Journal articles on the topic 'Tibetan Poem'

Thus sings Sangdhor in a metrical poem in praise of Tibetan versification, countering an anti-verse sentiment that is prevalent on the contemporary Tibetan literary scene. Since the flourishing of free verse form in the 1980s, thanks to the pioneering works of Dhondup Gyal, many Tibetan writers have attacked metrical composition for its perceived inflexible, archaic and inadaptable form and uniformity of content. Sangdhor, one of the most iconoclastic and forward-thinking intellectuals writing in Tibetan today, vehemently refutes such a stance on the grounds that the bulk of great Tibetan works, literary or otherwise, are set in verse. To underscore his point he writes the cited poem in a “leaping and flying” style of themgur(‘poem-songs’) genre. In fact, most of his many innovative poems are written in an eclectic style drawing on Tibet's rich literary tradition, Buddhist texts, oral sources and contemporary writings. Their content is equally diverse yet most of all current. It is infused with social and religious criticism, themes of romance and eroticism, critical literary commentary and current Tibetan affairs. His poems, like those of many other writers, show that metered poetry is very much a part of modern Tibetan literature. As he draws on classical literature and indigenous oral traditions for his own literary innovation, to borrow a concept from Northrop Frye, in Sangdhor's work we can “see an enormous number of converging patterns of significance” that is a complication of Tibetan literary formulas stretching to the narratives of the distant past.2Therefore, it must be borne in mind that modern Tibetan literature transcends a theory of rupture which many scholars overstress to the point of overlooking its deep, outspread roots. Some parts of these roots predate both the 1980s, which saw a flourishing of new Tibetan writing, and the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s that has had a profound impact on Tibetan cultural production.

Folk songs and dances originated from people’s sacrificial activities in the struggle against nature in the primitive society. Their origins are related to the ideology and living environment of the people at that period of time. These activities were expressed in the form of primitive songs and dances, and gradually evolved into folk songs and dances. The gar pa song and dance from Diebu, in Gannan region, is a unique song and dance of a Tibetan region on the eastern edge of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Its content and form are unique. It still retains the original trinity feature which includes poem, music, and dance. The production of songs and dances contains rich cultural connotations and unique local characteristics. This article elaborates the characteristics of Diebu’s gar pa song and dance in terms of its music and performance form.

<p><em>Almost all people experience trauma in their life. Surviving in the era that has witnessed a lot of trauma, a millennium composed of two world wars and cold wars, has made every human being experience chains of trauma. Traumatic problems affect a person mentally and physically. There is a long history of human associating himself through a way or therapy to find himself out of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). This paper projects the importance of writing that serves as a therapy, with the backdrop of the Tibetan writer Tensin Tsundue. Tibet at present undergoes the tough situations due to the Chinese invasion and Tibetans are mostly away from their homeland and staying as refugees in other countries. Tensin Tsundue is a Tibetan activist and writer, and his works bring out the reality of the Tibetan struggle, where his poems stand as a placard for the readers to identify the lost identity of Tibetans. This paper brings out the importance of writing as a therapy to overcome the traumatic stress, and it analyses how an individual writing brings the impact of collective healing into action.</em></p>

Generally speaking, the message of a poem is conveyed on three levels: the semantic, the syntactic, and the phonological. How translatable each of these levels is to the translator depends on how much cognation there is between source and target language: the more cognation there is, the more translatable each of these levels. Thus, in respect of all three levels, translation between languages of the same family, such as English and French, both of which belong to the Indo-European family, is easier than translation between languages of different families, such as English and Chinese, which belong respectively to the Indo-European and the Sino-Tibetan family. If a further distinction is to be made, one may say that, in translation between Chinese and European languages, the semantic level is less challenging than both the syntactic and the phonological level, since syntactic and phonological features are language-bound, and do not lend themselves readily to translation, whereas language pairs generally have corresponding words and phrases on the semantic level to express similar ideas or to describe similar objects, events, perceptions, and feelings. As an image owes its existence largely to its semantic content, the imagery of a poem is easier to translate than its phonological features. Be that as it may, there is yet another difference: the difference between the imagery of non-dramatic poetry and the imagery of poetic drama when it comes to translation. With reference to Hamlet and its versions in Chinese and in European languages, this paper discusses this difference and the challenges which the translator has to face when translating the imagery of poetic drama from one language into another; it also shows how translating Shakespeare’s imagery from English into Chinese is more formidable than translating it from English into other European languages.

Symbolic reconstruction of “purple ruins”—the abandoned ruins of traditional Tibetan buildings, monasteries, temples, and old manors of the aristocracy—has become one of the main topics of Tibetan Sinophone dissident writer Tsering Woeser. Her effort to preserve them not so much as testimonies of the glorious Tibetan past, but rather of the dark chapters of modern Tibetan history and as an indictment of Chinese rule in Tibet, has intensified during the last decade with the surge of commercialization and increase in mass tourism—trends that are rapidly changing the face of Tibet and the urban landscape of Lhasa. In her book Purple Ruins (Jianghong se de feixu), published in January 2017 in Taiwan, Tsering Woeser has combined a subjective perspective (poems, personal memories, interviews, etc.) with “folk tales” (minjian gushi) including legends, oral histories, and gossip, and with historical material. While reconstructing the image of both the “old” and the “new” Tibet in her book, she contests the official Chinese representations and narratives of Tibet, Tibetan history, and Tibetan culture, appropriating postcolonial theories to reinterpret Chinese imperial/colonial endeavors in Tibet from past to present. The aim of this paper is to examine how Tsering Woeser engages with the complexities of official Chinese representations of Tibet in an attempt to (re) construct the missing parts of modern Tibetan history that have been concealed or even intentionally erased by the Chinese official discourse and to (re)construct modern Tibetan identity against the background of the dominant Chinese culture and ideology.

