I seek for the purple fish. -- Jim Leftwich On Celestine Frost's, "Kalkaino" (1997)
I seek for the purple fish.
Jim Leftwich
On Celestine Frost's, "Kalkaino"
(from I gathered my ear from the green field)
Origins of the lyric in an attempt to express the ineffable. Previous to writing, to speak the unspeakable. With the advent of writing, to write the unspeakable. Then, to write the unwritable.
"I search in the depths of my mind." The purple fish is the motion of thought within the stillness of the mind.
"I ponder deeply." In the depths of the mind an imagined stillness disturbed by the silence of an invisible movement. Thought. Not a thought, but the process of thought, thinking.
It keeps us aligned to the presence of eros, a choice to enter the world as known mind. Information as awareness bled from the ear.
Either not of this or intuits the upper air. The presence of an aporia is a methodology of the unknown. "I don't know" is a hymn of affirmation. The monopoly of not. An erasure of chance is a refusal of the senses. The word waffles though its letters. The surface of the mind inheres in a page of thoughts. Being counter to bundled showing. Distinction is a niche.
We are a lyric which becomes a record of the relict symbols filled with doubt. The dare is the causal breath of the page. You can see the lack between darts. Awareness is a glimpse, need is the rest of mind. A word is an imaginary cross between the real and its interruption. Words enter the discontinuous into the book of things.
The surface of a word is the evidence of its ceremonial song. A lyric is a particular religion, will joined to the sun, I Am. The garden is a flinch of will. Language and wind are the same story to us. In the beginning was the burning coil tilled by thought.
A lyric is the engagement of sound and the urge to abstract play. Gathered blood and wind from the corners of the hand.
The author's note at the end of the book: "This has been an inquiry into the origins of lyric thought." ("It is reasonable to suppose that the first 'lyrical poems' came into existence when human beings discovered the pleasure that arises from combining words in a coherent, meaningful sequence with the almost physical process of uttering rhythmical and tonal sounds to convey feelings. Both the instinctive human tendency to hum or intone as an expression of mood and the socialization of this tendency in primitive cultures by the chanting or singing of nonsense syllables in tribal rites are well-documented. At that remote point in time when the syllables ceased to be nonsense and took on meaning, the first lyric was composed, though in what Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon cave this took place, no one will ever know. ... The earliest recorded evidence of lyric poetry suggests that such compositions emerged from ritual activity accompanying religious ceremonies and were expressive of mystical experience." (James William Johnson, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics)
This lyric begins as a narrative. A man and a woman are crossing a street. The woman is carrying a book which says:
"You can look in the garden
and in the land."
It does not say:
You can look in the depths
of the mind.
In a search for origins, you will look in the garden. You will find an apple and a serpent. Knowledge, sex and deception. You will find a narrative about consciousness, epistemology, symbols and language. When you look in the land, you will look at the work that is to be done. This is the same story. After the exile from Eden. "Behold, the man is become as one of us." "To till the ground from which he was taken." The origin of the lyric begins with the story of consciousness. The story of consciousness begins with language. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
"She stood still,
open to the wind."
You can look through receptivity to the invisible and palpable motion.
The wind is an ancient symbol for the spirit. The invisible which you can touch, which touches you. It moves on the water, it moves across your skin.
"The wind plays on the surface of her mind."
Once away from touch, the tactile enters symbol. Thinking is a way, away from. You can look on the surface of the mind. The ripples are perception as it troubles the imagined stillness of consciousness. Not a stream, a pool. Wind moves across the surface and reminds us of a stream. You can look at the act of looking. Awareness of process is two processes. Thinking about thinking is distance, a stillness stretched between.
Initially intangible theory forms an author in her mind. Nothing is an approximate paradox. An epistemology of sound if an awareness of the notes. The reader is repeated in this proffered singing. Reading occurs in a withdrawal of the eye from the page. Words align as poetry when the mind is a play of heard things. A subtle mentation accompanies the enclosure of representation and disruption.
