The Room Next Door: Poetry, Ritual and the Production of Impossible Space
When I was a child, I lived in a subdivision town called Middleburg Heights, on the south side of Cleveland. The lots were small, just a bit wider than the houses, with yards that backed up to a short hedge that separated one yard from another. Alongside the garage, my father had planted fruit trees and rhubarb, and there was a honey locus tree with its thin willowy leaves. The folks who lived behind us fought sometimes, and their son was the “weird kid” at school who’d spend all day in the bathroom, sometimes climbing out the window to get free.
In a dream once, I crawled back through the hedge and, instead of the back neighbors lawn, I found an open strip of land, a bit like the cuts that travel along power lines, but wind tossed & high grass & purple shadowed bushes like Van Gogh’s Arles, and the excitement of this, discovering this between where it couldn’t be, an impossible space, tossed by June airs. In some ways I’ve been looking for this kind of thing since, places between, or further rooms, a twisting stairway above.
In the brief time I have here, I read Anne Carson’s treatment of a poem by Sappho in Eros, the Bittersweet, and my own analysis of early Rg Vedic hymns to dawn to explore the manner in which figuration/articulation functions to open what I call a second neighboring, proximate, dialogically imbricate “impossible space” that is, depending on circumstance, the “room” of the ritual or the space limned by the lattice work of a poem. I’ll then move way upstream to show the relevance of this with respect to Rainer Maria Rilke, so as to consider the ways in which poetry is used in modern contexts as a way of revealing and justifying impossible space in the face of the ascendancy of a materialist world-view and/or the deconstruction of metaphysical specularization of the figure
My degree is in History of Religions, with a focus on Vedic and Early Buddhist ritual and discourse. In the course of a long project focused on explaining the centrality of the Buddha-image in a supposedly non-theistic religion, I worked on the creation of figural relations in RgVedic poetry and ritual as a relevant contextual case. The key finding in this work was that the early context for many of these poems was a set of lauds sung at a ritual at which fire was kindled and brief offerings made at the sun’s stations at dawn, noon, and sunset.
Very briefly, the poems lay out two figural surfaces or topoi: the topos of the dawn itself figured by speaking of the quality of light, the new colors, the sun ranged in the morning’s clouds or perhaps just the bare line of red lifted into a lowering charcoal night or the new blue shapes of just discerned surroundings; and a mythic, imagined topos figured by way of singing of the devas, powerful spirit lords associated with plays of light (the sun, storm-louds, the flashing waters, fire). The verses lay these topoi out like cloth and then weave them together using all the devices of poetry, and in that making, a third topoi is figured:the reflexive topos of the ritual ground itself on which the singer stands, the songs sung alongside the doubled dawn, doubling the dawn.
Imagine then: a guy or several men sitting around a fire at dawn, somewhere on the vast steppes of Central Asia, their cattle moving about nearby, tawny in the fresh light, wind brushing the straps of their tents, calling out into—spelling out—the day. Like a bird song, something flung out into the air as a way of projecting a shape—a duration—that then exists as a figure among the other objects of the world. A figure that opens out a space of relation. A field in which they suddenly see themselves stand.
And so a tryptic: dawn world of the senses said doubled by an imagined topos writ across sky, by which singing a second doubling of fire and sun, world and the impossible space of the self—what Rilke will call a human space between river and rock—is gestured.
***
In a class on Poetry, Desire, and Religion, I have students read from Maurizio Bettini’s The Portrait of the Lover alongside Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. Bettini’s work includes a study of the trope by which a drawing or statue of a lover becomes a sometimes haunting, sometimes fruitful portal to an absent, often dead, lover. Carson considers a proximate case, taken from a fragment by Sappho, in which a triangular set of relations is figured: Sappho, the poet, watches a man embrace a woman, and, in the saying of that, her own desire for the woman is admitted.
Carson suggests that in this case, desire for an other is opened up through a figure, and, mediated by that figure, a necessary and mimetically constructed difference between other and self is founded, where self discovers itself, secret, seeing from a separate, and interior place, apart from, and in relation to, even though.
Again then a triadic structure related to a call: a sensible other, an imaginaire—vehicle or prosthesis by which the reach towards sensed other is said, and the newly disclosed and impossible place of the self, now layered in relation to the other by the articulation of the poem. A space opened up between self and world in which one is said to stand.
***
In both cases, what mimesis makes involves a touch between imagination or thought and sensed world: a bending or weaving, a back and forth made possible by language: edge of one image folded into the next, enjambment or metrical slip, doubled vowel or consonant by which two worlds touch, dance apart, echo back proposed. In this way what sense said finds is a doubled world and an impossible place for desire.
***
And, in both cases, a third term infused or considered by an imaginative act of seeing (devas in clouds, the statued lover, Sappho, herself, in the man), slid over the other, makes possible both a difference (no matter this is understood in physical or embodied terms or as the difference of death) and relation.
My sense of the relevance of this for this conference is that, when the poem itself is thought of as a lattice or tongue, a word that covers what desires reaches towards, it is then, also, a means of interrogating the relation of self to other, and thus a means of interrogating all that we ask of the “other”—as object, as God, as lover—we are at stake in.
