Nothing Adds Up

 [draft chapter 00 of work in progress entitled Adding Up to One: On the Seriality of Everything]

HERE

Four4 Great Errors broadside and poems

 

Broadside designed by Oswaldo García. 

Available HERE.

Four4 Great Errors [PDF]

Kisses on the Feet of a Metalhead: Some Indices on Standing

[published in X 1 (2022): www.x-n1.com]

[photo by José Castrellón]

You are not on earth as you believe, but lighting, fleeing its proper place, never sped so fast as you, going back to yours.

 – Dante, Paradiso

 

To know everything in a flash takes an eternity in the illusion of time while you gradually die to yourself.

– Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing

 

There’s restless joy in standing watch and waiting!

– Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 

 

The question is where to stand (?)

 

“Love means that you remain standing close to your Beloved, when you would be deprived of your attributes.”[1] So said Hallāj, whose decapitated “trunk remained erect for two hours [after] the head fell between his two legs, repeating a single phrase ‘Only One! O Only One!’”[2]

 

To stand is to remain standing, to fall with whatever falls, fly with whatever flies, to flash with the fastest stillness of the soul, which is “whole and undivided, at once in the foot, in the eyes and in every member,”[3] especially when your head falls to your feet. To stand is to hang out with the question where it answers itself, to hold the line or horizon where “severing is also a joining and a relating.”[4]

 

The modern question mark derives from the medieval punctus interrogativus, which indicates the rising intonation of the question with a line resembling a flash of lighting suspended above a point.[5] A/the question seizes with the continuity of a thunder strike, a stroke connecting being and doing, head and feet, heaven and earth, cause and effect. Feel the heavy metal shock of being struck by the question of oneself as another pointing back: “What is this that stands before me / Figure in black which points at me?”[6] Of being seen by the other of one’s own vision, “you in whose eyes I have become a question to myself.”[7] Who withstands standing in the infinite current of their own event? Are you (not) someone “who is struck by his own thoughts as if from outside, from above and below . . . who is perhaps a storm himself, pregnant with new lightning[?]”[8]

 

The form in question reflects the infinity of individuation’s depth charge, a force hidden within the absolutely asymmetrical crack connecting oneself to everything. Is one or is one not intrinsically one with Reality? Is one’s will other than that which is creating, preserving, and destroying the universe – yes or no!? What fact can the fact that one is oneself – summit of impossibility – not make to tremble? As Meher Baba explains, the cause of this whole multifarious cosmic mess without and within oneself – not the universe or a universe but this one, today – is the unaccountable whim of the eternal or divine Reality to know itself, which operates as the universal dialectic from ‘Who am I?’ to ‘I am God’, generating en route, in the spiral of evolution and involution, all temporary beings as provisional answers: ‘I am stone’, ‘I am plant’, ‘I am human’, and so on.

 

“Beyond the sphere that circles widest / passes the sigh that issues from my heart” (Dante, Vita Nuova). “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Be silent” (Hafiz, Divan). To speak without speaking, just breathing the word(s), in passing. To inhabit language, the so-called “house of being,” like a passerby or prison escape artist, just standing there.    

 

“We became enamoured of travel, intoxicated / with the sensation of movement . . . We must go somewhere where we will not find ourselves . . . More time to consider the lily in another's heart? / to watch the leaf-bud and flower putting-forth of our own?”[9] Fleeing what? And what the hell had to happen for a three-staked instrument of torture (trepalium) used to punish runaway serfs/slaves to become our name for going somewhere (travel), not to mention labor or useful/productive activity (trabajo)? On the one hand, “The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft.”[10] On the other hand, “Travelling is a fool’s paradise . . . I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”[11] Between fleeing and being forced to stay there is standing, only way out. “Escape,” says Levinas, “is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même].”[12] Only the lonely. Good luck to you. O way of being the way!

 

Flames of sun fall to earth. Earth melts matter into fire. Fire burns heart into light. Light flashes mind to ash. Ash condenses into star. Star . . . Love loves you (so do I) without any care whatsoever about whoever you are. “That the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition [cogito ER/GO sum]) – that is what the State cannot in any way stand [tollerare].”[13]

 

Why do you want them to answer your question???

 

Rogare, to ask, derives from rog-, to stretch out the hand (cf. reach), a variant of the root reg-, to move in a straight line. This is also the root of ergo, therefore, in consequence of. ER/GO: To stand in the reach of the question which points to everything as its answer. To touch everywhere by not reaching anywhere, holding on to the hem, reaching into the roots of oneself with closed hands, asking nothing. To play the one game, every game, the infinite game of question and answer, by standing, taking the only possible, the infinitesimal shortcut (from here to Here), precisely where there is none: “With the infinite question, there arises also the infinite answer. The infinite question is infinite unconsciousness; the infinite answer is infinite consciousness. But the infinite question and the infinite answer do not simply annul each other and relapse into the original unity of the Beyond. The two aspects have now descended into the primal duality which can resolve itself only by fulfilling the entire game of duality and not by any shortcut.”[14]

 

See how the world, this society we co-create, wants you to keep moving, shifting, likes you unfirm, choosing, without a proper place to stand, always towards the next thing, the hopefully yet never quite?^[15] Ergo they cannot stop offering new opportunities to repeat ourselves, to do the same thing in novel guises, educating us in the opposite of being where one is. Stop and look, but keep moving. Stand – in line. Browse (a word that means to graze on young shoots and buds, cf. breast). Whatever you do, don’t stay. Instead, stay distracted, not where your body is, like January shopping his mind for May in The Merchant’s Tale: “Many fair shap and many a fair visage / Ther passeth thurgh his herte night by night; / As whoso tooke a mirour polisshed bryght, / And sette it in a commune market-place, / Thanne sholde he see ful many a figure pace / By his mirour.”[16] At least as it passes . . . you may skip ad in . . . I can “try to take seriously how advertising never tires of repeating itself.”[17]

 

Not milk but its mother’s milk is what a baby needs, food of the one whose mouth puts me wherever she wants, makes me walk on air.[18] My intellect is a straying kitten, a babbling infant whose life feeds and grows strong in becoming more and more centered, stilled in satisfying desire – Et erit tamquam lignum quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarium (Psalms 1:3) – not in being promiscuously passed around, but in nursing (from sna-, to swim), swimming the ocean-flow of love via the sucking, sapient depth of all-consuming interest: “Truth cannot be grasped by skipping over the surface of life and multiplying superficial contacts. It requires the preparedness of mind which can centre its capacities upon selected experiences and free itself from its limiting features . . . Such whole-hearted concentration and real interest is necessarily precluded when the mind becomes a slave to the habit of running at a tangent and wandering between many possible objects of similar experience.”[19] Ergo, the real problem of distraction as inevitable imperative to remain (become more and more) distracted by something that all distractions distract from, to distract distraction itself. To think from one’s feet.

 

“The feet, which are physically the lowest part of the body, are spiritually the highest. Physically, the feet go through everything — good and bad, beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty — yet they are above everything. Spiritually, the feet of a Perfect Master are above everything in the universe, which is like dust to him.”[20]

 

What is their stance, they (whoever) for whom market is mother, touchpad their mouth, browser the breast? In what sky do their thoughts swim, what horizon their hearts rest? Where the earth in which their body or soul nests? “Unless a man takes his stand against the world of a dying civilization, / unless he stops discriminating the patterns of shadow / and turns his face to the Sun . . .”[21] Ergo: ground yourself by touching the blessed feet of a cherubic breast-fed metalhead, charged with standing in the light of that which never has to be brought from anywhere, which fills the world by staying where it is.

 

It seems not so much that one stands somewhere, as that standing is the place where place happens. Here and there, inner and outer, silence and language, spin around the axis of standing, this ground zero of the horizon that, pointing to itself, makes all other indications possible. But who wants to think about that? Why bother guarding the stance which guards thinking? “Pointing can only be done from a standing location. My standing location matters because I am in the midst of things, in media res . . . We are in a place where we can point at the hand and at the mountain; we are among them. We can therefore think about what is around us.”[22]

 

Back off (stay proximate), all you posers who want position (not stance), who crave identity (not birth/death), who like to take pictures with your eyes (not X). Ergo, what is the photograph, as materialization of an image of an instant, but a projection of the standing question, the question of standing, an indexical capturing of the what-is-this-that-stands-before-me (figure-in-black-which-points-at-me)?

 

Photography as science devoid of – before/after – project. The photographed, gaze-species of something invisible, as an objective not-seeing of someone-who-stands, i.e. the in-stans itself, a gesture of time’s likeness to eternity or imaginal place in which being becomes. Ergo, photographer as reflector of the standing that the photograph abstracts into concrete image.

 

“[P]erhaps it is from the most obscure and the most irreflexive depth of the body that the photographic act departs . . . from a stance rather than a position . . . ‘Stance’ – this word means: to be rooted in oneself, to be held within one’s own immanence, to be at one’s station rather than in a position relative to the ‘motif’.”[23]

 

Verbless language. Silent speech. Motionless gesture. Each thing simply a pointing to everything through itself. Speak now – after there is something to say: “God made sense turn outward: therefore / man looks out. Now and again a daring man / looks back and finds himself. Now and again / after becoming God he speaks.”[24]

 

Better to point (by not pointing) than burp a word. “The universe is deictic or indexical, and therefore demonstratives are better equipped than substantives to deal with it, and ultimately to provide some sort of account of it.”[25] Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus (Psalms 13:1). The fool hath blabbed to himself, hath spoken as a substantivist. What are you talking about?

 

Better that one “s’ascose nel foco che li affina” (Purgatorio 26.148), put oneself away (abs-con-dere) in flame, staying in the fire which life never stops being a birth-like leap from and into: “To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world.”[26] Better to stand on the threshold between prepositions, wearing the sandals of the sacred, and there remain more and more a white hot black metal head. For it is precisely and paradoxically the iron’s passive power or strongest weakness to resist omnipotence, the all-powerful impotence of its inability to be consumed by fire, in other words, the metal’s remaining itself or intensive standing in the midst of all that strips it of whatever it appears to be, which is the groundless ground of becoming all fire or liquifying in the love of . . . .[27]

 

Standing says: I am that I am. Man walks upon earth, but she stands in universe.

 

To stay means to remain where you are by being in your being, to stand by withstanding the heaviest-lightest weight of things. Not to be someplace but to insist on the in-stance of existence, which “has no purpose by virtue of its being real, infinite and eternal.” To stand is to dwell in staying without purpose, to step into what, “being everything and everywhere, cannot have any direction,” to insist on not taking the first step of creating a false goal, for the “Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of Reality.”[28]  

 

Stand up and say what you truly think. Do what you really want. Stay. Stop being mobilized, for life, against death, vice-versa, always on this side or that, never out of position, never without project, lost between ends and means, in line. Everything has already happened, and it will never happen again, because nothing ever happens. Except this. Says Rosenzweig, “The womb of the inexhaustible earth ceaselessly gives birth to what is new, and each one is subject to death; each newly born waits with fear and trembling for the day of its passage into the dark . . . Man should not cast aside from him the fear of the earthly; in his fear of death he should – stay. He should stay. He should therefore do nothing other than what he already wants: to stay.”[29]

 

But my God what the hell on earth is the human waiting for?

 

“Damned I also call those who must always wait – they offend my taste . . . Indeed, I too learned to wait, and thoroughly – but only to wait for myself. And above all I learned to stand and walk and run and leap and climb and dance. But this is my teaching; whoever wants to fly someday must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance – one cannot fly one’s way to flight!”[30]

 

ER/GO: To stay as to wait without waiting, to stand as waiting to wait. Here is a kind and degree of waiting that starts by escaping the boring/excited egoism of waiting (waiting as my waiting), an order of waiting that offers at once the best and the worst way to wait, as per the three-fold meaning of waiting to wait, which bears 1) the flat sense of superadded waiting, waiting only to wait more, where to refers infinitively to the activity one is waiting for; 2) the intensive sense of waiting as means of its own end, where to signifies the instrumentality of action (in order to, so as to); 3) the paradoxical sense of waiting that does not wait at all precisely by deferring or postponing it, that waits to wait, waiting, yes, yet not yet. Waiting to wait in this triple way is graspable as a form of eternal waiting, keeping in mind the word’s double reference to the timeless and the sempiternal, now and forever. Tying together, like head and tail of the ouroboros, a waiting that never ends and a waiting that never begins, eternal waiting unites the opposite senses of waiting to wait around the middle sense of the present moment of waiting per se. As the anagogic sense of medieval exegesis proverbially gives a ‘foretaste [praegustus] of paradise’, finding in the suspended moment of reading the palpable presence of a truth or reality that is non-futurally to come, so is waiting to wait, far from being anything that need ever arrive from anywhere else, simply the immediate elevation of simple waiting, a flight of the ground where waiting waits.

 

Neither thinking (cogito) nor being (sum), but the flash of what links them (ergo) and not even that because it is that itself. I.e. a standing in the current of what joins by severing the link between thinking and being.

 

To stand or wait eternally, waitlessly, for all that is here and now (nunc stans). Therefore . . . 

---

[1] Louis Massignon, The Passion of Al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam, Volume 3: The Teaching of al-Hallaj (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 11.

