On Philosophy

deviant art by disble


On Philosophy


amethyst vase shaped like a triton shell

no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes,
not even mysterious dark matter.
It is 1 billion light years across of nothing.
That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion
miles of emptiness
NASA astronomer Steve Maran said of the discovery:
“This is incredibly important for something
where there is nothing to it.”

wonderfuel: i just learned of that expression:
wonderfuel
love it

oddly it was in a negative way
as the person saying it
rejected the use of wonderfuel
a concrete poet/visual artist
linked to from that
poetry egg site

i like concrete poetry;
his was ok, but i
loved the idea
of wonder
fuel

(even its shadow terror fuel has a resonance
that barks up the thing that grists to our mill)

perhaps he rejects his own best stuff out of
a sense of shadow narcissism? somehow mistaking
all creativity as stemming from a child,
and thus in wanting to be a so-called
pure adult rejects
that which is tainted with any sense of
innocence & wonder?

(Hillman warns of the taint of the child,
how anything brought through its doorway
is somehow glassed with the spectrum vision of
all that is associated with child:
abandonment, nurture)

we want the milk
green & warm

how the un-child (still caught in the aegis
of the bad parent; shadow still belongs to
whatever light casts it: the idea is to become
your own light, not be pinned to the heel
of self-pity)
(Peter Pan & Hook & Wendy & Nanna Crocodile
time o see the child come in!)
sucks the essential miracle from every muon,
gluon, & boson of mattering
(some still don’t get the mystery of how
or why chemicals & electricity
can convey qualities of transcendental beauty
at all
much less their insistence on being right!
where is righteousness in
the table of elements?

it does not know
its milk)

i still subscribe to the contagion idea of Jung,
to the melting pot neighborhood,
each block, each goddess
on a street that is
connected,
heaven & hell
suburbs of the same
vast city of the all at once

i don’t have to be a child to know
the creative
anymore than i have to be in China
to taste plums in milk

o wonderfuel

i’ve been talking about nothing.
the nothing the void
voice of the id
Pandora
the all gold
milk of opening
the rounded doors

so in reading Giegerich on Jung & MDR
the child paradise god poopoo light & shadow
(so far)
((is it really one thought or two because
of the and; will any conjunction do—
the horse is black & the house is on fire—
are they one thought?
the horse is black but the house is on fire
the horse is black or the house is on fire
placing green on red, one color?
what makes a horse a horse
& a house a house—
how i niggle at
the hole,
to weave
any tapestry is to
weave one thought in potentia:
that is what poetry proposes:
the grist is the mill)

However you spell the word invalid,
you are either invalid because not valid,
or invalided out. Or you disentangle
the least bit of wiry fluff that has been
haunting your tongue for half an hour,
and assign it to the unwilling project
of the human mess. These rank as contributions
in some way or other, but the assorted
confectioneries are too massive to eat,
and the strand of henpecked fluff is too narrow,
which makes them both second-rate substitutes
and sees them out. What I’m trying to say,
in language ever more oblique, is that
the human psyche can sometimes see evidence
of what is not present to the senses.

“Bosh,” one hears you exclaim,
“this man is writing about nothing!” But is he?
It could be that he is writing about something
somebody said to him after he had regained
his senses, or that he regained these senses
for himself, and detected shreds of rabbit fluff
here and there. Imagine a man coming round after
five days in the human tank that denatures us all
and finds no memory worth talking about.
I suspected as much from my 10-day immersion
in whatever I was immersed in.

I say this in the most tentative manner because
there isn’t a great deal of difference between
what’s roiling and not rolling.
You could easily miss it for the whole of
the 10-day period. Nonetheless, I think it was
there for human consumption, and I am content
to identify it — if that is not too canonical
a word — as a lump of Lot’s wife going nowhere,
or what Samuel Beckett, in one of his wilder
notions identifies as Arsène going the unerring
rounds on his bicycle, even when he has nothing
to deliver.

Clearly we are dealing with shadowland
at its bleakest, and should not expect too much.
It is not likely to reward us with any vision
of something discernible. You always have a chance
to say “I saw nothing” or “I saw something.”
And it is not enough to say
“I saw Versed or chloroform,” because that would
generate far too much reportorial weight.
To recognize that we are not dealing with much
of the known hardly delights anybody, but just
imagine how much of the unknown is out there
among the dark clusters of stars
and the dark matter of which we know nothing.
We may think that we are dealing with
the nonstop hodgepodge of daily life,
but we are also dealing with the opaque mysteries
of the universe itself.

