We could have played other games,
ever so many on offer
whiling the distribution and dissipation
time might be
.
Yet “I” became,
constructing choices –
the parenting,
the poetry,
philosophy,
and family;
addiction,
restriction,
believing all the loving –
each complicity
.
To be
.
At least some things,
anything,
.
everything
one knows not what
.
but still
less (or more)
than nil.
“Sometimes God, sometimes nothing”
-Franz Kafka –
“Blank page called a day.
God.”
– Dan Beachy-Quick –
The praxis of empty signifiers : words : full of sound and fury.
If you accept the ‘I’, or find a name to call yourself – like using a credit card received in the mail (illusion of invisible funds), what do you charge to it, and does it always end in debt?
Does it make of you a consumer to believe the ‘I’? To use self-reference as a token or coin?
How soon do “my” and “mine” follow after, even though each object, event, or transaction, is clearly only a loan?
What is charged to the ‘I’ must be paid back – to put it in legal or religious terms.
Be careful what you say.
Wittgenstein claimed that we mostly speak without giving full meaning to the terms we use – that we ought remain silent whereof we cannot speak with adequate comprehension. Where we sing beyond our knowing –
very few (if any) utterances comply.
But how learn anything (even the untrue) without not-knowing? Without composing walls to break apart or knock upon, to breach or to climb? Without making it up to unlearn and repent of?
A word changes direction.
It’s happening as I write or think or imagine this. As if.
As if it signified something. I write with sound and fury. Into silence.
It’s what ‘I’ do – so I should do it! (shouldn’t I?!)
I seem to know I’m alive by touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing – things other… feeling, sensing, perceiving… crafting empty signifiers like nostrils, like a tongue, a kind of eyesight and ear, my fingertips. My flesh on loan. To be paid back.
In debt to what then? ‘World’? To sing. To sound. To dance a little. Imagine.
If ‘I’.
If I am given the sound of leaves as they crisp and color the Autumn breeze, refracturing light; if I can smell the moisting decay (debts repaid by undoing what was charged), if I can gather them with my hands and roil about them with my body, if I can bake the seeds and chew, take them in…
…what does ‘I’ owe?
You sentence me: two I’s. I hear your melodious song. You whisper, close.
I say ‘I love.’ Terms lacking comprehension. Metaphysics. Their meanings beyond knowing. Unlearned. “We” are (whereof we cannot speak).
Charging invisible funds we become responsible for. Obligated.
Swiping our cards for contents.
What do we owe?
What do we know?
What can we?
Each their own set limits. Sometimes raised, sometimes lowered, depending on our fidelity to pay with interest.
We owe. We all of us owe.
Even for our silence.
Even cash-only – that empty signifier – words. Even simply action. ‘I move’ – is a statement on credit, like breath.
Sweet burst of being! To “is.” To “I.” To “we.” All so heavily borrowed, contingently. Imagine.
Imagine what it means. To owe.
Again I break the silence of what I do not know via signs of repentance. These words.
All the silence they require.
HE in the feeling of HER approach. That syrupy abyss. Unknowing. Every anticipation and guess.
HER name. A bird’s song. Bird’s songs (all of them).
What other flesh is.
Any time you are enabled
to touch it.
We could imagine IT as HIM wanting. Awaiting.
But there is no resemblance to wait for.
Only HER, the delicious, dilemma, unknown.
Loss of memory. Hope of presence.
“Ecstasy” as commonly referred –
– the surprising rarety of ‘being-out-of’…
“HER,” “HE” calls it, names it, designates, conjures, conceives. (Perhaps “HER” has a name?)
In the center a shrine a temple. And no center exists, except by imagining, by metaphor, metonymy. Delusional illusion of some living cartography.
The words “NOW,” “HERE”…continuously NO/WHERE.
He longs. Desires. Fantasizes. Dreams.
This is urgency.