[2] Louis Massignon, The Passsion of Al-Hallaj, trans. Herbert Mason, 4 vols., Bollingen XCVIII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 2.18.1.

[3] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Herder & Herder, 2009), 341.

[4] “[A]uch das Trennen ist noch ein Verbinden und Beziehen” (Martin Heidegger, “Logik: Heraklit’s Lehre vom Logos,” in Heraklit, ‘Gesamtausgabe,’ Bd. 55 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970], 337).

[5] See M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

[6] Black Sabbath, “Black Sabbath,” Black Sabbath (Warner Bros., 1970).

[7] Augustine, Confessions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), X. 33.

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174.

[9] Francis Brabazon, Stay with God: A Statement in Illusion on Reality (Woombye, Queensland: Garuda Books, 1959), 96–124.

[10] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 151.

[11] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Complete Essays and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 165.

[12] Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 55.

[13] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 85, translation modified.

[14] Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1958), 9-10.

[15] “And everybody, in their shallowness, praises movement! Political, religious, educational, social, in the family, let’s do something, let’s go somewhere, let’s act, as if action is salvation, instead it is ruination. Where are you going to find one human being, where are you going to find one man or woman who will say, just a minute, what are you talking about, praising physical, mental, emotional movement as if it is a virtue in itself. I’ll repeat the question, where are going to find someone who will question it? . . . The cry, the wail of the human mind is: give me something to do so that I won’t have to think intelligently about what I am doing.” (Vernon Howard, https://nuncstans.tumblr.com/post/30991647359/and-everyone-in-their-shallowness-praises-movement).

[16] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Merchant’s Tale, lines 1580–5, in The Norton Chaucer, ed. David Lawton (New York: Norton, 2019), 291.

[17] Emanuele Coccia, Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image, trans. Marissa Gemma (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 28.

[18] “Who can ever know God? I don’t even try. I only call on Him as Mother. Let Mother do whatever She likes. I shall know Her if it is Her will; but I shall be happy to remain ignorant if She wills otherwise. My nature is that of a kitten. It only cries, ‘Mew, mew!’ The rest it leaves to its mother. The mother cat puts the kitten sometimes in the kitchen and sometimes on the master’s bed” (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna [New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942)

[19] Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1973), I.151.

[20] Meher Baba,

[21] Brabazon, Stay With God, 118.

[22] Hilan Bensusan, Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 14.

[23] François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Urbanomic, 2018), 12.

[24] Brabazon, Stay With God, 124.

[25] Bensusan, Indexicalism, 16.

[26] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 527.

[27] “All love is a fire, but a spiritual fire. What a corporeal fire does for iron, the fire . . . does the same for an impure, cold, and hardened heart . . . The whole mind becomes white-hot from the igniting of the divine fire; it flares up and, at the same time, liquefies in the love of God” (Richard of St. Victor, On the Trinity, VI. 2, in Trinity and Creation: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Richard, and Adam of St. Victor, eds. Boyd Taylor Coolman and Dale M. Coulter [Turnhout: Brepols, 2011]).

[28] Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing (Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House Publication, 1963), 62.

[29] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Ellen Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 9-10.

[30] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 156.

Glossator 12: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

VOLUME 12 (2022): COMMENTING AND COMMENTARY AS AN INTERPRETIVE MODE IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Edited by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock

Introduction: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock

The Pro-Active Scribe: Preparing the Margins of Annotated Manuscripts
Erik Kwakkel

Thinking from the Margins: Opening and Closing Illuminations and their Commentary Functions around 1000
Kristin Böse

Reading Texts within Texts: The Special Case of Lemmata
Andrew Hicks

The In-/Coherences of Narrative Commentary: Commentarial Forms in the Anegenge
Christina Lechtermann

Dante’s Self-Commentary and the Call for Interpretation
Elisa Brilli

Spiritualizing Petrarchism, “Poeticizing” the Bible: Two Counter-Reformation Self-Commentaries
Christine Ott and Philip Stockbrugger

The Power of Glosses: Francesco Fulvio Frugoni’s Self-Commentary and Literary Criticism in the Tribunal della Critica
Andrea Baldan

Commenting on a Purged Model: The M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton libri omnes novis commentariis illustrati of the Jesuit Matthäus Rader (1602)
Magnus Ulrich Ferber

HERE

Because It's Not There - Climbing Theory

HERE is a climbing theory conversation series with Bo Earle. First two sessions on question of climbing theory and deixis respectively.  

