Sunday, November 06, 2022
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Kisses on the Feet of a Metalhead: Some Indices on Standing
[published in X 1 (2022): www.x-n1.com]
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.
Saturday, January 15, 2022
Glossator 12: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Edited by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock
Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock
Erik Kwakkel
Kristin Böse
Andrew Hicks
Christina Lechtermann
Elisa Brilli
Christine Ott and Philip Stockbrugger
Andrea Baldan
Magnus Ulrich Ferber
Saturday, January 08, 2022
Because It's Not There - Climbing Theory
Tuesday, September 07, 2021
Glossator 11 (2021): Cristina Campo: Translation / Commentary
Sunday, June 13, 2021
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?