Category: poetry

Vanishing Points

How does a body emerge from a cave, except by studying the interplay of light over living forms?

These days, it’s easy and modern seeming for any semi-conscious person to feel alienated in a dark place, but fortunately it’s also possible to find relief. I’ve been reading odds and ends from those writing in the Dark Ages during a time when the greatest artistic and scientific achievements of Western civilization had been demolished in a misguided bout of religious fervor. Whole civilizations had regressed to illiteracy, and yet. Even from these dark ages came the stained glass of great cathedrals, promising that the light of another world was dominant, and once inside the nave, it was possible for the vulgar desolation to diminish, eyes drawn upward to the light filtering above, in tinted bands that called to mind images of a divine presence reaching in––not to mention the flourishing illuminations of non-Western civilizations of which the Western mind was largely still ignorant, whether by hubris or circumstance. I was reading about these times and the gradual and then sudden awakening that followed. Naturally, one arrives upon discussions of certain shifts in insight that marked the movement from one era to another, and among these are Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 treatise, Della Pitura (On Painting) from the translation by John R. Spencer (revised, 1966).

The following is adapted in my usual manner of a hungry person looking for something to live on, and borrows phrases from the translated text. 

***

While the process of learning may fatigue, it is good to remember, art is not unworthy of consuming all our time. This because of its divine force, which makes absent men present and the dead seem to live. To paint a god beautiful is to strengthen the heart’s instinct to worship, and what is this painting, anyway? Consider it a matter of describing a space, organizing contents, and receiving light.

Consider also that a thin veil can be of use, to place between the eye and what is seen. May the lines be so fine they are invisible.

It is so difficult to imitate the movements of the soul. Doubters should try painting laughter on a face. Tell me that it doesn’t look like weeping. You can’t, can you? Thought so. Let’s begin. 

Straight Talk at the Oasis

As it was in the beginning, is now, and––

Show me a straight line in nature. And yet, this insistence on the fastest means from point A to point B. Not to mention, the idea of this continuum: Then, Now, Tomorrow. As if.

Well, there is the horizon, as seen from anywhere on water.

Touché. 

Come to think, it was the seafaring people, wasn’t it, who so ardently embraced the linear alphabets and syllogisms and systems for organizing space?

True. Inland, its all curves and oases, mountains and arabesques, and everywhere space fracturing into its heavens and black holes, not to mention time and alphabets, and when the temple veil tears the shelter from the old masters, so do notions of antiquity shift away from what is solidly past to include what also was dreamed and may yet be, and there we are in it, singularities before our own consciousness and the moment among us, these mortals chanting to our own heartbeats and also to the the origins of time, insisting at each beginning, World without end.

Complementarities

Corresponding data suggests.

Here’s the tearing sky again; hold it close. See if you can stand a minute inside the detonating histories of the next flyover. I read this morning that the spider relies on the wind to spin fibers of a web between trees and still they go one loop at a time and my faith, by comparison, is weak. If light can be particle and wave, then knowing must be mind and universe at least, and maybe also body, in its necessary histories, these visions of the past, dreamed and remembered fresh with each new vision of the days ahead. Now what.

Ends and Means

On the insistent impulse toward redemption.

Language, in its majestic tyranny, if it had its human origins around the time when Adam went around naming the creatures, might be blamed for the way that he then forgot to see them. And if the first visionary made fire, it’s hard not to wonder what moved her, in the moments when she crossed back from the word to the first spark.

A common scene: you’re on a bench somewhere and a parent is telling the child with the ice cream cone, Careful! Hold it up! when it is clearly only a matter of time. You watch the child, see the cone fall. Now everyone is paying attention. Oh well! is one response. Another is Too late now!

It is, as a matter of fact, too late for that once-perfect cone to be salvaged. And yet, show me a parent who is not at least gut-level moved to offer a reminder of the promise of salvation, by proving that even the fallen cone may be followed by another. Who, if there is enough money and ice cream to go around, does not want ––on some level–– to perform the promise in living form, to say, Here and See and It’s Okay? They might resist on principle or principled pathology, but still. Some inherited impulse to embody hope in renewal and redemption has a way of pushing. 

It is either too late or just beginning

or both

and––

Embers

A meeting at the water’s edge.

We knelt at the water, holding our urns, one from the depths and another from the surface. We tipped them both behind us, five streams to water the land, and each returned to us in its smells, its touch, the offered visions, songs. We tasted, too. We each had one foot in the stream and listened. Shhh, came the next breath. There was no cover. Only the stars, and we held them, too. 

The New Science

On signs, symbols, and the origins of meaning.

Trace it with me: age of gods, age of heroes, age of men.

Our first language was born of knowing its poverty. 

We relied on signs and symbols. Then came metaphor, 

and then our measly letters, where we pretended 

to be saying precisely what we meant. 

Hieroglyphs suffice when observance 

is more important than discussion, 

as with religions and the like. 

