Madam Neoteric

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet, Letter Two
Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy)
April 5, 1903

…Of all my books, I find only a few indispensable, and two of them are always with me, wherever I am. They are here, by my side: the Bible, and the books of the great Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen. Do you know his works? It is easy to find them, since some have been published in Reclam’s Universal Library, in a very good translation. Get the little volume of Six Stories by J.P. Jacobsen and his novel Niels Lyhne, and begin with the first story in the former, which is called “Mogens.” A whole world will envelop you, the happiness, the abundance, the inconceivable vastness of a world. Live for a while in these books, learn from them what you feel is worth learning, but most of all love them. This love will be returned to you thousands upon thousands of times, whatever your life may become – it will, I am sure go through the whole fabric of your becoming, as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys…

And so, we have ‘Mogens‘… which was not as simple to track down as one may think. Rilke was right, it is worth reading.

Those who don’t feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don’t drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don’t want to change,

let them sleep.

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way,

sleep on.

I’ve given up on my brain.
I’ve torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you’re not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,

and sleep.

- Rumi, “Like This” Coleman Barks, Maypop, 1990

Front page of a site I’m building is beginning to take some shape… gotten a lot done over the last couple of days, but still a lot more to go. Enough work here to keep me at the keyboard for probably another 3 months, just coding.

Made arrangements with my old hosts for the next month, so I won’t get cut off too soon. As it is, the old server has been vomiting and causing forced reboots (in protest of my leaving?) for the last two days and I’m trying to grab copies of my files… therefore, it won’t behave. Why does this not surprise me? It’s been acting up for months, and I got tired of that, so I went to DreamHost, on the recommendation of friend at SU… and it looks like I’m getting a terabyte + of space and bandwidth per month (which grows by 8GB every week), plus a nice referral plan.

4:38 am : Awake again. Think I’ll activate QuickTime streaming server on the account and see what can be done with that over the weekend.

Ok, now I can go back to bed…

My words are so easy to understand,
so easy to follow,

and yet nobody in the world
understands or follows them.

Words come from an ancestry,
deeds from a mastery:
when these are unknown, so am I.

In my obscurity
is my value.
That’s why the wise
wear their jade under common clothes.

- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching