Category: Perception

Mind, Gap

Life as story and the body of work

Test, label, claim. Lose again. Markings on a page. Carry on, eating through the next one, in bedraggled astonishment. Fold after fold, brain after the pattern of its existence. The brain a character in the story we tell. About ourselves. Every story we tell a story about ourselves. Or the brain is the story, depending on point of view.

Bodies. What problematic texts you are, with your endless contradictions and shifting parts. At every turn, you are at best barely contained and forever deconstructing your own perimeters to devour some other body in constant rewrite.

Body in Time

One, two, one again.

Sure, I am interested in keeping time. Who isn’t? But there has to be more to it than clocks. I can lose a clock, or the clocks can go all wrong, and then what? I will not even keep my body, and yet. As long as I am of the keeping kind, it is where I hold the world. 

Sometimes I dream of knowing the world through other bodies. That I am a bird, for example, or whale, spider, tree. Of course, I do not know what it is to experience the world in these bodies. I can only imagine. If I ever did know, I suppose I had to give that awareness back, too.

Perhaps my first body is imagining. I cannot seem to keep myself. From asking, how did this happen? And when will? Or was, and then back again trying to collect some lingering residue of what, like the scent of a lover, is then gone. 

The bower bird, to draw a mate, collects. Some make arrangements of blue rocks, blue buttons, cerulean feathers, chipped glass. Here is a keeping kind, too. I seem only ever tethered to this place by what I try to hold, even as I am aware that the point, they say, is letting go. 

It is an easy thing to say––just let it go! But I think that we are so made for holding that the only way to know whatever insight might be held in this reminder is by drawing what will be released so close that it is married to your next breath, and on exhalation, finding that what flies is less air than essential limb, less tired past than the future hope you meant to breathe the next breath. And then what? No one goes around saying Just let yourself go!––with the same enthusiasm, and yet. 

I’ve lost it again, lost the thread and probably myself and all that follows is another opening, another chance to hold and one less limb to do it with, and this sense that the constant act for me may be keeping and I will not keep up.

Seeing Paul

And a language of love

I was reading Paul Celan in the season of coming into awareness of a need for glasses but not yet seeing the full picture (!) so I kept having these delightful misreadings which were less graceful than what he said but somehow more intimate, like the poetry of glances between secret lovers in a crowded room while everyone else is speaking in very matter-of-fact tones. Instead of cavity awake, I read sanity sneakers, and not heartstorm but heartstream, and not blessed but bleeded, and in a sentence about libraries, I saw beaks, not books, like Oh Paul, you imp, I see you, winking back, and then when I got the glasses there was a moment of trepidation before I opened his collection, because maybe after all that winking and innuendo of double meanings in a room crowded with strangers we would find ourselves alone with frank expressions and nothing much to say, like how he looks on the cover with eyes that seem to be daring the would-be speaker to break the silence of that pause, and it turns out that the words I’ve been reading as whispers have been in larger letters all along, not whispers at all but a normal tone like two people sitting in a room full of space and regular furniture even though everyone knows about the bodies interred in the cellar walls and when that happens what do you even talk about anyway that can do any justice to the naked fact of being the only other person in a room and all that human baggage? This is why it is no small relief to see, in a line about hands, that the speaker still calls what he is doing arrowing with you. (!) And why I close the book and stop there for the day and hold the thought like Oh Paul. How did you–––?

The Consultants

Moonlit expertise

There was a group we would see at night by the river. We wanted to know what they did there. If it was nothing good, as everyone said, we still wanted to know, but how? One night we went to see for ourselves. With blue-shadowed feet they danced the shores to pieces, and we woke in our beds and went back the next night to see why? and they explained that they were seeking out the marrow of the river stone and to our question on for what? they said to talk. There was a precision to their foolishness. This, we recognized.  These were definitely not the ones you called if you had a question about calculations having to do with variable rates but could tell you in the space of a single breath the minutes until daybreak or the number of feathers needed to make a heart on the ground the size of your head, and whether when you are done it will even fit, and how to go about attaching it. 

Nonsigns

And insignificances

I used to think that I might learn myself into some authority. With that, I might point, insisting look, look! In looping response to a constant call. This and this, on and on, beyond divisions or classifications, or orders of being, or causes as something other than effects. 

My natural response was to melt away from authority, preferring to drip into hollows and wells, to be among those strange strangers where the dominant discourse, such as it was, was guided by a compass of laughter, silence, body, and song.

What home was that, pulling our constant whirls back for mealtimes of melodic banter, brimming with every former and future self? It avoided our gaze while seeing us, into and through.