Paul Attinello

Category: Awareness

  • Exaltation

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    paulattinello
    in

    Perhaps (he said cautiously, looking around to make sure nothing was about to fall on his head) nothing bad will happen around this birthday at all. It doesn’t always; it’s just something I keep as a reassurance in reserve for the Bad Birthdays – which, for me, mostly mean the ones where nothing happens, where…

  • Conversations

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    paulattinello
    in

    I neglected to mention the best part about the past week: two sets of casual conversations with wonderful, calm, sensible friends – neither of whom unfortunately live anywhere near me. Such a valuable thing, really the most wonderful thing, and something I miss a great deal: in Hong Kong, Australia, and northern England (that is…

  • He is just going to wake up

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    paulattinello
    in

    I’ve spoken elsewhere about Nachiketas (his story, my name, a poem) – whose name means ‘he is just going to wake up.’ I always tend to concentrate on his name/story/meaning as that of the boy who makes friends with Death; it occurs to me tonight, as I reflect on how unawake I have been for…

  • Explaining Nachiketas

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    paulattinello
    in , ,

    I probably need to explain the previous poem, and the story of Nachiketas, and my own connection with it. I’ll tell all this from my point of view… which might seem a bit roundabout, but if you’re patient I’ll get to it. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were three powerful forces keeping…

  • The Song of Nachiketas

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    paulattinello
    in ,

    “At last his father turned on him in anger. ‘Enough!’ he said. ‘Why should I give you to God? I’d rather hand you over to Death!’ As a dutiful son, Nachiketas took him at his word, and set out at once for the House of Death.” – The Katha Upanishad, translated by Thomas Byrom I.…

  • Dim / reflections

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    paulattinello
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    Positions… different ways of viewing life – my life, my life as it is now, my life in my imagination, or if you prefer, life generally…. (a) Resistance to writing is a neurotic symptom, related to being a rigid and immature judgmental personality, constellated with various feelings/strategies of fear/laziness/self-justification, etc. My anxious reactions to the…

  • A quote

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    by

    paulattinello
    in

    A possible response to my feelings of this morning: If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial. If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked. If you want to become full, let yourself be empty. If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything,…

  • The abbot’s story

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    paulattinello
    in

    Have I ever told you the story of the Japanese abbot? – no, of course I haven’t. It was a tale that caught my imagination, or perhaps arose into my memory, some time in the late 1980s; on my computer is an aborted text where I tried to tell it, embedded in an imagined story…

  • Temporal (Sitges III)

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    paulattinello
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    After midnight, difficult to sleep, hearing David Lang’s shimmering, wispily endless Orpheus Over and Under pieces. There is something bothering me about Neville’s illness and impending death (aside from the obvious), plus its effect on his partner Chris, plus our mutual friend Dennis’ moving away up the coast, and the possible knock-on effects of these…

  • Fragments and overview

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    paulattinello
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    At 2:30 am, my smoke alarm goes off. There’s no battery in it, there’s no smoke, it just malfunctions. Somewhere in what I’d watched that day were the bleakly sunny rooms of an everyday Los Angeles apartment, with all its implied background – that strange flatness, that subtly disturbing sense of endless emptiness that is…