AbstractFew Tibetan figures have left an impression on the Himalayan landscape, both literary and geographic, as indelibly as Mi la ras pa (ca. 1028–1111), whose career as meditator and poet was punctuated by travel across the borderlands of southern Tibet. This essay will begin to address the defining role of place in Tibetan biographical literature by examining the intersections of text and terrain in the recording of an individual's life. In particular, this study examines sites of transformation in Mi la ras pa's biographical narratives, arguing for what might be called a geographic biography by examining the dialogical relationship between a life story recorded on paper and a life imprinted on the ground. It first considers the broad paradigms for landscaping the environment witnessed in Tibetan literature. It then examines ways in which the yogin's early biographical tradition treated the category of sacred place, creating increasingly detailed maps of the yogin's life, and how those maps were understood and reinterpreted. The paper concludes by addressing two specific modes of transformation in the life story — contested place and re-imagined place — exploring new geographies of consecration, dominion, and praxis.

This article is about the Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Shabkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol’s (1781–1851) nine “emanated scriptures” (Tibetan,sprul pa’i glegs bam). Described by Shabkar as being “unprecedented,” the “emanated scripture” is the single largest genre represented in hisCollected Works. In this article, I examine the significance of the emanated scripture using a literary perspective that remains cognizant of the texts’ original religio-cultural background. After considering the Buddhist philosophical context in which Shabkar understood his nine emanated scriptures, I demonstrate how an analysis of simile, intertextuality, textual structure, and style: (1) illuminates facets of the texts that may have otherwise remained unnoticed in traditional Buddhist contexts, (2) modifies the prevalent notion in Buddhist and Tibetan studies that traditional Tibetan society did not value newness, and (3) represents an important step towards understanding Shabkar’s written legacy and the relationship between religion and literature in comparative religious contexts.

A viagemConto de origem tibetana Dois monges estão viajando. Há três dias, eles encontraram apenas uma velha mulher sobre o degrau da porta de sua cabana. Ela lhes ofereceu um pouco de cevada torrada servida com chá e manteiga rançosa. Esta magra tsampa[1], que data da véspera, já é feita de restos de outra. Eles têm fome. Eles têm frio. De repente, a chuva começa a cair. O mais jovem dos monges se protege o melhor possível com uma aba de seu vestido. O mais velho caminha, adiante, em silêncio. A noite cai, no horizonte nenhum abrigo, nem templo, nem eremitério, nem a mais modesta cabana. O caminho que eles seguem se perde ao longo da montanha. O jovem noviço não pode mais. Ele ignora o objetivo dessa interminável viagem. “O templo zen não deve estar distante”, pensa, “me parece que nos aproximamos de Kamakura, mas essa é mesmo nossa direção?” Rompendo as instruções rigorosas do silêncio, ele ousa interrogar seu superior que caminha com passo igual:- Mestre, aonde vamos?- Nós estamos aqui, responde o mestre.- Você quer dizer que a parada está próxima? Insiste o jovem monge.- Aqui, agora. Nós estamos aqui.O noviço inquieto olha o caminho pedregoso que penetrava no nevoeiro. Ao longe, os cimos temíveis já se perdiam na noite. Ele tem medo. Ele tem frio. Ele tem fome. E rapidamente, como um raio, ele entende. Lembra-se das palavras que com frequência repetiam no monastério: “O Zen é um caminho que vai...” Em cada passo sobre esse caminho, a eternidade está cercada. No presente esconde-se a vida, o oásis, o infinito. Experimento o presente, o passado foge, o futuro é um sonho; o presente simplesmente é. “Quando você acorda para a verdade, diz um velho poema, seu espírito se torna brilhante e luminoso, como um raio de lua”.O noviço ia em paz murmurando essas coisas. BRUNEL, Henri. Contos Zen.[1] A tsampa é o nome tibetano da farinha de cevada assada. É o alimento de base no Tibete, assim como o arroz é na China e o trigo é na Europa.

Aju Mukhopadhyay is one of the brightest stars in the firmament of contemporary Indian English Literature. He is a magnificent literary artist, in fact a versatile genius. As a visionary poet he has enraptured the hearts and minds of millions of poetry lovers, both in India and abroad. He is a profound critic, and his insightful critical studies are highly valued in the literary world. His essays on various subjects have made a mark in every field. He is a great storyteller too, both in English and Bangla, and the range of his short stories has baffled the fiction lovers. Like his previous volumes of short stories, the present collection too offers a large variety of subjects and feeds the craving of every set of readers. Aju’s world is so vast that you cross the national boundaries many times to peep into a new world. You open the window to a new story and step into a different world altogether. “In the Company of William, Samuel and Dorothy”, Aju takes us to the Lake District of England to enjoy the company of the great Romantic poets, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth. His description is so vivid that you really feel you are watching everything happening before your ‘fleshy eyes’. In the next story “They Came Down from the Roof of the World”, the writer takes you indeed to the roof of the world, Tibet and the Tibetan Cause. Tibet and New York come alive before you and you partake in the stormy scenes, the rebellion, the persecution, the great Dalai Lama escape and the aftermath.

The Culex is now widely recognized as a piece of post-Ovidian, possibly Tiberian, pseudo-juvenilia written by an author impersonating the young Virgil, although it was attached to Virgil's name already in the first century c.e., being identified as Virgilian by Statius, Suetonius and Martial. Dedicated to the young Octavian (Octaui in line 1), the poem seems to fill a biographical gap in Virgil's career before his composition of the Eclogues. It is introduced as a ludus, which Irene Peirano suggests may openly refer to ‘the act of impersonating Virgil’, and, like many of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, it seems to have a parodic intent. The Culex has been interpreted as a parody of neoteric style and the epyllion, as mock-epic, as Virgil parody (John Henderson called it a ‘spoof Aeneid in bucolic drag’), as pointed Augustan satire, as mock Ovidian ‘Weltgedicht’ and as just very bad poetry (Housman's ‘stutterer’). Glenn Most has observed that the poem's three ‘acts’ structurally recapitulate Virgil's three major works in chronological succession. Little attention, however, has been paid to the Culex's final lines, which contain a catalogue of flowers the pastor places on the gnat's tomb. Recent scholarship has reintroduced an older interpretation of the gnat's tomb as a political allegory of Augustus’ Mausoleum; in this paper I suggest instead that the tomb and its flowers serve a closural and metapoetic function at the end of the poem.