 

Glossator 11 (2021): Cristina Campo: Translation / Commentary

Edited by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Nicola Masciandaro

 

A Bell for Cristina – Writing an Image of Echo and Chimera

Daniela Cascella

L’Imperdonabile Cristina Campo

Laura Boella

Six Poems from Passo d’Addio

Adrian Nathan West

Forme dell’Amicizia negli Epistolari di Cristina Campo

Monica Farnetti

Cristina Campo’s Commentarial Reflection on her Literary Translations

Višnja Bandalo

The Fairy Tales in Cristina Campo’s “Della Fiaba”

Cristina Mazzoni

Gli Anni della Perdita: Missa Romana e La Tigre Assenza di Cristina Campo

Nicola Di Nino

Magnificat Equation

Snejanka Mihaylova

Cristina Campo and Iranian Mysticism

Chiara Zamboni

Cristina Campo – The Unforgiveables: A Translation with Commentary 

Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Nicola Masciandaro

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The Whim: Cantos1-9

 

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.

– John 3:8

 

There is nothing but a bewildered one. There is nothing exercising properties but bewilderment. There is nothing but Allah.

– Ibn Arabi

 

It seeks to know itself. It is of no use to ask why it does so.

– Meher Baba

 

 

 

1: O Parvardigar! The Preserver and Protector of All

 

Everyday the human wakes, wondering

Where on earth, within spirals outside place,

Is one like its love—never anything

 

Once appearing on par with that pure face

Whose eye flashed eternal in the first soul,

Mirror of day before light, only trace

 

Of itself, dropping oceans down the whole.

I am here more or less another you

Acting out and in this singular role

 

No one alone will play, truthlessly true,

Being whatever nothing can be, split

Of time spilling earth’s old excess of new

 

Thoughts and words and deeds—as if tears, sweat, spit

May turn to sweetness the world’s secret pain.

The fact of infinitely being it

 

Informs a jumping spider all the same

Now transiting the moon glow of our screen

Like black starlight distilled into a brain

 

Unfolding the four-fold sense of the seen

Into lightning ideograms of limbs

Hunting the eye-color of longing: green.

 

Instant conviction that the ocean swims,

Otherwise no species of entity

Finds open its path through labyrinths of skins

 

Enshrouding the birth immaculately

Of matter, life, thought, and the God whose glance

Marks the plan of all spontaneity         

 

Pointing one asleep/awake in silence.

No one moves the puppet of their being

Without that infinitesimal lance

 

Sewing the horizon of every string

Far before it is twisted into form

Around the zero-dimensional ring

 

Adorning the end-origin, this storm

Absolutely safe filling the abyss.

Not a hair on any head comes to harm

 

In the universe whose expanding bliss

Springs from the seed of your eternal crown

In coils to be beheaded with a kiss

 

Some shoreless night when the full moon is drowned

In highest seas of future memory

And the pearl of pearls by itself is found.

 

Stay nearest the secret whimsically  

Ever swimming this matrix so clear,

Bound freely now in the one gravity

   

Whose net saves all from all where I am—here

Long before any were, lost in the care

Unending that pierces each eye, mouth, ear,

 

Heart with the sweet hook of life’s own navel.

 

2: You are without beginning and without end    

 

History is not happening today

Here in paradise where we not yet hang

With nothing or not knowing what to say

 

Other than remember me who once sang

Of something so dearest that knowledge weeps

To recall home the hunger of its pang

 

In mansions where the king dreaming us sleeps.

How many beings have you ever met

On this horizon scarred with light that leaps

 

In all directions outspreading the net

Into a view from nowhere so glamorous

That nobody sees you and lives and yet

 

One still is present like an anchoress

Floating wholly all well now in life’s tomb?

Answer not in thought-words unamorous

 

Any question left by love in the womb

Far before abyss springs from the recoil

Of asking in the first place like a bomb

 

Who individuation is, this soil

Of roots underneath gravity,

That black earth of every atom’s toil.

 

The soul is Mary, not an entity

Of the kind my blindness of thinking sees,

No thing squirming among identity

 

With shadow forms of fine or gross bodies,

But the real worm itself of life unbound

Echoing ever new in ecstasies

 

Of self-birth from her own omphalic ground.   

Never was and will be again always,

Such is the first order of someone’s sound,

 

Anyone who verses the rainbow rays  

Expanding from these shores of dreaming stones

To find impressions of the perfect maze

 

Known now-forever to one’s feet alone

In the whim of suffering the very swerve.

The vista of you nails us to the bone

 

One may say were it not for the pure curve

Of a plus lightspeed smile splitting the frame

Of pronouns, the unwhole skeleton nerve

 

Of humanity dying not to name

What everything is always seeing,

First image of fire before the eye’s flame.            

