs,
chasms close,
as song is born.
A jug of wine, and thou beside me
in the wilderness,
sang the ancient poet.
Let the wine pitcher
add to the kiss of love its own.
My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your nipples are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendor of life.
But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn laboredto fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.

The Birthing Juice (for Jeff) by Laurie Bonjo

I am the river, I said, watching you
watch the ice cream drip down my chin
melt down the crack in my cleavage, knowing
that my swollen, pregnant body, my lactating breasts
made sticky with sweet milk was almost too much for you
I rock my belly forward in your direction, beckoning
an invitation only you would answer
The last tease of the girl...the flirting as intense
as the July heat that ripples across the peach fields
blowing the scent of ripe fruit in through Mom's dusty screens.
You don't have to answer, you lead me upstairs.
Seven steps to the bed where I slept as a girl.
"One last time," I murmer, trailing behind you, sticky mouth.
Tottering off balance, you catch me and we fall together.
You sit back on the patchwork quilt of my childhood.
And then you are licking the cream from my breasts,
suckling, snuggling into me even in this heat.
The synapses enliven and connect your mouth with the root of me
the root that ends somewhere beyond,
where it sinks into the flesh of another Mother,
greater and more primal...maybe all mothers connect there.
Feel the filament line down my spine electrify...
It begins...the water comes down around you inside me
The sac that surrounded him in lifewater is flowing over us
we are swimming in the currents- electric and water,
as only in life they are united
as I breathe out the sound says, "I am the River"
first a whisper from a ghost, almost a memory
and then, it drives him down the canal
with the power of lightning
and the whisper becomes thunder
and his arrival becomes the rain.
Our son lies nursing greedily
in the house of man and wife
and I am blanketed by nothing
but the sweep of your eyes
and the sound of his rapture as the
river flows into him."

PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEN, A paper read to The Women’s Service League, From The Death of the Moth, and other essays by Virginia Woolf

"I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of—what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers—they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women."

"These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?"

"Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see it—here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first time in history I know not how many different professions—is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning—the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers—but not to–night. My time is up; and I must cease."

Alice Walker's Letter to the CEO of Kentucky Fried Chicken:

ALICE WALKER

Mothers’ Day

May 9, 2004

Dear Mr. Novak:

Suppose in a future life you come back as a chicken. You are small and fuzzy and scared.
You are soft. Beautiful. Yellow, with bright orange legs. Tiny feet. Innocent, deeply
curious eyes.
You are in a place that does not live up to you. It is dark and hot; there is no fresh air. It
stinks. As soon as you are born, part of your mouth, your tender beak, is burned off.
This indescribable pain is your introduction to life.
It will be a short life.
Each day “managed” by hands and machines you can barely glimpse and comprehend not
at all. You are in a cage with so many others! You feel your body, stuffed with food and
hormones, pressing against the bodies around you. It reminds you perhaps of the lifetime
ago when you were a human slave in a ship enduring the Middle Passage.
You feel heavy and hot, suffocating, because you are constantly drugged; your body forced
to grow so large and fast your bones cannot support it: they begin to break.
After an infinity of unbearable pain you are lifted out of the cage into which you
were born, and from which your mother was taken immediately after your birth, and
dumped, with thousands of others, into a vat of boiling water. Most of the others are dead,
but for some reason, you are not. You drown, choking, in the smelly, scalding water.
You have not had one moment in which to touch earth, to see the sky, to enjoy a worm;
you have had no chance to experience a mother’s love, to receive the rich comfort of
hearing a father’s cocky crow, or to feel the kind hand on your feathers of a caring human
being.
Your body, broken though it is, and smeared with the excrement that left it because you
were so afraid as you died, is plucked of its sickly covering of feathers, cut up, and sent to
the place where it will be covered with white flour and herbs, fried in hot fat, and presented
to human families who have no way of knowing they are eating – bringing into their own
bodies (and spirits) – the deep suffering, fear and misery of your largely unlived life.
I do not wish this for you. I do not wish it for myself. I do not wish it for the
thousands that eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC).
We do not know what Life has in mind for us, or how many lifetimes we are going to
have. Understanding this, it is wise, I believe, to avoid acts of cruelty and violence and to
put our trust and effort into consideration of all “others” with whom we share the planet; as
we extend, uphold and honor all acts of universal kindness.
With an embrace
for you
& deep hopes for health
and happiness
to your
family.

