What calls in response.
Consider a cornucopic mind,
tumbling out into its own
collapse
while gestational stars
assemble before first light
in light of other known principles
for living
––challenge, adaptation, change,
and how these forms grow by
call and response, into what will
persist when life is threatened,
and then try to hold some
stable notion of time.
Whose watch
is the reference?
The knowing unknowing of stormy hearts.
The Doctor says, look at these images, notice the noise and chaos at the heart, the lacy kinks of energy, bubbling near the buzz at the center.
What’s buzzing?
A black hole with the mass of four billion suns.
[ ]
What are these glowing filaments around it?
Each is a hundred light years across, the Doctor explains. Then leaves.
What does a body on this planet even make of a century of light years?
––rather, this body. I suspect cats already understand, along with whales.
In my case, there’s an instinct to set the idea aside, like I do with some mail I don’t intend to open. How about a cat’s eye nebula, or even the eye of Jupiter? Violent storm that it is, at least someone can point to it and say “there,” pretending to wear knowledge like a child playing dress-up in costume jewelry.
But there it is again, this veiled center, this electrical storm not unlike the beating of a heart, a sound we prefer to imagine as gentle and distant, a low murmur, like the now-dated images of galaxies as soft clouds of distant jewels and floating lights, swirling in slow motion like the mobile above an infant’s crib.
***
Inspired by (and borrowing phrases from) this article in yesterday’s New York Times: An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way
Toasting the iceworm.
With snow falling
too much
in some regions
and in others not enough,
a question of what’s next
to
melt
from permafrost
hangs
like a verdict
not yet delivered,
also, certain doubts––related maybe,
about what’s left
to be exposed
about the trajectory
of history
if that’s what
we’re still calling it,
so now seems like as good a time as any
to pay
homage
to the iceworm,
crawling through
glacial snows
and over ice,
eating the red of
sun cups, and melting
when traces of winter
depart. These are not
to be confused
with the army project
of the Cold War, its launch
sites under Greenland ice,
not to be confused with the
great worms
of legend heard
playing
beneath the northern
lights, near
the entry point
***
Inspired by news of the Cordova Iceworm Festival, which begins today.
The U.S. army project referenced above was nicknamed Project Iceworm.
Tracing lines of exile and return, from and to ourselves.
When we first moved into nature, we called it only looking, as with mirrors, but it’s one thing to know this and another to decide to be some deviation from the atmosphere. Ancient builders, considering the return of certain dreams, had sense enough to use the shadows cast by upright poles as tracing lines for temple architecture.
What made the created world less natural than, say, the beehive? On the one hand, maybe it was hubris, but it might have also been the practice of hoarding, to a degree not unlike the mythical cave dragons, those other anomalies.
The question lives in oscillation, tracing celestial lines of sight and we stand, sometimes still as solstices and just as briefly, before pulling back the orbital bodies of our dominion just when they seem to be slipping forever beyond our grasp, and the offerings that follow tend to synchronize with the rise and declination of the countless hidden orbs of shattered once-whole light that some say broke on arrival, leaving a legacy of singular purpose: find it––and this is shrouded, too.
Matters of perception.
Regarding certain questions of form and matter, an old, wise one observes, beyond earshot, there’s no joy in what doesn’t exist. Meaning certain illusions, such as righteous selves, but these are too busy saving to hear. Who else is saving? There’s a dragon somewhere in one of those caves, guarding what some would call fortune, but there’s another myth.
Imagination is another thing, a vital series of high-powered lenses for seeing what the naked eye, long dulled by resignation, will commonly miss, especially in moments read as ordinary time and especially in moments of crisis, where matters of life and death are prone to changes of direction before reaching orbital velocity.
I wanted to know more, so asked. The wise one said, it doesn’t matter, and then waited until we were both done laughing. Then said, Beware hallucinations of rote perception. Sight without surrender is only illusion. Then we kept watch together until we were both done cracking up. Our eyes were wet when we parted, washed into a state of fleeting and magnificent clarity.
***
The observation, “There is no joy in what doesn’t exist” comes from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation
Contending with a shapeshifter.
Some qualities of some visible bodies
––form, size, weight––are supposed
to belong to them even when they are
not sensed, by cultivated habits of
mind, creating certain illusions of
fixity. And yet
being has never been sensible––
or, for that matter, some thing,
and so many are terrified by
its/ not its evasion of form.
