stealing beauty

migration

surrender

and ever and

north? these restful blinds slip
smoothly here.  winter's scratch
                    over which year runs
bitter, they are all full of low time

     how authentic!  it's the hurried
watch bending out to dark, the earth, the
river.  aged autumn, why see the house,
last year's car, the farms?  ah,
this long april note down the rows -
celery, and beet.  one might think
without foretaste, how far north,
how quickly the end.
                    these leaves, leaves

no other.  some other.
air turning and yet i stretch the year
among the caress, its last rest
                is at it here
and the year
has his summer so high it
all clouds out winter.  here's to spring?
now here's rows of earth and these
reeds way before here was a how.
we've come this way into time
into lapping how at the sill
and now and there's and that

7.30.13

death,

soon enough

unorthodox percussion

imagine what my body would sound like

the hook upon which everyone hangs

two from adrienne rich

living in the cave

reading the parable of the cave
while living in the cave,
                     
                                   black moss

deadening my footsteps
candles stuck on rock-ledges
weakening my eyes

these things around me, with their
daily requirements:

                                 fill me, empty me
talk to me, warm me, let me
suck on you

every one of them has a plan that depends on me

stalactites want to become
stalagmites
veins of ore
imagine their preciousness

candles see themselves disembodied
into gas
and taking flight

the bat hangs dreaming
of an airy world

none of them, not one
sees me
as i see them

********************************************************************************
for the dead

i dreamed i called you on the telephone
to say: be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

the waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

i have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight

time probably always swings

two from marge piercy

armed combat in a cafe

how easy for us to argue
shoving the ugly counters
of jargon across the table,
mah-jong tiles slapping,
the bang of ego on ego
feminist versus marxist cant.

to feel alienated
is easy, to use words
to hold the self free,
clean from the taffy
of loving, from the wet
sticky hands of need.

we use our politics
as french papas put broken
bottles, jagged glass on top
of the walls of suburban
villas, so no prowler
can climb over.

what closeness remains
is that of samurai
in ritual sword dance
combat, each hoping to
behead the other and,
invulnerable and armored, escape.

**************************************************************************
apologies

moments
when i care about nothing
except an apple:
red as a maple tree
satin and speckled
tart and winy.

moments
when body is all:
fast as an elevator
pulsing out waves of darkness
hot as the inner earth
molten and greedy.

moments
when sky fills my head:
bluer than thought
cleaner than number
with a wind
fresh and sour
cold from the mouth of the sea.

moments
of sinking my teeth
into now like a hungry fox:
never otherwise
am i so cruel;
never otherwise
so happy.

us and them

from the politics of experience by r.d. laing

"only when something has become problematic do we start to ask questions.  disagreement shakes us out of our slumbers, and forces us to see our own point of view through contrast with another person who does not share it.  but we resist such confrontations.  the history of heresies of all kinds testifies to more than the tendency to break off communication (excommunication) with those who hold different dogmas or opinions; it bears witness to our intolerance of different fundamental structures of experience."

"collective representations come to be experienced as things, exterior to anyone.  they take on the force and character of partial autonomous realities, with their own way of life.  a social norm may come to impose an oppressive obligation on everyone, although few people feel it to be their own."

"we act not only in terms of our own experience, but of what we think they experience, and how we think they experience, and so on in a logically vertiginous spiral to infinity.

our language is only partially adequate to express this state of affairs.  on level 1, two people, or two groups, may agree or disagree.  as we say, they see eye to eye or otherwise.  they share a common point of view.  but on level 2 they may or may not think they agree or disagree, and they may or may not be correct in either case.  whereas level 1 is concerned with agreement or disagreement, level 2 is concerned with understanding or misunderstanding.  level 3 is concerned with a third level of awareness: what do i think you think i think?"

"it makes a difference, presumably, to many people whether they think they are in agreement with what most people think (second level): and whether they think that most people regard them as like themselves (third level).  it is possible to think what everyone else thinks and to believe that one is in a minority.  it is possible to think what few people think and to suppose that one is in the majority.  it is possible to feel that They feel one is like Them when one is not, and They do not.  it is possible to say: i believe this, but They believe that, so i'm sorry, there is nothing i can do."

