INSIDE UNDIVIDED (5)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

And as of today I’ve learned SATOR is the name of a press, a press that’s just published Mark Leidner’s aphorisms, this is exciting.  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fernando Pessoa as Bernardo Soares in THE BOOK OF DISQUIETUDE:

I’ve created various personalities within.  [ ... ] I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally.  I’m the living stage where various actors act out various plays.

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with thanks to flying object for finding Tacoma Narrow Bridge collapse film and for installing it in post #4

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…………who bends as if

he were the semiarch that forms a bridge

(Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto xix, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum)

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And then I stumble into this:  (Thanks to Chris Martin’s book’s (becoming weather) epigraph:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Nietzsche:

THAT THE WORLD IS NOT STRIVING TOWARD A STABLE CONDITION IS THE ONLY THING THAT HAS BEEN PROVED.

CONSEQUENTLY ONE MUST CONCEIVE ITS CLIMACTIC CONDITION IN SUCH A WAY THAT IT IS NOT A CONDITION OF EQUILIBRIUM—————–

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Famished I think, famished for what?

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in the mind of the man who when he speaks, he inches away, as he says, to leave room for words as they pile upon the floor, as they fall out of his mouth, as he says them, right there they are, on the floor, at his feet, before him.

To be that certainly literal.  To know with certainty that requires physical action, the materiality of words.  We can see a word, hear a word, say a word, write a word, that’s fairly material.  I like picturing a word’s spoken waves extending far out into space.  That is no less material than words having some kind of literal 3-dimensonal existence that requires space for them to enter.

(I never asked, and I should have asked, what happens to these word heaps, this mass of language we bring into being, when you leave the room, when time passes.  Do they dissolve?  Where do words go?

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I’m thinking of  how many I’s Fernando Pessoa needed to write (and perhaps say sometimes) his words.  Pessoa conjured so many others he makes thinking of other as more complex than a bee hive full of bees.  And as dependently inter-locked as one’s body.

It’s worth thinking how unknown to one’s self is any I in one’s poems, how un-autobiographical to write with an I, how other-centric the appearance of any I is, how against self-consciousness is an I’s encounter.

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I’m having a chance encounter with Jorge Luis Borges’s THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS, And I’m looking at his: The Double.

BORGES:  Suggested or inspired by mirrors, the surface of still water, and twins, the concept of the Double is common to many lands.  It seems likely that statements such as Pythagoras’ “A friend is another myself” and Plato’s “Know theyself” were inspired by it.

(so when I write or say We it is okay I am just being a double, I’m just being me in a mirror)

And then and there I arrive at this halting,  possibly hypocritical, corniche:  if not I who and then who would I think I am when I speak for who?  two?  you?

At last, us.

And significantly, without thinking, here and now come indications of We, I hear myself saying……….

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Whenever I know I am hearing myself I know it’s because I question the authenticity of the simplicity of what I seem to be saying.  When I know nothing’s as simple as that.

Whenever I hear myself saying something I lean toward believing I’m missing something, I’m not saying what I could be saying, and possibly, I will never be able to say.

And if I can’t say it, I can’t mean it.  If I can’t say it, I don’t know it.  And there plenty I can’t know.

Unknowables.  The Great Unknown.  It has to stay that way to be that way.

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I don’t believe poets like to be thought of as people who like to generalize. When we do , and it seems pretty certain we are always in the midst of it, it’s a open secret we see just how absurd we are.

Imagining distance, say 18 billion light years away, makes more sense than generalizing based on no matter what is our limited experience, filled with similarities, differences and those extra fine exceptions.

On the other hand we’re doing just about nothing but generalizing, if I take this to mean announcing something as something to be noticed apart from its original setting.  Saying something’s name.  Naming something.

It is outrageous and it’s one of the first things we want to do, we try hard to learn how to say and know and understand and send out into the world, words.  Almost everybody has a “first word.”

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I do prefer inventions and confabulations and fabrications and metaphorical standards over and all around conventional descriptions.

I do think one has to think one’s way out of one’s finitude and circumscribed surroundings and character.

I do believe in and have been given over to day-dreaming and cloud-gazing and reverie and fantasy and supposing and proposing and story-telling and speculations a good deal of the time.

At the same time, an attraction to so-called facts has also been a pre-occupation and has resulted in a liking of out of date encyclopedia, original and bogus systems of knowledge, taxonomies, organizing principles and almost every kind of religious dogma, science from an amateur skeptics point of view and appreciation, philosophy for its several competing logics and intensely conversational progressions, politics for its blatant exposure of our picayune tendencies and self-absorbing inclinations, so many things.

