Category: Wonder

Freeze Frame

Thoughts on a runaway train.

Now might be time for some realignment, someone says, regarding some speculation as to whether the moment at hand is coextensive with the time since the last ice age, or something of another order entirely, and didn’t Kant observe something awhile back about the gravity of the gravitational calculations that led to the radical separation between the human observer and the Nature he observes, and here we are, full circle or full ellipse, inside the fullness that someone might stop and measure, in a time when the fate of man and nature are again joined––since the moment the steam engine made the muscle of man or his mule no longer a natural limit for what he might do, where he might do it, and with what relentlessness, or since the moment that the soil was first irradiated by the bomb, since the explosion of acceleration of speed, people, pathologies, pollutants, possible beginnings and ends and alternative trajectories of being, but where in this blur of runaway objects emitting time does a body jump off to look, and what are the odds of landing in earth soft enough to break the fall?

***

Inspired by an observation by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, that “We are being exposed . . . to a catastrophe of meaning . . . Let us remain exposed and let us think about what is happening to us. Let us think that it is we who are arriving, or are leaving.” In After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

Windows

The fractured sky.

Glaziers mark to frame the squinting eye, here is what a sky becomes when you wake to the way the moon was always there beside the sun and inside a kaleidoscope of parallel heavens: now blue, now crimson, now slate, now yellow, each breaking into the next, and yet––instead of falling, it holds.

***

Inspired by the stained-glass sky collages of photographer Alex Hyner, as described here.

Nonlinear Equations

Exercises in conversion.

Translate fragility. One part the substance that allows anything to exist and another part the accident of its coherence.

Translate explosion. The wavering world collapses.

Translate yourself. I am. I am not myself.

Calculate the distance between the essence of the thing and its appearance. Assume a rift between two sides of a coin. Now assume the rift collapses. Calculate the length of time between distortion and consistency.

If x is a mortal wound and y may alternately represent either the why of an object’s existence or its possible death, what is the circumference of xy^2? 

Show your work.

***

Inspiration: Timothy Morton’s “Magic Death” again, in Realist Magic: Objects Ontology, Causality. This post is not intended as an accurate representation of Morton’s ideas, which are worth reading in the philosopher’s own words. 

Where Art Happens

With Allan Kaprow.

Here’s an idea: painting as performance, art as ritual. The focus shifts from the object to the process of creation. Against commodification––of all objects, here is an act of resistance.

After a long illness, the unreachable, maddening, metaphysical itch. It points to some connection with the art, but why? The finality of form, some speculate, casting it tragic. But look again. Notice the balance in these compositions. Unable to step back from the work, the artist is in it.

This is not a painting, but an environment; not the caged pheasant, observed at some remove, but the deafening scream of all beings in cages. If the price of admission into art’s space is surrender of distance, the loan of consciousness, then only a participant may observe. When this happens, there are no free hands left for clutching any claims of objectivity, and there is nothing to do but leave these scattered on the floor like the debris from the blown-out fourth wall. 

***

In honor of the birthday of artist Allan Kaprow, (1927-2006), I spent some time with his 1958 essay On the Legacy of Jackson Pollack. Kaprow is known as a pioneer of performance art who staged many one-time immersive events, or “Happenings” which were inspired, at least in part, by Kaprow’s interpretation of Pollack’s legacy. The caged pheasant is a reference to this 1956 Kaprow painting.

Bardo

Death and the high notes.

A matter if tuning: the singer to the frequency of glass, the virus to its host, death as the explosion of a vase. Contents of the vase move inside out, and no distinction remains. 

Before the glass shatters, it shudders. If you watch in slow motion, you’ll see it. To be moved deeply by what is well-tuned is to be on the verge of breaking into pieces until there is no longer a body to break.

***

Notes while reading Timothy Morton’s Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. 

Window Mirrors

These growing beyonds.

An old problem: how to phrase 

the far-away steeples. 

How to abandon a conversation 

made of one part memory 

and the other projection?

Which time is it now, the world 

of memory or the procession 

of days marching to the iron-fisted clock? 

What grows beyond the window over there, 

and who has a mirror? 

Let’s shine it by the opening buds, a signal 

to ourselves and our aboves: 

Look, here.

***

The opening line references Marcel Proust’s recollection of the twin steeples of Martinville. 

Lovers in Time

A triptych.

In the land where time is a circle, I meet you again and again, always with a rush of recognition–– the lilting wave that beckons hello, stranger. It seems I have known you before, and each time I lose you, it is with the shocking pain of the first cut.

In the land where time is water, a tiny rivulet of this becoming will sometimes turn backstream, and any creatures, debris, soil, falling branches, or conversations will find themselves suddenly in the past.  In this world, we know even after our most recent reunion, of the loss that comes next, because we learned this when we lived in the land where time was a circle.

In another world, two times exist concurrently. One is mechanical, its form a massive pendulum of iron, back and forth. The other is of the body, bodies, the body of the living planet and its teeming forms. It squirms, wiggles . . .  makes its mind up as it goes along. Most reject one or the other form of time. But the worlds have a way of colliding. The collision tends to create a desperate state, because everybody knows that you can make a world in one or another time but not both. This is because each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

***

This morning, while waiting for the coffee to brew, I was delighted to discover Einstein’s Dreams, a slim novel by Alan Lightman, hiding in plain sight on a bookshelf. Although I do not remember buying this book, it is easy for me to imagine why I would have wanted to, upon learning that the premise is based on a series of dreams that the young scientist had before arriving at his theories of relativity.  I wrote today’s post while reading the opening twenty pages of the book, using three of the worlds Lightman describes. Italicized phrases are Lightman’s.

Looking Up

With Dorothea Klumpke Roberts.

Since Cain slew Abel, she considered hers a threefold role: mother, priestess, aide. Faithful service to each has meant time spent gazing up to question the sun, moon, and stars in concert with the evolving hour at hand––not as objects or territories to be conquered or subdued, but with the reverence and awe she comes to hold as original truths. Her wish: to be a living torch, bearing these, that tomorrow’s children might see and be awed in turn. To look as she does, it will be impossible for them not to feel the moral impact of the moment and be awed by all that is and may yet be.

***

Today is the birthday of groundbreaking astronomer Dorothea Klumpke Roberts (1861-1942). This post is composed of ideas and images from a 1919 article she published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, “Woman’s Work in Astronomy.”

Nets

To catch and release, in good company.

Imagination loves a circle, perhaps because these are hooped like fishing nets for catching the galaxies swimming ever wider, above and below us. 

Friend, help me remember to let whatever knowns I manage to forage keep company with the wildly proliferating abundance of unnamed and undiscovered worlds suspended like invisible solutes in this glass and scattered like weeds along the walkway and around the floor like loose socks and cat fur, and in the back of cabinets like forgotten condiments long past their moment, so that I might continue to discover that behind the bright surfaces of the best I have found, these underbellies still dark with silence. 

It will be good to walk together and return them, tossing wide arcs into the turbulent waters of these sacramental tides everlasting though ordinary time, that each temporary finding may rediscover it’s secret affinities in those depths. What a process, to bear a human heart from its bottomless nowhere to its forever paths, each crashing an infinity with the next wave––out, out, out.

Waters

In the intertidal zone.

After time and weather have eroded a vision to sand, its attendant body may be found standing with wet feet in the remains, facing the invisible tide. There is substance here, too, but no name. We pour our loaded attempts to define it into the sea and she absorbs them, one after another metaphor, including this one now, until it becomes possible to say that the one with their feet at the edge of a lapping wave is actually long gone, adrift––waving, or not, and we hold cupped hands above our eyes, saying back and forth, Look, look out there, squinting.