The written is the origin of the not written. The work of words as poetry is an approach to the shape of silence. The shape of her mind is a corner of the song. Fish like darkened stars lit by the process of a present filled. An imaginal wind blows inside the charted links of the lyric. Gaps answer these thoughts in cusps of doubt.
A narrative of activity accompanies the lyrical amnesia. The garden is the magical book of the depths. The lyric is language becoming a wrought deception.
Excess is an erotic retelling of the mind as art. Reality is a darkened myth.
The lyric moment is an abstract depth inscribed on the surface of the mind. Writing is a refusal to violate the particulars of thought. The wor(l)d moves among recuperative discernments.
That which is appropriated as sound opens opaque against itself. Writing is a risk of flints, a corner of causal thinking. The letters choose the process. The word is a layer of serial presences. Imaginary origins discover the indeterminate abstractions.
Absence. To enter is to erase. The erasure of absence informs as presence. Another point. Graphs within a grid. The stillness stretched relocates and recedes. Emptiness. We fill it with pursuit, seeking, awareness working. An emptiness which is not lessened by being filled. Always an absence stretched taut between thinking and its thought.
"an empty volume in her hand,
an empty reality in her mind"
Empty volume, the book and paradox of awareness. Empty reality the presence of an experiential absence. Absence known. Felt lack. Filled with an emptiness. The unspeakable enters the writing. Origin of the lyric. Writing renders the unspeakable as writing against itself. The written becomes a record of that which is not being thought. That which is not written. The symbols remove the absence. Presence remains, opaque, approaching silence. Filled with its own emptiness, speaking silences.
"and as she thinks of letters
and of writing them, words,
like a school of fish,
darken a corner of her mind
(dart across a corner of her mind)"
Dart. Because thinking darts. Fish dart. Because dart repeats the first three letters of darken, which darken a section of the page. Which lights a corner of the mind. The words are made of letters, like purple fish. You can seek for, in, words. You can look for, in, letters. The darkened which darts is awareness which occludes itself, a glimpse of a process, the process of that glimpse. Which is to say a light. The presence darkens the present, lit by the lack between.
"you choose a daffodil, you don't need the rest
and lay it on the surface of your mind."
Not a thing, its presence, but an idea, its word. A real wind blows across the surface of the ideal. An imagined wind blows across an image of the real. The destabilized present is the origin of the lyric. Inside the interruption is the origin of the lyric. Origins are indeterminate. The links are discontinuous. The gap invents the leap. By leaping you can discover the gaps. You can look in the depths of the gaps.
Words are the tension between death and celestial depths. The origin of the lyric in the gaps between awareness and doubt. Reading is not the page. Thinking is sensitive chance.
Written thought is experienced as the remains of an unspeakable silence. Words are a glimpse of presence in ideas.
Knowledge emerged from mystical deviations. The lyric is a seam of serpents. Consciousness is the shape of openness.
Words explore the excess of absence inside the light of things.
Chance is a spiritual world. The presence of absence is the sheen of agnosia. Difference defines the final response of knowledge. The world of words is a sense of the style of things.
Reading the word removes the absence from its emptiness. The thoughts in words occlude the real. A gap invents the depths of the written.
The ceremony of narrative is an exile from consciousness as the word.
Silence appears as an excess of response to a world of silent lightning.
"I wrote in the abstract answer about things." The writing, answer, is a thing. Its presence is its answer, in that it is a question. Answered by a question which is the absence of an answer. Phrased as a statement, which is the absence of a question.
"Now we are going to talk about the Louisiana
Purchase, the Geneva perch and the Treaty of
...: Cover the oven-proof dish"
Not the things in words, but the words as things. Dish in which we find the fish, the perch, in the depths of the mind, along with the first five letters of "purchase". The middle of "cover" in the beginning of "oven". The sounds as we read silently are the full presence of an absence. Presence is ink on the page. As she thinks of letters.
Perch is where the heights meet the depths. Perch is a horizon, an aphorism in a word. A statement of the question of paradox.
Perch is where the axis of communication intersects the axis of representation. The disruption of the horizontal stream opens to the vertical metaphor.
Purchase is a grip, also a chase. Purchase is to time as perch is to space.
This perch is the purple fish. Interface of inner and outer. Multiplicity of the perch, a school.
"these are the basic states
and they go through (
) to this Ideal.
We have just had a perfect afternoon of questions."
Through the emptiness bracketed by thought. The idea of the real. The answer to the answer is an absent question. The perfect question is a statement concerning things. The real itself is absent. "The wind blows over the surface of her mind." "Life is our chance to respond to anything." Refusal of this choice is a withdrawal of the senses, an early death, euthanasia ("The act or practice of ending the life of an individual suffering from a terminal illness or an incurable condition"). Euthanasia is equated with being etherized, as in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Etherized, as in made ethereal, abstracted from the things which life offers for our response. "She floats upon the surface of her mind." Etherealized. Ethereal: 1. Characterized by lightness and insubstantiality; intangible. 3. Not of this world; spiritual. [From Latin aetherius, from Greek aitherios, from aither, upper air]. Upper air as the opposite of the depths of the mind. Nowhere does it say: you can look in the upper air.
The opposite of inner is the present. Writing is the affirmation of difference. The letters are a world of things.
Presence is emptiness speaking. The letter exudes itself. The surface of the lyric is the destabilized thing.
Compositions are consciously expressive of religious failure. The story is the sound of its words.
Truth is an untouchable singing. The reader is always absent from the origin of the words. Each layer of words is a kind of conditioned intuition.
The question is answered by the sound of its statement. Sound is ink on a page of thought. The surface of choice is the practice of entrance. Song is an incurably conditioned love.
The invisible is a paraphrase of the spirit. Mind moves across its thinking as a stream of ripples. The allure of absence is the work of its stillness. Awareness is felt lack.
The origin of the lyric lies in paradox. Aporia. The presence of absence as the present, the lyric moment, non-linear. An epistemology of unknowing, agnosia. Experiential gap between the thing and awareness of the thing, between awareness and awareness of awareness.
"I don't know how you ... No, no. This is not ... No."
The "you" has become the reader. The "I don't know how" is the difference between reading and writing. The repeated "no" is affirmation, the how of knowing in writing. "This is not": not only "not this", but simply "not". The final "no" defines its presence as not this. The writing offers the reader the chance to respond to the things of the page. A refusal of the withdrawal of the senses is a refusal of the ether, an affirmation of the particulars of the page, words and letters.
"Anyway swimming out there is not nice, the water is polluted
& (you have a dirty mind)"
The wind moves on the water, plays on the surface of the mind. Swimming out there, in the world, among the things, out there in the page, among the letters, in the polluted waters of the world, dirtying the mind with the things of the world and with the thinking which accompanies this encounter. Being in the world is not nice ("4. Of good character and reputation; respectable. 6. Showing or requiring great precision or sensitive discernment; subtle: a nice distinction; a nice sense of style. 7. Done with delicacy and skill: a nice bit of craft.").
To write the ineffable mind is an imaginary thought.
Flesh untouched by the turns of paradox. Writing is a series of origins linked by gaps.
Mind is a silence phrased as sequential song. Silence is presence of the real as music.
Receptivity is the surface of entrance. Consciousness is the erasure of seeking by work and paradox.
The experience of work is the advent of mind. The book is a tribal code of syllabic evidence.
The sound of thought is the fact of words. The words of a lyric are an emptiness previous to meaning.
Words are the sound of emptiness as it responds to death.
Process is play on the surface of stillness. Reality is filled with an excess of entrances.
"The words of ( ) in Persian I render, true.
But the fact is it's nice, untouched,
and the thoughts are just as fresh as shrimp."
