Bones and Stones

That is my intention, my obsession, here.  I want to traverse the muddy headlands of meaning, of vocabulary, and "make sense" of something.  Or, if that ambition is too much (for this late hour)--the ephemeral and mutable mots moving with the teasing and slippery grace of butterflies--I will content myself to look for bones and stones and berries to string together.  I will bead the seeds of some new language, laughing.  And I will wear the weary string around my neck.  It is enough to create patterns here.  It is enough--meaning aside--to piece together something pretty with which to decorate my naked, trembling self.

The Price of the Pearl

Being is a more congruent conceptualization of this consciousness that either mind or soul.  A fundamental dichotomy--the supposed tension between the physical and the spiritual--is disrupted by a new idea of the self, a self that integrates the instinctual, pleasure-oriented body with the creative and language-driven mind.  

This synthesized individual is the new man, and the new man bears the world on his shoulders effortlessly.  Taking under consideration the simultaneous experiences of the body and the mind and demonstrating they are not different experiences but rather the same experience conceived from different angles, being is immune to the conception of the body as a kind of prison (or temple) at odds with the amorphous "true self" that resides in the spirit or soul.  Biology,  chemistry, even physics conspire with the magic of science to topple old systems of superstition and the arbitrary division of the self from the self.  The embattled conception of who and what we are requires the sutures of a new language to reconstruct a self content with its complexity and absorbing its own contradictions.  

Like psycho-dynamic theory, dialectical materialism, and religious teaching concerning the afterlife, it is easy to see (and hunger for) a facile estimation of cause and effect.  This relationship, within the uncertainty of time, affords a certain comfort and predictability that will (at least for a while) ward off the sort of questions that lead to insomnia and indigestion.  But with the erasure of this model of "if a then b" the answers sought change; the questions themselves are immediately and essentially reframed.  For example, instead of asking where God begins and ends, where he intersects with the soul, we ask for what purpose did we creatures create the idea of creator and the idea of spirit?

So if in the updated map, soul (and mind and body) are eclipsed by the concept of being, then what residual value resides in the word "soul"?  We take as fact that soul is a simplified understanding of something genuine but we argue against each infant being imbued with said ghost at the moment of birth.  Rather, much in the same way that the clam containing a pebble or grain of sand, an irritant of some kind, will over time develop a precious pearl, the human--perplexed by the unanswerable awe for the world and for his or her consciousness--transforms fear and doubt into meaning by manufacturing its own pearl, the soul.  Here is a wholly beautiful object that serves no purpose.

The Enigma of Language

My prose exhales the mutant strain and a million microbes spread out like a flood, like a fever, finding the moist and welcoming surfaces of a viral garden.  Still lyrical, the lines are, nevertheless, a dose of  something dark, diseased, a slow poison.  My blood is rust burning; my skin is a kind of mold.  My corrosive mistrust of words infects what is said and how I say it.  

It is gravity without balance.  Half the time one clings to the delusion of precision, as if the right words--teased from the rat's nest of vocabulary--might overcome the slippery nature of "meaning."  Or, when I am feeling less committed, lazy, the disruptive futility of language overwhelms me;   better to focus on assonance, rhythm, and even rhyme, rather than pretending that (even at its most precise) words are capable of any sort of approximation of idea.  

There is that notion that "idea" itself is only the words one uses to describe it.  In this analysis, writing is the act of two gloved hands groping an object in the darkness, managing outlines, making sense of that which one's dulled fingers might, by this point, have some semblance of.  

This sounds silly when one is speaking of actual objects, after all, "a rose is a rose is a rose."  But, under the influence of either arrogance or even misguided confidence, and applied to ethereal memes such as freedom, love, or God, one gets a sense of the space between "wondering" and "knowing".  There are apparent (if not malicious) lies that allow one to abandon the prior in favor of the throne of the latter, in order to sit in the chair  of certainty.                        

Hmmmm.  A writer who does not trust himself to be clear nor his reader to be capable of understanding, a writer who conceives language not as communication so much as an amorphous cloud that both writer and reader can work on only with imagination (both parties projecting visions--by way of producing names--onto the quickly evolving cloud animals, but never knowing if the vaporous details--the elephants trunk, the horse's mane, the swan's wing--are being organized by the individual mind in the same way), such a writer operates with a handicap that effects both his pen and his tongue.

        
This is not the disease speaking; this is the malady...

Slippage

Crafted more out of some burnished expectations from another place and circumstance than out of the slightest commitment to the threatened truths variously competing to be the metamemes to underpin our future, the individually articulated theologies of the fundamentalist right forgo the traditions of tolerance and respect--indeed, of love--in favor of divisive judgment.  Such a position is typical of a simplistic world view.  And unfortunately--digestible by the emotions of the id--these are self-perpetuating, rapidly expanding perspectives.  They are the weeds of philosophy crowding out and supplanting calm reason in favor of the contentious superiority of their heretical hatred. 

