Some Favorite Snippets

A belief in happiness bred
despair, though despair could be assuaged
by belief, which required faith,
which made those who had it
one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.

—Stephen Dunn, from Circular



It's possible that while sleeping the hand
that sows the seeds of stars
started the ancient music going again

—like a note from a great harp—
and the frail wave came to our lips
as one or two honest words.

—Antonio Machado, It's Possible



I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what's in a name
To shame the one who knows
Mud does not stain
Clay he's made of
Dust Adam became—
The dust he was—
Was he his name

—Samuel Menashe, Adam Means Earth



I apologize to coincidence for calling it necessity.
I apologize to necessity just in case I'm mistaken.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from Under A Certain Little Star



Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then
have to be human—and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Duino Elegies



It's what we can't
know that interests
us—the pre-Greeks
or Australopithicus—
where there are more
absences and breaks
than bits of bone
or pot. It's not
news, but it
fascinates—our
love of hints, our
mending minds that
love to patch up
other times like
plates, and how this
might extrapolate
to hearts: explaining
how here can be
too much matching part.

—Kay Ryan, Not News



One could
almost wish
they wouldn't;
they are so
far apart,
so random.
One cannot
wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding
way they matter.

—Kay Ryan, The Pieces That Fall To Earth



The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person.

—Czeslaw Milosz, from Ars Poetica?



When the lover
goes, the vow though
broken remains, that
trace of eternity love
brings down among us
stays, to give
dignity to the suffering
and to intensify it.

—Galway Kinnell, The Vow



In joy and terror
I move in time where
nothing points to error;
I move in space
where love's event,
and death's, notch
time's face.

—Josephine Jacobsen, from The Clock



Joy's trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.

—Richard Wilbur, from Hamlen Brook



I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from Possibilities



... it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it ...

—A. R. Ammons, from Gravelly Run

A (True) Paradox

There are two kinds of people: Those who divide everyone into two kinds of people, and those who don't.

To Be an HK0

I was reading. Something gelled, something struck. It's funny to realize in the middle of reading that there is an interesting idea out there that you've come across before but never thought very much about. (It's also funny to realize in the middle of reading that there is an interesting idea brand new to you at the time—transfinitude, bivalent communication, an algebra that speaks equally well about knots and quanta—but this reading was not that.)

The idea was being blind. I never think about being blind and maybe I should, since I am notoriously bad (to boyfriend and optometrist alike) about sleeping with my contacts in. As I think back through the mists, it seems like I was 10 or 12 when I came to accept blind is better as my answer to the playground straw poll (/ candied, caffeinated chitchat) about whether it was better to be blind or deaf. I can't really isolate my 12-year-old intuitions; but it feels true to say that those then were mine now, as far as the blind-or-deaf question goes. Which pretty much means I haven't thought about it since. Weird.

The 12-year-old intuition, then (in a new suit of words): Love and friendship are muchly if not mostly vocal. A faceview says plenty, true, but faceviews say less than conversations (and not just trope-ically)... Little toddlings may look to faces for context and reassurance, but us older children look to the tics in the stream of voice. Or at least I do. I can watch a movie with my eyes closed—at least one of the old mise-en-scene human-paced variety—but I have trouble with my ears closed. Is this just the way movies are made now, dialogue-rich, or is this tentative evidence that human life more densely packs into sound than into sight? (If the latter, uh-oh. See my previous post, My Voice is Visual.) Upshot: I feel more cut off cut off from sound than I do from sight. Another illustration that this is true for me: When I plug my ears (unless I psych myself up for it and the scene is brief and visually rich, as when I use earplugs in a noisy dance club), I feel claustrophobic to the point of dry-drowning. But when I close my eyes all I feel is a calm, boring, eager dark.

I just experimented a bit to see if/how my intuition has changed. When I close my eyes now, fifteen years older, it feels scarier. The thought creeps in with moderate force, What if you couldn't open the lids again, at will? It would suck. (Maybe this feeling is fertilized by the knowledge that I love to see thoughts as sentences. I never hear them quite right, but often I see them just right. Also, I'm bad at visualizing hard abstract pictures—terrible topologist I'd make—so I need visual, symbolic assistance. I need to see the pictures tracked syntactico-discursively, since I usually can't see them in their naked forms. Pity, since I love nakedness. Damn my shitty visuospatial pathways. Thank God so much of math has been algebraicized.) But still it feels at least a pinch more claustrophobic to imagine a sound vacuum from here on out. Just a succession of signs and symbols, ugly pictures and pretty, faces and feces. Not good.

But let me move on to my motivation for writing this post. It's in the questions I'll try formulating as: How much of us is lodged in our senses? and the corollary/ancillary Utterly senseless, what are we? and most of all, Are our senses crucial to our identities, or crutches without which we might even be abler? I can't really answer any of these, but I'll stab at the dark with a few thoughts.