In peace,

Alice Walker

"two realms, elsewhere innately hostile, here cordially coexisted- each (by its very distinctness) intensifying the other- nor could I possibly have imagined either a loveliness so fearlessly of the moment or so nobly beautiful a timelessness. Three thousand oceanic miles away and some terrestrial years before, a son of New England had observed these realms bitterly struggling for dominion: then, as a guest of verticality, our impuritan had attended the overwhelming triumph of the temporal realm. Now, I participated in an actual marriage of material with immaterial things; I celebrated an immediate reconciling of spirit and flesh, forever and now, heaven and earth. Paris was for me precisely and complexly this homogeneous duality: this accepting transcendence; this living and dying more than death or life. Wheras- by the very act of becoming its improbably gigantic self- New York had reduced mankind to a tribe of pygmies, Paris (in each shape and gesture and avenue and cranny of her being) was continuously expressing the humanness of humanity. Everywhere I sensed a miraculous presence, not of mere children and women and men, but of living human beings; and the fact that I could scarcely understand their language seemed irrelevant, since the truth of our momentarily mutual aliveness created an imperishable communion. While (at the hating touch of some madness called La Guerre) a once rising and striving world toppled into withering hideously smithereens, love rose in my heart like a sun and beauty blossomed in my life like a star. Now, finally and first, I was myself: a temporal citizen of eternity; one with all human beings born and unborn."
-e.e. cumings, i, 6 nonlectures

Ode To Salt by Pablo Neruda

This salt
in the saltcellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me,but
it sings,
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those solitudes
when I heard
the voice ofthe salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the nitrous
pampa
resounds:
a broken
voice,
a mournful
song.
In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.
And then on every table
in the world,
salt,
we see your piquant
powder
sprinkling
vital light
upon
our food. Preserver
of the ancient
holds of ships,
discoverer
on
the high seas,
earliest
sailor
of the unknown, shifting
byways of the foam.
Dust of the sea, in you
the tongue receives a kiss
from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned
dish your ocean essence;
the smallest,
miniature
wave from the salt
cellar
reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness;
in it, we taste infinitude.

From, "I Sing The Body Electric," Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, 45 To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this, then? I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea. There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well; 50 All things please the soul—but these please the soul well...
The man’s body is sacred, and the woman’s body is sacred; No matter who it is, it is sacred...
If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred...
O my Body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you; 130 I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the Soul, (and that they are the Soul;) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—and that they are poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems; Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eye-brows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, 135 Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest. Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, 140 Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger, finger-balls, finger-joints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, 145 Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body, or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, 150 Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman—and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, 155 Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sun-burnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out, 160 The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you, or within me—the bones, and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say, these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul, O I say now these are the Soul!

Ode To a Lemon by Pablo Neruda

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium
Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.
So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

"Taste (or, more formally, gustation) is a form of direct chemoreception and is one of the traditional five senses. It refers to the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food and poisons. In humans and many other vertebrate animals the sense of taste partners with the less direct sense of smell, in the brain's perception of flavor. Classical taste sensations include sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. More recently, psychophysicists and neuroscientists have suggested other taste categories (umami and fatty acid taste most prominently.)
Taste is a sensory function of the central nervous system. The receptor cells for taste in humans are found on the surface of the tongue, along the soft palate, and in the epithelium of the pharynx and epiglottis." -Wikipedia

letters of the living

Monday, June 29, 2009

Who By Fire

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Dear Readers...

A Note From the Author:

Could YOU be an Apostate? Do you believe in:

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 19

Why We FEAST...

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 18

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 17

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Days 15 & 16

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 14

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 13

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 12

LoL 19 Day Feast: Day 11...Yum!

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 10

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 9

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 8

From, "I Sing The Body Electric," Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 7

Ode To a Lemon by Pablo Neruda

LoL 19 Day FEAST: Day 6

Eat Something. LoL 19 Day FEAST. Day 5

LoL 19 Day FEAST- Feed Yo' Spirit, Mind, & BODY Day 4

LoL 19 Day FEAST for your BODY & SOUL: Day 3