Veiling and unveiling.
Notice a center in the chaos, a face gathered in the netted folds.
You need a frame to hold it. To find the frame, first be hollow.
Wait in emptiness, then select materials. From? Where you are.
Notice the changing light: solid fluid, transparent form,
shapes like clouds, like smoke. Face them.
Notes:
Inspired by the artist Benjamin Shine’s series of face sculptures in tulle fabric, as described in this MyModernMet article I found this morning.
Considering the architecture of passage.
If, in the middle of these days, it’s time to leave,
if we consider time a mid-point, holding histories,
here is genesis, here an afterlife, and here
a map on fire.
Mineshaft, funnel, honeycombed monolith
buried in earth, nine rings of illuminated
heralds, the light blinds.
Next, a big freeze: saws, tridents, snakes.
Now the ghost-bodied eagle, the rule of
law, what recompense can follow?
Grip the talons, fingers in the sockets
of an ancient skull, soar. Hold it, this
reverence to bear other rays.
Head in these clouds.
You menace, you specter, you shadow, you––
bear? No, airplane! That one’s an elephant.
You vapor, you veil, you gloom, you mist,
I see you, dragon! Your tail, like this!
Muddle, obscure, puzzle the lot. We name you anyway,
cataloging images like suspects’ mugshots: cirrostratus,
arcus, shelf, roll; towers of cumulonimbus plotting hail.
We can’t resist forecast’s temptation to fate; foretell
this foreboding, foreswear it true.
Shapeshifter of heaven, where are you? Count me
in, you said, and left when we reached nine.
Our heads followed where we kept losing them. You
were the nightmare horizon, wandering lonely;
hold my unknowing and sing a feather canyon.
We’ll cross ages like you do these skies.
Melancholy idyll, romantic torrent, ominous calm.
You annihilate language, and still, we can’t keep
from naming, even if nothing holds beyond the
first sound you inspire: Ah! Oh, what is this
but the beginnings of awe, and here in this
open field we fall silent, planting alleluias
and waiting for rain.
Seen through a glass, darkly.
Giant wheel, the unpronounceable name at its face,
and here is a version of law: mercury, sulfur, water,
salt. Let there be life. Two serpents surround it.
One descends, another rises. Welcome, souls,
a watching sphinx greets. Now the four corners:
angel, eagle, lion, bull. Look, they are leaving.
It’s turning now, and now come the signs, and
now wonder, the magic behind you.
Now darkness. Know this
watching wait, the terror
a praise song, too.
On the virtue of resisting the easy answer.
Rabbi Moses Maimonides (1131-1205), is a good person to meet if you’re looking for some antidote to the excesses of a mode of thought (typically Greek in origin) that tends to value “the universal, the general, and the unequivocal” over modes more typical of Hebraic scholarship, namely an openness toward “ambiguity, contradiction, and plurality of meaning” (from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism). The title of Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed” was enough to pull me into his orbit. The following is inspired by this treatise, as translated by Shlomo Pines.
***
Consider this: the meaning of a sacred text can only be glimpsed. It is best accessed by those prone to being perplexed. Consider also how contradictions, so often maligned, may be embraced instead of being shunned as flaws.
I am moved toward those terms that may sometimes have one meaning, and sometimes many.
When it comes to some subjects, a sensible reader will know better than to demand a complete exposition and will not expect any given meaning to be exhaustive. A sensible reader would never consider the possibility of removing all difficulties, ever, from the interpretive challenge. The most valuable truths may at best be glimpsed, and then concealed again.
Sometimes, in a long, dark night, a flash of lightning will illuminate the landscape. It’s like that, and yet––
Many a fool has so hungered for certainty that he refers to pretend the flash continual, pretending night is day,
––hence the parable, the riddle, the poem, the allegory. Let me show you a deep well. Would you drink? No, you cannot reach it, except by attaching the pail to one, and the next, and the next of each of these, in succession and with humility of mind. You will find no rope long enough, but the vulgar won’t bear this truth. They’ll keep insisting, tell it straight and in a single breath, and when you can’t they will call you a liar and when you won’t you are nothing.