Each pressing and critical, earnest, persistent scenario and situation –
In-sistent.
It’s always coming. In. The status and singling. Ever singing.
Sometimes shrieking.
NO/WHERE : NOW/HERE. Same scintillating occurrence, occurring… per-sist-ence, pursuant and ins-is-isn’t-it? Awaiting approaching.
HE/HIM/HIS – SHE/HER/HERS (with)
[All-ways]
What might have been experienced as “LONGING” – that which is extended, strained toward…
SHE… a recoiling, a reconnaissance, some new emission.
HE laughs, as if capitulating, a surrender, a stab, asunder.
THEY… blend and weave inconceived. Inconceivable. Unknown. Never any stasis. Never NOW/HERE, never NO/WHERE.
In other words, too many… uncountable stories (may) have begun (begin)…
[All-ways]
We followed the arc of the diver, losing it in the fog, wishing to make it out clear. I might have said this meant “philosophy.”
“Poetry,” he said, “is utilizing known language to invoke the unknown.” Or certaintly uncertainty, or something like that, which I liked, and indicated by asking what is not uncertain?
Your hands, the music. My desire, a naming for them. I think of your waist as a séance.
What is it to be crippled? I keep trying to use words.
Another asked about the “arc of the diver.” How should I know? All of my sentences should be read as questions. I wonder how divergent questions or commands might be… as statements.
She said, “it falls between. It has to go somewhere.” I guess we pressed it there… were poietic… since we couldn’t find a name. “Dis-appearance” might be one. Like a guess that can’t be falsified.
We all hold a paper marker printed “You are here.” Perhaps paper is too substantial. But it still seems like an invitation I wish we had.
Maybe this is why Albahari inscribed “Words are something else.” We leave it at that. And are flummoxed as to what “that” refers to.
Still we look.
You move like flocks of birds that wheel. I’ve never comprehended “swarm.” Mathematics doesn’t cut it, though it certainly uncertainly tries.
The telephone Pictionary of ear-mouth-brain when we issue sound or gaze. Don’t foibles equal actions? Parts of us experience this as violence, as valence.
Relation as a struggle to balance victimhood and perpetration. Uncertainly.
When or where does this infiltrate unknown?
He went on to say…
I thought (imagined?) your ankles, knees, elbows and knuckles as adroit sworls in swift mountain streams.
So also losing it in the fog, hoping to remember where the trees were. Philosophy. Or was it the forest?
Poetry as ocean surface between “known”/unknown? So wavy, so heaving. No one said that.
The richest respect he gave was his readiness to call me “Nobody.” Or “Anybody.” Carte blanche.
She said.
I can hardly perceive what’s in your head now. Potentia? An horizon of waves. A place where words press images press events, the banal. Perhaps. Uncertain sphere of unknowing? They say learning happens there. Like a cell in a culture, animal in terrain. Cacophony of dreams.
Each time we encounter.
Hold lightly, it said,
there are so many voices,
movements.
Hold lightly,
lest you repeat,
she said.
[the surfaces, and distance, beneaths]
I listened:
breezes, waves;
windiness and water;
the moon riding along,
each night so differently
the same.
Without repetition,
she said,
my hands open,
palms and whatever fingerprintings,
the bruising, barely,
again and again,
so differently.
How tides change,
or seasons:
things we’ve come to think of –
each you, each I,
each every –
quivering along
like leaves
through the years.
In other words:
over and over
without repeat
again, anew –
how ‘new’ requires reference
of similarity.
So love
hold lightly,
she said,
it says,
as wheat falls into ground
and suns set down, again,
as moons rise – (which, neither) – and
never the same.
Both-and
either-or
neither-nor
and so on
without repeat
within the like,
the long, the loving.
You come again.
I try to grip lightly –
the future never knows –
I’d like to leave it,
to gather you,
to hold…
you. You. You.
(Again, differently).
