Tag: emergence

jacaranda

emergence at twilight

hand, palm, open head bowed. it was nothing & we named it believing only hunger teaches how to dream of food never tasted even if the last calorie went to the dreaming then describing to an empty room: let me tell you about the swell of it the shining memory of that exquisite fat greasing fingers lips the smell because if hearing is the last to go there may be someone there still listening even after the death of the all we risked for the never arriving meal by scar upon scar & you kept repairing mine–why–i lived with a man whose pain would cloud then sharpen vision and no one could say which it was in any moment until its aftermath which made it hard to answer simple questions like what is that thinking yes what is that really so i started calling it by unspeakable names meant to apply one day to some constant beginning like the way you taught me to say jacaranda to the purple that waved where we walked in the ordinary reverence of Tuesday late afternoons where in your skin i am smuggled from judgement to awe

point being

in the after

The point, if there is one, is to emerge. Or else, to acknowledge the emergence of something. It is possible these acts are synonymous, or that one lives inside the other. Does it matter which holds which? Likely not. Whichever it is, it won’t be fitting into that familiar template of the hero myth––having tried this one, and found it lacking, possibly deadly.

Fictions of Kind

Study of the world: views from below.

Amidst an immensity too vast for containment, one vessel’s first heresy was division. The sorting into kinds: an exhilarating project for its heroes who were––(un)naturally self-proclaimed. From their abdomens they emitted the substance of webs of significance, and from these spun stories to support conclusions about which were to be marked for life and which for death.

So here we are. And now.
But who, we? And when.

If what is to be done is freedom for all, we move to unwind the choking snake of this original heresy from its tail/tale, to return to the beginning of the Word.

Knock at a Door

Here is an invitation.

Here is no wall, but a congregation of forces in flux, and tree is a small word for the constellation of alchemies this body holds. Dense with time, here is a geometry to resist the easy abstractions of the surveilling class. It is possible, after all: to notice the grid imposed over perception and leave it; to train eyes on the invisible presence and laugh at the challenge to prove it. Here is a fluid power.

If you would be an observer, detached at some remove, it becomes possible to construct a polished opening shot with a wide angle lens to match the score, but when you are in it, all impressions immediate, the world is the sculpture you are making from the inside out, tunneling naked through each slab of clay, leaving impressions and sensing some emerging form while not knowing what it is.

Here is an invitation: come not to look, but to witness, and bear the weight of sight, the hot breath of a body in proximity. Try to extract from your life its history, but it will not be moved.  Why remain, then? Why continue, and when? A heart insists by its own measure, this echo. Come out.

Bones of the Earth

With Isamu Noguchi.

Here is a survivor whose work breathes beyond current styles, with a character all its own. Here is a wanderer, an activist, often in motion, and yet the work exudes tranquil elegance. The space from which you create is neither here nor there. It is another space.

To be part of all phenomena means that you may be anywhere, in contact with all other phenomena, means a kind of freedom that means you do not belong anywhere.

Here is an ambiguity that is conscious of its refusal to lift the veil. How can forms so carefully defined elude exact interpretation, except by design?

When asked what you are after, you say only, emergence. Perhaps you anticipate certain questions about your meaning when you decide to add, as if by way of explanation, only this: rocks are the bones of the earth.

***

Inspired by the art of Isamu Noguchi.

Fragilities

Considering emergent occasions.

Common practice refers to any “I” with consistency, but there is no monument here, only these constant aberrations. A body may be well one moment, wounded the next, then ill. Same for soul, spirit, mind, and whatever else we try attaching to this ongoing flux.

Also common, at least after a certain point, to wonder each morning, how now? Check pulse, blood pressure, eyes. Are the dark circles back? I remember the years I could not look because I knew. How cold, this seeming indifference. I was angry at her, for being so much less than solid. And possibly more, too; more than I wanted to imagine. I wasn’t myself, we commonly say, looking back on moments like this. And yet, I never asked, who are you? I never asked, how is your name? or what form shall we take, next?

We move more gently now. I check the pressure, coaxing encouragement. C’mon, I whisper, while I wait. Don’t let up. The translation might be a little prayer, some invocation to this small, quaking of tentative flesh and fluctuating fluids, to hold. We are still emerging.

***

Inspired while reading John Donne’s opening meditation in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624).

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