#nancy kline

[majestativa]

Illusorily, I am both in my soul and outside it.

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by Nancy Kline, (1992)

[luxe-pauvre]

This we can stop. We can stop all forms of interruption. We can decide right now to be masters of our attention, to commit to the flourishing of our minds, of our hearts, of our very nature. This attention, this promise not to interrupt, this act of breathing free, is prodigious. It changes things. Even the big things. It bestows sanity. It shapes and reveals and shapes again who we are. It offers ease in the face of uncertainty. It can stop things like hatred and start things like love. It rescues our meetings from vacuity, creates fabulous places to work, brings humanity to leadership and leadership to humanity. Attention, some have told me, is what we mean by “God”. It launches the dreams we have for ourselves, yes, but also the dreams for our world. We all have them. Even the most cynical of us. We’ve just grown wary and weary and willing to walk away from each other, and from ourselves. This promise of no interruption, this sustaining of generative attention, can turn us towards each other. In fact, the decision not to interrupt each other is powerful enough to mitigate the prepotent relationship issue of our time, the issue that cleaves our conversations at work, in politics, in families and invisibly inside ourselves – the societal bifurcation we call polarisation. This contemporary scourge is ancestral. And it is high time we faced it down by facing its cause. Polarisation is not a result of disagreement. It is a result of disconnection. When we disconnect from each other, when we see each other no longer as human beings but as threats, we polarise. And the first, most forceful disconnector is interruption.

Nancy Kline, Let me finish: how to stop interrupting… and change the world

[majestativa]

You are, poem, a wayside altar of darkness on my too-exposed face.

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by Nancy Kline, (1992)

[majestativa]

He challenged her, went straight for her heart.

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by Nancy Kline, (1992)

[majestativa]

The second you appeared to me, my heart had all the sky to light its way. It was my poem’s noon. I knew that anguish slept.

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by Nancy Kline, (1992)

[majestativa]

With your hand take the wrist of the hand that holds out to you the most enigmatic of gifts: a laughing lifted flame, enough in love with its stalk to leave it.

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by Nancy Kline, (1992)

[majestativa]

I will unveil you to those I love, like a long stroke of summer lightning, as inexplicably as you showed yourself to me.

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by Nancy Kline, (1992)

[majestativa]

Ô dédale de l’extrême amour! (O labyrinth of utmost love!)

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by Nancy Kline, (1992)