The Songs I Do Not Know (1)

“Tell me the songs you don’t know.”

Dan Beachy-Quick, Of Silence and Song

“–knowledge is made by oblivion.”

Sir Thomas Browne, in B-Q, Silence & Song

clips, or snippets,

the known as partial

notes

signifying

the experienced

gesturing

hymning (nearly celebrating)

its reverse –

everything

unknown

i didn’t know

the sounds of

as they were

always changing –

ever never

.

so i made noise

my shapes

transparently novel (novice)

windows

framing, marking, visibling

all i do not know –

every word an icon

view-finding

all it’s not

.

Image

Sound

Landscape

Intention

Meaning

Clarity of

.

definition

None

.

thus every song i sing

i sing of what i do not know

or hear or dream or feel

i think

but do i tell of songs

i do not know

or sing not knowing?

.

would i recognize

unknown

song?

do i?

sing?

.

it’s hard to tell

meaningful questions

from questioned

meanings,

meaning

tones

notion

her eyes

the water

sky

adroit

wonder

or passion

.

not known

i sing.

Deranger

Someday maybe, someone will say of me that I “tore up language,” made it useless.

Maybe, someday, someone will “feel” that.  That I destroyed something precious.  Something necessary.  Like oxygen, or water: something we could not live without.  And I ruined it.  Like meaning.

That would be something.  Something I could do, with nothing.

Simple undoing.  To sequester and burn.  Try or experiment.  Atomic bombing atoms.  Untangle into knots – vacuum emptiness, so to (un)speak.  Rather ask than say.  Rather ponder or wonder than postulate or state.  To query, not question.  Change, not challenge.

Disorder and dismember as an alternative to reordering and remembering.  Dissolute versus dissolve.  “Me.”

.

How significant that would be!  How real and present I might become!  How impossible to ignore!  Then ‘I’ might come, be-come, cum-cum… be undone, finally.

.

De-ranger opposing A-rRanger.  The chaos, disturbance, tremor and volatility… the tension pulling on the only bottom we can conceive… the bottomless.  Topless.  Beautiful that way.  Exposed.  Denuded.  Open.  Available.  A fresh take.  Lake.  Like.  Lack.  Unknowable.  Perhaps deep or infinite.  Perhaps uncontained.

.

Let’s say “language.”  Let’s say molecules, atoms, cells.  Let’s say “space” or “time.”  Let’s say “let us say.”  (i.e. let’s assume something).

.

Like hallucinogenetic drugs without purpose.  Instrumentalization.  Meaning.  Like feeling too cold or too warm.  Like grief or ecstasy – any of these experiences we don’t understand.

.

Disjunctive dysfunction.  The uncanny.  Morphology.  K would call it (maybe) “infinite possibilities of infinities without numeration – perhaps most of which are empty” – and how would we know (or be able to know) what that means?  Like this here = that.

.

Suppose you could “see” it (imagine – image-in) – I use language.  I’d use language.  I would.  To “see” it.  To image-in, to imagine the impossible…compossible.

.

To love.  To be.  To live.  To try.

.

Apparently (according to K) that doesn’t “do” anything – doesn’t instrumentalize or operationalize the unknown potential, even though I compare it with sound or dance or computers or nuclear war – as physical.

.

Whatever.  (Exactly!).  The vague potential of supposed infinite possibilities we cannot possibly comprehend, uncover, dis-cover, realize (as far as we know, at our scale of experiencing) – but how is it not part of these possibilities?  Actualized, instrumented (pen / paper / sign), operated-in or upon or with or for…

.

Whatever.

Exactly.

.

Here is your possible result: an 100th Monkey.

.

Water moved all over me – a bath, a shower, the rain… I broke my skin stumbling on a curb, and bled… a knife, a table… Ha!  I have a body.  Yes, there it is.  Maybe I’ll make love – what will be discovered then?  Yes, “we.”  I have a porous body.

.

Another reason writing is an instrumentalized “reason.”  Eat this.  Peace among worlds.  Going on a manhunt for a woman.  A particular ‘one.’  Watch me (if you want).

.

I can pull at the hair on my face.  I just gathered my child in an embrace (a ‘hug’ we called it).  Ha!  I have a body, it is porous.  Operationalized by “desire” (we call it).

.

Part II: Language (we call it).

.

Floor (feet feel).  Hair (hands hold, harry, hank).  Skin (sentences slit, suckle, sense, susurrate, sing).  Grass (gander, gaze, grab, grackle).  Oh the things you can do!  Meaningless, morbid possibilities.

.

To prove – ? What? – “I” hear?  “I” touch?  “I” see?  Taste?  Feel?  Encounter?  Interrupt?  Intrude?  Act with and upon?  To what purpose?

.

Proof of possibility?  Infinite (unknown) potentials?  What do “I,” am “I,” wanting?

.

“Desire” I wrote (instrumentalized) earlier.  Ha.  A word.  An action.  [I have a porous body].  “I” (what I call) “love.”

.

In other words, this was the day K hobbled away.  You wouldn’t understand.  [meanings].

.

I’ve written other words, even what might be called “assemblages” (markings in accord with other ‘possibilities’…infinitely (?) variable).

.

In other words… the spread of the tree.  This one sends its branches this way into the world… (porous)… this one yearns vertically… these at certain angles… sentences… reactions…

.

I am thankful for Kansas… for sex… for her… for elsewhere…

.

For Pakistan.  Where she first appeared… from California… I “love.”

.

It’s, she’s, notable.  Noteworthy.  I mark them.

.

The refrain: I love.  I have loved.  I will.  [“desire”]

.

“I” say “yes”

.

Yes, M.  Yes D.  Yes A, T, H, H, J, M, T, J, M, J, S, R, R, R… yes almost anyone almost anywhere… yes.

.

Yes.

.

Let us try this out: language.  Touch.  “Yesterday.”

.

And something becomes.  The unknown (unknkowable?) – K’s infinities paralleled and interwoven.  What is liminal.

.

The liquid between every book on my shelves, every line, the air and its waves, the light and hard matter.  [porous].

.

G, D, K, M, Lispector… what do we see?  Le spectre.  The specter.  What we see.  What can (not) be seen.

.

The visible and the touchable – “the Prose of this World.”

.

“You.”

.

Trees sprout branches slantwise.

.

Language.

Silence.

.

Whatever.

Exactly.

.

And there… the name “Steiner.”  A Viking.  A Spartan.  A Cherokee.  And there is “rain” (we call it).  And I: love.  And that can be its own end.  The German.  The Thai.  The Nubian.  Each native as The World Goes On in The Physics of Sorrow… selected, selected, selected…

.

Selah.