The words of blank, translated, remain true, untouched. The thoughts, like shrimp, from the depths, are fresh. You can look in the depths of the words. The fact of the translated emptiness is nice: subtle, done with delicacy and skill. The subtlety and the skill lie in leaving it untouched. Truth is the untouched translation of an absence, the origin of the lyric in paradox.
"and it's yours, but it's never going to get us home,
it's like suicide ..., like"
The words which the writing offers the reader will never give a reading beyond words. Home is the silent presence of the origin, always absent. You can look in the depths of the words, but you don't get out of words by going deeper. Writing will not provide release from the materials of writing. Each layer is another metaphor. Layers of disjunction. Meanings linked by gaps. To seek in those depths for an exit, a return to origins previous to words, is to seek a kind of suicide, a euthanasia, release from a terminal illness or an incurable condition. The condition of being in language.
"Lord! it's sexy!
(She snorkels in her mind.)"
Awareness is an erotic engagement. It keeps us alive to the things of the world. Tension between this and an urge to absence. Eros enters where absence appears as death. Snorkeling is play and danger. A choice to stay, explore, respond, in the depths of the mind. Response to the world as known in words.
The lyric is the written openness of the mind. The sound of thought is the meaning of the syllables.
Origin is release translated into disjunction. The real is an absence filled with chance. Absence is the imaginary surface of the empty process. The unwritten is the origin of silence. The lyric is silence thinking. Time singing the tonal expression of existence.
Words are the translation of thought into a reading. Writing is a metaphor for being.
The letters are a fictive thinking of the real. Thinking is the way perception informs its work of emptying distance. Unspeakable thought is the process of lyrical inquiry.
The fact of an absence does not provide a language beyond words. The letters are the life of the senses concerning things. The lyric is a rhythmical shining disturbed by thought.
Words dart in a darkened corner of the mind; awareness of this is a lightening.
"don't show me any second-hand information"
(from I gathered my ear from the green field)
Origins of the lyric in an attempt to express the ineffable. Previous to writing, to speak the unspeakable. With the advent of writing, to write the unspeakable. Then, to write the unwritable.
"I search in the depths of my mind." The purple fish is the motion of thought within the stillness of the mind.
"I ponder deeply." In the depths of the mind an imagined stillness disturbed by the silence of an invisible movement. Thought. Not a thought, but the process of thought, thinking.
It keeps us aligned to the presence of eros, a choice to enter the world as known mind. Information as awareness bled from the ear.
Either not of this or intuits the upper air. The presence of an aporia is a methodology of the unknown. "I don't know" is a hymn of affirmation. The monopoly of not. An erasure of chance is a refusal of the senses. The word waffles though its letters. The surface of the mind inheres in a page of thoughts. Being counter to bundled showing. Distinction is a niche.
We are a lyric which becomes a record of the relict symbols filled with doubt. The dare is the causal breath of the page. You can see the lack between darts. Awareness is a glimpse, need is the rest of mind. A word is an imaginary cross between the real and its interruption. Words enter the discontinuous into the book of things.
The surface of a word is the evidence of its ceremonial song. A lyric is a particular religion, will joined to the sun, I Am. The garden is a flinch of will. Language and wind are the same story to us. In the beginning was the burning coil tilled by thought.
A lyric is the engagement of sound and the urge to abstract play. Gathered blood and wind from the corners of the hand.
The author's note at the end of the book: "This has been an inquiry into the origins of lyric thought." ("It is reasonable to suppose that the first 'lyrical poems' came into existence when human beings discovered the pleasure that arises from combining words in a coherent, meaningful sequence with the almost physical process of uttering rhythmical and tonal sounds to convey feelings. Both the instinctive human tendency to hum or intone as an expression of mood and the socialization of this tendency in primitive cultures by the chanting or singing of nonsense syllables in tribal rites are well-documented. At that remote point in time when the syllables ceased to be nonsense and took on meaning, the first lyric was composed, though in what Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon cave this took place, no one will ever know. ... The earliest recorded evidence of lyric poetry suggests that such compositions emerged from ritual activity accompanying religious ceremonies and were expressive of mystical experience." (James William Johnson, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics)
This lyric begins as a narrative. A man and a woman are crossing a street. The woman is carrying a book which says:
"You can look in the garden
and in the land."
It does not say:
You can look in the depths
of the mind.
In a search for origins, you will look in the garden. You will find an apple and a serpent. Knowledge, sex and deception. You will find a narrative about consciousness, epistemology, symbols and language. When you look in the land, you will look at the work that is to be done. This is the same story. After the exile from Eden. "Behold, the man is become as one of us." "To till the ground from which he was taken." The origin of the lyric begins with the story of consciousness. The story of consciousness begins with language. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
"She stood still,
open to the wind."
You can look through receptivity to the invisible and palpable motion.
The wind is an ancient symbol for the spirit. The invisible which you can touch, which touches you. It moves on the water, it moves across your skin.
"The wind plays on the surface of her mind."
Once away from touch, the tactile enters symbol. Thinking is a way, away from. You can look on the surface of the mind. The ripples are perception as it troubles the imagined stillness of consciousness. Not a stream, a pool. Wind moves across the surface and reminds us of a stream. You can look at the act of looking. Awareness of process is two processes. Thinking about thinking is distance, a stillness stretched between.
Initially intangible theory forms an author in her mind. Nothing is an approximate paradox. An epistemology of sound if an awareness of the notes. The reader is repeated in this proffered singing. Reading occurs in a withdrawal of the eye from the page. Words align as poetry when the mind is a play of heard things. A subtle mentation accompanies the enclosure of representation and disruption.
The written is the origin of the not written. The work of words as poetry is an approach to the shape of silence. The shape of her mind is a corner of the song. Fish like darkened stars lit by the process of a present filled. An imaginal wind blows inside the charted links of the lyric. Gaps answer these thoughts in cusps of doubt.
A narrative of activity accompanies the lyrical amnesia. The garden is the magical book of the depths. The lyric is language becoming a wrought deception.
Excess is an erotic retelling of the mind as art. Reality is a darkened myth.
The lyric moment is an abstract depth inscribed on the surface of the mind. Writing is a refusal to violate the particulars of thought. The wor(l)d moves among recuperative discernments.
That which is appropriated as sound opens opaque against itself. Writing is a risk of flints, a corner of causal thinking. The letters choose the process. The word is a layer of serial presences. Imaginary origins discover the indeterminate abstractions.
Absence. To enter is to erase. The erasure of absence informs as presence. Another point. Graphs within a grid. The stillness stretched relocates and recedes. Emptiness. We fill it with pursuit, seeking, awareness working. An emptiness which is not lessened by being filled. Always an absence stretched taut between thinking and its thought.
"an empty volume in her hand,
an empty reality in her mind"
Empty volume, the book and paradox of awareness. Empty reality the presence of an experiential absence. Absence known. Felt lack. Filled with an emptiness. The unspeakable enters the writing. Origin of the lyric. Writing renders the unspeakable as writing against itself. The written becomes a record of that which is not being thought. That which is not written. The symbols remove the absence. Presence remains, opaque, approaching silence. Filled with its own emptiness, speaking silences.
"and as she thinks of letters
and of writing them, words,
like a school of fish,
darken a corner of her mind
(dart across a corner of her mind)"
Dart. Because thinking darts. Fish dart. Because dart repeats the first three letters of darken, which darken a section of the page. Which lights a corner of the mind. The words are made of letters, like purple fish. You can seek for, in, words. You can look for, in, letters. The darkened which darts is awareness which occludes itself, a glimpse of a process, the process of that glimpse. Which is to say a light. The presence darkens the present, lit by the lack between.