The proposed research paper seeks to study the notion of home which has been defined and redefined in various ways predominantly in diasporic, partition and exile literature as history and heritage of thousands of years linked to it and the way this association was broken. Home became a floating signifier with each literary piece penned down with angst of exile. Tenzin Tsundue, an unusual blend of an activist and a writer articulates collective consciousness of the Tibetan people in exile. The target poems published in Kora, a collection of stories and poems written by Tenzin Tsundue analyze how the word ‘exile’ is catastrophic in many ways, how excruciating it is to untie with home/nation.

Este breve artigo descreve algumas das questões envolvidas na tradução de um poema tibetano para o português a partir de sua versão em inglês, comentando suas especificidades e justificando escolhas com base em premissas da tradução do texto literário em geral e, em especial, de poesia, com base na teoria de Paulo Henriques Britto.

Muna, the female protagonist of the epic poem “Muna Madan”, suffers from prejudices. She becomes the victim of patriarchy. Her effort to resist the imposition of masculinity upon her has been useless ultimately. This paper explores how she appropriates the imposition of masculinity and gives consent to her husband to leave for Tibet. While doing so she remains at home nursing his aged mother, waiting, hoping for his safe return that never materializes until she transforms her from her physical state to the spiritual one.

About a thousand years ago in northeastern India a group of spiritual adepts known as siddhācāryas sang poems about the discipline required of the individual who seeks ultimate release. These carýāpadas, as the poems are called, were eventually compiled and recorded in a manuscript found about a century ago in the Nepali Court Library by a Bengali scholar (Sastri), since when concordances have been recognised in the Tibetan scriptures and numerous articles have been written about them by a variety of learned scholars. The carýāpadas have aroused considerable interest, among other reasons, because of their language, which is considered the earliest record of the Bengali tongue (Chatterji 1970, pp. 90–116), and because of their religious precepts, which are based upon tantra (Bagchi 1933, 1956A, B). Tantra teaches the individual to pursue his own release from phenomenal existence through direct, empirical means, through the manipulation of his own physical and psychical constitution, and these means are learned viva voce from a preceptor who also demonstrates the necessary techniques.

Este artigo apresenta uma análise introdutória sobre a figura de Jesus em um estudo comparativo entre as literaturas de diferentes civilizações e tradições - essénio-judaica, cristã, islâmica, indo-tibetana-, na perspetiva da busca de trocas e confluências entre textos e evidenciando raízes culturais e filosóficas comuns. A partir das suras (capítulos) do Alcorão que contam a vida, a missão e a “paixão” de Jesus-ʿĪsā de um ponto de vista diferente da tradicional dos evangelhos canônicos (para os muçulmanos, Jesus é um profeta enviado por Deus, filho da Virgem Maria), as pesquisas sobre suas eventuais fontes externas pertencentes a várias tradições filosóficas-literárias do Mediterrâneo, Oriente Próximo e Extremo, nos fazem supor que existam convergências culturais que podem chegar a um “ponto de partida” compartilhado: uma fonte ou tradição “Q” que pode ter se tornado parte da redação final do texto do Alcorão, por meio de histórias orais disseminadas na área siro-árabe graças ao intenso comércio e trocas entre caravanas na época do profeta Muhammad. A abundante literatura canônica e apócrifa, muçulmana, budista tibetana e hindu, e secular - incluída a pós-colonial e as várias “leituras alternativas” -, desde o primeiro século d.C. até os dias atuais, alimenta o debate entre diferentes visões e interpretações sobre a figura histórica e mitológica de Jesus, traçando um retrate humano e espiritual com uma mensagem filosófica universal.

Abstract The paper discusses radicalized aesthetics and politics of structure and form in the experimental autobiographical writing of American avant-garde author Leslie Scalapino. Associated with the innovative protocols of the “Language School” poetry movement, Scalapino’s oeuvre emerges as simultaneously a poststructuralist and phenomenologically oriented poetics in which writing performs a thoroughgoing scrutiny of how one’s implication in linguistic and cultural matrices determines one’s being in the world. Scalapino’s Autobiography, framed by Paul de Man’s remarks on autobiographical writing as always controlled by the external expectations of self-fashioning, sets out to examine and deconstruct the autobiographical project as in itself constructive of one’s life. In Zither the poet complicates her take on life-writing by interrogating and reconceptualizing hidden mechanisms of the genre and confronting it with its own fictional status, while in Dahlia’s iris Scalapino juxtaposes detective fiction with a Tibetan form of written “secret autobiography”, based on a radical departure from the chronology of one’s biography toward a phenomenological horizon of what she refers to as “one’s life seeing”, a practice of attempting to see one’s mind’s constructions as they are formed by the outside as well as by one’s internalization of the outside.

TheCulex—the earliest and best attested of the purported minor works of Virgil, and the most outright in gesturing towards Virgilian authorship—poses a problem for modern classical scholarship. Since at least the seventeenth century scholars have been preoccupied with the poem's authenticity. Is it a piece of early Virgilianiuuenilia, as the ancient testimonies and mediaeval transmission of the text seem to assert, or a later production? If a later production, should we see it as a deliberate forgery, or as a poem severed in the course of transmission from its original author and helplessly swept up in Virgil's train? The authenticity problem has proven persistent: as recently as the 1970s, scholars tried to claim theCulexfor Virgil. Even among those who think it non-Virgilian, the apparent consensus of anonymous late-Tiberian authorship has been contested by Otto Zwierlein's suggestion of M. Julius Montanus and Jean-Yves Maleuvre's, even more unlikely, of Augustus.