"it is always the others, and always elsewhere, and each person feels unable to make any difference to Them. . . such collective power is in proportion to each person's creation of this power and his own impotence."

"when we have installed Them in our hearts, we are only a plurality of solitudes in which what each person has in common is his allocation to the other of the necessity of his own actions.  each person, however, as other to the other, is the other's necessity.  each denies any internal bond with the others; each person claims his own inessentiality: 'i just carried out my orders.  if i had not done so, someone else would have.', 'why don't you sign?  everyone else has', etc.  yet although i can make no difference, i cannot act differently.  no single other person is any more necessary to me than i claim to be to Them.  but just as he is 'one of Them' to me, so i am 'one of Them' to him.  in this collection of reciprocal indifference, of reciprocal inessentiality and solitude, there appears to exist no freedom.  there is conformity to a presence that is everywhere elsewhere."  

 ************************************************************************

"the group, considered first of all from the point of view of the experience of its own members, is not a social object out there in space.  it is the quite extraordinary being formed by each person's synthesis of the same multiplicity into We, and each person's synthesis of the multiplicity of syntheses."

"a group whose unification is achieved through the reciprocal interiorization by each of the other, in which neither a 'common object' nor organizational or institutional structures, etc. have a primary function as a kind of group 'cement', i shall call a nexus. . .  it is an ubiquity of heres, whereas the series of others is always elsewhere, always there.  the nexus exists only in so far as each person incarnates the nexus.  the nexus is everywhere, in each person, and is nowhere else than in each."

"the condition of permanence of such a nexus, whose sole existence is each person's experience of it, is the successful re-invention of whatever gives such experience its raison d'etre.  if there is no external danger, then danger and terror have to be invented and maintained.  each person has to act on the others to maintain the nexus in them.

some families live in perpetual anxiety of what, to them, is an external persecuting world. . . the 'protection' that such a family offers its members seem to be based on several preconditions: (i) a phantasy of the external world as extraordinarily dangerous; (ii) the generation of terror inside the nexus at this external danger.  the 'work' of the nexus is the generation of this terror.  this work is violence."

"the highest ethic of the nexus is reciprocal concern.  each person is concerned about what the other thinks, feels, does.  he may come to regard it as his right to expect the others to be concerned about him, and to regard himself as under an obligation to feel concern towards them in turn.  i make no move without feeling it as my right that you should be happy or sad, proud or ashamed, of what i do.  every action of mine is always the concern of the other members of the group.  and i regard you as callous if you do not concern yourself about my concern for you when you do anything."

"the essential characteristic of the nexus is that every action of one person is expected to have reference to and to influence everyone else.  the nature of this influence is expected to be reciprocal.

each person is expected to be controlled , and to control the others, by the reciprocal effect that each has on the other.  to be affected by the others' actions or feelings is 'natural'.  it is not 'natural' if father is neither proud nor ashamed of son, daughter, mother, etc.  according to this ethic, action done to please, to make happy, to show one's gratitude to the other is the highest form of action.  this reciprocal transpersonal cause-effect is a self-actualizing presumption.  in this 'game', it is a foul to use this interdependence to hurt the other, except in the service of the nexus, but the worst crime of all is to refuse to act in terms of this presumption."

"if peter is prepared to make sacrifices for paul, so paul should be prepared to make sacrifices for peter, or else he is selfish, ungrateful, callous, ruthless, etc.

'sacrifice' under these circumstances consists in peter impoverishing himself to do something for paul.  it is the tactic of enforced debt.  one way of putting this is that each person invests in the other."

********************************************************************************

"the invention of Them creates Us, and We may require to invent Them to reinvent Ourselves.

one of the most tentative forms of solidarity between us is when we each want the same thing, but want nothing from each other.  we are united, say by a common desire to get the last seat on the train, or to get the best bargain at the sale.  we might gladly cut each other's throat, we may nevertheless feel a certain bond between us, a negative unity, so to say, in that each perceives the other as redundant, and each person's metaperspective shows him that he is redundant for the other.  each as other-for-the-other is one-too-many.  in this case, we share a desire to appropriate the same common object or objects: food, land, a social position, real or imagined, but share nothing between ourselves, and do not wish to. . . two people both want the same house, two applicants both want the same job.  this common object can thus both separate and unite at the same time.  a key question is whether it can give itself to all, or not.  how scarce is it?"

"perhaps the most intimate way we can be united is through each of us being in, and having inside ourselves, the same presence.  this is nonsense in any external sense, but here we are exploring a mode of experience which does not recognize the distinctions of analytic logic.

we find this demonic group mysticism repeatedly evoked in the pre-war speeches at nazi nuremberg rallies. . . no group can be expected to be kept together for long on the pure flame of such unified experience. . . under the form of group loyalty, brotherhood and love, there is introduced an ethic whose basis is my right to afford the other protection from my violence if he is loyal to me, and to expect his protection from his violence if i am loyal to him, and my obligation to terrorize him with the threat of my violence if he does not remain loyal."

"we do not now suppose that chemical elements combine together because they love each other.  atoms do not explode out of hatred.  it is men who act out of love and hatred, who combine for defense, attack, or pleasure in each other's company.

all those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people.  once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways.  induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same things, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive - you have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder."

"the patterns in space and time, their relative permanence and rigidity, do not turn at any time into a natural system or a hyperorganism, although the fantasy can develop, and men can start to live by the fantasy that the relative permanence in space-time of patterns and patterns of patterns are what they must live and die for.

it is as though we all preferred to die to preserve our shadows.

for the group can be nothing else than the multiplicity of the points of view and actions of its members, and this remains true even where, through the interiorization of this multiplicity as synthesized by each, this synthesized multiplicity becomes ubiquitous in space and enduring in time."

"each group requires more or less radical internal transformation of the persons who comprise it.  consider the metamorphoses that the one man may go through in one day as he moves from one mode of sociality to another - family man, speck of crowd dust, functionary in the organization, friend.  these are not simply different roles: each is a whole past and present and future, offering differing options and constraints, different degrees of change or inertia, different kinds of closeness and distance, different sets of rights and obligations, different pledges and promises."

"the tired family man at the office and the tired business man at home attest to the fact that people carry over, not just one set of internal objects, but various internalized social modes of being from one context to another, often grossly contradictory.

nor are there such constant emotions or sentiments as love, hate, anger, trust or mistrust.  whatever generalized definitions can be made of each of these at the highest levels of abstraction, specifically and concretely, each emotion is always found in one or another inflection according to the group mode it occurs in.  there are no 'basic' emotions, instincts, or personality, outside of the relationships a person has within one or another social context."

this isn't moving

misshaping introduction

dance break

so m. gives me advice, or rather, asks the right question.  "how about taking a break from analyzing?"   

i fall back on that boring template of an excuse: how could i?  this is all i am.  anxiety rules me, i live inside of analysis, one leads the other by both of my hands, we are all inseparable...

yet.  i have come to love those hard, impossible questions (thanks m!), those pressure points.

he adds [something like] "your analytical mind is a survival tool, which is not good or bad.  yet it is overdeveloped & has crowded out other tools.  maybe your impulsive self is child-like.  why don't you turn off the analysis and let yourself be impulsive?  grow up."

i have agreed.  i will whittle away or cut off or redirect the analysis for awhile.  to be in my body, to feel my feelings, to melt away the ice block that i've become.

this goes along well with my current (temporary?  permanent?) breakup with buddhism, meditation.  it is ironic timing, actually.  i have recently realized that i no longer feel so anxious most of the time.  however, i haven't been able to feel my body, or feel anything really.  so is my choice between feeling+anxiety or no feeling+no anxiety?  hmmmmmm

so, for life to have meaning, i have to feel alive.  to feel alive, i have to feel anxiety?  really?  and... how do i get there again?

there's been alcohol.  lots of homemade nachos.  going on dates.  having a new, enormous crush (feelings! for such a highly impulsive/creative human being).  getting sun-drenched & sore-limbed at the garden.  cuddling hardcore with guts, my neglected cat.