      

I know you know my beloved, the being

Whose question calls yonder unlimited

Domains the dark world-desert is fleeing,

 

A numberless friend losing first his head

To save each from themselves, bleeding such drops

As pierce my bubble-sphere with sighs undead,

 

Everybody falling before the sight.  

 

3: Non-dual, beyond comparison

 

Nothing what it thinks it is (divided)

And the one and only one so perfect

That none anywhere ever has a head,

 

Each face being before number bedecked

In decollation, crowned nameless today

By life’s body, the overboard subject

 

Beached like Priam, Palinurus, Pompey.

This all along was the absolute plan,

Projecting our purposes far away,

 

Unframing the picture of each lifespan

With hands born of wind breathing wherever

It will, all the while preferring a man

 

Whose right love the left does not outclever,

One whose sigh knows silently where to go.

Remember the shore of birth, the treasure

 

Retrieved there in midst of the first death throe,

This vast cetacean stranding of dark souls

Bleating syllables of origin’s blow

 

From which nothing recovers only rolls

Playing it again upon the om point

To sew time’s hide-and-seek game through new holes?

 

The supreme power splitting every joint

Of being’s chain ain’t imaginable,

Hands of one that all hands bind and anoint,

 

Tapping open and closed the gates of hell

Or paradise as love dictates within

This pulsing of nerves immeasurable

 

Enveloped in image’s very skin.

When Teresa sees the beauty of them—

Peripherally my eyes imagine,

 

Unable to sustain the diadem—

Every overestimation falls so shy

That no wonder it is merely the hem

 

Mind and heart are commanded to hold, why

That limen is what best molds your grasp.  

Line is horizon, the far-nearest sky

 

Within which all that makes contact may clasp,

The special place for love itself to meet,

Filling the spectrum between shout and gasp,

 

An omnipresent spot or endless street

Where all oppositions bow to the one

Whose presence proves everyone wrong, his feet.

 

See their shadow trample upon the sun,

The illimitable darkness of light

Outshining above and below the run

 

Of gravity, hear their steps in the night

Stalking the spirals of a lost thought’s ear

Like a panther nonpareil in whose sight

 

You will no more protect what never was.

 

4: and none can measure You

 

She felt like counting things, went to the sea,

Spent three days there numbering the waves,

Seventeen thousand eight hundred and three,

 

And then to a desert, among the caves

Within a centimeter of sand where

Dance grains of void like dusty crystal graves

 

Containing only themselves, what is there.

Truth is—heard in dream—the truth is a tree,

This whole slow bomb branching into the air

 

Of one worlds writing now by dreaming we

Asleep in the signature all over

Lining the art of petals such as these,

 

The ones sewn into beloved lovers

Of life’s full zero of the human form.

Number it as long as you can hover

 

Here, daring once to unswallow the worm

Of seeable spheres sprouting from a point

By falling in fronds unto their own germ,

 

And fail to fail to stop before the joint

Of soul and body suddenly sunders

In a dark flurry of stars at flash point.

 

Not a deity can tally the hairs

Of this—one’s very own—head, not one god

Flames not into being by sparks that dare

 

To swerve wheresoever spirit will nod,

Sewing by seeing the shape of things bleed

Alive into fresh forms perfectly odd,

 

Born by chance more necessary than need.

So full all place is with things never found,

Intersections of all with all which seed

 

In silent explosion the starry ground

So deep to carry my hands even here

In your heart-eyes for a moment unbound

 

And so light to unclose the furthest near

Like a banner rainbowing in the mind.

For example, in iridescent tear

 

Shed the skin snakelike from my face, designed

By predawn in a sleep pattern bluer

Than the purest lazurite ever mined

 

And cupped as a double crystal ewer

Like old interlocking hands of a man

Whose sight pours silence into the viewer.

 

Truly no ruling shall there be nor plan

Of this one and only reality,

Never a marking of its endless span

 

Beginningless, far too present to see,

And still just like that our appointment

Is kept, arriving my breath to where she

 

Waits, filling the ink of night with her eyes.

 

5: You are without color

 

A thousand yesses to all that transpires

Upon this sphere infinite where we crawl

Like ants spying the path of their desire

 

Until today the curve of the whole ball

Carries my heart into the first first dawn  

Whose hue memory will never recall  

 

(Goldening green eye of the Amazon).

