This is another post I made during Advent four years ago, which bears repeating. I have read this sermon by St. John Chrysostom (late fourth century …
St. John Chrysostom: Homily on Christmas Morning
Tag: complexity
a view from nowhere?
he can only be distracted by nothing (the reflection of everything), light uncontained or perceived, even though he cannot cease registering her flesh and its forms, thigh-lines, tone and texture, fluidity of folding and motion. Nothing refuses to contain it, and rather brings it back, and forth, or all at once space, always “this. this here. here.” Nothing missing mirror, his emptiness replete.
Bends and scent, nonsensed, indelible.
Him, there (here), composed observer, unable/disabling any view from nowhere. It is without a not…
our small lives are traversed by momentous movements, avalanches in the depths of the everyday
Knausgaard, Summer
How much longer still dreaming of a language
Not enslaved to words as it is today…
des forets, Poems of Samuel Wood
so we use words in order to go beyond words
Markides, Mountain of Silence
What constitutes unbounded in literature?
Knausgaard, My Struggle 6
…still she remains a remarkable beauty (how so easily contorted from inside?). If inner bodies resembled outer, how different life would be, observable reversed as well – cultural ugliness/fear/repulsion softens from inner loveliness, even as prettiness suffers its evils. That being said, the inner therefore rules the day for beauty, and earth must be divine.
Veins outstrip hand lotion. Wrinkles give the lie.
he depends on his non-mirror, and many come to light. Refractions, glints, unending activity – a world (or however you attempt to measure the imagined) exists as relation alone (all-one) – infinite interdependence ‘to be.’
slope, angle, apparent rest – the wrist, the knee, the curve to ankle, each knuckle and blade about the eye, how else to distinguish hair from head from air from skin from water – its relative.
all i do is sense and praise (that poorly) – relation, gratitude. Awareness – attention – all act. Calves, puppies, elbows, crooks – sway and struggle, chaos-strife, relations of same differences, now.
he calls out, a wave of vibrations; he smiles, a rippling fabric; looks (out or in at once) – “becoming” (some have spoken or written) – enacted, enbodied, at-once ‘taking place’ – now. Here it is, they are, him/her with in of. It goes. Nowhere but here (it comes in other words). his left, your right, his east, your west, up-down-other: relation. Occurs.
No else. No one. No thing. No where. Never. All depending, relating to this, us, that, here, now. Without which? Unknown, inconceivable, imperceptible, nonsensical…only possible.
Deconstructing Definitions
Perhaps “work” means something must be done, regardless of desire,
and signifies felt effort.
If “to love’s” “unassailable affirmation,”
something verbal, and not only.
“Education” as “familiarity with thoughts of others” (K. O. Knausgaard),
entails “experience” as “familiarity with itself”?
And what of “wisdom”?
I wonder if “deaf” implies “not-listening,” or/and, “our forgetting of the body.”
and who defines “republic”?
Or “nowhere” and “now here” in all their differance?
Frere Jacques (yes, go and sing it)
suggests impossibility fuels valuation –
negation requiring its positive with –
terms all ways relative in their contexts,
indeterminate and groundless,
yet term-in-able, undecided, written-in.
I don’t know.
But I sense it’s indefinitive,
de- and con- structure something else,
like trace or foggy margin,
the space between the sounds
that continues (us and them).
Being something
This is how we see:
a set of brackets, dark,
moving across wires in the sky
(that we placed there)
because of the angle of light
and it’s changing
– perhaps –
and perhaps it’s the change
and the angling,
and perhaps it’s involved with the light
What Words Do
“language cannot cope with its relation with the world”
– Giorgio Agamben –
“language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein –
Sometimes it seems that words might do anything! Connecting things and people; defining, describing, explaining and exclaiming; naming, inventing, questioning… arguing, fomenting, discovering; seducing, displacing, and singing. Very little experiencing of the human kind comes unaccompanied by terms. – Is that so?
There are dreams – like signs and billboards of liqueous or exaggerated perceivings… “the sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” (A. Dragomoshchenko)… and slit it does. We bleed.
And breathing, heart’s-pulse, sleeping along with the intake of food, its output as waste, our birthing and walking, working and running… and dying. All our play. Intercourse, of course. Do moans and groans, grunts and cries and sighs, lisps and complaints (our myriad utterances) – mean words? mean language? What of our relative silence? The thrumming body of the speechless and deaf? Eye-gaze dumb, its blindness?
