Ours are the conversations,
the pages and days of the world,
the shapes of silent music from an unknown
brightness of all forgotten or submerged
voices in a place that appears no longer.
"A voice speaks and you listen:
wondering at the form of what is foreign
or alike you listen, speak in reply and listen."
Why hope that there is something material,
something less like ghosts who slip
treacherously out of meeting
in the words we knit and reach for?
Languages fierce in their secrets intersect
or slice apart the dreams proffered
across gravity, space, time, motion.
The sky speaks and the vacant face
looking up to shapeless face
speaks, unheard and unknown.
So much unfolds to be told.
We stare together at the same spark
and then go home.
What if there were more to give
and a heart to empty into hands,
whatever that would mean,
regardless of how it were held?
Though you've rested in this place
I can barely breathe.
This is the gift that isn't yours to give,
the canvas that isn't yours to fill.
"We could still stand together.
I hope we could walk as if we weren't alone."
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Saturday, September 3, 2011
to be, to be like.
I've heard sometimes that there are two ways of understanding and defining things. You can either describe what they are like or divide them from what they are not, and these are conflicting approaches. While the first way seems to evoke a primitive kind of cosmology, a tangible world where similitude, meaning and metaphor belong together, the other is linked more with Western rationality. The whole idea seems to lament the responsible necessity of dividing logic's desired Reality from the countless perspectives known by experience.
I'm not sure that this is right. The fullest and most resonant ideas seem to approach their subjects according to their shape and their substance simultaneously, working through the relationships and differences between both aspects of each thing as we see them to be. The universe is varied and yet it's real; it's not a homogenous field of feeling, intense yet irrelevant to the nothingness outside it. It's not a mass of shadows or echoes, and certainly not a cold shell of categories.
Logic stands strong, but never stands alone. The further you travel into understanding the layers upon layers of what the world is (independently of us, except for ourselves) and is significant as, this grows: feeling and meaning stand together in a highly natural way.
Knowledge like this can be surprising and intense. It can be familiar and ordinary. That's not the point; there's something deeply right about handling what defines and what comprises a thing in the same breath. Even if you won't and can't pin all things down like dead moths, they may not be elusive to reason.
Even when it feels like the sense of sight has rarely, if ever, existed for us.
I'm not sure that this is right. The fullest and most resonant ideas seem to approach their subjects according to their shape and their substance simultaneously, working through the relationships and differences between both aspects of each thing as we see them to be. The universe is varied and yet it's real; it's not a homogenous field of feeling, intense yet irrelevant to the nothingness outside it. It's not a mass of shadows or echoes, and certainly not a cold shell of categories.
Logic stands strong, but never stands alone. The further you travel into understanding the layers upon layers of what the world is (independently of us, except for ourselves) and is significant as, this grows: feeling and meaning stand together in a highly natural way.
Knowledge like this can be surprising and intense. It can be familiar and ordinary. That's not the point; there's something deeply right about handling what defines and what comprises a thing in the same breath. Even if you won't and can't pin all things down like dead moths, they may not be elusive to reason.
Even when it feels like the sense of sight has rarely, if ever, existed for us.
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