He with the mind meandering like the great rivers – those that function metaphorically for whole cultures and histories – the Taiga and Thames, Amazon, Euphrates, Danube, the Mighty Mississipp, and so on – along with all of the tributaries and streams, springs far removed, deltas and falls…
In that his mind has assimilated, absorbed particles of eons of blood, trash and shit, death and being born, creatures and passengers, landscapes and strata, wars and rumors of wars, nations and races and species…
he was the written word as a river, knowledge as a catch-all, depository, wealth and waste and millions of miles to tangle
the body being like this as well – billions of cells, some relatively foreign to others, some of entirely different types, all connected and held together somehow; “body” of water, of work, of being: arteries, capillaries, aminos, neurons, stems, DNAs, whole worlds of rivers, lakes and creeks.
Heidegger pictured it a hell of a journey through thickest forest – rivers do this – sometimes underground, the earth is filled with reservoir – to traverse the “open,” coming to a clearing, a stream wending its way in dry desert, mountain meadow, steppes and prairies…the surround is still denser than dense,
his mind become so, with awareness of the body, or mind as body, also mind matter stuff, indecipherable, inexplicable, barely described.
Yet all, so far, inscribed? What little of all could be held. Infinitessimal. Finite. In the face of infinity…relation.
Derrida’s abysme – a feeling, an unknowing, almost a certainty that “things will never be sorted out…” that the tiny wiggles over the mapped surfaces can never all be traced, all the planes, there is not time nor capacity, to follow thoroughly even an arbitrarily chosen segment of a smallest stream, constant movement from and toward, through, up and down, over, under, behind, before…abysme.
Untraceable traces. Mind, emotion, sense, soul, causality discombobulated and befuddled beyond cognizance or comprehension, indeed – of what comprehension consists.
“Know thyself,” cruel riddle, as if spoken by a genuine god – something entirely Other, outside, impossible and impassible…the knowing cannot be known, or who knows it? Is knowing it now, and then now?
The rivers do not know, they flow, happen. God cannot know or not be a self/person in any way that corresponds with us – without not-knowing or abysming in endless spirals centrifugal and –tripetal.
Bakhtin sees the picture of us seeing pictures of what we do not see…all together…but we’re never all together and imagining is only one way to correspond.
It would require a miracle, yet it already is, he thinks – inexplicable, unprecedented, unaccounted for…kenotic theory, Forms and Chaos, quarks and atoms – nothing explained, ever re-described, only resolved in irresoluble faith – in theory, in truth.
And so on…mapping these rivers.
Oceans and the pooling of eyes, vast landscapes of fleshes, fragile impossible organs, tenuous and tenaciously flowing on, through drought, through death, flood and
“all things come about through opposition, and the universe flows like a river”
He with the mind meandering like great rivers and their effluvia…