The skin has been rubbed off my fingers.
Wordlessly, soundlessly, lust and desire screech on…shrill in body and bone – both where the starving exudes and toward its petulant prey.
What of the growth of grasses? Is language there? In rhythmic patterning of rain? A sense of sunlight?
Sometimes wind whispers.
A cat moves. Silently.
And a “sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” – darkness visible, darkness speaks – (it has been claimed – via words, the verbal).
Sweet and troubling confluence: activity and languaging (the same): the “verbal.” Of sound and motion. Our noise. Moving sound around in and with our bodies – in speech or dance, in strain and the clamor of being.
What falls (or grows, blooms, disappears) outside the devouring knife – that which segments and shrivels the fluid songs of experience and reverie? Of presence. The Slicer-Dicer we’ve composed, posing together to cut from faultless fabric?
As utterance, inscription fondles its way, brushingly and blade-like, sensually surreptitious. Caressing and crafty, rapaciously blessing its praying and braying of names – who can counter its reduction, repression, its blame or silvery shame?
Ye without words, cast the first stone.
As if genesis were language and time: space to create with.
Comprehensively unknown.
Thickets
The world overgrown. At least any accessible sector. I’ve heard tale of open, of empty, of spacious, of dearth. Not where I approach. Even my own body – its in- or out-sides, its wherewithal. Always where-with-all.
Tangled, almost briny, in some instances. If able to determine a surround wherewith or whenwith to take a stance in. Even thinking, even breath, even a pulse of bloodbeat. Any sound we form toward music. Any making-sensible. For us. Our kind. Those within the overgrown – the untamable, reckless warp and weft.
To hunch there, immediately becomes here. How different – if imagined? To gather, to pre-tend. To suppose a disposition, a presence somehow differentiated. How-some? To curl in, therefore (perchance? per theory?) “to find,” to be able to, to call, to be-in-g? Yet how? Or why? Where is the for? And what might the hole be suspected to fill?
Where is the gap between this and the other? Between you and me, he or she, this-that-the-other, between…any/thing? Something wishes to know, apparently… and this wishing/motion/decision/desire/activity/drive (whatever “ “) begins by implicating violence… bi-lining a world with borders, invented barriers, perceived traces, intuited splits, cuts and hacks that are not there until. How un-till this supposed “soil” from which to distinguish, fabricate, or function? From which to “operate.” Surgeon-species.
What knowledge is expected by destroying? Deconstructing (or constructing) – both requiring joints? By suture and slice? By taking life? Prone to decompose. What a trajectory.
What options? Compelled…to con-fuse…confess…to communicate, express, enjoy, enjoin (what we find ourselves joined to) still even to de-scribe, in-scribe, in-voke, ex-tol, inter-act or en-gage provokes difference, demands separations, dismemberment. To cleave.
To try to body. To try to mind. Attend. Acknowledge. Distortion. To twist and torture an other, as the one or…alteration. De-pict.
Impossible connection already seems to be. Each, every add-ition a disconnecting, a cutting, a stitching seam according to a pattern. Whose? Whats?
Over, under, whelmed. Where is the open, the undifferentiated, the is? Always already be-fore. All ways, all ready, be-for. In other words…not possibly worded. Prior to word. Involving act (including language) but unincorporated (already corporal), defying design-ation (surprisingly? one would think ‘it’ [not] is at the end of de- or un-signing/signifying), erasure of description, all palimpsests equaling… perhaps (per-happening) – infinite, certainly uncountable, incalculable, without ordination, order, ordaining, without with-in or –out. Only WITH, inconceivable, imperceptible (perception cuts), irretrievable (the rejection of any re-), disabused, disturbed perturb, a dreaming dreamed turbulence = a happen to be.
Still this thinks with. Language. Lost already, displaced and falsified by a tiny thread, an whole fabric, a world-veil at least whilst continuing as world…
Think again. Dream. Confuse. Imagine. Invent. Art ducts (vents) for breath… further re-moves, com-pli-cations, furthering within, for fun? A dance, a play, a re-morse (cryptic codification, surreptitious and additional) some native complicity to immeasurable complexity. As is. As if. And so on…
Untitled
Then:
pregnant with fore and aft –
a jumbled detritus
of flotsam and jetsam
and chance.
