Category: Wonder

Altar

At the crossroads.

On the day of the dead, among this cloud of witnesses, someone here whispers, help me find it again, that joy I once had in looking. Instead of an answer, this space, and the hum of a motor nearby. 

We love the old trees of our myths for the spaces they hold inside themselves, but also for the way they know to keep it around them, this cushion of shade made soft by the absence of another tree.

In the eruption of any given birth, a core could easily splinter, and yet here we are, faces dappled by the light and noise of becoming, learning to make room for what would breathe.

Sense of Direction

Laughing in the basement.

If revelation is marked by unknowns, happiness by suffering, ease by difficulty, then it’s not a stretch to recognize that those serious truths everyone has been so steadfastly seeking were under our noses all along, hiding among the stuffed jesters and the Lego bricks in the carpet. If truth’s constant companion is the absurd, let us sit in the dark and laugh.

No, but seriously, you said, and raised self-doubt to the level of moral imperative, and at the crossroads between Either and Or, you boldly announced, neither will do–and chose anyway, as one must.

In your good company, we sleep no more in this underground of mirrors and toys; instead, we are awake with the question of whether we are, after all, in or out, as relates to the houses we once took for granted as ours. And now, you said, for my final performance, I shall confide the meaning of life to this scrap of paper, which you cleverly managed to lose.

Easy come, easy go, you said, while continuing to insist that neither would do.

***

Earlier in the week, some other search reminded me back to some of Søren Kierkegaard’s ideas, so today I am appreciating his teasing sense of humor.

Knock at a Door

Here is an invitation.

Here is no wall, but a congregation of forces in flux, and tree is a small word for the constellation of alchemies this body holds. Dense with time, here is a geometry to resist the easy abstractions of the surveilling class. It is possible, after all: to notice the grid imposed over perception and leave it; to train eyes on the invisible presence and laugh at the challenge to prove it. Here is a fluid power.

If you would be an observer, detached at some remove, it becomes possible to construct a polished opening shot with a wide angle lens to match the score, but when you are in it, all impressions immediate, the world is the sculpture you are making from the inside out, tunneling naked through each slab of clay, leaving impressions and sensing some emerging form while not knowing what it is.

Here is an invitation: come not to look, but to witness, and bear the weight of sight, the hot breath of a body in proximity. Try to extract from your life its history, but it will not be moved.  Why remain, then? Why continue, and when? A heart insists by its own measure, this echo. Come out.

Out of Sight

With Italo Calvino.

The cities were born a little at a time––not unlike poems, you said––of various inspirations. You had a habit of collecting odd strangers and mythical heroes, and notes on places that you had been, might be, would tend to imagine. What happened was not a book exactly, but a geography to move in. You mapped cities of memory, cities of desire, cities and signs. There were continuous cities and hidden cities. These cities were braided: cobweb cities across an abyss, a microscopic city, spreading. 

Watch that one, you said, and as it grew, it revealed concentric cities like tree rings. Sometimes, you said, you would come across a city that would write itself.

Into what? We wondered, and you said yes.

***

Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in honor of his birthday.

Another Sound

Humming, deep and low.

It was a time of release and collapse, confusion and the search for new bearings, and many painted aftermaths in words. There was much emphasis on resilience. Aspirational? Perhaps. It seemed a sort of mask. Something unraveled.

What is happening now? Someone asked. Attempts at description became profiles in shapeshifting practices: power and truth, dreaming and living, and then language. Interesting uses of words like safety raised questions.  For whom and from what and by what logic are these questions obscured?

This is what we were wondering on the morning that we left our homes to walk into the fog. We seemed to be going to its source, but we could not see it. No one spoke at the time because the words were not there. Not yet. There was a humming, deep and low. It was not clear if it came from some hollow behind the heart, or somewhere outside. Perhaps this distinction, too, no longer mattered.

Intimate Immensity

Once upon a forest.

Behind the dying wind and softening rain, silence compels the listener. Since the immense is not an object, it relies on imagination, and so it becomes possible to open the world by seeing more than what appears to be. In the immediate immensity of the shattered forest, piling infinities far from all history of men; a curdling quiet trembles. You’d need a map the size of a given world to make it truly accurate, so the dreamers continue. 

***

Notes while reading Gaston Bachelard’s “Intimate Immensity” in The Poetics of Space.

Fogs

Muted sounds and atmospheric shrouds.

Today’s challenge: to walk with what is unknown and accept its presence on its own terms, even when it rejects walking, preferring instead to swim or roll in the mud or follow birds and the bells of ice cream trucks. To interject ambivalence with ambiguity, the center of a spinning top nearly toppled is the climax of its dance.

The white dunes of reverberating fog smudge the skyline, obscuring as much as it reveals of us back to ourselves, warning of certainty’s trespass, as if to say, try knowing time without the blunt tool of sequence to hammer it into submission. 

Nothing this soft will respond as desired to such obtuse force, accepting a given shape or placement. It will only become more and more diffuse, more and more what it is, the disquieting formlessness that makes atmosphere visible by resisting expectations of transparency.

Turn

The sound of planets in orbit.

Every poetic center has its gravitational pull, multiplying repercussions between these miniatures and their attendant skies. Here we go again, pivoting around the lamp sun at the center of an ariel table, and she keeps us moving by the music of her pen. Without this, we would be permanent invalids, plunging ever away from some distant possession, our placid faces dumb with belfry daydreams pretending to be lessons in solitude. In this concert hall, these skies, we hear the saplings grow green and the crawling trellises; the bitter rain on the long road until the high wind yelping names of the dead finally expires into the silence, the axis on which she turns us with the next opening notes. Wait.

***

Inspired by and with borrowed images from the section on miniature in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

Contingency Plans

Welcoming the unexplained.

We’ve all heard and held some fixed ideas, but what is up for grabs? If it is true that there can be no knowledge of the impermanent, can we be so confident in our ideas of any knowns––or of their position in the hierarchy of seeking?

When so much is up in the air and out of the blue, these fragments of mind and their attendant doubts are percussive in the right hands, against the right drum––and the left. Handled well, they sound ovations to unknown galaxies, hidden chambers, and the neighbor on the porch.

There can be no point of reference when the point remains at large, dancing among us, the ache and the torch by which we seek, by which we chart these territories, and the greatest virtue of any map is a commitment to presenting a decidedly incomplete picture, with most of the details missing. It’s enough to read by, passing through.

***

Inspired by an introduction to the work of philosopher Hilan Bensusan.

Let There Be

Notes at twilight.

New world, lens flare: the beginning of light is the beginning of time, and who controls it moves the vision of the moment––and its form. What difference is there, at any genesis, between making space and shining into it? 

Seeking, some found light until the dark begat seeking again. A hard time for thinkers, some say, though others object. Reason’s luminescence, which progressed by co-opting fire and then the lives of those deemed fit for its fuel, can only know its debt in waning radiance.

In this twilit hour, something comes. Lurching through a forest of shadows, flickering through an expanding dark, it speaks in long silences now. Given the limits of this human form, and the limits of a word designed for pointing to a nonexistent boundary between itself and other life, only when I begin to know the fullness of my nonexistence as human can I begin to say, I am.

***

Inspired by Digital Light, ed. Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz.