Showing posts with label phenomenology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label phenomenology. Show all posts

Friday, February 17, 2017

Add

There is too much ego in this painting
Add in bits of straw
broken bits of other things
that radiance has become
dog’s teeth
lost ball
the field where no one walks
windswept and alive, unsecret
but unknown
add wheat that is food
food which be darkness
darkness which is home
home a dream

Thursday, February 16, 2017

For the Image-Makers

The stains on a wall
I mean the photographs come to mean so much
The fractions of being
An arm cut off……….but not a head
You understand the distinction
Don’t you, painter of the mind of algae
You green fraction of being you

The fly’s armor
Admittedly soft and ridiculous
Nevertheless is a sort of ecstasy
You can’t hold back
The stains on a wall might actually be edible
If you are a fly

If you are a half-lost photograph

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

On Photography



I can’t explain why a photo isn’t a plot.

Because it is true and untrue.

Except that it is also a wheel.

It is the wheel of plots. Platelets spinning.

How is an image inside (us) different?

It cannot lie as effectively.

It must cast (mere) starry nets of words.

Here, crumble this clod of dirt:

Inside earth is more earth.

Inside a fist are many more fists, tinier ones.

The children of fists are fists.

The earth can’t be bothered being a fist.

Except that it is also a wheel.

I have deliberately misplaced my syllogism (my soilogism, my solilogism)

the way a man deliberately misplaces his lover

to lose him or her.

I can’t explain why a photo isn’t a plot.

Because it is.

The cast of a photo is illimitable.

You will never list all the players, dramatis personae.

That stark chair is a person.

That pleading window.

That river, surgeless, carrying away a flowering branch.

It is hopelessness I seek in photography.

The hopelessness of understanding.

And the conviction of being.

Cat



A cat listens to strong winds from inside a cave.

It has never known human hands.

The sun is setting outside of any screens.

The animal feels a sort of contentedness.

(The prey has been consumed.)

Sky is a conflagration and knows nothing.

Cat faces conflagration and knows.

(The face is a sort of conflagration.)

This knowing is a way of being.

Inhuman, as humans are inhuman.

Time is permutations and nothing more.

But there must be a matrix.

The cave serves the cat as a sort of second self.

There are extensions of mind, which is place.

No one in Europe has invented a door yet.

This is the closest thing to a door.

I mean this poem, this cipher.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

If


                 


If you understand that most things that exist do not have names. If you understand that the unbounded is not susceptible to names. Some believe it is worthless to say "most things that exist" because they believe that things only exist if named, if partitioned. If they are ascribed existence. Ascribed.  This word means that they are written into existence. But they, the things, exist in the field of potentiality. Unspoken things are still things. Unenacted things are still things.

If we think about the weight of the dark mouth. The dark mouth is the things you almost said but did not. I do not mean the things you spoke to yourself but did not allow into the world. I mean the things, the dark matter of thought, you did not speak or act because fate did not allow you to speak or enact it. Much of your life will be in opposition to the dark mouth. Much of your life will dwell on the dark mouth and the dark hand. Nobody can tell you why this is so.

If I could believe in the structuralism of paragraphs. If I could believe in the sequencing of the DNA of prose. If one believes in this simple islanding of thought in a sea of hidden, "greater" intent. Then one believes in a book. The paragraphs are real, concrete entities. But the book itself is something more. The book is the gestalt of all the pages. It includes the invisible threads you must spin between paragraphs and then the way the ocean itself lies on the earth. The river of reading is the river Meander. There is no true, direct path through any book on earth. Only liars say that. The promise of the book is the promise of wandering.

If you enter the room or I enter the room. Doesn't it make a difference? Depending on our mood. Depending on love. Depending on skill. Who enters the room first? With what intent?  Some tiresome people enter rooms constantly. They are assailers of rooms. Some tiresome people are reticent about entering any room. They hang back. They need exhausting coaxing. The idea of the room itself is exhausting! Who is in the room presently? We can't always be sure. The room might be beyond our capabilities to visualize or represent it correctly. We might have to ask others in the room if a certain personage is actually in the room or not. They might be able to see and say with certainty that the person is indeed in the room, whereas you doubted. But then you might insist that some particular person is in the room and several others might vociferously argue with you, correct you, au contraire, that person is not in the room.  Then what did you see? A phantom? You saw an actual body. He or she was there. Obviously, this means you do not know the room's true boundaries. Or the room's boundaries have shifted since you last reckoned them. The room is much more phantasmal than the people who may or may not occupy it at any given moment. While you may not acknowledge this fact to yourself, you almost certainly spend many hours of your day focusing on this problem of The Room. Possibly humans are categorical creatures even more than they are emotional creatures. It may very well be that emotions are all, at bottom, issues of categories. A recategorization can often correct even a very horrible emotion.

