Category: Perception

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.

The Visitors

Calling with matters of life and death.

The round bird call was constant. Its audience would no sooner hush life than they would have thought to banish death. These creatures tended to hide when we approached, as some children are cautious after being abruptly silenced, in the crouching way that the banished will learn to move.

It was rare that we heard her full song, and just as rare to witness the extravagant leaps and turns of her dance, the revelation of her full plumage something she had learned to save for the shadows.

And yet she would emerge sometimes, with the upright carriage of a dancer, to find us in our own reflections at the water’s edge, barely listening, as was our custom. With a deft fingertip she would nudge the temples, saying look up. 

Go, she would say. Go to the babies and hold them, for they are like us, too.

What Counts

On seasonal records.

1.

I’d love to tell you, but the words become ghosts, choking intention. 

2.

Once, they showed their insides, breaking open. 

3.

Meaning tends to expand at the site of the cut.

4.

The next attempt reminds: what is necessary is also impossible.

5.

The space after time’s vanishing has a way of losing its contours.

6.

To compensate, you can try cross-mapping histories to create an architecture of memory.

7.

Now we are inside the stones, now we are their erosion.

8.

By exposing matter, you can revisit its secretive nature. Some colors don’t happen in paint.

9.

The synapses around a single sentence can curl a face into the face of another time.

10. 

We pierced the soft flesh of old monuments. 

11.

A child makes bricks of debris, each block a memory.

12.

If each of these haystacks is another time of day, seeing is what happens between them.

***

Inspired by Monet’s Haystacks.

Intimate Unknowns

A brief encounter.

It was a single date, but memorable.

Who wears a watch anymore? he quipped, except if you are trying to impress.

He was referring to the old watches that just did time. 

Laughing as they entered the restaurant, she removed her coat to reveal a dress made of old watches.

What is this? he asked. 

She had her reasons. It’s been a week of dark dreams, she told him, and she was done with fighting them off. They are creatures too, these memories. She supposed they just needed a home.

Now nervous, he tried to make light. So, do you have the time?

I have all the time in the world, she replied. Take your pick. Every watch was set to a different time.

Suddenly, he remembered something he had to do. There was no time to explain, he told her. Urgent business, he said. So sorry!

She waved as one does from upper deck of an ocean liner at departure, smiling.

What followed was a beautiful meal.

***

Inspired by an encounter with this reference to L. Mylott Manning’s Kiss the Dark.

Feats of Becoming

In mythic memory.

In the days when we knew forms were only provisional, you called Leap! at the sight of the next star. Our metamorphic world buzzed with a panorama of possible and the hours were a cyclic series of somersaults.

We read by the myth from inside its closed shell, unlike the heavy-headed beachcombers trying to recover something lost. From inside, we dissolved selves well enough to forget our tired, temporary names and donned instead originals of dark dimension. In these we splashed back to the undergrounds where the Mothers knew us, to restore the old tales to their first beginnings. We chased the slivering prints of angels’ bare feet to catch them only long enough that they would whisper again the small verse assigned to each of us. This one is yours to bring forth, they told us, one at a time.

In dawn’s purple flame, the branching capillaries of eons swelled our skins, and Time’s wild clowning made us know ourselves at once alive and dead, ending and beginning, never and again. By this light, the world’s creatures seemed to know us, looking back as though waiting to be named.

The Edge of Water

Pulled from the stream.

When the veil slips against this grip against the fire of high noon, and there’s no recourse but to take in the full face of a day’s madness, no words can help me bear it, each too round unto itself, biting its tail. 

I slipped into the stream again, dead weight at your shoulder, the nebulae of closed eyes until the saving tongue of salt lime chased my veins back into themselves and you shone me a remedy. 

The words go on biting their tails. None can help me bear this love, when only the living will do.