The Nagas originally a Sino-Mongoloid tribe are substantiated to have originated around 10th century B.C. in the plains between Huang Ho and Yangtze Ho in North Central China. As migration is a process which is reported to have been going on since time immemorial, the Nagas too could not have isolated themselves from being a part of the mass odyssey from their homeland with the anticipation of exploring and settling in naturally upgraded habitats. Hence today, the Nagas have been found to inhabit the banks of Chindwin and Irawaddy Rivers in Myanmar, and Nagaland in India. As far as their language is concerned, it is said to be an affiliate of the greater branch of Sino-Tibetan besides sharing certain similarities with Tibeto-Burman languages. As for the etymology of the word Naga is concerned, it is said to have been derived from either of the Sanskrit word namely Nagna or Nag with respective meanings ‘naked’ or ‘mountain. Frankly speaking both the etymons in question validate the universally recognized conception of Naga identity. Nagaland itself is dotted with multiple number of hills and a faction of people among all the Naga Tribes are said to have been still embracing primitivism. But what is most conspicuous about the Nagas is that though today we know Nagaland as a self-Governing state, the fact can never be contradicted that Nagas have never considered themselves part of India despite the state being taken over by India in 1952. Right from their partially being colonized by the British in the middle of the 19th century, to their strict resistance to both the British-Indian Government and then to the post-Independence Indian Government, the Nagas have shown that their assimilation to Indian mainstream is a daunting and cumbersome exercise. The origin of the Naga National Council, preceded by the armed resistance movement of Rani Gyindulu and that of the genesis of National Socialist Council of Nagaland simply bespeak that this prospect of wholesale assimilation into Indian Sense of Nationality will await the elapse of an elongated stretch of historical time. This very aspect has been enjoying international attention and the literary activists of Nagaland such as Dr Temsula Ao and Dr Easterine Kire have contributed a lot through their literary output in harnessing this aspect, throwing new critical insights into the same. This avouched denial cum resistance to be assimilated into the greater Indian National Fabric is one of the many facets of Naga Identity which also encompasses other cultural traits such as patriarchal ideology, Naga Heraka Practices, Animism, Mythogenesis and Head-Hunting Practices.
 Objective of this write-up: This write-up endeavours its best to foreground the very traits of Naga Identity Poetics by taking into consideration selective but relevant literary fabrications, the brainchilds of one of the two internationally recognized Naga Writers, Dr Easterine Kire with the other being Dr Temsula Ao.
 Methodology: This write-up is built upon the selective reading of the summary of the novels and poems of both the writers with selective perusal of secondary anecdotage in the form of critical essays, the Naga History of Independence and Naga Anthropology.

Em suas edições anteriores em 2008 e 2010, o Simpósio Internacional de Medicinas Tradicionais e Práticas Contemplativas foi um sucesso, contando com um público predominantemente composto por profissionais e estudantes da área da saúde, provenientes de diferentes estados do Brasil. Neste evento estiveram presentes pesquisadores de renome internacional como a Dra. Shirley Telles, uma das maiores autoridades internacionais em estudos na área do yoga e Ayurveda e o Dr. B. N. Gangadhar, chefe do depto. de Psiquiatria do National Institutes of Health da Índia. Tivemos ainda a presença dos Drs. Dawa e Pema Dorjee, um dos mais importantes professores da Medicina Tradicional Tibetana, Dra. Tamara Russell (King´s College), além de importantes palestrantes nacionais.As Práticas Contemplativas como a meditação, o yoga e outras práticas que integram mente-corpo, têm sido utilizadas em diversos setores públicos e privados da saúde, sejam como parte do tratamento a doenças, bem como para promoção de bem-estar e uma melhor qualidade de vida.Por outro lado, há evidências de que as Medicinas Tradicionais podem contribuir para prevenir e tratar diversas doenças, especialmente àquelas de natureza crônica. Estas medicinas têm sido utilizadas em muitos casos, como complemento ou de maneira integrada à Medicina Convencional do ocidente.A Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS) vem estimulando o uso das medicinas tradicionais/complementares/alternativas nos sistemas de saúde de forma integrada às técnicas da medicina ocidental moderna após constatação de que as terapias complementares são cada vez mais procuradas no mundo todo. Também a constituição brasileira, no inciso II do art. 198, dispõe sobre a integralidade da atenção à saúde como diretriz do Sistema Único de Saúde. Assim, em 4 de maio de 2006, foi publicada no Diário Oficial da União uma Portaria que aprova a política nacional de Práticas Integrativas e Complementares no Sistema Único de Saúde.Objetivos: Apresentar estudos realizados e aplicabilidade das sobre as Medicinas Tradicionais e Práticas Contemplativas e sua aplicabilidade na área da saúde.