Cabbage served twice means death.
So says one of the older Greek proverbs,
though it goes no further into the lethal lineage
of cabbage. I was becoming accustomed to these
devil servings, mainly of the mythic cabbage,
as distinct from the real one. But how to divest
yourself of the mythic one, when the real thing
offers itself up? I long ago decided to opt for both,
lest I for some reason lose one or the other,
whether bull-rushing into a dead end,
or having the real thing played out on my skull
for days.

unfortunately he drops this line of inquiry
or perhaps there is nothing more to say
one begins with the eye of needles
with the pushing of the pierce
& then the net becomes
what winds about
the pulling of
that push

what
else to
say save
once upon
a needle prick

then the milk of the 17th century

Thomas Browne on amythyst &
“the noble tralucent gems”
in relation to the mandrake
as the hanged man
the semen of which yields the mandrake
the something emanating
from the O
short of
the number 12
(o anguish of all numbers)
“tender strings in the fashion
of beards & other hairy teguments . . .
& in the root of white briony
may be practised every spring”

So when the Oxe corrupteth into Bees,
or the Horse into Hornets, they come not forth
in the image of their originals.

(qu)’ails (wh)at ails
th’ pr’(aerie) amethyst
s’oul (l’âme) of the virgin
qu’avering truth, o ruth, o dove
th’ sorrow o’ th’ holes
how the amber
rushes in to
preserve
th’ fold

o eagle’s nest
decked wi’
th’ bones
of qu’

amber is not green
a solid liquid
red on green

the horse is on fire
the house is black

the serpent’s teeth
the elephant tusk
the little prince
wears a thorn
of distance

the seal of Pandora’s
box was a thin
hammered
scene
goldleaf
portraying
a bearded man
leaning from a bough
to drop an apple into a dragon’s mouth

the foil burned when it popped & flickers
in the dreams of virgins
on the night before they wed
& men dream of blue mouths
petal soft & spiraling
an endless maze
of soul skins
seeds on
ice blue
heaven

which is why i chafe at essays
not that essays
are lesser

but
more that
so much of what
pullspushesrounds
the me that cups & pours
is cupped & poured
wants expressing
in an indirect
(di)rection
(e)rection
(cor)rection
a decor of a place
that opens & closes
a mouth a wing a gap
an O that is a wave seen sideways
ide weighs in the voice of the id (void)
the egg of the O that points to the oi slide
of the lid of the olive in the drink
of the eye iced
omphalos the Om & phalOs f’amaleoily
& fate of the fey
falsified & ossified & sifted thru the gyres
of the grit of gnaw(t)
ama & a mal & leo & il y ya ya toi & roi & hoi
of poi the OI overlapped f of the ec y aeon
the body the body that rots in the water
raised in the water walks on the water
parts the water & clouds the water
in a fire of water unquenchable
the way gold stamps
itself on a flesh
veined with
an exertion
to circle
until
it
ashes
a thumb
on the forehead
of a god
risen
white
as a hair
curling on the loins
of an old woman laughing
the worm seedling of
having bees in
the bin of
being
ein
1
w(ith)(ou)t
w’ending back
but spiraling where
the wh’O wh’ere wh’en
overlaps in f
spinning
sinning
with
a no
thing
th’e c’enter
enter the body (ec)
already flow & eddy
of the infinite tide of t(urn)ing

on my copy
of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
the cover is a rendition of a brick wall
reddish brick with grey mortar
pocks & chips in the brick
wetted discolored
i do not
know
if it
is a not
so subtle dig
at Wittgenstein’s
somewhat tortured
way of saying nothing
can be said of much anything
at all: that this wall of logic
even if the ladder of
6.54 is long
enough to
top it
said wall
is but a chink
o Pyramus o Thisby
& nothing more in the wall
a play within a play
a metametaphor
of a sheet in
the wind
or (4)
just turn the page
& there you see a blank
or how i told her that sometimes
it feels like i am walking thru stone
love such a thing as walls cannot contain


Richard Lance Williams

Posted over on More Poetry