My goal: to guide a single, virtuous reader to rest. Most will be highly displeased. Here is no answer, no show. What may be told to mortals of their own beginnings, except obscurely?
After listening, how to explain?
There is no music center in the brain,
the doctor observed.
Just a dozen scattered networks.
Try to describe it, then: adiago, allegro, aria.
Barcarolle, crescendo, elegy, etude;
Fugue, glissando, hymn. Nocturnes never fail.
Poco a poco crescendo, requiem.
Sforzando is fitting here: to play with sudden and marked emphasis.
Tremolo, hold it.
Vibrato, here we are. Waltz.
Thoughts on perception.
Continuous stream in perpetual motion,
no levees until we build. The mind wants
a fixed pattern, some mollusk shell against
the swell. So, we make and remake ourselves,
these others, our tools these numbers,
tests, images, sounds, scents, records
like Remember this. Color me a Milky Way
in turquoise, violet, rust, crimson tides of
possibility, a membrane across
these newborn eyes.
Anthems in an ancient garden
Like a balloon, they say, when they hear us, as if to be deliberate in dismissal
of the possibility that what is being loosed here is an admonition. They consider
it a mandate to avoid any reference to a common soul, especially the possibility
of some familiar lamentation, they can’t say we are naming ourselves,
renaming ourselves in our own image. They can’t speak
of our ambitions, our undisclosed wishes, our furtive wonder or clandestine
grief. They can no sooner detect these than they can remember
what it was like in the age of the flowering plants when forests
stretched pole to pole and everywhere the shallow seas when we
splashed together, laughing, before the lines of our bodies separated at
the forked branch in the palm of our last common mother, as if to
prophesy some glorious calamity that would make one of us forget
our common womb. What did you think, we call,
when you noticed we would not live for you in captivity?
One, listening, observes: We are here. Here,
hold.
***
Inspired by a recent New York Times article about singing lemurs in Madagascar.
Imagine we gather, here.
It has been a long time since we have gone home.
Let’s gather.
We will meet in the nest.
I have hidden the meal, over that hill. See, in the distance.
In the forked branch of the second tree?
We will feast on what we find. Bring what you find.
Or bring nothing. We will share.
There is a round table in the nest, and six chairs.
Around the table, we will feast inside our nest.
Come.
***
Inspired by the art of Charlie Baker, as described in this article
and by birds everywhere.
A Sampling of Longinus’ First Century text, “On Sublimity.”
When it comes to explanatory text, practical help ought to be a writer’s principal object. The point is to explain what it is and how can we achieve it. Regarding sublimity, I will do my best.
Help.
How to explain? The source of distinction of the greatest poets? Grandeur. It produces ecstasy, not persuasion. Persuasion we cannot control, but sublimity tears like wind.
Nothing is truly great that is great to despise: wealth, reputation, absolute power. The wise disdain these. What of literature depends on nature can only be learned through art. Some marks: it is impossible to resist and it endures, leaving a long impression.
Inspired emotion, a kind of madness and divine spirit, can help. Another way is to make the mind ever-pregnant with noble thoughts. Selection and organization are not to be underestimated. See Sappho here, how she layers. Consider imagery, Phantasia: the point being, to astonish. In this vein, consider hyperbation: the arrangement of words and thoughts outside the normal sequence.
Also, remember metaphors. Consider the bodily tabernacle, the head as citadel; the heart a knot of veins; spleen, a napkin for the insides; blood, the fodder of flesh; death, a loosing of the cables binding the soul’s ship.
***
Inspired by the first-century manuscript “On Sublimity,” widely (though not uncontroversially) attributed to Cassius Loginus, as translated by D.A. Russell. Finding it in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, I was heartened by the slightly bombastic and utterly romantic confidence of this writer, moved with urgency to explain the sublime.