Our translation and analysis of sections of the epic poem, “Avadāna of Silver Flowers” showcases Tibetan-language poetics or “nyen-ngak” (snyan ngag). In this case, this mode of fine writing serves to reestablish the authority of Tibetan lamas as integral to the revival of Tibetan Buddhist culture in the aftermath of decades of state-sanctioned violence against Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China. Within the context of the early 1980s in China, the use of Tibetan belles-lettres flouts the nation-state’s purported civilizing mission which legitimizes its rule by disparaging Tibetan culture as inferior or backward. Evading this denigrating discourse, the poem’s author, the Buddhist monastic scholar, Alak Tséten Zhabdrung, creates a literary mandala radiating from his birthplace that centers on the subject of the poem, the Géluk Buddhist hierarch, the Tenth Panchen Lama, who was also born in Xunhua County, and was a key figure in the survival and continuance of Tibetan culture in the early Deng Xiaoping era. We translate sections of the twenty-page epic poem and discuss our translation choices as an ethical imperative to bring attention to the particularities of Tibetan poetics in terms of style and subject matter. We view this as part of a larger discourse on decolonization and anti-colonial translation practices because this foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies of literary aesthetics. In order to make these heuristic moves, we are indebted to insights from Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and from a claim in the philosophy of aesthetics that decouples objective values from aesthetic principles, which help us open up discursive space for Tibetan Indigenous aesthetic and epistemic values in English translation. After establishing our theoretical basis, we analyze the intertextual literary figures in “Avadāna of Silver Flowers” by drawing upon Alak Tséten Zhabdrung’s General Commentary on Poetics (snyan ngag spyi don) to develop an appreciation for the specifics of Tibetan poetics and enrich the English language with new types of wordplay. རྟོགས་བརྗོད་སྙན་རྩོམ་“རྟོགས་བརྗོད་དངུལ་གྱི་མེ་ཏོག་”ཅེས་པ་ལས་ཚིགས་སུ་བཅད་པ་ཁག་ཅིག་གི་འགྱུར་དང་དཔྱད་པ་བྱས་པ་བརྒྱུད་ནས་ང་ཚོས་བོད་ཀྱི་སྙན་ངག་གི་དཔེ་མཚོན་ཞིག་བསྟན་ཡོད། རྒྱ་ནག་མི་དམངས་སྤྱི་མཐུན་རྒྱལ་ཁབ་ཀྱི་དབང་བསྒྱུར་འོག་ལོ་ངོ་བཅུ་ཕྲག་འགའ་ཡི་རིང་ལ་བོད་མི་དམངས་ཀྱིས་གཞུང་གི་དྲག་སྤྱོད་མྱངས་རྗེས་ཀྱི་དུས་སྐབས་སུ། འདི་ལྟ་བུའི་རྩོམ་རྩལ་གྱིས་བོད་ཀྱི་བསྟན་པ་བསྐྱར་དར་བྱེད་པའི་ཁྲོད་བོད་ཀྱི་བླ་མའི་ཤུགས་རྐྱེན་སླར་གསོ་བྱས་ཡོད་པ་མཚོན་ཐུབ། རྒྱ་ནག་གི ༡༩༨༠ གྲངས་ཀྱི་ལོ་འགོའི་གནས་བབས་འོག་ཏུ། སྙན་ངག་རྩོམ་འབྲི་ཡིས་རྒྱལ་སྲིད་དཔལ་ཡོན་སྤེལ་བའི་ལས་འགུལ་ཏེ་བོད་ཀྱི་རིག་གནས་དམན་པ་དང་རྗེས་ལུས་ཡིན་པར་སྨྲས་ནས་དམའ་འབེབ་ཀྱིས་དབང་བསྒྱུར་ལུགས་མཐུན་དུ་བྱེད་སྟངས་དེ་ལ་འཕྱ་སྨོད་དང་ཟུར་ཟ་བྱས་ཡོད། འདི་ལྟ་བུའི་མཐོང་ཆུང་གི་ལྟ་ཚུལ་ལས་གཡོལ་ཆེད། སྙན་རྩོམ་འདིའི་རྩོམ་པ་པོ་སྟེ་བོད་ཀྱི་ནང་པའི་མཁས་དབང་ཨ་ལགས་ཚེ་ཏན་ཞབས་དྲུང་མཆོག་གིས་རྩོམ་རིག་གི་དཀྱིལ་འཁོར་ཞིག་གསར་བཞེངས་བྱས་པ་དེ་ཁོང་གི་སྐྱེས་ཡུལ་ནས་མཆེད་པར་བྱས་ཡོད། སྙན་ངག་འདིའི་བརྗོད་བྱ་གཙོ་བོ་ནི་༧པཎ་ཆེན་སྐུ་ཕྲེང་བཅུ་པ་མཆོག་ཡིན་ལ། ཁོང་ནི་དགེ་ལུགས་པའི་བསྟན་པའི་བདག་པོ་ཞིག་ཡིན་པར་མ་ཟད་མདོ་སྨད་ཀྱི་ས་ཆ་འདི་རུ་སྐུ་འཁྲུངས། ད་དུང་ཁོང་ནི་ཏིང་ཞོ་ཕིང་གི་དུས་རབས་ཀྱི་དུས་སྟོད་ལ་བོད་ཀྱི་རིག་གནས་རྒྱུན་འཛིན་དང་གསོན་གནས་ཐད་གལ་འགངས་ཆེ་བའི་མི་སྣ་ཞིག་རེད། ང་ཚོས་ཤོག་གྲངས་ཉི་ཤུའི་བདག་ཉིད་ཅན་གྱི་སྙན་རྩོམ་འདི་ལས་འགའ་ཤས་ཤིག་བསྒྱུར་ཏེ་ཡིག་བསྒྱུར་བྱེད་སྐབས་ཇི་ལྟར་བདམས་གསེས་བྱས་པའི་སྐོར་ལ་གྲོས་བསྡུར་བྱས་ཤིང་། དེ་ཡང་རྩོམ་ཉམས་དང་བརྗོད་བྱའི་ཐད་ནས་བོད་ཀྱི་སྙན་ངག་གི་དམིགས་བསལ་རང་བཞིན་ལ་དོ་སྣང་བྱེད་དགོས་པ་ནི་བཟང་སྤྱོད་ཀྱི་དགོས་མཁོ་ཞིག་ཏུ་བཟུང་ཡོད། ང་ཚོས་ལས་གཞི་འདི་ནི་མི་སེར་སྤེལ་བ་ལ་རྒོལ་བའམ་དེ་ལས་གྲོལ་བའི་ཡིག་སྒྱུར་ལག་ལེན་ཁྲོད་ཀྱི་ཆ་ཤས་ཤིག་ཏུ་བསམ་བཞིན་ཡོད་ལ། དེ་ཡང་གདོད་སྐྱེས་མི་རིགས་ཀྱི་ཤེས་ཡོན་དང་རྩོམ་རིག་གི་མཛེས་དཔྱོད་རྨང་གཞིར་བཟུང་ཡོད་པས་ཡིན། གོང་སྨྲས་ལྟར་གོ་བ་ལོན་ཆེད། ང་ཚོས་རྩོམ་པ་པོ་ གུ་གེ་ བ་ ཐོན་ལགས་ཀྱིས་བརྩམས་པའི་“མི་སེར་སྤེལ་ཡུལ་ལ་རྒོལ་བའི་སེམས་”ཞེས་པའི་དཔེ་དེབ་ཀྱི་ཤེས་བྱ་དང་རྣམ་དཔྱོད་ལ་བཀའ་དྲིན་རྗེས་དྲན་བྱེད་བཞིན་ཡོད་ལ། མཛེས་དཔྱོད་མཚན་ཉིད་རིག་པའི་རྩོད་པ་ཞིག་སྟེ་ཕྱི་རོལ་ཡུལ་གྱི་རིན་ཐང་དང་མཛེས་དཔྱོད་ཀྱི་རྣམ་བཞག་གཉིས་ཁ་ཐོར་དུ་འཛིན་ལུགས་ཀྱིས་ངེད་གཉིས་ལ་བོད་ཀྱི་གདོད་སྐྱེས་སམ་གཉུག་མའི་མཛེས་དཔྱོད་དང་ཤེས་བྱ་ཡི་རིན་ཐང་ལྟ་བ་ལ་བོད་རྩོམ་དབྱིན་འགྱུར་ཁྲོད་དུ་རྩོད་གླེང་གི་བར་སྟོང་ཞིག་བསྐྲུན་པར་རོགས་རམ་བྱས། ང་ཚོས་གཞུང་ལུགས་ཀྱི་རྨང་གཞི་བཏིང་རྗེས་ཨ་ལགས་ཚེ་ཏན་ཞབས་དྲུང་ཚང་གི་སྙན་འགྲེལ་“སྙན་ངག་སྤྱི་དོན་”ལ་གཞིགས་ནས་“རྟོགས་བརྗོད་དངུལ་གྱི་མེ་ཏོག་”གི་སྙན་རྩོམ་ནང་གི་རྒྱན་དང་དེའི་དབྱེ་བ་ལ་དབྱེ་ཞིབ་བྱས་ཏེ་བོད་ཀྱི་སྙན་ངག་གི་དམིགས་བསལ་རང་བཞིན་ནམ་ཐུན་མོང་མ་ཡིན་པའི་ཆ་ལ་བརྩི་མཐོང་དང་། དེ་བཞིན་བརྡ་ཆད་གསར་བའི་རྩེད་འཇོ་ལ་བརྟེན་ནས་དབྱིན་ཇིའི་སྐད་ཡིག་ཕུན་སུམ་ཇེ་ཚོགས་སུ་བཏང་ཡོད།