Dusty Rabbits in Cosmos Borders

At dusk they grow ecclesiastical and sarcastic.

Though they never say a word, it is their posture

That judges us to be the less than the serene beings we are.

They stare off into something we will always miss, us

With our big brains and long nerves and red scarves.

They write nothing down.  What they know is too profound.

And they are good and true and beautiful and young.

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It doessn’t matter to me whether this is true or not. I choose to believe it is true. It does matter to me that I can write it and that words can make it and that there it is somehow absolutely true whether true or not.

And almost last of all a little Randall Jarrell:

………You need to read good poetry with an attitude that is a

mixture of sharp intelligence and of willing emotional empathy, at

once penetrating and generous………When you begin to read a poem

you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life

are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its

stews taste exactly like your mother’s hash or to reject it because

the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the

Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that

inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural

death will die.

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Excerpt photo from on-going  series by Boyadjiev in which photographs of monuments are finished with all their riders erased, all human heroes vanished; the series is called ON VACATION.

…………………….From the vast depths of a box embelished with foreign stamps, delicate immobile objects emerged:  silver from Utrecht and Paris covered with hard heraldic fauna, and a samovar.  Amongst them–with the perceptible and tenuous tremor of a sleeping bird—a compass vibrated mysteriously.  The Princess did not recognize it.  Its blue needle longed for a magnetic north; its case was concave in shape; the letters around its edge corresponded to one of the alphabets of Tlon.  Such was the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality.

(from Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlon, uqbar, Orbis Tertius” printed in LABYRINTHS, a collection of his short fiction and a few essays, short ones)

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Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, theAmerican Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.

INSIDE UNDIVIDED (4)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

In Which I Confess to an Addiction to Recursive Contrariness and some of its Ramifications

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We see this moment from outside as within.

                                        John Ashbery

                                        The New Spirit

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Robert Hook:  only that which is allowed to be completely flexible will form the exact pattern for a stable construction of rigid materials…they way to build a stable arch is to invert a flexible chain hanging freely from two points of suspension.

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The seeds of why write at all after reaching self-consciousness….

…one writes what cannot be transformed by other means

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Why transformed? Why transform?  To be on the giving side,

to participate in living, in the feeling that this is what it sometimes means to be alive.

Trans and trance and true as in compasses across it all.  Across is mostly a good way to go.  It can be a short cut.

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Sometimes when you hear a word you know how much the word is admired.

The word I heard was parataxis.

Here are the pieces, here are two.

Here are plenty, here now you piece it together, you say.

Here is what you get.  What you get is what you do.

Here is where you know.  Inside, no, not so fast,

In between, there now that is so, you be in between

You be the here in there, you be what pulls it all into one.

You can tell when someone says or writes a word with some kind of pleasure.

Hey, you like that word, huh.  It holds what you need in it.

Parataxis.  There are so many ways to think about it.

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There were at least five safe places to be on the farm I was raised on below New Orleans, below Belle Chasse, below Jesuit Bend, on a spot on the river called Naomi.

In Naomi if you are by the river, you are said to be upfront.

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In Naomi if you are by the road, you are said to be back behind.

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Out over the levee on the batture with no one around.  Upfront.

(if boy cousins happened to pass by, forget it, you can be sure you’ll pretty soon be in quicksand)

Way under a haystack.  By the headlands.

(cool, very dry, now and then a mouse, now and then a cat or a kitten)

Back under the porch.  Upfront.

(silky dust, fine dirt, smooth and cool, an occasion snake might come by, good to be in the sifted quiet you could find there)

Right under a bed.  Inside.

& safest of all, up top on the same bed where, safest of all, one could sit between two facing mirrors, and there one would become a living recursive actual embodiment.  (Naturally I hadn’t those words, recursive or embodiment then, then I had me alone in the space in between those two mirrors)

inconclusively forever one sees one’s self recede into infinity, infinity on all sides,  the point is infinity and its never-ending ineluctable vanishing point

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and right there, you were, right in the middle of it, in the middle of infinity

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that turned out to be the safest place

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let’s say, this is related to why and how it is a point of view to be wished for,

to be put in the position of looking in through a keyhole.

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Let’s say, this is why thinking about false doors is to be recommended.

And later there will be frames!