Good old Helen Keller teaches us that a sense vacuum (especially two of the main 'cognitive' senses, sight and hearing; the abstracting senses of music, math, and art) is a nightmare but that there is at least something like waking, into the calm provided by that even more abstracting, representation-providing faculty: the linguistic intellect or more simply, language. Representation (hereafter, REP) joins us to a larger world and frees us from the sticky hothouse you can simulate by touching and tasting things for an hour with a blindfold on and earplugs in. REP is so integral that it's hard to think without it. Although modernism and postmodernism try; with their words and paint splotches speaking only their own language; as wheels within wheels and no road around. It's interesting. Doesn't get you too far, though; you start hating or loving the melody, the splotches or the inward aesthetics of the words (their meaning, context, and advocacy aside), which is all good and a good source of loveable things to keep handy in your life, but still, after a while you crave meaning context and advocacy. You want the abstracted bits to open up views, to transport you to them. (Side note: Sometimes they do this without having to, just by jogging or instigating thoughts: by founding thoughts, intentionally or unintentionally.) O REP, too much of you and all we have is the world again—the world redundant, the words pleonastic—but too little and all we have is smudges of word-tokens and pigment. (Which again are sometimes lovely, but not lovely enough to keep us satisfied... not lovely enough to keep us loving the world and the fact of our being in it, or so I'd conjecture.)

Math is a weird special case. It's abstract, so much so that besides the kooky Platonists (who in flights I almost join now and then), everyone believes math isn't 'about' anything other than the structure of our formal concepts, which we lift from the empirical world but then de-empiricize before christening mathematical. Like the natural numbers. You know, 1,2,3..., those. If someone tried to verify a very large computation with say, popcorn kernels, and the instantiated kernel-calculation disagreed with the abstract one done in numerals, the numerals win. Everyone assumes something went wrong in practice; and the kicker is, some computations are with numbers oodles larger than the number of particles in the universe, and no one worries that there is no way to verify that the computation is really 'true of the universe'; and the double-kicker is, even if the world did weird shit like when you put exactly 500 kernels together in a group, one disappears, so that physically adding 500 and 500 gives 998, math would still claim that 500 + 500 = 1000. De-empiricized.

So math is lost, basically. Between being certain about what it's certain about (which it is, and should be) and not being about anything in the world; only in worlds the world inspires. (Bertrand Russell made a similar point a hundred years ago, before he came to believe—bad Wittgenstein!—that math is fully tautological and therefore fully pointless.)
So math is awesomely powerful, but philosophically tenuous.

But interesting. Math grows and thrives, cut off from the world. Maybe other cut-off things can grow and thrive? God? That's a whole 'nother story.

And something I'm keeping in mind as I'm wondering if a senseless world would make a better one (if Helen Keller, twice deprived, is defined as an HK2, then the utterly senseless are HK5s) is that without all that periodic sensory input, influx and inspiration math gets before it sets up shop in the concepts, the concepts probably wouldn't be there for us. (A philosopher might put this as No abstracta without concreta.) Or would they? HK had language abilities waiting to be activated, and boy were they once they were. What else waits with us and in us? And is some of what waits (a religious itch?) de-activated by our usual sensory overload? Is God any brighter in a blackened sky? Blank inside—for moments or hours, by choice—what choices might present themselves?

My Voice Is Visual

Any reading I or anyone gives is doubly affected: contingently, with one's currently chosen way of moving through the words (I speak them how they speak to me today, like); and necessarily, with the actual one way (however the words come out) the words come out.

At one point, in the Phaedrus, Socrates argues his complaints against written words as a source of wisdom. One of those complaints is that they always say "only one and the same thing." But that has not been my experience at all. The static written words of my favorite poems say handfuls of things, some of them dozens. The ambiguity of the oracular? Yes, that is what does it, and other forms of ambiguity, which other of my other posts have touched on.

Occasions of reading aloud: Those are what always say one thing. More carefully: Occasions of reading aloud may say just as many things as the quiet page does, but they always sound as if they say one thing—and then the listener has to try to separate the affectations of the speech from the manifold meanings of the words.

At some level, it's charming. You get to hear the words spoken from and with a personality unlike your own. (Whether it's really the author's is another matter.) But I am always ready to poke at the tyranny of the "poetry is sound" crowd. Poetry is much! Poetry is many! Poetry is sound, and sound is older—but poetry is sight, and sight is bolder! (He said in rhyme, noting the irony.)

An Analytic Code

Back when I was an Analytic zealot, I was taught one of their codes: Say what you mean and mean what you say. It's a well-worn penny of the tribe.

I've been daydreaming about it lately. First off, I like to break it down—'analyse' it, in the Briticism. Once in parts, say what you mean and mean what you say then have oppositional force and we can crank up the gristmill of compare-and-contrast.

