Month: March 2024

To Move the Stone

Into light.

Like the fine dust of the nearest moon,
its footprints to prove that even stone carries
within its stubborn mass the key to lightness.

Like the magnetic field that holds it upright
spinning days and nights against its body.
These sudden leaps against its weight––
these secrets that will not be summoned
––only met.

As the bird and not the feather, unseen
amid glare and muted by noise––nested
by the patient weavers’ nets of threads
to catch the fallen nothings where they
float––

As masked dancers beneath surveillance
states, limbs stretched against compressed
space to tread the arcing thread taut
between the spikes of barbed gates––

And soaring, inside the empty vessel
of my cupped hands lifting
where I reached them up to you
to catch me back, the waters
of this heavy form.

Reflections in Water

And the telling, slant.

My favorite detail about Perseus other than his winged horse has to do with the delicacy with which he handled that severed Gorgon head, taking care not to scratch or rough the head by grainy sands, how he thought to place it on a bed of leaves, then sea plants, how this act birthed coral. 

I am reminded by Calvino, who in an age for questioning the fate of books, considered a related question of weight, and made a case for lightness. Only the reflected image allows for the presentation of what may be revealed only indirectly.

I am reminded by Moses, pleading let me see your face to God on the mountain, and God like, no but here is my backside and no doubt the frisson of such an encounter with the hind-parts of divinity is the highest achievement of any art.

How else does a winged horse emerge from Gorgon blood? By what other arrangement but such delicacy can the stomp of a single hoof draw water from stone and invite muses to drink? Where they gather to admire the horse, its beautiful wings.

Always wings, always the mountaintop. The nearness to sky, to flight. The weight of being is weight enough. Only the image––or better, song––can pulse across space, soaring.

I hope so. Let us not, before it comes, be crushed the accumulated weight of the dust of ourselves rubbled in the making and unmaking empires, those heaviest of forms.

***

Notes while reading the opening of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Perception Problems

And the chase.

With everyone going around asking what is going on here, I decided to take the question to the oracle, who was just starting to move out of her third or fourth morning nap. She was nonchalant, grooming her back fur while keeping an eye on the birds outside. Call it a crisis of perception, she said. As an advanced being, she is tolerant––but only barely––of some of my neophyte questions. I suppose the point is humility, so have learned to persist.

Look, she says. You all talk about signs of the times, but you have a momentum problem when it comes to reading them. Some of your so-called ancient minds (here she laughed) may be useful to your kind now. Take that guy Euripides, for example. In one of my earlier lives, I would visit him in his cave. It was home to a sizable rodent population, so it was a win-win. Plus, he had a terrific beard. 

Then she went back to grooming, assuming the point to be made. As always, I must implore her to elaborate. A magnanimous oracle, she usually does. She is referring to his idea that the movements of a moment can be traced to the ebb and flow of two essential forces, love and hate. Plus, the fact of what chases both. Love in its infancy is easy prey for fear, and this feeds its primary opposite. Which is never sated.

Anything else? She asked, looking bored. Let me know when you get around to something interesting. 

I couldn’t resist. I had to ask her how she knew. The look that followed seemed especially calculated to remind me of my stunning ignorance.  

You are asking me how I know about chasing? 

At this point, she returned her gaze to the birds. Mine followed. 

Artifact

And drift.

A body gets to asking of itself sometimes, what am I? And what can I say of this other, before me? Scents offer one set of answers, measurements offer others. There are those that reject measurements as crude in favor of the more nuanced explanation, but their explanations tend to point consistently to the calendar which selects and arranges into chronological order––defaulting, in the end, to measurement by another name. 

This raises more questions. Such as, what about duration? Types of this quality will vary according to kind and not all kinds translate easily into the common currency of solar time. Consider the range of gravitational fields in the cosmos, how time varies according to mass. Then there are the varying life intervals between species. And what of souls, which are characterized as having beginnings but not ends?

As a questioning body, I am naturally pulled to return to the known pattern of my form even as I am drawn to fly from it. I feel like an old something, newborn. I do not quite cohere to myself always and have often felt the nearness of evaporation of my assembled matter into some wider vastness I dare not name. 

