Category: Perception

Alice, eat.

Overheard, between chases.

There you go again, Alice, with your rabbit. What now?

Let me guess. It’s the old question about time, and

why you can’t see it, exactly, even as it leaves traces

everywhere while this visible abundance of space makes

a mystery of itself by including the atmosphere

with no evidence to label: this. It cuts you.

You should eat something. Here. Apple slice?

This, at least, is visible. Maybe also at most.

See the lilac, its leaning posture even in rest.

Now the oak, raining leaves.

Will love save any of it? I can’t tell you, Alice.

I am not laughing at you. Okay, a little. Here,

have another slice. I know you want to know

if it’s enough, but what are you counting:

acres? Dollars? 

Look, only a machine will move in reverse.

Your question is moot, muted by necessity

of movement between stations and the

fact that you are still hoping for a chance

to erupt from this constellation of endings

into a singular, magnificent bloom.

Light Sickness

Unprotected by shadow.

Madness is vision unregulated,

constant sight without ceasing.

Revelation without the refreshment

of blindness can only debilitate.

The continuity is unbearable.

To love and lose, again and again.

And yet, we madly want

this madness.

***

Inspired by Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day (trans. Lydia Davis).

Diving in the Desert

Metaphor and unknowns.

The space between fiction and nonfiction is often a no-man’s land, but the artists know it. Which is to say, they have become accustomed to its strangeness. Which is to say, accustomed to not claiming to know anything about a space so wild. 

Now it is dense to the point of opacity, now translucent. Now deep dives under desert waves, now a barren ocean. Now the weather is a cat. 

We asked one, what is your work about? When they were done laughing, they told us. It is about encounters with other people, they said. And water. Also, the search. For water, and for the others. In some places, both are elusive.

***

Inspiration: While considering the work of Ivan Vladislavić,  I came across this article: “Diving the Reef: Water Metaphors in the Work of Ivan Vladislavić” and today’s post sprouted from my notes.

For the Time Being

The volume of shadows.

Two trees, one real enough to be seen, another seen well enough to last the length of a dream. But neither can ever become real. This from Hannah Arendt, and now the alarm can’t wake me.

The sun is visible one moment and then less so in another but indicates nothing of sorrow or regret. It offers shadow. We see by the shadows. We measure them. Once, someone considered their lengths, prone to stretch and collapse, and asked, what do they mean? A decision was made. These mean Time.

Numbers were assigned to the lengths, etcetera, etcetera–– but some of us here, so often delayed as measured against a standard pace, retain some skepticism about these systems. Of their presumed inviolability, a separate matter from their usefulness.

Trees cast long shadows and are associated with knowledge and wisdom, and yet standard practice rejects the idea of arboreal sentience. In a world bent on speed, stillness so often gets mistaken for stupidity.

But only in stillness do certain questions show up. What is the length of the water on a face, bearing witness to the beginning or the end of a life? And the volume of this shadow of the solitary pilgrim on the long road in late afternoon? 

I still don’t know. But speech is an act of making concessions. Consider the first lessons of any language not inherited. Standard practice begins with the basics for moving through a landscape: Hello. My name is. What time is it? It is an o’clock. How are you?

The last of these is the least amenable to explanatory language, wanting only touch and smell and song.

***

I came across Arendt’s words in an epigraph to Ann Lauterbach’s Spell. My italicized presentation in the opening lines is a paraphrase.

A video reading of this post appears here.

Staking a Claim

With cat and other creatures.

I was going to make a grand announcement.

A proclamation!

A natural doubter, I knew I had to earn the right.

I thought it would help to learn some things.

I learned that I lacked patience.

One day, after years of preparation, the shimmering moment arrives, and I am ready to stake my most credible claim on a final silence. I accept, sort of. In the end, this will have the last word. Still, I want to stick around for the conversation as long as possible. 

This morning, in a sort of interim silence that was not without the noise of pipes and a washing machine and car doors, I notice that the cat makes a muted mew in her sleep. It is unlike her other sounds.  

I have a sense the cat knows many things, traveling as she often is, between here and the hereafter where she stores her other lives, among the other lives of what must be an immense congregation of creatures, and wouldn’t it be something to be in that church, hearing?

Whatever they are, the cat has yet to announce. She holds her silence and I hold my flimsy patience in midair with the posture of someone who has just forgotten why they entered a room. 