"you choose a daffodil, you don't need the rest
and lay it on the surface of your mind."
Not a thing, its presence, but an idea, its word. A real wind blows across the surface of the ideal. An imagined wind blows across an image of the real. The destabilized present is the origin of the lyric. Inside the interruption is the origin of the lyric. Origins are indeterminate. The links are discontinuous. The gap invents the leap. By leaping you can discover the gaps. You can look in the depths of the gaps.
Words are the tension between death and celestial depths. The origin of the lyric in the gaps between awareness and doubt. Reading is not the page. Thinking is sensitive chance.
Written thought is experienced as the remains of an unspeakable silence. Words are a glimpse of presence in ideas.
Knowledge emerged from mystical deviations. The lyric is a seam of serpents. Consciousness is the shape of openness.
Words explore the excess of absence inside the light of things.
Chance is a spiritual world. The presence of absence is the sheen of agnosia. Difference defines the final response of knowledge. The world of words is a sense of the style of things.
Reading the word removes the absence from its emptiness. The thoughts in words occlude the real. A gap invents the depths of the written.
The ceremony of narrative is an exile from consciousness as the word.
Silence appears as an excess of response to a world of silent lightning.
"I wrote in the abstract answer about things." The writing, answer, is a thing. Its presence is its answer, in that it is a question. Answered by a question which is the absence of an answer. Phrased as a statement, which is the absence of a question.
"Now we are going to talk about the Louisiana
Purchase, the Geneva perch and the Treaty of
...: Cover the oven-proof dish"
Not the things in words, but the words as things. Dish in which we find the fish, the perch, in the depths of the mind, along with the first five letters of "purchase". The middle of "cover" in the beginning of "oven". The sounds as we read silently are the full presence of an absence. Presence is ink on the page. As she thinks of letters.
Perch is where the heights meet the depths. Perch is a horizon, an aphorism in a word. A statement of the question of paradox.
Perch is where the axis of communication intersects the axis of representation. The disruption of the horizontal stream opens to the vertical metaphor.
Purchase is a grip, also a chase. Purchase is to time as perch is to space.
This perch is the purple fish. Interface of inner and outer. Multiplicity of the perch, a school.
"these are the basic states
and they go through (
) to this Ideal.
We have just had a perfect afternoon of questions."
Through the emptiness bracketed by thought. The idea of the real. The answer to the answer is an absent question. The perfect question is a statement concerning things. The real itself is absent. "The wind blows over the surface of her mind." "Life is our chance to respond to anything." Refusal of this choice is a withdrawal of the senses, an early death, euthanasia ("The act or practice of ending the life of an individual suffering from a terminal illness or an incurable condition"). Euthanasia is equated with being etherized, as in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Etherized, as in made ethereal, abstracted from the things which life offers for our response. "She floats upon the surface of her mind." Etherealized. Ethereal: 1. Characterized by lightness and insubstantiality; intangible. 3. Not of this world; spiritual. [From Latin aetherius, from Greek aitherios, from aither, upper air]. Upper air as the opposite of the depths of the mind. Nowhere does it say: you can look in the upper air.
The opposite of inner is the present. Writing is the affirmation of difference. The letters are a world of things.
Presence is emptiness speaking. The letter exudes itself. The surface of the lyric is the destabilized thing.
Compositions are consciously expressive of religious failure. The story is the sound of its words.
Truth is an untouchable singing. The reader is always absent from the origin of the words. Each layer of words is a kind of conditioned intuition.
The question is answered by the sound of its statement. Sound is ink on a page of thought. The surface of choice is the practice of entrance. Song is an incurably conditioned love.
The invisible is a paraphrase of the spirit. Mind moves across its thinking as a stream of ripples. The allure of absence is the work of its stillness. Awareness is felt lack.
The origin of the lyric lies in paradox. Aporia. The presence of absence as the present, the lyric moment, non-linear. An epistemology of unknowing, agnosia. Experiential gap between the thing and awareness of the thing, between awareness and awareness of awareness.