Say what you mean has a nice ring of, Be straightforward (I'm rarely that, but I realize it works for some people), but it hits other notes too. Like, Out with it: Don't sit on your words; along the lines of, Don't brood: brandish your thoughts. Good advice—You might meditate for a few minutes or hours over the right way to say something, only to discover later in a chat with someone that the two of you were only synergistic seconds away from the formulation you were pining for. And then there's the idea that thoughts kept too long on their back burners before tasting dry out—It's nice to speak with heroic confidence in pitch-perfect diction, but that's what you risk in doing so. So: Issue things in drafts. (Draughts?) Think of this as culinary school.

But wait, there's more! Say what you mean is also sort of cutting, sort of soul cutting. As if to say, Don't sin by omitting (nicely in tension with Be straightforward): Say everything you're thinking, not just what you think we want to hear. Maybe something like, Don't edit too much—Say first, edit later. Or we'll edit. But in the other direction, say what you mean means, Don't beat around the bush if beating around the bush is your way of avoiding the bush, rather than your way of approaching it. Dance for the issue, not around it. And last but far from least—probably first in importance—there's the note of Don't lie to me or bullshit me, meaning or knowing one thing but saying another.

Let's switch over to mean what you say. The strongest note I hear is one of will: mean what you say (you'll do). Be faithful to your responsibilities both material and semantic: Deliver on your promises. But right there one chord away is, Mean what you say (you mean), which is what but Don't lie to me or bullshit me, again. Not to complain. Something that important bears repeating, and that cute round of redundancy has got to be one of the charms/conceits that makes the code so attractive (to us exacting types) in the first place.

But wait, there's more, again! Mean what you say sets up a head-to-head tension with say what you mean: Meaning what is said implies something like owning or standing behind what is said, and that implies something like caution. Pause. Nearly opposite to Out with it is Make sure you really endorse it. Beyond believing something close to it, make sure you believe it, the very thing you said—because someone might quote you, someone might make a decision on the basis of what you say, or someone might decide you don't know what the hell you're talking about even if you do.

So many treasures in a penny's gleam. Penny candy may have died, and pennies are not much offered for our thoughts anymore, and pennies themselves are on the way out, but I hope the Analytic code, Say what you mean and mean what you say, stays with us a while longer.

The Perfection Spectrum

Suddenly — despite my misgivings ever starting a sentence with such — suddenly, I imagined a world without poets, in two parts.

More Kant than Freud but free of both, first I imagined poetry as equal-opportunity sublimation, subliming both what we want to see and what we don't. What we want to see — the secret centers of our being, well-walked feet soaking in attractively rustic buckets of warm water, 24-hour museums, lives lived up and down but always tethered to our world the space elevator — and what we don't want to see — the blood of children in the streets, corn-dog grease in the carnival midways, half-way houses gutted of half their funding, Aberzombification of old-fashioned promiscuity — All redeemable by the poet, in his picking up each handle of contingency chanced across and kissing it with the lips he has; in his tissue-paper and butcher-paper wrapping of the good bad and ugly alike in probative words of concern and discovery. All boats lifted. All of life's bits, worldly and wordly, deliverable in words from their clichés of meaningless passing and passed over, finally, into clichés themselves in need of further deliverance, unendingly and unendably.

And then I imagined all of this obsolete. A water-wheel world with the goods on their pedestals and the bads buried in holes; the good perfectly actualized and the bad perfectly gone. No gaps between the world we want and the world we have; no need of wordsmiths to forge any bridges across. No need to make ornaments of anything since everything is already self-beautifying: a sphere without a crust.

It was mildly terrifying (like an oncoming car only for two seconds too oncoming, too brief to be true-blue terror). So I added another line to my growing list of reasons why writers write —

To cherish equally both end-zones of the perfection spectrum, close to and far from, in some secular allegiance to the Christian-Apologist message: Beneath the atoms and strings, beneath the sensations and states of being momentarily fragmentarily known, the world is made of redemption.

Blurb

Awkwardly, reaching to renovate the soul-source, many of my early poems were parts of an attempt to reimagine the divine; more specifically to de-bundle God's perfections and most specifically, to de-couple God's perfect goodness and perfect power. (To update God's downgrade from Being-above-being to Platonic demiurge. And to recognize the full circle therein: If God is Eros again, then God is Love again. A substantive return to his nominal self.) Also, many of my early poems were parts of an attempt to rediscover Buber's divine Thou after decades of scientistic sandstorms. The first attempt followed on the second, since I suspect(ed) that personhood and comprehensive perfection are at odds, even for candidate Gods. Throughout, I made these attempts from the point of view -- under the wide-reflective equilibrium -- of an agnostic.