“Hold lightly”, you (she) says,
“lest you repeat
and grow tired…”
My palms are open (to touch, to pass by)
I am trying to read,
to listen.
To leave be.
click image for full text
I do not doubt that we are all capable of learning to freeze. Or starve to death, for that matter. Death will not be a stranger for any, for long.
.
There are reasons we are constituted in uncertainty.
We are able to learn.
Everyone will.
.
It’s why I told her how much I trusted her. To change. And therefore never knew anything, asking so many questions, again and then again, about plans. Who knew when? or then? or now? I said. Things fluctuate as they die.
Or I never knew. Having so little to do with facts or truth, beliefs or trust. IS is always something else. Or here is always different. NOW has never been, in other words. Even if the words are the same.
.
And. So. On.
Apparently.
.
There is music. And recognition – recognizability – (memory?) – a passion for pattern, a shine to similar, a longing for location, locatability. For what it’s worth – a pronounced inaccuracy and pro-found nostalgia. As the ‘similar’ is founded on what’s been experienced before (pro-found), and at least less than (or more?) than present. Pre-sent? NOW was given / sent before? I doubt that… but feel wary that that’s all we’ll ever know, never quite catching up to being.
In another sense: the inherent lag of perception. How old (again, pre-supposedly) are the stars we ‘see’? Or the squirrel on yonder branch; your eyes across the table; our held hands… by the time they register?
What happens, “now”? And why are we occupied with what we call “next” when we can’t even exist at once’s occurring? Seeking a head start? A virtual or imagined pre-sent?
.
Yes I heard what you said…after you’d said it.
There’s our “now.”
The cut from stepping on glass… and then the pain… later.
The bite of food, licks of flesh, kisses… and then the tasting.
The breeze and then the leaf, light and then its outline. Mostly shadow.
“Hello,” I reply in turn, but your head already bowed and path resumed, on the far sidewalk.
.
I fall behind.
.
Suppose this is why, in conversation, ever losing our way in delay, we ask “where were we?” rather than “where are we?” What is it we wish to know? Where do we hope to be with one another?
As I was saying – with requisite gap between whatever may have been transpiring in my ‘mind’ (or whereverywhere thinking occurs) and the sludgy musculature, instruments, and carefully crafted formulation of alphabetic symbols to display attempts of communication or composures…
…now I’ve forgotten…
It was funny how she, how I, refused, declining enticing invitations of love. Once.
Then again. Or not.
Still, it happens, rejected or otherwise. Naysaying, that is.
Negotiations.
Strange relations. Using yes for no, and their returns and variations.
She says no though. I did.
It eventuates, seemingly regardless of our answers.
Check boxes. Lists. Identities. Likert-scales of experiencing.
Mouths inclining. Decline. A trajectory of eyes. Reclining seduction.
I decided not to go along. (Where do we go instead? Who goes? When?). Each denial an assent.
What did the trees refuse? What was the grass fighting, then? The clouds? I watched… she observed birds.
The dancers’ bodies. A dismissal of space. The removal of sound. Absent silences.
Where was she? I?
We said no.
Do words incline or recline for us? What of the ear, the eye?
Still I smelled her.
“I love,” I thought, “I cannot love. I can not.” She declines.
These are the ways of naysaying, all our doubled negatives, equaling… what, exactly?
I love her. I can not. She won’t. Will not. Negativity in a vacuum. Apparatus.
The squirrel upside down, above the lawn, on the long tree limb. What is it denying? And where is the use of speech?
We cried out, decrying. (What could that mean? That seems always in question).
I asked Beckett and Blanchot. They each said that she said “no.”
Apparently, she says “no.” “I’d really like to, but can not, must not,” i.e. “no.”
It rings out, like bells – so radiant, so silent, such dissipation. Such temporal hazard and warning.
Something refuses the air.
I remember. She traces back. What means “over”?
Sound refusing silence. The first. The second. The next.
What is “last”?
