The Journey of the Eye

There is the overself, always there, largely frustrated, fighting against the conspiracy of time and station.  Sensitive, eyes open, the overself sees (and feels) the disequilibrium of the planet acutely.  There are the concerns of poverty and justice, overwhelming; the piercing poignancy of music and art; and the crushing familiarity with the weight of this tragedy that we see in our own lives, know in our own bodies.  Life is an awkward burden that shifts over the course of the journey.  One must stop--from time to time--to adjust, repack, retie.  And one continues--over the mountains that bleed the sunset, fording streams both languid and lascivious, crossing the androgyny of the desert, untangling the knots of the jungle, carrying on, carrying life on our backs as we track this mystery to the water's edge, to the ocean, to the chant of the waves.  An old song... 

Don't disembowel your emotions by trying to explain them.  By placing words to this music (in an attempt to articulate these landscapes of feelings), you cut out the tongue of the world.  Complexity, nuance, contradiction and context all limit the layers of experience.  In deciphering meaning, you neuter the poem.  Be careful.  Go slowly.  Leave the book open...

...to a blank page.  There is much magic in the world.  You may (think you) need words to explain this emotional state, the power and poignancy of an event or idea, but (at the same time) you KNOW you don't need them to understand it.  The feeling is there; and where this feeling remains undiluted and unpolluted by the cannibalism of words, where it is independent of one's "explanation",  the feeling is like the evolving scents that enter the head of the sleeper, quietly impacting the landscape of his dreams.  The overself aside, these are the strange and artless creatures that we are:  reality is made to order.  It is tailored to the size and shape of our senses, a specificity determined by phylum and species, boiled down in God's laboratory to one's personalized dna...

Maybe that blue is a little bit brighter for some, for others yellow might be a the broken yolk of jaundice or the fond bleaching of those photographs from childhood of summer, sweet summer.  Or the ears might tune to the rumble of thunder and water and train instead of the Bedouin calls of migrating birds.  And the nerves in the skin may find sin on the lips, the small of the back, or the back of the knees.  We are robots wired with minuet and mazurka, march and mambo, replicants who in the end are variations on a theme.