piero scaruffi

“It is always night”
“I can see the Sun”
“Trust me: here it is night - always - we left the Sun behind”
“Forever?”
“Forever”
“I’d like to go back”
“Too late”
“Too late for what?”
“To make sense of the present”
“How senseless that is”
“No: it was”
“When?”
“Here”
“It is so easy to confuse when and where”
“When is here and where is now”
“I am here and now”
“No: I is here and now”
“I am not a person, i am a place - there are many people inside me”
“Life is a place”
“Death is a time”
“I wonder if, overall, there are more living people or more dead people”
“It is easy to confuse life and death”
“You cannot die if you are not alive”
“Can you be alive if you have never been dead?”
“Can it be day if it has never been night?”
“It is always night”

More: http://www.scaruffi.com/poetry/halfmoon.html

May 17

[video]

May 04

Octavio Paz’s “Epitaph for no Stone”

(Translation by Eliot Weinberger)

Time.
that devours faces and names,
devours itself.
Time is a mask with no face.

The Buddha did not teach me how to die.
He tells us that faces dissolve,
that names are empty sounds.
But at death we have a face,
and we die with a name.
In the borderland of ashes
who will open my eyes?

I go back to my scriptures,
to the book of the knight read badly
in a sunlit youth
that shared much of its violence:
the gashed plains,
the battles of wind and dust,
the wild pear tree, green fountain of shadow,
the nape of the sierra, stubborn
against clouds pregnant with chimeras,
the rigorous light that portioned out
the living body of space:
geometry and sacrifice.

I buried myself in my reading,
surrounded by wonders and disasters:
to the south, the two volcanoes
made of time, distance, and snow;
the barbarian characters of fire
on the pages of stone;
the terraces of vertigo;
the hills, almost blue and scarcely drawn
with invisible hands by the air;
noon, the icon-maker
making sculptures out of all that it touches,
in distanm; where the eye learns
the duties of birds and architect poets.

High plains, terrace of the zodiac,
circus of the sun and its planets,
mirror of the moon,
high tide turned to stone,
stepped immensity
that the dawn, barely light, climbs,
and solemn evening descends,
lava garden, house of echoes,
thunder drum, shell of the wind,
theater of rain,
hangar of clouds, pigeon coop of the stars.
Seasons turn and days turn,
the heavens turn, fast or slow,
the wandering fables of the clouds,
the fields of play and the fields of battle
for unfounded nations of reflections,
the kingdoms of wind dissolved by the wind:
on peaceful days space is throbbing,
sounds are transparent bodies,
echoes are visible, silence listens to itself.
Source of presences,
the day flows vanished in its fictions.
On the plains the dust is asleep.
Bones of centuries ground by the sun,
time turned to thirst and light, ghostly dust
that rises from its stony bed
in brown and reddish spirals,
dust, masked and dancing,
under the diaphanous domes of the sky.
Eternities in an instant,
eternities enough,
vast, timeless pauses;
each hour is tangible,
forms think, stillness is dance.

Pages more lived than read
in the ﬂuvial afternoons:
the horizon, fixed and changing
from Ajusco the purple storm
hurled down to the plains
with a crash of stones and hoofs
and broke up into peaceful waves;
the bare feet of the rain
on that red-brick patio;
the bougainvillaea in the decrepit garden,
crimson ardor …
My feelings at war with the world:
reading was a fragile truce.

Memory invents another present.
As it invents myself.
What has been lived
blurs with today.
With eyes closed I read the book:
returning from his madness
the knight returns to his name and studies himself
in the still water of a timeless moment.
It dawns, a dubious sun
in the mist of the mirror, a face.
It is the face of death.
In such trances,
he says, man must not mock the soul.
And he looks himself in the face:
thaw of reﬂections.

(Greatest poets of all times: http://www.scaruffi.com/fiction/bestpo.html )

Apr 14

An introduction to Language for the SMMMASH at Stanford University http://www.smmmash.com

Language - An Introduction from piero scaruffi

Apr 11

[video]

Apr 02

[video]

Mar 25

Ernesto Sabato - From “On Heroes and Tombs”

By virtue of that notable attribute of independence and superimposition possessed by the universe, as a banker makes ready to bring off the most formidable operation involving strong currencies that has ever been carried out successfully in the Rio de la Plata (incidentally scuttling Consortium X or fearsome Corporation Y), a bird, a hundred paces away from the Powerful Office, hops across the grass of the Parque Colon, searching here for some little bit of straw for its nest, some stray grain of wheat or rye, some little worm of nutritional interest to it or to its young; while in another even more insignificant stratum, and one in a way even farther removed from everything (not from the Great Banker but from the slender cane of the pensioner), tinier, more anonymous, more secret beings live an independent, and on occasion an extremely active, existence:

worms, ants (not only the big black ones, but also the little red ones and others even smaller that are practically invisible) and enormous numbers of other more insignificant tiny creatures, of different colors and very different habits. All these beings live in different worlds that are foreign to each other except when Great Catastrophes occur, when Men, armed with Fumigators and Shovels, undertake the Fight against the Ants (an absolutely useless fight, let it be said in passing, since it always ends with the triumph of the ants), or when Bankers unleash their Petroleum Wars; so that the infinite number of tiny creatures that until that moment lived on the vast greenswards or in the peaceful subworlds if the parks are wiped out by bombs and gases; while others that are more fortunate, those belonging to those species of worms that are invariably victorious, make hay while the sun shines and prosper with astounding rapidity, as meanwhile, up above, the Purveyors and Manufacturers of Armaments thrive.

Mar 23

Liu Bolin’s photograph “Hide in the City” (can you see the person?)

More of his photographs and optical illusions: http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/bolin/