Notebooks

Unless otherwise attributed all writings are by Robert Dorsett

I like to live in China because there is more reality here. There is as much reality in New York but in New York I belong to my place; here, I have no place, so there is more reality.

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The world is beautiful, even the oppression and suffering are beautiful if only through my opposition. Beauty makes the temples of Japan and Bangkok, as well as the poor in the streets, possible in poetry. And among this beautiful world, among this effluence of being, among hate, love, in detail, I am at the center.

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Vanity causes a great number of people to pour poems into the media—but crowds are never human.

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The least satisfactory definition of the ethical is the hedonistic, viz. “do what you want as long as you do not hurt others”, since it advocates a complete lack of decision.

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Any estimate of love must be confined by its inexpressibility.

- Rachel Bespaloff

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The blocks are more often psychological than technical. I ask myself: what am I afraid of—I fear exposure of the self, even when not writing about the self.

- Anais Nin, Novel of the Future

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The source of human evil is hardness of the heart not the heart in passion.

- Abraham Heschel

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The palace of the King of Thailand has large, ample grounds with many intricate buildings of fine detail. In the chapel sits the Emerald Buddha, composed not of emerald but of milky green quartz. From the steps of the chapel, it is partly seen placed high between long, vertical doors, giving the partially occluded Buddha an impression of levitation as well as being at an elevated center. After entry, the surrounding columns, sculptures, and paintings, flow upward like flames disappearing into the symbolized star-bedizened sky of the vault. Two Bodhisattvas, flanking the Buddha’s feet, hold their hands, flat palms outward, like traffic cops, prohibiting any horizontal motion. At the focus point of the architectural stops and go, centered within the gold statues and multicolored paintings, sits the Buddha, fully revealed, high, cool, simple.

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I am not interested in language as explanation, composition or definition, but language as manifestation. This is poetry.

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It seems to me that to consider a word, as primary experience, isn’t sufficient, since there is something always secondary about them. On a walk, if I let the pure sensuousness of what is there delineate itself, it marks a dialectic that is both a harmony and a discord. This frees me of anxiety and cliché and the compulsiveness that underlies both.

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In poetry the salient features of the landscape come to the liminal edge of perception and transform into symbol. It is not the dream but the world that remains opaque.

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Winds attend the threshold of the world, for wind is the image of the invisible.

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It takes pity, as it does courage, to illume what hides within.

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Not pure inwardness but the inward side of events.

- Gershom Scholem