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And the reading of Witold Gombrowicz’s COSMOS

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from Peter Altenberg’s TELEGRAMS OF THE SOUL

…………..I squandered your godly gift of freedom, doted on noble and altogether ignoble women, loafed around in forests, was a lawyer without studying law, a doctor without studying medicine, a book dealer without selling books, a lover without ever marrying, and finally a poet without composing any poetry.  Can these short things really be called poetry?! No way.  They’re extracts! Extracts from life.  The life of the soul and what the

day may bring, reduced to two or three pages, cleansed of superfluities like a beef cow in a reduction pot!  It’s up to the reader to re-dissolve these extracts with his own lust for life and stir them back into a palatable broth, to heat them up with his own zest, in short, to make them light, liquidy and digestible.

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from Walter benjamin’s archives:

What is Aura?

The experience of aura rests on the transposition of a form of reaction normal in human society to the relationship of nature to people.  the one who is seen or believes himself to be seen {glances up} answers with a glance.  To experience the aura of an appearance or a being means becoming aware of its ability {to pitch} to respond to a glance.  this ability is full of poetry.  when a person, an animal, or something inanimate returns our glance with its own, we are drawn initially into the distance; its glance is dreaming, draws us after its dream.  aura is the appearance of a distance however close it might be.  Words themselves have an aura; Krause described this in particularly exact terms. “the closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it returns the gaze.

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And the longer one looks at a false door, the more one sees there is only one way to open it.

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one acceptable way to get through it

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………………… allowed to be completely flexible will form the exact pattern for a stable construction of rigid materials…they way to build a stable arch is to invert a flexible chain hanging freely from two points of suspension.

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See if you want, THE TACOMA NARROWS BRIDGE COLLAPSE

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daytrip to paradox  (it will be a little harder to build paradox with parataxis)

unsaying

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Everything about this sentence is false.

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By this I can be ever enchanted.  How words have lives of their own.

How when and if words want, they can unsay themselves as they come into being.

They seem so not inert.  They seem so moving.

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Nothing can be handled with all the care it deserves.

it unsays itself as it comes into being

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You and I, we go our separate ways.

it unsays itself as it comes into being

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its own recording angel

everything held in suspension

under conditions of superstition

in suspicious circumstances

in substantial circuitry

suspended

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up in the air with a recording angel

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arc, he said, I look forward to the day when story and narrative can survive through a sentence that doesn’t include the word “arc”

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parabola, on the road to parabola

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prepostions as keyholes………….prepositions and do this………

(and as potential recursive word actions, or activators)

of of of of of of of

for for for for for for for

behind behind behind behind

within within within within

after after after after

through through through through

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who looks through a keyhole, going through a locked door (and a false door) by other means

the outside and the inside of anything, of it all

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Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, theAmerican Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.

INSIDE UNDIVIDED (3)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

There are so many occasions for absolute silence, complete amnesia, few words, aphasia. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are made speechless (again) by bliss or in grief.

In extremes, in shocks, in sudden irreversible steps;

in deep love and devotion;

in sudden presentations of beauty,

in steady attention to fire, say, or water.

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We find ourselves without words.  Words can’t be shaped to fit what we can’t know we’re positively feeling.

And what is strange and beautiful and good is that when we do find words we often in a poem are most likely to be closest to what is unwordable, unsayable, something that has to remain unspoken, unworded or else it will be destroyed or otherwise disappear.

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Yves Tanguy Multiplication of the Arcs MOMA

Find a way into that space in which contradiction and multi-dimensional paradox can be apprehended

Or more clearly, find a way to prepare one’s mind so that contradictions in abundance and multi-dimensional, omniscient and omnipresent paradox rushes in because it seeks an environment in which it can thrive

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we are most vulnerable, we are more receptive, or receptors are more sensitive, we are more available

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to shocks of feeling our being is inside all else

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we are droste effects!

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Sally on Mad Men: “When I think about forever I get upset. Like the Land of Lakes butter has that Indian girl, sitting holding a box, and it has a picture of her on it, holding a box, with a picture of her on it, holding a box. Have you ever noticed that?”

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we are inside undivided!

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it feels true to being alive

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it is worth seeing how one can create circumstances, how

when art generates circumstances favorable to these conditions

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in which one is more likely to be inside mystery……….

in which one can be near mystery, up against it, nearby…….

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Eudora Welty:

I do not know even now what it was that I was waiting to see; but in those days I was convinced that I almost saw it at every turn.

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove.  I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible—-actually a  powerful position.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what…………………….

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And next I’m going to confess to a terrible weakness for contrariness.

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Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, theAmerican Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.