She says no.
I recall dreams from time to time. Unable.
Something may have been said.
“Whether it makes any difference what you say – whether there is any point in it anyway; whether there is any point in saying anything anyway.”
– Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein & the possibility of discourse
It was the mystery that found us, all the unknown buried beneath and beyond.
She said to me, or rather she offered her hand, or rather we made eye contact, well, she greeted me and held out her hand and we looked at or into one another’s faces. Just the surface of the ocean. Seas and skies are larger than our imagining.
Say skin, language, thought, or feeling are flexible bordering insides and outsides, contained and beyond. Something like that I thought, unknowingly.
He spoke to me, then hugged me, with an asking. I couldn’t know the question, but I understood the words. We seemed friendly and respectfully embraced, hesitant and expressive at once. There’s a cliff at the end of the trail. Sometimes I don’t remember.
Sharp curves on roads in mountainous terrain. That sort of thing, voids that look empty but allow plummet.
And whether it makes any difference, she said.
Difference is made, apparently.
Mother used to tell me, what was it? Her voices are clear, kind of, almost, but the words are lost in others. Deep waves are like that, it seems; hard to follow or find, prominent and obvious while rocking the boat, regardless the size. Clouds. Wind makes little sense of skies. Everything is out there.
Inside, it’s raining.
I was asked for a cigarette and large trees moved above rooftops. She offered her hand the way he hugs me, my son playing music on the piano while a cat escapes and someone’s doing homework. They say the ground goes deeply down beneath us, compiled by potential millennia. Nobody knows, though we have tools to measure by. Whatever those tools measure.
I remember first times. Every time. Only it’s perplexing that they’re exactly the same.
Does anything repeat?
Father got on me again about irresponsibilities, my dreaminess. If only I’d been military I’d be disciplined. Different. She offered her hand plus an ankle, a hip, a breast, a womb. I’d have values. The crook of a knee, a neckline. Take responsibility. He wanted it in my mouth – that feels best, he said.
What do I know?
Surfaces of oceans.
She stops and reads books. I do. There is music and a din of dialogue. Raucous. Discomfort. Anxiety is familiar, always the first time again.
I am afraid. Usually. Deep water disturbs me. No one knows. Many are afraid of flying.
Crying is its own thing. How is an ocean made? I won’t succeed.
Whether it makes any difference – saying anything anyway. Someone speaks at me. Eyes meet. A brush of lips. A grasp of hand. What is the question? Skies and oceans. Earth’s depths. What do I understand? Always ending begins, beginnings. What ends. What has no end? It begins. Again. Always first times. Nothing.
Her breath tastes good, inhaled. His muscle. Seawater burn. Heartloss. So much fresh air. The turn is sharp.
Saying anything anyway: the point is whether, weather, difference…its repetition.
The how and why of her. Of him. Of it and other.
There I must have been when I saw her or felt it or once again the beginnings. Once again the first time. Always again. Begin. While ending. While ends.
He said so – whether there is any point in saying anything. He said what felt best when he hugged me, kindly.
She offered. Someone asked for something. Like surfaces on oceans. Horizon lines. The ground beneath our feet, beneath that. Differences. The above. I cut my skin.
The “world,” as it were, as it ‘is’ (also, reduced, in addition) “for us.”
How it comes to be as we are – briefly. Almost incalculably miniscule. Almost ‘happenstance.’
“Our” world, as it were: all we cannot know, that we are part in, of, with.
One wonders what “world” can possibly mean.
Every meaning apparently nothing outside of this microscopic sliver of kind… EVERYthing and more, “for us.” Some ‘infinity’ or ‘void;’ ‘abyss’ or ‘chaotic complexity’ – a reference to every-thing (or not) that so far surpasses us, outstrips us, beyonds us. Some so-called…”world.”
One. Can.
