A digital glass installation by Sally
Weber
Quotes in Panel #7
Location: Middle blue vertical
Quote by: Rainer Maria Rilke
Title: "Turning Point"
Book Ref: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, page 134-135
Originally published: New York 1982, Random House
Edited and Translated By Stephen Mitchell
German Version
Wendung
Der Weg von der Innigkeit zer Grobe
geht furch das Opfer.
- Kassner
Lange errang ers im Anschaun.
Sterne brachen ins Knie
unter dem ringenden Aufblick
Oder er anschaute knieend,
und seines Instands Duft
machte ein Göttliches müd,
daß es ihm lächelte schlafend.
Turme schaute er so,
daß sie erschraken:
wieder sie bauend, hinan, plötzlich, in Einem!
Aber wie oft, die vom Tag
überladene Landschaft
ruhete hin in sein stilles Gewahren, abends.
Tiere traten getrost
in den offenen Blick, weidende,
und die gefangenen Löwen
starrten hinein wie in unbegreifliche Freiheit;
Vögel durchflogen ihn grad,
den gemütigen; Blumen
wiederschauten in ihn
groß wie in Kinder.
Und das Gerücht, daß ein Schauender sei,
rührte die minder,
fraglicher Sichtbaren,
ruhrte die Frauen.
Schauend wie lang?
Seit wie lange schon innig entbehrend,
flehend im Grunde des Blicks?
Wenn er, ein Wartender, saß in der Fremde; des Gathofs
zerstreutes, abgewendetes Zimmer
mürrisch um sich, und im vermiedenen Spiegel
wieder das Zimmer
und später vom quälenden Bett aus
wieder:
da beriets inder Luft,
unfaßbar beriet es
über sein fuhlbares Herz,
uber sein durch den schmerzhaft verschütteten Körper
dennoch fühlbares Herz
beriet es und richete:
daß es der Liebe nicht habe.
(Und verwehrte ihm weitere Weihen.)
Denn des Anschauns, siehe, ist eine Grenze.
Und die geschautere Welt
will in der Liebe gedeihn.
Werk des Gesichts ist getan,
tue nun Herz-Werk
an den Bildern in dir, jenen gefangenen; denn du
überwältigtest sie: aber nun kennst du sie nicht.
Siehe, innerer Mann, dein inneres Mädchen,
dieses errungene aus
tausend Naturen, dieses
erst nur errungene, nie
noch geliebte Geschöpf.
English version
Turning-Point
The road from intensity to greatness
passes through
sacrifice.
- Kassner
For a long time he attained it in looking.
Stars would fall to their knees
beneath his compelling vision.
Or as he looked on, kneeling,
his urgency's fragrance
tired out a god until
it smiled at him in its sleep.
Towers he would gaze at so
that they were terrified:
building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!
But how often the landscape,
overburdened by day,
came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.
Animals trusted him, stepped
into his open look, grazing,
and the imprisoned lions
stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;
birds, as it felt them, flew headlong
through it; and flowers, as enormous
as they are to children, gazed back
into it, on and on.
And the rumor that there was someone
who knew how to look,
stirred those less
visible creatures:
stirred the women.
Looking how long?
For how long now, deeply deprived,
beseeching in the depths of his glance?
When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home --
the hotel's distracted unnoticing bedroom
moody around him, and in the avoided mirror
once more the room, and later
from the tormenting bed
once more:
then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what through the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt -- his heart;
debated and passed their judgment:
that it did not have love.
(And denied him further communions.)
For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.
Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpower them: but even now you don’t know them.
Learn, inner man, to look in your inner women,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.
Location: Right blue vertical
Quote by: Anaïs Nin, The Diaries of Anaïs Nin
Throw your dreams into space like a kite,
and you do not know what it will bring back,
a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Location: Middle blue vertical
Quote By: Rainer Maria Rilke
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it,
you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Location: Right blue upper vertical
Quote By: Edward de Bono
Submitted By: Stephen Schafer
Think sideways.
Location: Red vertical
Quote by: Al Zolynas, "Considering the Accordion"
Submitted by: Richard Newsham
The idea of it is distasteful at best. Awkward box of wind,
diminutive, misplaced piano on one side, raised Braille but-
tons on the other. The bellows, like some parody of breath-
ing, like some medical apparatus from a Victorian sick-ward.
A grotesque poem in three dimensions, a rococo thing-am-a-
bob. I once strapped an accordion on my chest and right
away I had to lean back on my heels, my chin in the air, my
back arched like a bullfighter or flamenco dancer. I became
an unheard-of-contradiction: a gypsy in graduate school. Ah,
but for all that, we find evidence of the soul in the most
unlikely places. Once in a Czech restaurant in Long Beach,
an ancient accordionist came to our table and played the old
favorites: "Lady of Spain." "The Sabre dance," "Dark
Eyes,"
and through all the cliché his spirit sang clearly. It seemed
like the accordion floated in air, and he swayed weightlessly
behind it, eyes closed, back in Prague or some lost village of
his childhood. For a moment we all floated-the whole
restaurant: the patrons, the knives and forks, the wine, the
sacrificed fish on plates. Everything was pure and eternal,
fragiley suspended like a stained-glass window in the one
remaining wall of a bombed-out church.
Location: Bottom corner
Quote from: Sally Weber
Find someone who makes you laugh and sit next to them.