If the Room of People Whom I Love Who Love Me Back has a door to enter and exit does that make me a healthier person? But what if there is no door? No exit. No entrance. Does that thought scare you? Or does it weirdly comfort you, the way that tyrants may be easily comforted?

If the dark hand slips around your throat when you sleep, when you're dreaming, then you are like everybody else. If the dark mouth sings to you then, how lucky you are. Because there are lost people on this earth whose dark mouth can reach them even in waking hours. They go about the earth strangled by the dark hand. Their real hands cannot pull it away from their throat.

If you can understand that the dark mouth, the dark hand, do not exist in the sense of good or evil. They are capable of either. Their existence points to the provisionality of all existence. Time surely passes differently in their universe. Time may be arrested in the dark mouth, in the dark hand.

If the space of this sentence was sufficient to itself.

If color enters a window in a pronounced way, you are called upon to respond. The window frames something, a sky, which seems to possess a sort of self-knowledge in the form of color. This is an emotional construct. Windows are emotional constructs.

If the dark hand slips around your throat when you sleep, you do not exist in the sense of good or evil. Something is recycling you inside you. That is one way to understand it. There must be a door for even the worst emotions to enter and exit. Even your throat has a door, admittedly a pitiful one. When have you ever seen a truly well-defended mouth?  This is why so many resort to dropping the portculis of silence.

If we consider what the dark mouth and the dark hand do when they are not engaging us from that great distance of theirs, a distance which can close instantly to zero, what answer can we give? It is an answer given in the mystical tense. It is the mystical tense of the otherness of being which is not present, past or future tense, nor any of the variations of those tenses.

If we do not understand that we are creating a dark matter self throughout all the days of our existence, we do not acknowledge what it is to be human.

If someone would be temerarious enough to write an autobiography of his or her dark matter-self rather than the one that lived out its days in ordinary matter, what would this sound like? Impossible you say? If justice were done, would it not be nearly infinite in length? The only acts subtracted would be those of the biography proper.







Thursday, December 1, 2016

Clarification

bird chatter / at morning / is not song / is need / processing / need / evaluative being / not romanticism




Saturday, November 19, 2016

Plant

This cat reminds me
when it wants
to eat,

a drink
the poor plant
cannot beseech,

brought inside
a human world
the way memory's

turned beggar,
called parasite
when it would prefer

to live outside

Saturday, April 30, 2016

The Room

The room is dark so comforting
So the room is full of meaning
Another one is gone now
The room grows darker now
So full of more meaning
How filling is it does it fill you up
The meaning of the darkness
And the meaning of the room
They are separate things
This is what keeps you busy
Separating them
Don't turn on the light
It would be so painful to me now
It's like the darkness is a second skin
And the light would burn like hell



Friday, April 29, 2016

Fear of a Dark Room

When the room is dark
There is more room in it
When the room is dark
I find more space more kindness
For the leaves falling the glasses falling
The lilacs breathing across the room
There is more grammar no less
I don't have to decide in the darkness
The artificial legs are friendly
Think night crabs crossing wide highways in Japan
There must be massive destruction
Coming up out of the sea
When the room is dark
You don't know how many bodies
Share the space with you
This sculptural space of flowers
They enfold darkness to become
Or the crabs climbing these flowing trees
In the darkness of the room of night
The ones the Japanese cars didn't run over
The night is only a room
Attached to a much bigger room
They are going from room to room
They go from dark to dark
That is what the crabs do
The room is growing larger
But it cannot let you know this



Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Paean

Sometimes it is a single hair
I don't know what it is
Sometimes it is a simple dwelling
A bit of forest beset in an urban area
The shape that mathematics takes
A hill of numbers
Or an uphill climb like a forgiveness

I know certainly it is a foreignness
It's the place where the lava grips the rock
It is like a hand closing over another hand
It is the robbing at dawn
The trees won't kowtow for it in the night
They have their ancient dignity

As you have yours lurking the streetlights just as they go out

Before or after the stars



Saturday, April 23, 2016

A New Law of Gravity

There is this other form of gravity.
Let's call it "sympathetic gravity."
The drowned bug, so tiny, in the bathwater with you,
keeps drifting towards your leg,
anywhere on your skin
its afterlife can make contact with your life.
It creeps you out.
You scoop it up in a cup, a lonely pink cup,
and the bug corpse floats in there.
But it drifts towards the pink wall
of the plastic rinse cup
the way we put our hands out to touch
pink marble in a cemetery.
There is a pink limit that is either alive
or is felt as alive,
which is nearly the same thing.