Abstract From the late-1200s to the mid-1400s, the river valleys of Central Tibet experienced both droughts and political upheavals. This combination of inclement weather and administrative dysfunction led to a series of famines. Although the famines were noted at the time, they were later forgotten in Tibetan narratives, and this is the first time that they are the subject of historical study. In this article we analyse the historical narratives of famine – found in biographies, histories and poems – and compare them with the region's paleoclimatic records, focusing particularly on changes in temperature and precipitation. We begin by discussing the famines’ climatic and political causes and their relationship to broader South and East Asian climatic- and famine-related events. We then outline the Tibetan religious, societal and government responses to these events. These responses include the community's initial reactions, and the multiple magical and managerial strategies they eventually developed to stave off famines.

Thalia Field’s work, which she has described as an “ecology of questions,” inhabits the edges of genres, where she grows her verbal environments of researched material animated by her asking. Her most recent book, Bird Lovers, Backyard (New Directions, 2010), spins itself from the twigs and strands and of terminologies ranging from architecture to zoology as she tracks questions of language, behavior, and relationships between species. “Whose Umwelt is it anyway?” she asks in this extended study of human behavior and the uses of language in how we interpret and shape the world for ourselves and other life forms. Through this exploration of human contradictions and miscommunication between species, Field makes a nest for an egg that is a question of possibilities—for Bird Lovers, Backyard is also a kind of future studies for human potential, operating by way of past example, telling tales of what might amount to a “series of mistakes.” Kicking off this inquiry into what we might be, the book opens with an epigraph from her young son that slyly functions as a kind of crossroads: “What if everyone in the world wasn’t nice?” asks the child—a question that may serve as a hardnosed premise for going forth into the world or as a challenge, a call to grow up. And here, for a reader looking, Field’s submerged Buddhist outlook catches the light. For in her allegiance to an agile balance of “nichelessness,” Field keeps Buddhism—fitting its central idea of interdependent origination—as but one strand in the weave of her influences. In the book’s third poem-essay “This Crime Has a Name,” which this paper will focus on, Tibetan Buddhist figures and ideas form a part of an ecosystem that encompasses industrial design, biosemiotics, and Chinese logicians wherein she thinks through the displacement of sparrow by spaceman, asking what extinction looks like and what our species might mean. La obra de Thalia Fields, descrita por ella como una “ecología de las preguntas,” se halla en la franja de los géneros donde, animada por sus preguntas, cultiva ambientes verbales del material que investiga. Su libro más reciente, Bird Lovers, Backyard (New Directions, 2010), se teje sobre las ramas y los filamentos de las terminologías, abarcando desde la arquitectura hasta la zoología, mientras se indagan cuestiones de la lengua, el comportamiento, y las relaciones entre las especies. “Después de todo, ¿a quién pertenece este Umwelt?”, se pregunta la autora en este extenso estudio sobre el comportamiento humano y los usos del lenguaje de cómo interpretamos y damos forma al mundo para nosotros mismos y para las otras formas de vida. A través de esta exploración de las contradicciones humanas y la falta de comunicación entre las especies, Field crea un nido para un huevo que es, en realidad, una pregunta sobre las posibilidades –porque Bird Lovers, Backyard es también un tipo de futurología sobre el potencial humano, que utiliza ejemplos del pasado y cuenta unas historias que pueden sumarse a una “serie de errores.” Guiándonos hacia estas preguntas sobre lo que podríamos llegar a ser, el libro comienza con un epígrafe de su hijo menor que funciona lúcidamente como una especie de cruce de caminos: “¿Y si no hubiera nadie bueno en el mundo?”, pregunta el niño –lo que puede servir como un reto, como una invocación a madurar. Y es aquí donde la sutil mirada budista de Field resplandece, manteniendo el budismo – apropiado por su idea central de la originación dependiente– únicamente como una rama o filamento entre sus influencias. En el tercer poema-ensayo del libro “Este Crimen Tiene un Nombre,” sobre el cual se concentrará este artículo, las figuras e ideas budistas tibetanas forman parte de un ecosistema que abarca el diseño industrial, la biosemiótica, y la filosofía China. Dentro de este ambiente, Field reflexiona sobre la sustitución del gorrión por parte del astronauta, y se pregunta sobre el aspecto que tendría la extinción y lo que nuestra especie podría significar.