Which came first, I wonder? Letters or language, 

chickens or their eggs? 

Attempting to separate one from the other is folly.

The first speakers, by necessity of nature, were poets. 

Here is the key to any meaningful science worth following: 

the source of all poetry is poverty of language, 

catalyzed by a need to express.

The point? To learn the language 

spoken by some eternal history, 

across time. Another: to name 

the beginnings of learning. 

To our unseen source, knowledge 

and creation are one 

and the same. We 

are mind and spirit; 

intellect and will, but 

it’s the function of wisdom 

to fulfill both.

Children of nascent mankind 

created things according to their ideas, 

which are not to be confused with God. 

But usually are. 

The role of fear 

should not be discounted here, 

in stoking robust ignorance, 

corporeal imagination. 

Frightened men, 

in their infinite vanity, 

no sooner imagine than they believe.

Natural curiosity, the daughter

of ignorance and mother

of knowledge, gives birth:

to wonder.

By Jove, the thundering sky.

***

Adapted from The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.

First Breaths

Learning to look from here.

Why study the stars except to enact the living wonder and proximity to countless possibilities for those infinite lives beyond the next inevitable end?

Why look at all, why make a telescope, except to measure the passage of time and a body’s position, except to measure by extension, the depth by which it might be penetrated by some unknown, swollen with original mystery?

In the beginning was the word, but the telescope came later.

This sequence depends on a certain view of time, doesn’t it, as a length of collected experience and not a renewable fountain of recycled water, and not as a looping circle, with every end the next beginning and every fresh possibility the natural conclusion to the most recent fall?

***

I read somewhere that Gallileo Gallilei unveiled his telescope on this day in a former century, which probably has something to do with why I landed here.

From Rubble

An invocation for healing.

After we’ve read and re-read the last bomb-shelter bedtime story, enough that we no longer need the books; after the skins of our backs have collectively dulled the barbs at our borders, after children no longer know the difference between fire and sky, what will we know for certain, except the common ghosts floating among us like pigeon feathers? When the rags of our bodies are strewn across the singed lands of our erased ancestors, and we’ve burned the last of our vengeances in the name of the justices we stood before rights, when the mute children no longer need to be hushed, will we remember to offer a beginning in our next word?

Alpha Omega

On the architecture of hope.

You get this finite span of years; we have the bodies to prove it, and yet. There’s this persistent dream of forevers just beyond our knowing, held aloft as constant possibilities, and it is into these dreams that we forever pour devotions, as if there were no way to avoid a strong sense of something adjacent to these bodies, some transferable essence moving through us, across time and geography, language and species, a vastness that is in and not of us. How wildly clumsy we are in our attempts to name it, our dance the balletic gestures over cliffs of possibilities we can’t unsee, these reaching poses straining to catch what will not be grasped, washing over us most vividly as we leap towards our beginning and our ends, from rupture to renewal, and it’s hard not to wonder, which came first, creation or memory, or were these always entwined, in the dawns born of this substance ever stretching toward the ripe possibility in the amniotic bubble of the first word?

To Be Heard

It’s no longer necessary to burn the books that the tyrant would silence.

On this day in 1644, John Milton published Aeropagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship. The following is assembled from ideas and phrases in this text, with an eye toward connecting to the current moment, where a chief concern seems to be censorship through noise, manifesting in ways that that are perhaps beyond what many writers of previous centuries might have imagined.

Let this be a certain testimony. When complaints are freely heard and deeply considered, then is civil liberty attained. 

Deliver us from tyranny, from superstition, and from flattery of idols, including ourselves––and from condemnation of the others we are unprepared still to recognize as ourselves, and from fashionable thinking and unthinking, from those superficial modes of sorting that deny what lives in those depths that frighten so many.

To silence grievance is to smother liberty. No covenant of fidelity can be kept with blind praise. Those upright in judgement know that right judgement is fluid and shared by others, including the unexpected strangers to a given land. Those who honor truth will hear them. Those who honor wisdom will welcome recognition of how it is to be practiced, a daily exercise and never a trophy to fix against a wall like the preserved carcass of a felled animal. 

Books are not dead things. Each contains a potency as active as the soul that delivered it. They may raise armies, yet consider this: to kill a man is to kill a reasonable creature. To kill a book is to kill reason itself. Revolutions of ages do not often recover the loss of truth, rejected. Beware the persecution of living labors.

It is less often the bad books that are silenced. Consider what a scholar celebrates today, those writings that were censored in their time. Also consider the silence of scholars and contemplatives. One might assume, by extension, that the starkest wisdom of our moment is also suppressed. 

The tyrants of our moment don’t need to burn books when they have noise enough to extinguish their voices. They don’t need to take what offends them from public view when they have abundant means already to keep people from reading. They need only propagate the mantras of the moment: speed, efficiency, and the idea that the only truth that matters comes in bullet points, easy to digest. If you paralyze the listening capacities of potential hearers, whomever would you need to silence?