"I don't know how you ... No, no. This is not ... No."
The "you" has become the reader. The "I don't know how" is the difference between reading and writing. The repeated "no" is affirmation, the how of knowing in writing. "This is not": not only "not this", but simply "not". The final "no" defines its presence as not this. The writing offers the reader the chance to respond to the things of the page. A refusal of the withdrawal of the senses is a refusal of the ether, an affirmation of the particulars of the page, words and letters.
"Anyway swimming out there is not nice, the water is polluted
& (you have a dirty mind)"
The wind moves on the water, plays on the surface of the mind. Swimming out there, in the world, among the things, out there in the page, among the letters, in the polluted waters of the world, dirtying the mind with the things of the world and with the thinking which accompanies this encounter. Being in the world is not nice ("4. Of good character and reputation; respectable. 6. Showing or requiring great precision or sensitive discernment; subtle: a nice distinction; a nice sense of style. 7. Done with delicacy and skill: a nice bit of craft.").
To write the ineffable mind is an imaginary thought.
Flesh untouched by the turns of paradox. Writing is a series of origins linked by gaps.
Mind is a silence phrased as sequential song. Silence is presence of the real as music.
Receptivity is the surface of entrance. Consciousness is the erasure of seeking by work and paradox.
The experience of work is the advent of mind. The book is a tribal code of syllabic evidence.
The sound of thought is the fact of words. The words of a lyric are an emptiness previous to meaning.
Words are the sound of emptiness as it responds to death.
Process is play on the surface of stillness. Reality is filled with an excess of entrances.
"The words of ( ) in Persian I render, true.
But the fact is it's nice, untouched,
and the thoughts are just as fresh as shrimp."
The words of blank, translated, remain true, untouched. The thoughts, like shrimp, from the depths, are fresh. You can look in the depths of the words. The fact of the translated emptiness is nice: subtle, done with delicacy and skill. The subtlety and the skill lie in leaving it untouched. Truth is the untouched translation of an absence, the origin of the lyric in paradox.
"and it's yours, but it's never going to get us home,
it's like suicide ..., like"
The words which the writing offers the reader will never give a reading beyond words. Home is the silent presence of the origin, always absent. You can look in the depths of the words, but you don't get out of words by going deeper. Writing will not provide release from the materials of writing. Each layer is another metaphor. Layers of disjunction. Meanings linked by gaps. To seek in those depths for an exit, a return to origins previous to words, is to seek a kind of suicide, a euthanasia, release from a terminal illness or an incurable condition. The condition of being in language.
"Lord! it's sexy!
(She snorkels in her mind.)"
Awareness is an erotic engagement. It keeps us alive to the things of the world. Tension between this and an urge to absence. Eros enters where absence appears as death. Snorkeling is play and danger. A choice to stay, explore, respond, in the depths of the mind. Response to the world as known in words.
The lyric is the written openness of the mind. The sound of thought is the meaning of the syllables.
Origin is release translated into disjunction. The real is an absence filled with chance. Absence is the imaginary surface of the empty process. The unwritten is the origin of silence. The lyric is silence thinking. Time singing the tonal expression of existence.
Words are the translation of thought into a reading. Writing is a metaphor for being.
The letters are a fictive thinking of the real. Thinking is the way perception informs its work of emptying distance. Unspeakable thought is the process of lyrical inquiry.
The fact of an absence does not provide a language beyond words. The letters are the life of the senses concerning things. The lyric is a rhythmical shining disturbed by thought.
Words dart in a darkened corner of the mind; awareness of this is a lightening.
"don't show me any second-hand information"
the first draft of this was written in my car while waiting in a parking lot in Charlottesville for my wife to get off from work (1997)
Labels: 1997, 2020, Celestine Frost, essay, jim leftwich, poems
posted by jim leftwich at 1:55 PM
<< Home