Growing in Spirit - C.P. Cavafy
He who hopes to grow in spirit
will have to transcend obedience & respect.
He will hold to some laws
but he will mostly violate
both law and custom, and go beyond
the established, inadequate norm.
Sensual pleasures will have much to teach him.
He will not be afraid of the destructive act:
half the house will have to come down.
This way he will grow virtuously into wisdom.
I've been reading a slim volume of Cavafy and read this poem about ten times this morning in the gray kitchen light. An important guide & teacher from college, Richard Hoffman, has a stunning memoir entitled Half The House, but I'd forgotten that the title was taken from Cavafy.
Here is Patrick Wolf at Heaven (a London club that had accrued terrifying meaning over the past few years, terrifying in Rilke's sense; a place my imagination returns to repeatedly). Patrick Wolf is my age, a month younger than me. I love his awkward magic. I like to imagine that we'd get along. I'm still baffled as to why someone hasn't proposed to him a full-scale rock musical - I can see him writing an incredible love story... The song is from his new album "The Bachelor," Go get it.
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