little moments of emotion return in their odd waves, usually in the form of compassion: a. listens to a podcast on immigrant rights activists and detention center infiltrations, tears lurk under my face.  my sister tells me about a kid in my niece's class who appears quite neglected by his parents.  immediately i well up & want to adopt a fleet of children. 

i AM starting to feel again!  it is pain that alerts me, but i keep at it.  i sign up for a modern dance summer class.

during the first hour of the first class, i adore the calm voice & careful visualizations of the instructor.  i love thinking about my lumbar spine again, feeling the creases in my hip joints, the weight of my heels.

then we go into the sequences.  i cannot figure it out.  the split between my brain & body echoes, grows enormous.  i am trapped.

here are my eyes, watching the footsteps, observing the arms.  here are my ears, listening for rhythm.  here are my shoulders remembering their role and one two three four one two three four one two three four five fucking six which foot where / arms go how / why am i dying

fourteen eighteen twenty-five tries (or so it seems), i am the only one in the class who does not get it.  thinking leads to over-thinking which brings so much head, no body.  i can't feel anything, how again was that supposed to go?  what is the rhythm why am i here how can i escape what if i start crying 

yet i am laughing, goofy faces, aloof or clumsy or whoever i am performing

the instructor, she is wise and kind.  she looks for ways to help, she compliments my breathing.

i watch the clock, the final 30 minutes moving backwards, where is the rhythm why is this wide open space

we switch sequences.  the new one goes one two three one two three one two three four.  there are jumps, i get it, i am gliding across the floor.  she calls it "walk-falling".  we are always doing it, in those little moments before the heel hits the ground. this one feels fluid, familiar

(this is why i am here.  to walk-fall my way around, to feel-fall my way through.  to discover the fluid-familiar.) 

now.  this is a journal entry, an impulsive one, broadcast almost live near & far, to no one.

this mind invests itself in a disappearing act, a switcher of flips, a poker of soft spots, a presser of tension.  but my body sense, my feeling sense (the i & mine that i've come to know) is invested in being seen, validated, cared for, and ultimately, recognized.

my mind loves the no, the boundary
everything else loves the yes

between sense and non-sense
i remain torn and split but leaning heavily
how to: coordinate. integrate.
always i breathe until

acceptable dissociations

By sina queyras

1

Meanwhile the expressway’s hum, it roars into
Her, the expressway cargo and tree-lined, stretched
Radio towers, mowers its horns and hogs, its beef

And bread vans, hour after hour, laptop, radar
Detectors from New Mexico, Idaho potatoes, HoHos
And Cheetos, all organic grain-fed, pieces of chicken,

Pieces of cow, slices of pig, kernals of corn, diced carrot,
All packaged meals, she of drums, her mile after mile
Of interchange escape into itself rest stop, progress

Is welcoming and bidding adieu, states drinking
Her progress, passing tolls, Motel 6 she hum as glass
And EconoLodge, passing itself traces of Ashland

And Peoria, Willingboro, Paterson, every inch of it grafted,
Numbered, planted, barriered, mowed, guardrailed,
O my citizen consumers, for the time, infinite,

Replaceable, scaling these walls of sound and motion,
Dipping in, expressing oneself, expressing oneself,
Expressing oneself.


2

Wonder warships at citizens in blue, the number
Lining the leaf, infinite expressways, and scaling
Blood, soil a Camden, shouting over water Sunday

Steel passing the in and sky noise, another abandoned
By of one to mills, at steel, above bone, gazing (euphoria,
Nostalgia!) citizens, up leaf, citizens, wonder! Infinite warships

Sunday and abandoned a shouting expressways, noise,
Across in blood, steel, lining passing bone, at gazing
Blue mills, scaling the water another number to in

The above soil by of steel up one and sky at the
Over Camden, citizens, euphoria nostalgia!
All along the avenue spronging, tent-like, their attitudes

Way ahead of them. My computer screen, waving. Where
Is your horse? she said, and there was nothing I could say.
What I want is generally tidy. What I get often can’t dance.

What wants a date who can’t dance?
Who wants a line without rhythm?
Who wants a line without thought?


3

Occasionally there is anger. Occasionally she takes her one good foot and applies it to surfaces otherwise flat and safe, the expressway progressing itself through her, expressly.

