The first 14 essays tried to “come to terms” with the limitations of language. By extension this included all of thought and imagination – the whole category of construct-making.
How can we discover the “limitations” of something that covers the whole of experience? An all-enveloping fluid from which we can’t leap free, like lucky fish?
The reader is being reimagined. While this is happening, I’ll shake my notebooks free of the rejected scraps of previous essays.
After that, maybe a new phase can begin. A phase in which writing plays second fiddle to something I can’t really name. I’m not a writer and I have no intention of being hitched to any writerly discipline.
The commitment to a discipline feels narrowing. An intentional commitment feels like I’m putting on blinders and being yoked to a practice that promises its own enticing infinity. An infinity within a narrowing frame.Read More »
Pharsalia, or Civil War, is also the title of a poem by Lucan, written sometime around the time of Christ — about the civil war between Julius Caesar and the Roman Senate. “All wars are civil wars.” All empires mark our own triumph and defeat. The footprints of all these triumphs and defeats can be seen in the land, in Pharsalia itself.
What I see in Pharsalia is the terminal moraine of a ruinous glacier of hyper-rational thinking that came from Europe. That witchery (as Leslie Marmon Silko uses the word) — that non-sacred vision of reality — has reached its apex and is melting away. It leaves behind a flattened landscape of political and social thought, of spiritual ruin. It becomes evident in places like Pharsalia first.
It’s a place near where I grew up. There’s a melancholy power here. Subdued, ancient, hard, desolate, beautiful. In this beauty there are seeds of renewal that will remove every last trace of witchery from our system. But first one has to appreciate the desolation of the place.
The Royal Elephant carcass of a bus lies mangled among legions of Fords and Chevrolets. From shrinking drifts broken doors and mirrors reach out like Chief Bigfoot in Death. All of Pharsalia melts again into the stone boot-prints of mile-heavy ice.
Here pool retreating forces. Their triumph and defeat merging and disappearing like ice in water, like elephant into earth.
Where Oneida once held a feather dance, thanking Maples, now Chevys and great yellow plows, their wings rusted, lie buried in snow.
In a paintless church, old window frames lean against the sills, thick with flies, an inch deep, overhead broken cobwebs swing.
Here and there Erratic hunter/gatherers Slump on sofas in aluminum encampments piled along the highway like a terminal moraine
—
I used AI generated images in place of the actual photos I once used for the poem, much to my own disgust. But I’m not much of a picture taker and was using other people’s photos of the area, and then worried about copyright. So in the meantime I figure, poetry is imaginative. So if I supply imaginary photos and confess to that fact, then perhaps it’s not as unseemly as it still feels. Elsewhere in the essays I don’t have good things to say about AI. But we have to find a way of living in and around this potential monster of a technology. So until I take my own photos, (apart from the old photo of Chief Bigfoot, which is real), I’m leaving these suggestive AI photos. It’s ridiculous, but for now they stay. I’d prefer actual drawings to these things, but I can’t draw.
More coherent modes of language arise when the following perspectives are realized (at the very least):
1) We each see different parts of the proverbial elephant.
This suggests parallel truths. A multiverse. Each infinite and also limited.
2) We look with different levels of magnification. A microscopic vision of the elephant’s trunk at the cellular level is not more true than a macroscopic vision of the trunk as a whole. They are relevant to different contexts.
This makes it easy to suspend judgement.
3)The elephant is a moving target. The trunk we describe is already a different shape. Reality changes as we learn. I go into this a little more in Ritual, part II, in the section titled “The Simplifying Potential of Negative Language.”
This is a humbling perspective.
4) Wildest of all: The elephant we perceive is actually not the elephant itself. But I think a distinction needs to be made between actuality (the “holomovement,” the creativity of nature itself), and reality (the “things” we abstract from actuality as information, perceptions, theories or thoughts).
If we understand this in our bones, then there is no alienation. Then the world becomes sacred in the absence of religion.Read More »
“[T]here is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
A Place for Words
I’m hoping the word “epiphany” carries a bathetic meaning. I hope it signifies a “ludicrous descent from the exalted to the commonplace.” But in this case a descent from the high horse of a ludicrous certainty to the banal wisdom of uncertainty. Being dis-illusioned in the best sense.
The epiphany doesn’t have a pedagogic purpose either. It’s only a moment without resistance to one’s folly. A receptive mentality. But not a proscribing or self-help mentality. Therefore without ulterior purpose. Banal in its own way. At least from the standpoint of conventional wisdom, which tends to picture a dumb blankness in the absence of knowing.Read More »
“The illusion that the self and the world are broken into fragments originates in the kind of thought that goes beyond its proper measure and confuses its own product with the same independent reality. To end this illusion requires insight, not only into the world as a whole, but also into how the instrument of thought is working. Such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life, mental and physical, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
The Reductive Bewitchment of a Literal Language
The literal mood of language is necessary for carrying out almost any practical work. It’s dominant in following a blueprint (a legitimate authority), or in honing a craft. And it plays a subordinate role in art, teaching techniques for working in any medium.
In its “proper” context this language could be described as “positive”, “practical” or “technical.” In a utilitarian context the connection between the useful thing one describes (such as the word “hammer”) and the hammer itself is so close that almost all awareness of the meta-level functionality of words recedes (or never develops).
The witchery begins when a literal language spills over into conventional life; when it’s used to talk about ideas – about opinions, goals, and identities. Then opinion posits itself as a literal description of material reality. Fixed. Truth. Not mere opinion.Read More »
“His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything” (from Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko)
I enjoyed moving-up ceremonies in elementary school at the end of each school year. Every grade stood in a separate line in the gym. And then the principal commanded everyone in each grade to step forward. There was some magic in that step. It instantly made us older and wiser.
But after a few years ceremonies all began to feel like empty gestures. Stepping forward and serving Communion and so on felt too superstitious.
Then in college I read the book Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko. It was about a Laguna Pueblo man named Tayo, returning home from World War II, unable to cope, heading for ruin. Read More »
I recently had the pleasure (along with my brother Brian) of meeting Tony Dias at the train station in Old Saybrook, CT.
It was a good talk. And at first I thought we’d walked into a Beckett play.
My brother and Ithought we’d arrived early. There was a sign at the intersection that seemed to proclaim the correct address, 355 Boston Post Road, but the name of the cafe was wrong. I told the bartender I was looking for the “Old Saybrook Cafe” at 355 Boston Post Road. He’d never heard of it.
So we kept waiting next to the misleading sign. Iwas reluctant to call Tony on my brother’s cell phone because I didn’t want to seem impatient. I have some inhibitions of that sort that I claim to find amusing.Read More »
An unobtrusive assumption came tumbling from the apex of a small inverted pyramid of beliefs and hit solidly enough in passing that I took notice. What came loose was the belief that doing things – even writing this rambling note — requires a purpose; purposes which are ulterior to the enjoyment one takes in the activity itself; as if it isn’t enough to do something for its own sake.Read More »
Almost a year ago, one of my truest friends died. Pat Styer. I never met her in person. It didn’t matter. We spoke the same fundamental language. It wasn’t about agreeing or disagreeing. It was about playing catch with a perspective that few in my circle at that time seemed to find worth picking up. What she said broadened my own vocabulary. And whatever I said, she received without distortion. It was as if we were learning something that could only be discovered between us.
I think every relationship (whether with a human or a dog or a cat) gives rise to someone new between us, creates a context of understanding that will never be duplicated with another. We move between parallel worlds. Each infinite, but limited to our mutual contexts.Read More »
Negative Geography 