One could turn toward all that, could ‘be-itself,’ bi-pedally, shrimpishly, speck-o-dust uprightedly, with/in ‘it’…and have a dwarfed, almost indiscernible ‘experience.’ Or “one” (were such a thing possible) could de-cide, di-vide, con-sider (?) – place oneself ‘over against’ or ‘in contrast’ (contra-di-stinction) to all that: otherness, ‘world,’ ‘uknown/unknowable,’ ‘beyond,’ ‘out-side,’ infinite… and de-term-in.
Squash it down to ‘one’s own scale, name it / call it / sign it, and ‘fit’ it in. i.e. cut it small enough to be comprehensible, digestible, sensible (according-to-one’s-own) and pre-tend, fore-tell, image-in, sign-i-fy it ACCORDING TO… ‘one,’ ‘us,’ ‘me’ (such as math, logic, language, communicable signs, etc – in-(ter)ventions on/of our own terms).
Human knowledge, inquiry, disciplines, creations, theories, etc. are EXACTLY (and perhaps ONLY, one surmises) THAT: at the scale of the human. ‘One’ is prone to automatically grant every ‘other’ (plant, material, organism, structure, system, etc) the ‘same’ ‘world’ – as Wittgenstein indicated: indecipherable, untranslatable or communicable between kinds, but most probable, no? – Umwelts – worlds upon worlds within worlds outside worlds… we (‘ones’) can have no share, understanding, con(with)cept, com(with)munication of…
To each its scale of experiencing, and all scales together…
Given the human (so-self-called) scale, this seems pertinently and poignantly most evident…
…why would we chafe against our limits… or (perhaps) every scale always is – no ‘one’ could know this… ones (and many ones) are only ones – more and less than their own possible perspectives… in- and out-looks OF. Scale. (Perhaps).
Obviously, com(with)posing in your/our language… whatever I dream is representative of my scale… i.e. is only a capacity of ‘one’(kind) … of many.
Pleasurably so… or why not?
Dreaming beyond scale (or, inventing scale and its beyond – in the de-term-in-ing) demonstrates itself as a capacity… (e.g. mythology, science, religion, fiction/fantasy, psycho-anything, spirituality, philosophy, history, and so forth) … all imagined efforts beyond-scale, that, in occurring demonstrate the possibilities/limitations of human scale…
What ‘beyond’ could ‘one’ see, think, feel, etc., that is not a demonstration of limited and actual capacity of ‘one-scale’-to-experience?
So ‘one’ has a-, con-, etc. scales… all part of one’s scale (abilities, capacities, possibilities, options, kind). Against, with, creative, reductive, but ALL and ANY activities of one kind (so-self-called ‘human’) show its locked and limited capacity. One never goes beyond.
Fini.
To ‘work limits,’ and boundaries are clearly elements of our ‘limits’ and ‘boundaries’ of the scope and scale of the ‘human.’
“Gods,” cosmologies, dreams, histories, theorizing, etc., all contained within the ‘bounds’ or capacities of the ‘kind-of-thing-‘One’-is. Perhaps.
It is the ‘perhaps’ that haunts us. [but what could ‘haunt’ indicate but another human capacity – perhaps a ‘felt capacity’ of bursting or extending our capacities?]
Witchcraft. Art. Technology. Religion. Theoretical and experimental anything. Logos. Arche. Tohu. Bohu. Beginning. Universe (must needs always shrink to one’s own scale… in order to uni-anything… ‘multiverse’ simple exponents of capacities for in our microscopic self-experienced sphere… we named ‘infinity’ – is there no exponent we can’t add – within our tiny range of potential?).
One’s own anthropology.
Logically [though I excessively distrust that program of human-ing] – what con-cept, i-dea, imagine-ing, or object-ivity is not necessarily always paramatered by the human ex-periential capacities?
The bounds may be elastic or no – there would be no way for a kind to know – being all-ways the ‘one’ experiencing.
IN-HERE-NT BOUNDS.
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