By seeing their conversion and their faith as evidence of their special relationship with the divine--their blessedness--the true believers are able to justify and rationalize their own behavior while stridently condemning that of those they perceive to be outside of the covenant.  These believers define the parameters of their community to the exclusion of others so as to emphasize their own exceptionalism.  Among the elect, they are above criticism;  they see their purpose as higher giving them broad authority in both private and public spheres. 

In fairness, while focused on Christian fundamentalism, this assemblage of words could just as easily call out Islam, NeoPaganism, or Atheism.  While the hypocritical abandonment of the most basic tenets of Jesus' ministry makes evangelical Christian dogma a special case, the alignment of any one of these belief systems with arrogance, defensiveness, and certainty make them all subject to this malady.  Without curiosity and humility, we lose both humanity and empathy.  This narrowing of the gaze, while not without a kind of protective comfort, skews one's vision of the world.  It shrinks not only who we allow others to be but also who we are capable of being.  The invention of "meaning" and the confidence that comes with an individual's subscription to some personally extracted version of belief gives foothold to "difference", and thus to division and hate.

Paul Verlaine Reads Me and I Spit His Words Back in His Face

"What have you done, O, you that weep
In the glad sun,---
Say, with your youth, you man that weep,
What have you done?"

P. Verlaine

I Rebut

O man,

with your weep done,

You say your glad you have that:

what youth have,

Weep in the sun 

that  what you done...

Significant

"Convinced of the exception he was (or would be), he moved with lithe assurance through those years, patient with himself, patient with the world, wanting nothing more of God than the bounty of gifts that God had already provided." 

You read this.  Again.  You read, already biased against this "type".  The ease implied for this life in that description causes a rash of frustration, a seething envy.  What begins as a sniffle and a tickle in the throat spreads, consumes the body....

like envy.  There is an itch behind your ears, that spreads, around the wrists and ankles, an itch in the small of the back, unreachable, a ringing phone that can't be answered. 

You have a hunch.  An idea came to you that settled like a raven on your writing desk, another (off-hand) gesture by god, the provider, the sustainer.  The complainer in chief, Job, far fallen face down in the mud, understands the situation.  The emotion is not without contrast or context.  Having had, he has a greater sense of not having.  There is more meat and meaning in dispossession than there is in "simple" poverty...

(dilemma:  for starters, you are given a life that will last only 75 years.  you must choose.  either your life will be fifty years of ease and health and material comfort followed by twenty five years of anguish and suffering or--in reverse--you will experience twenty five years of torment that gives way  to fifty years of wealth and wonder...or...or...or...)

...but remember... In the end, Job's suffering comes with a whole banquet of bennies.  On the other side of the crucible, mango will taste a little sweeter; orgasms will last a little longer.  Like Frankl telegraphing from Auschwitz--the darkest and most petrifying corner of hell--we are still able to access the light and power of life.  If you can connect to that which some would call spirit, you cannot fail to be impressed by the resilience of that fire so much so that, later when you're slightly healed, you are not surprised in the least that those few embers are capable of consuming everything, of permeating the planet, the spaces between people, the words that they work into wrought-iron meaning, a series of signs....

and so it goes

Envy is like a cactus.  The prickly trick of the protective skin, while inside....

There is nectar, sustenance.   Each defensive layer serving to insulate the canteen, but just because one has recognized a handful of assets that may allow you to survive in the desert (or if you prefer, in the belly of a fish) it is no reason to settle there.  There are other latitudes more conducive to the joys of existence, the magic of being. 

Posies of Poesie

Words are the premise upon which poetry is based.  It is what words are, or rather it is what the poet conceives the purpose and meaning of these fractured fragments of language to be, that informs the essence of his or her poetry.  This is the wisdom (bias) and architecture that will forever contain and constrain the words, the claustrophobia of the page.  Thus, if the poet believes words to be the elements of truth, there will be (always) an arrogance in his/her constructions.  If s/he sees words as essentially decorative, the assembly of them will be motivated by the music of language rather than meaning.  

The history of poetry is the history of assumptions about what language is, what language is for.  When the purpose purports to be the enlightenment of the reader there is an inherent faith that words have a usefulness that is rooted in the eternal. The very notion that there exist fixed meanings for words and that by juxtaposition of this meaning with that meaning and these meanings with another some Polaris might be revealed is a comforting delusion.

But every poet knows--even with his or her very personal reverence for language--that s/he will invariably be "misunderstood."  Misunderstanding, and its companion alienation, are symptoms of the ambition and impossibility at the center of the true-believer's communication.  