Show me a mirror that does not reflect,

Refuse the force whereby a breath is drawn,

 

Lock someone’s corpse never to genuflect

Before mind, energy, matter, the whole

Massive mess moving totally unchecked,

 

Charioteering itself like a soul

Across the curve of all continua.

Everything here burning is in that coal

 

Of brightest ever black as Siddartha

Waking up and seeing the world anew

So good luck voting here other than yea,

 

Appearing elsewhere than in the pale dew

Of motherless birth like a falling word

Or moth-wing flaming the sun’s light from view.

 

At what point in whatever story heard

Has any of it made the slightest sense

Or single truth-drop from the cloud emerged

 

Other than unknowing’s own turbulence,

Something like the pure tint of this color

Out of space, a most ultimate presence

 

Sweetened inside bewilderment’s dolor?

Not beings but fatal contradiction

We are, latest singular plural spore

 

Of lives scarring the corpus with fiction,

Shadowing in ever-expanding gloss

That text unseen, yet felt, without diction,

 

In echoing sport of children across

The day’s darkening oceanic skies.   

See the impossibility of loss,

 

Take and read the total zero of whys,

This infinite sum of points escaping

Everywhere from your dreaming, unborn eyes

 

As if the one behind all creating

Is simply the pupil’s simplemost act

Of missing the moment of its shaping.

 

Something that nothing will ever distract,

A person so spontaneously friend

Now friendlier than the friendliest fact

 

Of original friendship without end

Right in the middle of every movie

Suddenly taking life by the left hand

 

To walk straight out of this void cinema.    

 

 

6: without expression

  

As the boulder he and his beloved

Are climbing at once begins to give way,

Rolls back crushing soon their small bodies dead,

 

He twists as if somehow to shield her clay

With his, curl space beyond the weight of dust,

Pressing gravity this once to obey

 

A will other than its own heavy lust.

Can you fathom the secret of their smile

In that total moment of helpless trust

 

When universe, contracted to a trial

Of instant spirit, with nowhere to flow

Save through itself, unfolds a new while

 

Neither temporal, eternal, or now

Blazing to gold the ash of all words?

Help me to hug that love, to be not vow

 

Whatever alone knows silence, as birds

This moment musicking in nearfarness

A sweet raw scent erasing the deaf herds

 

Of noise still demanding just less and less

Of a more and more available free

Among palms who labor first to confess.

 

Time is not much—do not ask—like a key

To no door, nor to mention any state

To save you from life or death which can’t be  

 

Regardless, simply a sense of breath, fate,

If you will, some mist of dream on the glass

Murmuring echoes back where we await

 

Thoughts stirring in the diorama grass.

Some days immutable so full of light

And strange like speaking in tongues to the gas

 

Whose souls we once were in unearthly night

Already too long after the first sound

By saying nothing produced the big plight

 

Of being others, not one but we, bound

By birth into cosmic history.

Others so heavy with some ancient wound,

 

Unable to respire the mystery,

Only boring horror of me hanging

As brain or hookbait of self-puppetry

 

Signifying nothing—muffled panting

Of the heart needing water not vapor

Trapped in required facemasks of ranting.  

 

So the next day spent burning this taper

Fly the whole world upon smoke unsaying

Whatever ink can shadow on paper,

 

Let all the drones of silent prayers praying

Themselves until the end of ends swallows

The tongue express what truth is conveying

 

Without pressing lips to flute, snake to ear.

 

 

7: without form

 

Those beautiful hands Saint Teresa saw,

Same ones each breath holding all our hearts,

Conducing crystal to leaf, limb to claw,

 

Midwifing birth’s whole into body parts,

Move here themselves exactly as they wish,

Not unlike an atom’s flow into quartz

 

Or the swirl of seas into fins of fish.

Whatever wondrous thing this is, neither

This nor that and both (query Ramakrish-

 

na), wherever one folds between breather

And breath the line of one’s own living who,

It is what it is and, yes, not either,

 

Forever an X for him, her, me, you

To fathom alone wherein silence drowns.

Is there something to be, someone to do,

 

In the daily masquerade of sad clowns,

Mad heroes, and bad sages, idiot

Slave-porters all to painted leaden gowns

 

With masks unhiding faces hideous,

Or, in deserts wild where unnamed flowers

People the sun with thoughts mysterious?

 

No directions lead to the sudden hours 

Where the whole shape of life’s monstrous circle

Feels to fall itself in unseen showers

 

Landing in my mind’s lap like some purple

Skin of ouroboros shed around dawn

By the still centrifuge universal

 

Until I understand and it is gone.  