An old sleight of hand: make
a thing of what is/not, in order
to pretend control over what
moves too well for naming.
What we stash to save beyond selves.
This morning, I read that chickadees make it through the winter by eating through a stash of eighty-thousand seeds they hide during warmer months, and if I put my keys anywhere but on the ledge by the door I will be at a loss and probably late.
There are different categories of memory, say cognitive ecologists, and this one is spatial. What is mine, then? It’s not spatial, nor is it numbers. I rarely have the right fact at the right time. Impressions, I have plenty. I remember the images, sounds, and sudden sensations that stopped me. The lilting laughs and mannerisms of departed loves, near-strangers included, the dimples in a former toddler’s chubby hand. I return to these only to be stopped again and again. From a lens of individual survival, this penchant toward becoming increasingly porous with each piercing recollection seems the opposite of useful.
It’s no effort at all to harvest cache upon cache of opportunities to grieve, to return to what is lost, and I’m hardly alone in this. Perhaps this is the best adaptation of our species, this enforced stoppage, this innate entanglement.
We make music after death to sustain the living, our elegies like bridges reaching for the land of the dead, so that we are never fully in ourselves, but always reaching, from and to how many points? None of which seems essential for any one of us, and all of which complicate and tighten the weave of this larger forever netting, holding us, somewhere beyond the spatial Here to hear something else.
Because of this, any one of us can say to another, Remember This, and by this sacrament maintain some subtle evasion beyond death’s inevitable hand. It will get us each when the last winter comes, but not before we go around stashing parts of ourselves away in the living, remember.
What may flower.
What blooms in the desert blooms quickly
from seeds that have learned how to wait.
There’s a well in the heart of this city
with buckets of quiet. Drink.
Remember when we mourned the last
eagles, and our grief refused to quit?
When they circle again, we stand at
the living brink, whispering Rain.
To sing, chirp, breathe.
What do you call a spring without birdsong? Carson wondered and the answer was dying. Without this symphony, sentience itself is suspect. Sing, shriek. Chirp. The people who knew before genocide called what moved here holy wind. All breath, all spirit, all soul.
It is something, isn’t it, to live when a common descriptor of our common malaise involves the need to get away and breathe. Where is away, then? When everyone’s chest is aching, there is a silent agreement: don’t mention it. Is it true that a wolf can smell a body’s feelings, or is it only fear that scents?
If we were the gods of the people who once listened, we could turn ourselves into wolves and know. Take the flight of raptors, stretching our sights. Assume the bodies of dolphins and realize our depths. We could hear an octopus cry, taste its tears, dance with urchins, and let the lamprey finish our sentences.
Then we might know breath again, the word meaning life. Meaning, duration of a moment; a short time; a movement of free air. Air, meaning the invisible everywhere, ether of arias, current of hymns.
Reading the honorable dispatch.
See this tree-lined walk, snow framed beneath the red brick. Notice the tower, the arch. Hear this presidential address: honor society, an array of diversity, equity, inclusion. Notice the right words in appropriate places.
Want evidence? See this picture! Don’t miss our greens, our greenhouse, and We Are Going Green. Dedication! Concert! Debut!
We cut the ribbon. A trio of new sculptures in the courtyard. The renovated center. Award, fellowship, title, win! Our success rates. Recognition, honor, inaugural event! Homecoming.
Last, in memoriam. Here are the latest dead. See their photos, all smiling. Notice their honors, connections, advanced degrees. They are survived. We remember. Dates. Pay no attention to the missing. We look forward to an exciting year ahead!
I remember the tower bell, how it would sound on the hour, the expansive flood of its knell. Impossible, even if you kept talking through it, not to notice the suggestion, at least, of what was infinitely more vast and ancient than the oldest historic building––in the air we gushed, the land we rushed over, the silences between each proclamation.
*
Inspired by the pile of mail I’ve been meaning to go through, in which I found my alumni magazine. It’s a beautiful publication for a wonderful school, but I always feel a little funny about opening it, probably for reasons similar to the trepidation one feels around reunions. One’s life never quite fits into an update. One never quite feels quite “arrived” enough. Sensing that I must not be alone in this discomfort, I decided to read it here.
