The Telling Itself

The Telling Itself

By Steve TellArts
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The Telling Itself episodes

  • I'm Just An Animal Looking For A Home

    SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD

    We live our lives of human passions,

    cruelties, dreams, concepts,
    crimes and the exercise of virtue
    in and beside a world devoid
    of our preoccupations, free
    from apprehension—though affected,
    certainly, by our actions. A world
    parallel to our own though overlapping.
    We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
    admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
    Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
    our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
    an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
    response to that insouciant life:
    cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
    pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
    of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
    animal voices, mineral hum, wind
    conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
    of fire to coal—then something tethered
    in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
    of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
    No one discovers
    just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
    into our own sphere (where we must
    return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
    —but we have changed, a little.

    DENISE LEVERTOV 

    --

    Notes: 

    -Gateway to Heaven quote: https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/podcasts/

    -Other audio quotes from Richard Holloway's Stories We Tell Ourselves

    -Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings (PDF): https://bookos-z1.org/book/960274/09138f

    -José Ortega y Gasset quote from: “The Self and the Other,” in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 178.

    -Second reading of the poem: https://vimeo.com/269056790

    -"This Must Be The Place" covers:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCxrEUEO43M&ab_channel=HaleyBlais

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nahv3rqguDs&ab_channel=BartonStrings

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNsgMqgi2pg&ab_channel=SureSure

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7s38Lwk7T4&ab_channel=Myndset


    15 min
  • I Speak Because I Am Shattered

    The great thing

    is not having
    a mind. Feelings:
    oh, I have those; they
    govern me. I have
    a lord in heaven
    called the sun, and open
    for him, showing him
    the fire of my own heart, fire
    like his presence.
    What could such glory be
    if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
    were you like me once, long ago,
    before you were human? Did you
    permit yourselves
    to open once, who would never
    open again? Because in truth
    I am speaking now
    the way you do. I speak
    because I am shattered.

    -Louise Glück

    NOTES:

    "As to future pharmaceutical approaches to major mental health problems, there is nothing on the horizon – most of the large drug companies have abandoned the search for new drugs to treat conditions such as depression or anxiety, considering that both the costs and the risks are far too great. This situation is not surprising – if we do not yet properly understand the functioning of even the simplest animal brains, there does not seem much prospect of responding effectively when things apparently go awry in our own heads. " (Matthew Cobb, The Idea of The Brain)

    “I’m more like a cow. Cows move at their own pace.” from "Many A Little Makes" by  Sarah Shun-lien Bynum: https://www.newyorker.com/books/novellas/many-a-little-makes

    Sunny Prestatyn by Philip Larkin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwF7-suGD4&ab_channel=Music%2CSpokenWordandMiscellanea

    Modest Mouse Lampshades on Fire (cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zulpm_YOaec&ab_channel=Gabrielle


    9 min
  • Honey, Ah Sugar Sugar

    every little meth

    runt crouched in
    the dark part of the culvert
    every sugar road
    half a bag shy
    of the flour roads
    every here we go crow
    spoiled at the touch
    of gun holes in signs
    love is inside
    light wet seeds
    nailed into
    the crawlspace
    between eyetooth
    and barred goon

    -Abraham Smith

    (Music by Bailey Pelkman)

    8 min
  • Chilli Hiccups

    For caressive calling or homophonous hiccoughs, transpose the laugh. Let them suppose that tears are snowdrops or molasses, or anything than human insufficiences.

    MINA LOY

    4 min
  • Maybe The World Without Us Is The Real Poem?

    I have dreamed

    of accomplishment.
    I have fed
    ambition.
    I have traded
    nights of sleep
    for a length of work.
    Lo, and I have discovered
    how soft bloom
    turns to green fruit
    which turns to sweet fruit.
    Lo, and I have discovered
    all winds blow cold
    at last,
    and the leaves,
    so pretty, so many,
    vanish
    in the great, black
    packet of time,
    in the great, black
    packet of ambition,
    and the ripeness
    of the apple
    is its downfall.

    MARY OLIVER

    --

    Pronunciation of on Forvo.com: https://forvo.com/word/%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%B9%CE%B5%E1%BF%96%CE%BD/

    How to make (and pronounce) Kolokythokeftedes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Krujpbi8Sg&ab_channel=Dimitra%27sDishes


    15 min
  • Thoughts Meander Like A Restless Wind Tumbling Blindly As They Make Their Way Across The Universe

    SAFETY BEHAVIOUR 

    The thoughts, I’ve been told, to put somewhere else.

    So I put them on the roof. I put them in a box
    and post them. I put them in shoes I never wear.
    I split them up from each other and put each one inside
    a stranger’s pocket, to be taken home and washed so
    the thoughts drown in several different washing machines.
    I put them on the wing of an aeroplane. Inside a hollow
    bit of wall. I tie them to balloons and they fly off.
    I put them in the ocean and they swim away. I hold
    them over a candle and they evaporate. I hide,
    no, bake them, inside an enormous, delicious cake,
    seven tiers high, and I give a piece of it to everyone.

    EMMA JEREMY

    7 min
  • A Pixel, If That

    Hello, then, you at the front, yes you

    With the puzzled blinkers. If you like

    I’ll make arrangements for you to sit

    Here with me on the other side

    Of language for a spell. In a way

    You’ll see it from the inside and as

    The quick stations of silence slide

    Past our ears, we might, I might

    Slip you a message to take back.

    …

    You are with me here behind the alphabet

    Silence has raked and chosen us from.


    W.S. GRAHAM (From Aimed at Nobody)

    14 min
  • Until The Guilt Becomes Too Burdensome To Carry

    Other guilts as far as a life away turn up to mourn me back over into early outworn linens of fear.   Over a time again gathering up the old sore Self house and servants, the far parts send their name.   

    I am not that man now as I read the rowan and make a book of a tree. 

    Better I’d make some new guilt shine?

    W.S. GRAHAM

    7 min
  • Human Kind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality

    Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

    Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
    Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
    Cannot bear very much reality.
    Time past and time future
    What might have been and what has been
    Point to one end, which is always present.

    T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

    NOTES: 

    How racial inequalities contributed to Darwin's evolutionary theories: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00gbf2g 

    Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture (by Elise Aaltola): https://book4you.org/book/2687438/e43ff7 

    Jo Jo's Jacket (Stephen Malkmus): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS90RLeWILY&ab_channel=Hubadaeus 

    Eliot reading Four Quartets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga8tQrG4ZSw&ab_channel=vinyhilist

    16 min

About The Telling Itself

From the publisher's feed

There’s a bird crying outside, or maybe calling, anyway it goes on and on without stopping."