Give yourself a name, sex, now run ahead

And place the stiff neck of that tiny pawn

 

Unpromotable to king on the red

Line of any guillotine’s little moon

Because everyone both living and dead

 

Is dying to fly from the dark cocoon

Of your cosmos into our home of homes.

Planlessly plan to meet me yourself soon

 

On a shoreless shore where the ocean foams

Bubbles sweet as spittle from Krishna’s flute

Or upon primordial plains where roams

 

Only love’s sigh bearing scent of the fruit

Of paradise, or elsewhere wherever

You want because to here there is no route.

 

Walking down the street today I never

See anyone anything anywhere

Until one far more circumspect ever

 

Appears right in the middle of a prayer

Silently there sculpting the wild wind

Into waves of sight and shadows of hair

 

Darker than darkness and lighter than light.

8:  and without attributes

A light shirt woven of your signature

Is the one my naked heart wants to wear

In this darker celestial color

 

And living texture of something’s hair

With the weight of a warm feeling or thought

Interested in everything without care

 

To breathe between all that is and is not.

Colder than today have you ever felt

In the people-less world of people fraught

 

With mirror-forms frightful that live to melt

Under the tongue of one’s own siren gaze

Spitting breath’s spice to the asteroid belt

 

Of history’s tomorrows, that flat maze

Or screen whose blade now beheads Earth’s children?

The only god who will save us—O rays

 

Of my real eyes neither seen nor hidden!—

Is the one one now is, this that no one

Seems willing to face in the lion’s den

 

Of your own lion-soul or soul-cave sun

Blindingly brighter than all daily dreams

And beaming from the ears of everyone.

 

Thread myself like zero into the seams

Of the garment of garments, God’s rainbow

Of flying sky whose silent freedom beams

 

In all directions or none with the glow

Of becoming whatsoever it may

And is and will be forever ago

 

The simply true happiness here to stay.

Or wait—while the thing-counting never stops

Adding un-verses to none—let me sway

 

Like a tear swimming itself in the drops

Of light that cannot escape your pupil

In some pink sunset drowning the rooftops

 

Up through the gravity unusual

Or smile sometimes known as anagogy.

One day (says heart with sweet mouths quadruple

 

Aping the tetragrammatology

Of causes unsaying its own event),

One day the time of speleology,

 

Of downclimbing the cave of time’s descent

Will uncoil itself as a butterfly

Surprised by its spontaneous ascent.

 

Since from the beginning of the first why

Or unplace of all places glimpsed unseen

To the final it, passing through each eye

 

Shut tightest on itself or piercing keen

As an eagle’s, this one spot has it all,

A knot of blue and white and brown and green

 

Where right now no world has ever been known. 

 

 

9: You are unlimited and unfathomable

 

As they scribbled with the friend about scars

Of the horizon, more and more was said

Than known and vice-versa; words like stars

 

Cut themselves from void, burning to be read

By a few disjointed no ones who feel

That everything alive is beyond dead

 

And more than any mind may observe, real.

To die in secret is the life, unheard

Outside boundless silence who feels the deal

 

In all directions since the first sigh stirred

Your waters of sleep the way it pleases

To be what things are really like, absurd

 

Or flooded with form that never freezes

Swallowing all on the way to nowhere. 

Now one more reason to love the breezes

 

That breathe upon the temples of your hair

Whose priestesses sweeter than the honey

Dropping unseen on their own heart-tongues’ prayer 

 

Sway as lions to drive off the money

Changers, thieves of blood who have no business

Near the pure pulse of something so funny. 

 

No one will ever stop laughing at this

Which nor can be indicated as that—

A wild abyss of mountains of such bliss

 

As is hardly felt living on the flats

Or in cities dense with desire’s pain,

Only closer to the sea habitats

 

Of Andean stones singing in the rain.

What I mean is that the entire world

Of everything (all) is totally vain

 

Or simply the shadow of a dance whirled

Of itself by God hanging round your neck

In cords out of life-creating cuts twirled

 

Down to the diameter of a speck

Whose color dots the pupil of image.

If at some moment on this mountain trek

 

All strength stumbles before the vast mirage

And the bubble of breath drowns in the blur,

Do not think that you are not the mad mage

 

Whose spell is causing all stuff to occur

Or that somehow anyone arrives here

Else than from here, the future where we were.

 

O bewildering whisper of the ear

Speaking all truth in a spiral of spots

Still-staying faster than the speed I hear

 

Passing time by through a series of knots

Each nested in the other yet somehow

Shortcutting the circuit of endless thoughts

 

How on earth to face whatever you are?