El poema épico del héroe tibetano Gesar de Ling nace de tradición oral, posteriormente es escrito en diversas lenguas, y sus interpretaciones orales, en el Tíbet, perduran hasta nuestros días. El conflicto que desata las acciones en el relato es el enfrentamiento del héroe contra los seres demoníacos, que asolan y subyugan al pueblo tibetano. La categoría de demonios en el occidente difiere de la naturaleza de los demonios en el budismo tibetano. La subyugación de los demonios por Gesar de Ling, que se efectúa en el poema, corresponde a uno de los objetivos del budismo a su llegada al Tíbet.

With the exception of a few remarkable female luminaries, traditional Tibetan literature hardly has any room for the public voice of Tibetan women. Women have been mostly excluded from and totally marginalized in the Tibetan republic of letters, which has been a men’s world for an extremely long time. The Tibetan intellectual scene and Tibetan language literary production are unfortunately still dominated by men. However, Tibetan women writers are making welcome inroads into these exclusive male reserves. In recent decades there has been a refreshing proliferation of Tibetan women’s literary voices. By giving artistic utterance to the many joys and woes of Tibetan women from all walks of life, contemporary Tibetan women’s writing not only diversifies and enriches Tibetan literature, but also helps us appreciate Tibetan history, religion, culture and society anew through fresh and critical perspectives and insights. This lecture will give an overview of contemporary Tibetophone women’s writing and highlight some of its predominant themes that critique major socio-cultural norms and complex repressive structures. Through the exploration of specific poems and short stories it will demonstrate how Tibetan female writers address exploitative relations between men and women, domestic and other forms of violence against women, and the marginalization and exclusion of women from education, employment, artistic production, political power and the economic system. Alongside bestowing delight and insight, in their creative hands literature functions as a mode of redress that gives expression to the repressed and counters oppressive forces and injustices. ཁྱད་འཕགས་ཀྱི་བུད་མེད་སྐྱེས་ཆེན་ཉུང་ངུ་ཞིག་ལས་བོད་ཀྱི་སྲོལ་རྒྱུན་རྩོམ་རིག་ནང་ཀུན་ལ་ཁྱབ་ཐུབ་པའི་བོད་མོའི་སྨྲ་བརྗོད་ལ་ས་མིག་ཕལ་ཆེར་མེད། བོད་ཀྱི་མཁས་པའི་སྡེ་ནི་དུས་ཡུན་ཤིན་ཏུ་རིང་པོ་ཞིག་ལ་སྐྱེས་པའི་འཇིག་རྟེན་ཞིག་ཡིན་པ་དང་། སྤྱིར་སྡེ་གྲལ་དེར་བུད་མེད་མང་པོ་ཚུད་མེད་ལ་ཡོད་པ་ཡང་གྲལ་མཐར་ཕུད་ཡོད། བཀྲ་མི་ཤིས་པ་ཞིག་ལ་ད་དུང་ཡང་བོད་ཀྱི་རིག་གནས་ཀྱི་ཁོར་ཡུག་དང་བོད་སྐད་ཀྱི་རྩོམ་རིག་སྒྱུ་རྩལ་གསར་སྐྲུན་ནི་སྐྱེས་པས་དམ་འཛིན་བྱས་འདུག ཡིན་ནའང་བོད་མོ་རྩོམ་པ་པོ་རྣམས་ཀྱིས་སྐྱེས་པའི་རྫོང་འདིར་བཙན་འཛུལ་རབས་དང་རིམ་པར་བྱེད་ཀྱིན་པ་འདི་ནི་དགའ་མགུའི་གནས། ཉེ་བའི་ལོ་རབས་འགའི་ནང་བོད་མོའི་རྩོམ་རིག་སྒྱུ་རྩལ་གྱི་སྨྲ་བརྗོད་ལྡབ་འགྱུར་གྱིས་མང་དུ་སོང་ཡོད་པ་ནི་རྣམ་རིག་གསར་དུ་བཀྲ་བྱེད་ཅིག་རེད། འཚོ་ཚིས་འདྲ་མིན་གྱི་བོད་མོའི་སྐྱིད་སྡུག་དག་སྒྱུ་རྩལ་གྱི་ལམ་ནས་བརྗོད་ཀྱི་ཡོད་པར་བརྟེན། དེང་རབས་བོད་མོའི་བརྩམས་ཆོས་ཀྱིས་བོད་ཀྱི་རྩོམ་རིག་སྣ་འཛོམས་དང་ཇེ་ལེགས་སུ་གཏོང་གི་ཡོད་ལ། ད་དུང་ང་ཚོར་བོད་ཀྱི་ལོ་རྒྱུས་དང་སྤྱི་ཚོགས། ཆོས་ལུགས། རིག་གཞུང་བཅས་ལ་རྣམ་དཔྱོད་ལྡན་པའི་བསམ་བློ་གསར་བ་དང་སྦྲགས་ནས་གོ་རྟོགས་གསར་བ་ལེན་ཐུབ་པར་རམ་འདེགས་བྱེད་ཀྱི་ཡོད། གཏམ་བཤད་འདིར་དེང་རབས་བོད་མོའི་བོད་སྐད་ཀྱི་བརྩམས་ཆོས་མདོ་ཙམ་ཞིག་གླེང་ཞོར་སྤྱི་ཚོགས་དང་རིག་གཞུང་གི་འགྲོ་སྟངས་དང་དྲག་གནོན་གྱི་མཐུན་རྐྱེན་རིགས་རྙོག་འཛིང་ཅན་དག་ལ་དགག་པའི་བརྗོད་བྱ་རྒྱུགས་ཆེ་བ་འགའ་གསལ་སྟོན་བྱེད། སྙན་རྩོམ་དང་སྒྲུང་ཐུང་འགར་བརྟགས་ནས་ར་སྤྲོད་བྱ་རྒྱུ་ནི། བུད་མེད་རྩོམ་པ་པོས་སྐྱེས་པ་དང་སྐྱེས་མའི་བར་གྱི་འབྲེལ་བ་གདུག་རྩུབ་ཅན་དང་། ཁྱིམ་གྱི་དྲག་སྤྱོད་ཀྱིས་གཙོས་བུད་མེད་ལ་དམིགས་པའི་དྲག་སྤྱོད་རིགས་གཞན་དག བུད་མེད་རྣམས་སློབ་གསོ་དང་། ལས་ཀ སྒྱུ་རྩལ་བསྐྲུན་པའི་བྱེད་ལས། ཆབ་སྲིད་ཀྱི་དབང་ཤུགས། དཔལ་འབྱོར་གྱི་ལམ་ལུགས་བཅས་ལས་ཕྱིར་སྐྲོད་བྱས་ཡོད་པའམ་གྲལ་མཐར་ཕུད་ཡོད་པ་དེ་དག་ལ་བསམ་གཞིགས་ཇི་ལྟར་བྱས་ཡོད་པ་དེ་ཡིན། སྐྱེས་མ་རྣམ་པ་ཚོའི་གསར་སྐྲུན་ལ་བྱང་བའི་ཕྱག་ཟུང་དུ་རྩོམ་རིག་ནི་སྤྲོ་བ་དང་བློ་གྲོས་སྦྱིན་བྱེད་ཅིག་ཡིན་པ་མ་ཟད། དྲག་གནོན་མྱོང་མཁན་ལ་སྨྲ་བ་སྦྱིན་མཁན་དང་། དྲང་བདེན་མ་ཡིན་པའི་རིགས་ལ་ཡ་ལན་སྤྲོད་མཁན་ཏེ་ཡོ་བསྲང་གི་ཐབས་ལམ་ཞིག་ཀྱང་རེད།