By contrast, when words are afforded their fullness (and their emptiness)--each one as complex and delicate as a snowflake, as unique--they become impressionistic in their intention instead of didactic.  The quality of poetry in this context is similar to the visual impact of a collage.  The play of symbols creates the possibility of ideas, ideas that solidify in the mind of the individual rather than in the construction on the page.  The "message" is  independent of the singularity that would be accessed by "understanding"; the locus of meaning is thus attached to the viewer, the reader, the hearer, the receiver and not to the artist, the writer or the composer.  

Since this to the post-modern mind reflects the actual ambivalence of meaning, the primary, secondary, and tertiary meanings as conceived by the creator are comfortably unclear.  A post-modern set of eyes does not look for what dwells between the lines, what is hidden there.  Rather s/he looks for only what resonates personally.  S/he sees where the words and symbols intersect with her/his vocabulary.  These contacts in meaning are enough.  They are better that the delusion of "something to get" and "getting that something"....

Eavesdroppings

When I remember the conversation (and I do, often, the words tap, tap, tapping on the inside of my skull in dull mesmerization: "When you hear the word 'homo', you will experience a stiffening in your jeans."), it is asif I am there sitting at the same table, across from him, face to face, mano y mano, man on man, eyes plunging into eyes, the whole world opening up between us.... red, hot, and sticky...

but its NOT hell.

.....


Against what context do you judge me?  Why are the biases of a specific place and a specific time to be valuated over any other

But there was a time before intentionality.

Meaning?

Meaning that the imagined past all falls between pillar and post.  Each year, each event either stands  on the side of innocence or knowledge.

Yes, the guttural place of origins wherein instinct and desire were in full copulation, begetting memes to beget memes, to beget the next mega-meme that--projecting metaphor with semaphore--might very well be a kind salvation for the ape."

Your journal?

(the shy bobbing of his head)

Narcissus with a missing gene?

Just a tad damaged.

Just a homo.

Shaking You

You are bruised by the world, a little broken.  And you come to me, tired; you bring your burdens in the form of stories, torturous tales of loss, regret, fear.  You bring to me words, words, and more words.  You bring a vocabulary you have rehearsed in the deep hours of your dark night, rewriting your childhood, your father's death, your lover's betrayal.  As if you are stringing the beads of a new kind of a rosary, aligning the words to blurt out or blather, you have chosen these words carefully.  The curling letters, the cursive smoke--cancerous, burning, a dragon's urgency in your breath--comes out of you, the fire of your own certainty that you have been wronged, or wounded, or worked to your last raw nerve.  There is nothing that tethers you to the world but your pain, or so you imagine, or so you etch on the monument you are making to your misery.  And you will carve each last letter into granite permanence even as your every finger bleeds and bleeds...

Let go of these words.  They are the weight that is sinking you.  They are the cement that prevents you from swimming, from flying, from laughing, from making love.  Don't believe them.  Words are wasted on trying to "make sense" of this world, of this life, of this struggle.  Feel your way through the obscure passages, the labyrinth; feel your way without giving names to your feelings, without dissecting their meaning.  Your feelings are more immediate than your words would have you believe, more present that psychology or novels conceive them.  You do not take pleasure in the sun because of some dumb luck of where and to whom you were born.  Likewise, the frustrations of daily living--the flat tire, the cold coffee, the failed flirtation--are not seeded in genes or dreams or traumas.  These are the breezes of today, the sensations of now.  Breathe today's anger and tomorrow's lust without linking these into some kind of eternity.  Words are a timeless malady.  Life is a temporary gift.

Patriot

They were so near
the surface of the Earth
before;
gravity unraveled
and the whole tapestry of stars,
galaxies, nebulae
conspired with the spinning
wheel of time.
A delicate thread
dyed red or lapis blue
or gilded
made of what is said,
of what is done
(and undone) until...

Spun, 
out, into
a thin, shimmering line,
this life chases
after
its own favorite needle,
now stitched
into constellations
that the restless cosmic wind
leaves ragged
like the flag
and its torn stars.

Filling the Hole

(Barely) holding this all together, the black hole at the center of the universe, the black holes punctuating the centers of a billion various galaxies, all convene and, in agreement, conspire to balance all that matters (or matters not) in the precarious tensions of creation and annihilation.  For some, for the ambitious, the nervously religious, the young lovers with the burgeoning obligations in the ingenue's elastic womb (another center for the gravity, another black hole), the very idea of this dance between destruction and expansion is unnerving, unspoken, and unspeakable, left for the crowded nightmares in which everything is falling, sinking, going away.  For the others--the beatniks, the existentialists, the goths with raw red fingers and black glass nails--for those for whom their hopelessness is hope, they do not curse the blackness nor fear it.  To fill the hole, they become it and give it different names...

