Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I’m turning into English haiku, will be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations give insights into spiritual growth, so I’m posting a few here, interspersed with other work.
The first was gulls, the second surf, and the third is dialogue:
dialogue’s great but with
each their own idiolects
words spin their own worlds
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freddie omm
october 2019
The spider sculpture is called “Maman” and is by Louise Bourgeois who associated her mother with spiders (“spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother”). This casting of the sculpture (there is one original in stainless steel at the Tate Modern and six in bronze that go on tours) is visiting the lawn outside Museum Voorlinden in The Hague.
I like how the title seems to emerge from the spider’s egg sac, with the rest of the words spilling down to the grass like seeds of word-worlds.
The light is autumnal, heavy with its dropping light.
Another evocative one, Freddie.
Thanks much, Verity, again 😍
Yes the light was heavy last Sunday and the light did drop weightily down among the dripping trees.
That huge spider is quite scary, by the way, and doesn’t really, as Louise Bourgeois says about spiders and “Maman”, give off supportive maternal vibes… (come to that, neither does her “Maternal Man” in the exhibition inside the Museum Voorlinden)
This haiku is clever in the way it subverts the notion that talking is generally seen as a good thing, that talking through one’s issues or problems with people is a good way to solve them.
The haiku posits that with each of us having our own way of speaking, or “idiolects”, the result of talking is, conversely, to drive people further into their own worlds, the worlds created by their own words or discourse – dialogue as the creator of separate worlds.
This is a relevant, timely idea in our age of siloed social media “conversations” and self-focused “stories”.
Thank you, James – loose talk costs lives! 😏
Dialogue (or speech, or words) is like a spider which weaves a web in which others are caught, confused, or trapped by alien conceptions and verbiage?
Well, dialogue is its own entity, separate from the people speaking, something with its own being.
And this entity feeds itself on the words, thoughts, conceptions of the speakers.
(The difference of course is that spiders kill those caught in their web – dialogue doesn’t, it allows the speakers to live and ((at least partially)) escape, killing only, perhaps, the concepts they were attempting to speak.)