Монгольская гипотеза происхождения осетинского нартовского эпоса, которую развил и многие годы отстаивал Тамерлан Гуриев, ввиду многих факторов не была затребована и не получила развития, но интенсифицировала дискуссию среди нартоведов, и в ходе полемики с ней осетинская наука обогатилась многими ценными наблюдениями. Между тем, вне поля зрения ученых остались параллели между мотивами нартовских сказаний и монгольским фольклором, преимущественно героическим эпосом. Среди прочего, это мотив рождения из камня, который в нартовском эпосе осетин является важной и неотъемлемой частью эпической биографии нарта Сослана. В теории Гуриева эпический Сослан прямолинейно отождествлялся с предмонгольским правителем Грузии аланского происхождения Давидом Сосланом, поэтому на мифологические составляющие его образа не обращалось внимания. Между тем, в монгольском эпосе из треснувшего камня рождаются богатыри Хёрёг цоохор баатар, Хэцуу-бэрх, Асар, Ергиль-Тюргюль, Донжин Молор эрдени, Чин джоригту ченггель кюю, Нюсгай жур, Шонходой-мэргэн. Из камня иногда появляются на свет и их кони. Присутствует этот мотив и в тибетской легенде, связанной с религией бон. Поскольку религия бон развилась из митраизма, в котором присутствует мотив рождения персидского бога света Митры из камня или скалы, аналогичный рождению нартовского Сослана, то возможно, что и в тибетской легенде этот мотив имеет иранские истоки. В монгольском героическом эпосе он тоже выглядит принесенным с Запада. Характерно, что у монголов отсутствует важный мотив оплодотворения камня, который есть и в нартовском эпосе осетин, и в мифах о Митре. The Mongolian hypothesis of the origin of the Ossetian Nart epos, which was developed and defended by Tamerlan Guriev for many years, was not requested and did not receive development due to many factors, but has intensified the discussion among the Nart scholars, and the Ossetian science was enriched with many valuable observations in the course of polemics with it. Meanwhile, parallels between the motives of Nart legends and Mongolian folklore, mainly heroic epic poems, remained outside the field of vision of the scientists. Among other things, this is the motive of birth from a stone, which in the Nart epic of Ossetians is an important and integral part of the epic biography of the Nart Soslan. In Guriev’s theory, the epic Soslan was straightforwardly identified with the pre-Mongol ruler of Georgia of Alanian origin, David Soslan, so no attention was paid to the mythological components of his image. Meanwhile, in the Mongolian epos, heroes Hörög coohor baatar, Kecüü-berh, Asar, Ergil-Türgül, Donžin Molor erdeni, Čing ĵoriγtu čenggel küü, Nüsgaj žur, Šonhodoj-mergen are born from a cracked stone. Sometimes their horses are born from the stone. This motive is also present in the Tibetan legend associated with the Bon religion. Since the Bon religion developed from Mithraism, in which there is a motive of the birth of the Persian god of light Mithra from a stone or rock, similar to the birth of the Nart Soslan, it is possible that in the Tibetan legend this motif has Iranian origins. In the Mongolian heroic epic, it also looks like it was brought from the West. It is characteristic that the Mongols lack an important motive of the insemination of a stone, which is also found in the Nart epic of the Ossetians and in the myths about Mithra.

Abstract In 1890, the Maldivian judge and poet Sheikh Muhammad Jamaluddin connected poetry with linguistic description in two ways. First, when he described features of the Dhivehi language with the aid of Arabic linguistic theory, he used Dhivehi poetry as linguistic evidence for correct usage. Second, he authored Dhivehi-language poetry about Arabic linguistic theory. Cosmopolis scholarship relates a narrative of how the wide circulation of Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian fostered a vast network of writers who authored texts in major vernacular languages like Bengali, Burmese, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Malay, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, and Urdu. This scholarship suggests that authors living within a particular cosmopolis wrote in divergent vernacular languages yet were, in some sense, connected because they translated and responded creatively to the same widely circulated source texts written in Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian. Yet in cosmopolis scholarship's effort to reveal understudied connections, various degrees of disconnection among writers of vernacular languages within a cosmopolis tend to be missed. One problem of overlooking disconnection among writers of vernacular languages is that readers could mistakenly conflate superculture-subculture interaction with intercultural interaction. In this article, I argue that Dhivehi-language poetry and linguistic description was inside the Arabic cosmopolis but simultaneously outside, because in circa 1890 non-Maldivians in the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia could not even read the Thaana script of the Dhivehi language.

[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.