(I live here because the country I once lived in is now a corporate washroom, where there were once gardens now oil refineries turn night into day and farmers into militiamen—you won’t even understand this, and your teeth gleam!)

Once again the feeling comes, like a sprong in the groin, an abundance of feeling that is sharp, almost hostile in its need to overtake. Several women in pink felt it coming. They turned, their pierced ears like arrows in her thigh.

Sprong, sarong. I ask you?

Over the course of several weeks developers wiped out all the trees in a town in A to avoid having them designated as essential sites after a rare woodpecker was found to be nesting in the town. Woodpeckers are not essential. Trees are not essential. Trees are ornamental. Humanity is ornamental. Prophet is everything.

This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice.

Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi.

Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.

breath, passing through

tis the spiderweb
season, lilac
quickened.  with slick
walks off the lightning
street, with hand in a bag,
(wrapped in a fist)
push!    
                 the drizzled
day bends and cracks.
burnt yellow paint shoved over
and over against the ages
of a wall.  lines ticked with tall
decisions, certain flecks stick
to t-shirts, pale purple.  here
lies the mirror mark: fingers
extend, appendages.

crack it two times,
a lucky double.     
                              do you
believe me?
you shouldn't.
especially        

                         you are not
little but lying repeatedly
then standing focused, heels hinged.
forehead, unwrinkled.  with hips
swinging home, someone punches      
                                             past
the scattered drunks
the overdarkened parks
                                          through
those twisting twisting clouds.

6.16.13

more r.d. laing

from the politics of experience

"There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shrivelling up the reality in which one is lodged." -erving goffman

 . . .

Let us take the simplest possible interpersonal scheme. Consider Jack and Jill in relation. Then Jack's behaviour towards Jill is experienced by Jill in particular ways. How she experiences him affects considerably how she behaves towards him. How she behaves towards him influences (without by any means totally determining) how he experiences her. And his experience of her contributes to his way of behaving towards her which in turn . . . etc.

Each person may take two fundamentally distinguishable forms of action in this interpersonal system. Each may act on his own experience or upon the other person's experience, and there is no other form of personal action possible within this system. That is to say, as long as we are considering personal action of self to self or self to other, the only way one can ever act is on one's own experience or on the other's experience.

Personal action can either open out possibilities of enriched experience or it can shut off possibilities. Personal action is either predominantly validating, confirming, encouraging, supportive, enhancing, or it is invalidating, disconfirming, discouraging, undermining and constricting. It can be creative or destructive.

In a world where the normal condition is one of alienation, most personal action must be destructive both of one's own experience and of that of the other. I shall outline here some of the ways this can be done. I leave the reader to consider from his own experience how pervasive these kinds of action are.

Under the heading of "defence mechanisms", psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious", that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, so to say, an impersonal process which has taken over, which he can observe but cannot control or stop.

There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defences" by the term "mechanism". But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality, because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology.

But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realising that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.

Ultimately it is possible to regain the ground that has been lost. These defence mechanisms are actions taken by the person on his own experience. On top of this he has dissociated himself from his own action. The end-product of this twofold violence is a person who no longer experiences himself fully as a person, but as a part of a person, invaded by destructive psychopathological "mechanisms" in the face of which he is a relatively helpless victim.

These "defences" are action on oneself. But "defences" are not only intrapersonal, they are transpersonal. I act not only on myself, I can act upon you. And you act not only on yourself, you act upon me. In each case, on experience.

If Jack succeeds in forgetting something, this is of little use if Jill continues to remind him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also.

Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on "bringing it up". He may invalidate her experience. This can be done-more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: "It"s all in your imagination." Further still, he can invalidate the content. "It never happened that way." Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the bargain.

This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time. In order for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable to overlay it with a thick patina of mystification. For instance, by denying that this is what one is doing, and further invalidating any perception that it is being done, by ascriptions such as "How can you think such a thing?" "You must be paranoid." And so on.

. . .

Man, most fundamentally, is not engaged in the discovery of what is there, nor in production, nor even in communication, nor in invention. He is enabling being to emerge from non-being.