Thus the universe is made out of the infinity of desire, the infinity of revulsion.  And life, with its fascination with need, with emptiness, is beholden to the same quantum physics.  The hole in my heart seeks love.  The hole in my soul seeks god.  The hole in my belly is hunger.  The hole down below is lust.  I want to be full, pregnant, sated.  My brain seeks the fullness of knowing.  But, in our haste to find an antidote to nothingness, we miss the genius that is contained and is itself at the center of all these black holes.

I hate every fucking word that works its way, like a spell, out the tips of my fingers.  (How do I find the keys, without looking, without thinking.  There are so many programs running in the background, just to  keep me alive.)  And there is nothing to say, except perhaps to discuss the implications of there being "nothing to say."  I hate my words.  I hate my ideas.  I hate the quandary of the impulse to write, to share, to communicate in the dim light of this absurdity, the itch to attempt the impossible and be understood, taken in and digested, "made sense of", when words are weary approximations that mean more or less what you think they do when someone else is saying them...this waterlogged, flood-muddied, faded and moldy Grammatica is garbage; if the components are a poem are washed up flotsam from some capsized trash transport.  All that paper!  All them words!

Church Windows

Seven swords of light
the pulse,
(pulse, pulse) as the bellows
swell and sigh.  Seven shades--
the faded stained glass--mixing
with the dust passing
in (and out) of the illuminations.

Sunday morning
is torn by the trumpets.
Church windows
shatter.
Unbreakable
triptych. 

There are
seven sacred mysteries,
a trinity unhinged.  At night,
no fire in the eyes,
the windows turn
to ice, black ice
with cracks sutured with hammered lead,
the fleeting fix
to an imperishable problem.

SHARK ATTACK!!!

The shark in the harbor,
an aimless fin,
is spinning out its hours
in purposeless circles
always moving,
(...must keep moving...),
one thought, one undulating necessity.

If you attach meaning to momentum
while movement is motivated by nothing
save instinct, the deep inkwell of the ocean
will devour you, will write you
out of the will.  What is this red ribbon
spilled, the words staining my fingers?

When the scent of blood comes,
conveyed on warm currents
of fervent salt,
all the lazy animation is forgotten.
Meaning is met by the scar
in the water, adrenaline
defending your right to this life.

Silver glides inside,
underneath the blue
canopy,
and disappears.
There is a closing
tunnel of light...

The detritus is a kind of snow
falling
slowly,
in intricate spirals
with particular wings
until...
found by gravity
on the pacific floor.

Wordless

Chalk this up to apathy, this silence. Talk this up as awe; I am dumbstruck, under water. My mouth is agape. And God is love. Or translated, "And everything is infinite." Words cannot express...

Sentence

God speaks the universe into existence ("In the beginning, was the word..." says the inscrutable tongue.), differentiating and defining the components of creation. Then--almost arbitrarily--s/he attaches value and emotion, perspective and meaning. S/he operates as if by fixing the word one was setting all of history in motion. Similarly, when the judge pronounces "sentence" and a deterministic universe becomes more personal, there is a heavy hand applied, heat and pressure on the back of the neck. Doctors have their diagnoses. Witches have their spells. There is a universal fascination for this class of apes with the ability to communicate. But there is a fallacy that is not confessed, a softness to the language that is at odds with the animal attachment to a concrete reality. We say there is a "truth" but the gaping spaces between thought and speech, between hearing and understanding belie the tenuous quality of our words. There is no certainty, only approximations. This is true for the poet, the doctor, the god. The judge's sentence does not damn us because it cannot define us. Our complexity is our resilience. Like God, we exist (persist) before and after the fractures of space and time that have been created by language.

At the time, I had believed (with some reverence) that this universe was only a solipsist projection, and that it revealed itself to the measure of my fears, the gravity of my shame, the durability of my delusions. This place, I thought, was all about scrubbing the soul, an opportunity to evaluate (and question) both the sentimental obligations and the dutiful ambitions that still held me here. The challenge on this moon was to live in engagement with the self, and by so doing, bring authenticity to one's connections with others. This was a way of being alone in the world: to be neither unbalanced by the tone or the substance inherent in the expectant stories that others might share nor too desperate oneself to be "understood," one's speech pressured, trying hungrily to piece some truth together--a poorly pasted collage--for whatever audience you might be able to assemble. Thus conversation, invariably, underlined the expansive isolation that contained everything. It was perhaps better to remain quiet, to allow the words of others to pass around oneself, immune to their meanings but attentive to the breeze that carried them.

Words are mere symbols and thus can only approximate action. Looking backward or looking forward (by virtue of their inherent removal, they possess no present), either as history or prophecy, words are overblown or mangled, tacked together with all nuance broken off, heaped in a pile and lit on fire to give some reprieve from the always encroaching blackness. In light of this, the virtue of honesty is eclipsed by the impossibilities of language. This is not to suggest that communication is inevitable deception; rather, reality is more multi-faceted than can be expressed, always containing both clarity and obfuscation.