.
Like now.
But where is the body
alive?
in what chances,
for whom –
all the whens,
all the wheres,
.
here:
nothing happening
but thought and a world;
what is: being some feeling of –
circumstance – small bubble,
same as there.
.
Go on,
take your rest
and escape…
you cannot leave it.
And then you do.
How in the world
The world is a weighted haunting –
– some complex surround –
to be dreamt and/or measured, and felt
with-in time
I amended the ‘haunting’ to be –
not the thick and illegible “world,”
but the compulsion of ‘figuring-out’ –
for with-out
the ‘figuring out,’
an ‘haunting’ is ghost –
and only just happens:
a nexting,
a breathing,
relation;
a missing,
a moving,
a touching,
a feel:
in convulsion.
Within which is conceived a convergence –
– event –
(some humanish word for ‘what’s happened’).
This ‘we’ –
what is it?
what part does it play
in the muddle?
And ‘what happens’ –
what means?:
That-which-is
(for us)
some occurring.
So diverge,
and tri-verge,
multiply in the mess –
the ‘world,’
as you feel it
and think it
and be –
how it wholly
might be
with itself.
“This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown…” – Jan Zwicky, Alkibiades’ Love
“the dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought… So, too, philosophy. So, too, the gestures through which we bind, and let go of, our lives.” – Jan Zwicky, Alkibiades’ Love
“…readiness is all…” – William Shakespeare
On our way down above the below, recognition dwindling through each swerve, turn, and curve. Uncertain of finding, finding uncertainty.
What began in fantastic. Unanticipated. Such sights, indescribable, feels. Sirening sounds, whooshing and whining; colors and tones past belief, perhaps, unless of course you’ve been there…I had thought that you were? We followed by following, relentless, directionless openings, vague paths.
Kaleidoscope world of liminal pinwheels, whirring musics of future and past, tinged with voices we wish that we knew, and we did. It seemed you were there…?
Where have we been? Where are we going?
Navigations that spiral – we wind and knot, unwind, become. And over again – yet nothing is ever not new. Or so nearly, almost.
I, if indeed it was I looking out (or in) kept distracting desires (and extracting) ~ wanting this way and that, akin to imagine, hungrily, wily, and wild. As effects of strong wishes might be – subterranean, subsumed, leveraged like magnets and threats.
I stumbled, turned ‘bout, perhaps even flew, there were times that I ran – indistinguishable voices undoubtedly precious, familiar, like realizing wants tended constant as fuse…dangerously sparked to go off…
…now this and this and this…fierce purpling red, liquid breasts and svelte buttocks, elbows and shins, calves and thighs (ah! sweet the ankles and knees, wrists and shoulders, the lips, the hair, and the eyes… I love bodies! I crave!) the serpents, the birds, the language and leaves flung like banners… where were you? I had thought you were there… and you… and you… and many others of Is beside…
Darkening greens. What gathers and whispers in pleasure, awareness acute, we We again in these margins and loops. We reach and we blend, wrestle and harm, struggle and rush, and we mend. We are bound and unbounded, boundlessly shaped in our flight.
Constrained in the thickets, the azures, the blood. I choke and cry out (do you strangle?)… we are veining, okay, seeming ever en route, all approachings and wanders from here.
I (if it’s ‘I’) I am there, by which I must mean, “it is here,” diving downward or in to the out and the others, another, anew. We’ve become and we’re far more than we – both generic and common – and burning, aflame, each of ever a kind, made of ice and so crystalline, clear, so…
…unknown and still further… along, further on, further out and away, further in, indecipherable and never forewarned…
“There is IT!”
“There is IS!”
And our readings surround as do laughter or tears, streamings of verbiage, mellifluous notes, and you and I and countless of we, and no matter, we happen, or are, happening, or become, as we come, as we enter, reveal, as we’re reaching…
I had thought you were here –
Where are we?
This. Interesting. Day.
Interesting: it will come, whispering in your imagination that the English interest comes from the Latin inter esse, literally “in-between-being.” – Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal
“something must have changed” – Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
I guess I just decided to let something else happen…
I suppose I decided
insofar as we do
to let something else
become…
“This is what I’ve decided. I see no other solution. It is the best I can do…
…that little space of time, filled with drama, between the message received and the piteous response…
…Of myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others…”
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
distrusting human plans
Polysemic Stupor 