I have been grateful to discover that certain rituals have adhesive properties, so I try to use these when I practice flight and grounding, so as not to lose or shatter myself completely. Without them, who knows what I could get myself into? To be sure, the unknowing persists just as thoroughly with ritual. But there are sticking places for the edges of a body, to hold. 

***

These are some odd notes made while reading George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962, Yale University Press).

Phantom Lines

Writing with zombies.

Am trying to remember something of weight, but there is too much memory and not enough mass in me to hold it down. It has always been like this. A landscape to echo with ghosts. I chase the unborn story to gap the river where I run from where form became content and then the content of a drawer, then a server somewhere. In this temporary light I’d like to trace a moment well enough to land the flight of contents back to form. I crave order too, but pretense angers. Same with heads in the sands of running time and the cloying sweet of certain seeming niceties, which from where I stand tend to have the effect of sticking to the otherwise transparent bodies of ghosts around here until they are ghosting around looking gaudy and ridiculous in candy pinks with spun-sugar hair and sequined eyes. I would prefer that the ghosts at least could retain some seriousness, some biting awareness of chasm between life and death even as they blur through them. Ghosts are fine company when not costumed undead. 

Molt

From one utterance to the next.

They were symbols, sure, but don’t ask of what.
It was a restless practice of experimentation––
over time.

Here is an art seeded across generations,
its braided roots the scales of a skin
shedding itself unto a new body.

Constants

And figuring.

The work involved an intellect of spirit, but our teacher called it only love. Or nothing, as it mattered little what you called it, our teacher reminded, repeating: show your work. It was endless iterations of complex proofs, each for a simple truth. Only love. The thing about it was that its coordinates kept shifting in infinite directions, so as soon as you finished one proof, you could be sure that it no longer held because the prior constant was now something else. Go figure, the teacher told us, and meant it. Feel into weeping, carry the mess, survive the noise until arrival at some inner music. Same with smells and what is unbearable to look at. You couldn’t tell anyone what you were up to because as soon as you said the name, the meaning would vanish. It was no good explaining ourselves, so we learned not to. They called us idiots. But you can learn to nod at this kind of thing, laughing as you get back to work. No, it wasn’t satisfying, we might have corrected, if we had any inclination to answer certain questions. It was something else, that work. Always.

Plaything

Playtime with cephalopod.

They were infamously difficult to study, known to refuse the crude foodstuffs offered by scientists as offensive to their refined tastes.  For example, they would have nothing to do with frozen shrimp. These members of the phylum Mollusca were likely not what Plato had in mind when he observed that if we are the playthings of the gods, then play is the most serious thing we do. Such considerations simply were not made. To do so would be to a blasphemy of unspeakable genus. The custom, when it came to describing the creatures one preferred to dissociate from was to declare them to be incapable of thought––an interesting and even artful collection of cells and systems, patterns and even grace, but not cognition. 

It was reasoned that for these non-thinking others that were surely quite unlike ourselves, there could be no fear of death beyond instinct and therefore neither mourning nor inclination to register captivity as tragic. After all, how could a creature incapable of foresight lament the possibility that it may not return to the known world?

Among our kind, certain unknowns often register as their own justifications. We have within us a tremendous capacity to decorate our blind spots in manners suggestive of insight. 

Then an octopus was observed to gather stones at the mouth of the den that it entered, presumably to prevent the entrance of potential intruders. Foresight? Perhaps. Some scientists conceded.

Later, the scientists observed the difficult creatures in play, bouncing objects, juggling, manipulating out of curiosity––us?

The creatures were indeed capable of a great deal, but surely not that. It was declared. Studies continued.

***

Inspired by this morning’s encounter with and excerpt of David Toomey’s work in LitHub “On the Uncanny Way Octopuses Play.”

Morning

Breeze at dawn.

Red sun? The weight of grace.
Pelt of bottle caps? Dragon’s hide.
In this world? But not to know.
Come? Closer.

Next time you see this, it will have another face.
This is about the shuffling on the ground.
Take off your shoes and we will gather cloth.
For what? A revival garment to resemble time.

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