Lines of Inquiry

Ancestries in spacetime.

The children of Time and Space had questions. These were about certain unknowns and uncertain knowns.

For example. Does this blind spot have to do with the invisible time in known spaces, or with the unseen spaces in measured time? 

Well, one of us sighed. I guess you never really know your parents.

Space seemed to be always smoothing her voluminous skirts, welcoming us into her lap or brushing us off, laughing. When she stormed, she raged and we hid, but our shelters were only deeper folds of her. 

Time was off somewhere. Running, she said. We wondered if he would come back, and she laughed a quake to cut the earth outside the window. When the dust settled, we would hide there, too.

Survey of Poetry

With cephalopod.

I mean to tell you about the artist whose paintings, according to some, have a brittle, airy alloverness. How insistent they were, melancholy like the memories of a landscape.

I am thinking about the way that every human eye has a blind spot. How the blind spot, instead of appearing as a black dot in the vision field, is conveniently filled by a process of extrapolation, based on visual information at the border regions.

Taking a break from the paintings, I notice someone at the fountain, playing guitar. I would like to tell you about the poetic arc of the neck, leaning over the instrument, the taut curve of intention.

But I am distracted by thoughts of cephalopods. I have recently read about Otto, the six-month-old octopus at the Sea-Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, who was caught juggling hermit crabs. Otto was known to rearrange the contents of his tank to, as the aquarium director put it, “make it suit his own taste better.” Otto made international news for short circuiting the aquarium’s electrical system several nights in a row. It turns out he had learned to turn out the light above his tank by squirting water at it. It seems he did not care for the light. 

Octopus have eyes like ours, but no blind spot.  

Each arm has a mind of its own, unobstructed by central control. And now I cannot stop thinking about this looming intelligence of the sea, how when we’re not reminding ourselves to fear its presence, we are replacing it with a cartoon caricature. 

I want to talk about the art of this cephalopod, the poetry of its symphony of intelligent parts in motion. But between this blind spot and the limits of my language, I cannot take it in.

***

Otto’s story is available here (to Telegraph subscribers). I found it in James Bridle’s Ways of Being––Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence.

Signs of Life

What trembles.

Consider all this a precursor, the artist was saying, to work in another medium. I wanted to begin with some questions, she told us. I was talking to a friend, she said, as I am now––and the friend, these friends, had certain questions. These questions encouraged me, she told us. To keep looking, you know. With these hands. 

I was trying to make something, to see it. There is a way to thread a map of layered memories so that knots are formed at the points of collision. There is a way to see the knots as what hold the web together. 

Of course, they won’t hold still, so it is not clear yet, but I can see how the tendrils of these maps might thread together, suspended in ropy intricacy as though in branches above us. How we might assemble beneath the canopy, looking up. 

It would be so much that we would have no choice but to return to a preverbal state with sounds and textures and smells and a sense of being in one place expanding out and then back between carryings, and no one can ever describe what happens in this state, when the tremble of memory is soul.

Before Seeking

What hides.

What makes the running child in an everlasting dream suddenly slow at the base of a breath, to crouch here, beneath a rib? It is a passing shadow. It is not unlike hunger or pain, but it is neither, exactly. 

To the child, it is not unlike the uncanny feeling of seeing someone familiar wearing the changed face of a stranger, and this is cause for stark concern, like nightfall at midday. 

So, the child waits here, crouching behind a rib, until it passes. The child waits for a long time. Naturally, they continue to think, this will pass. Naturally, they whisper comforting phrases while waiting. Like one day. Like when it is safe. Like ever after.

Nobody’s Defense

Testimony at sea.

When the officials came to demand my history, I pointed to the sea. She had the only enduring record, I told them, of our bodies, our wrecks, the wreckage we endured, our ancestors.

Did we call it known, once? Ask her. Did we know our first breaths through gills, and before this, much thinner membranes? When each of us was a single cell, did we imagine that this would make us invisible one day to our later selves–– or were such concerns trivial beside some vastness of knowing–– or was nothing too small to be named?

When the officials came to demand my measurements, I said, keep your instruments and I will keep swimming in this saving ignorance, in the margins of your marked territories. 

When the officials moved toward me, I said, friends, you are welcome, too. Anyone can be taught by the twilight and by the other transparent creatures known to glow.