The experience of being the actual medium for a continual process of creation takes one past all depression or persecution or vain glory, past, even, chaos or emptiness, into the very mystery of that continual flip of non-being into being, and can be the occasion of that great liberation when one makes the transition from being afraid of nothing, to the realisation that there is nothing to fear. Nevertheless, it is very easy to lose one's way at any stage, and especially when one is nearest.

. . .

In our "normal" alienation from being, the person who has a perilous awareness of the non-being of what we take to be being (the pseudo-wants, pseudo-values, pseudo-realities of the endemic delusions of what are taken to be life and death and so on) gives us in our present epoch the acts of creation that we despise and crave.

Words in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to recapture personal meaning in personal time and space from out of the sights and sounds of a depersonalised, dehumanised world. They are bridgeheads into alien territory. They are acts of insurrection. Their source is from the Silence at the centre of each of us. Wherever and whenever such a whorl of patterned sound or space is established in the external world, the power that it contains generates new lines of forces whose effects are felt for centuries.

not into but out of

from the politics of experience by r.d. laing

we experience the objects of our experience as there in the outside world.  the source of our experience seems to be outside ourselves.  in the creative experience, we experience the source of the created images, pattern, sounds, to be within ourselves but still beyond ourselves.  colors emanate from a source of pre-light itself unlit, sounds from silence, patterns from formlessness.  this pre-formed pre-light, this pre-sound, this pre-form is no-thing, and yet it is the source of all created things.

we are separated from and related to one another physically.  persons as embodied beings relate to each other through the medium of space.  and we are separated and joined by our different perspectives, educations, backgrounds, organizations, group-loyalties, affiliations, ideologies, socio-economic class interests, temperaments.  these social 'things' that unite us are by the same token so many things, so many social figments that come between us.  but if we could strip away all the exigencies and contingencies, and reveal to each other our naked presence?  if you take away everything, all the clothes, the disguises, the crutches, the grease paint, also the common projects, the games that provide the pretexts for the occasions that masquerade as meetings - if we could meet, if there were such a happening, a happy coincidence of human beings, what would now separate us?

two people with first and finally nothing between us.  between us nothing.  no thing.  that which is really 'between' cannot be named by any things that come between.  the between is itself no-thing.

if i draw a pattern on a piece of paper, here is an action i am taking on the ground of my experience of my situation.  what do i experience myself as doing and what intention have i?  am i trying to convey something to someone (communication)?  am i rearranging the elements of some internal kaleidoscopic jigsaw (invention)?  am i trying to discover the properties of the new gestalten that emerge (discovery)?  am i amazed that something is appearing that did not exist before?  that these lines did not exist on this paper until i put them there?  here we are approaching the experience of creation and of nothing.

what is called a poem is compounded perhaps of communication, invention, fecundation, discovery, production, creation.  through all the contention of intentions and motives a miracle has occurred.  there is something new under the sun; being has emerged from nonbeing; a spring has bubbled out of a rock.

without the miracle nothing has happened.  machines are already becoming better at communication with each other than human beings are with human beings.  the situation is ironical.  more and more concern about communication, less and less to communicate.

we are not so much concerned with experiences of 'filling a gap' in theory or knowledge, of filling up a hole, of occupying an empty space.  it is not a question of putting something into nothing, but of the creation of something out of nothing.  ex nihilo.  the no thing out of which the creation emerges, at its purest, is not an empty space, or an empty stretch of time.

at the point of nonbeing we are at the outer reaches of what language can state, but we can indicate by language why language cannot say what it cannot say.  i cannot say what cannot be said, but sounds can make us listen to the silence.  within the confines of language it is possible to indicate when the dots must begin. . .but in using a word, a letter, a sound, OM, one cannot put a sound to soundlessness, or name the unnameable.

the silence of the preformation expressed in and through language, cannot be expressed by language.  but language can be used to convey what it cannot say - by its interstices, by its emptiness and lapses, by the latticework of words, syntax, sound and meanings.  the modulations of pitch and volume delineate the form precisely by not filling in the spaces between the lines.  but it is a grave mistake to mistake the lines for the pattern, or the pattern for that which it is patterning.