***
The early twentieth century poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s repeatedly took up the poem as a primal scene for considering the relations I find in the Rg Veda and Carson saw in Sappho. There is, of course, no way to make this point here in full. Hence, as a prolegomenon, I will spend the remainder of my time briefly reading a series poems—two from his early work, and two from the late Sonnets—as a way to trace this point.
The first is the lintel or bookplate poem for The Book of Images, “Entrance”. The poem begins with an imperative invitation to “whoever you are” that we step away from our room “where we know everything” at “the last house before the far-off” and from that threshold he imagines:
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
And like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning
tenderly your eyes let it go…
Here, Rilke lims the basic figure of the poem as imagined gesture—tree listed up against the sky, figured—by which world and self is known: world as word grown ripe in silence, and self in the movement of reaching for and forgetting, in the aside which is its own impulse, a prior echo, perhaps, of the Eighth Elegy’s “any womb-born creature” that, “terrified as fleeing from itself, zigzags through the air, the way a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat quivers across the porcelain of evening”.” Here, the disclosure of desiring self produces a question related to the relation between self and world. In this poem, early in Rilke’s oevre, he can still imagine world can be relinquished, that the other can fall away, the ties undone.
If one looks at Rilke’s process, his major works generally came into being in pairs, differentiated either by genre or form, or by tactic. This suggests that, at the compositional level, a particular project was realized in at least two iterations. The second poem I want to consider is from the better-known sister of The Book of Images, whose English title is “The Book of Hours”, whose three sections were written over about five years. In the first section, written not long after Rilke’s return from a trip to Russia, Rilke attempts to fashion a series of icon-painting poems in which an image of his “dark God” was figured. Very much aware that the poetic gesture “brought God into being” (much as the tree made world), these poems explore the poets relation to an other that, like the poet, needs and wants.
The series of poems make “picture” or “figure” as Bettini would have it dialogical by adopting a conceit of direct address as an aesthetic dynamic. The poems are sketches in a workbook, but also letters and make full use of what the epistle allows—direct address, assumption of sympathy, self-disclosure and questioning. The force of this diction allows Rilke to imagine the God he draws a neighbor, in a nearby room, separated only by a thin wall.
The familiar diction Rilke assumes here is close to that of Indian bhakti or Rumi, where God is read as lover, as thou, rather than distant Lord. And its no surprise as many of the poems written were also, partly or in whole, written for Lou Andres Salome.
What is at stake in bhakti is an understanding that the intimate love relationship leads to a recognition of an other as a difference to which one must be loyal, and the use of this insight in thinking of the other in its relation to self whatever metaphysics or theology one has chosen to say the other in terms of. What Merleau-Pont calls chiasmus, a
doubling of world that makes it possible to imagine other (and thus objects too) as worthy of ethical care and consolation.
The last poems I want to consider here are the first two poems in The Sonnets to Orpheus. The first, which echoing “Entrance” begins”
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh! Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.
Rilke imagines that this note makes the forest animal’s own cries seem smaller—it quiets their difficult desire, so that they who at best had had a “makeshift hut to receive the music” of beauty, “a shelter nailed up out of their deepest longing” now have a temple that Orpheus has built “deep inside their hearing”.
The notes here are caught from the Seventh Elegy and Rilke’s determination there that at the heart of the relation figured by desire was call—and that call could be a sheltering tree, a stop against desire, a place for it, shelter, or well, or room. Hence, the difference of self and other that figure makes, when held to, is an ethical difference, a means of realizing a good in the face of the other.
In the second poem, Rilke produces a layering, showing how well he has learned that things are doubled. We read about the Orphic call, the tree ascended sheltering, and turn the page, and he names it differently as a girl, beginning again:
And it was almost a girl and came to be
out of this single joy of song and lyre
and through her green veils shown forth radiantly
and made herself a bed inside my ear.
And slept there.
Towards the end of Part Two, Rilke pairs this poem with one that takes a note from the myth of Daphne to finish the thought of tree as dancing girl who, “as she feels herself become laurel, wants you to change into wind”. But here, it is her sleep—her forgetting is everything:
the awesome tree, the distances I had felt
so deeply that I could touch them, meadows in spring:
all the wonders that had ever seized my heart.
She slept the world.
And so tall tree in the ear is doubled by girl asleep in the ear and dreaming. A doubling that is made formally explicit where Rilke makes us aware of Sonnet as lattice, pouring his thought across the end of the first quatraine, and then again across the turn the first tercet should signal. Following a mimetic impulse has led him to say world and self as garment laid down over a lattice, a bit of cotton seed, caught by a thorn.
Thus mimesis also as a way to make room, and not just room, but what Rilke speaks of in a poem from The New Poems, “The Rose Interior”:
Where is there the outwardness
to what lies here within?
Whose wound was ever dressed,
bandaged in such fine linen?
Reflected here, what skies
lie open and at ease
as in a lake within
these open roses
in which all softly rests
as if no accidental hand
could shake or make it spill?
Unable to contain
the riches that are theirs
they pour out their excess
sharing their inwardness
to enrich the days; until
the whole of summer seems
one great room, a room within a dream.
I want to end by briefly meditating on the place of the ear in these first two sonnets. In a poem from 1912, Rilke concludes a withering self-reflection on this exploration of stereoscopic effects in the New Poems by saying
Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.
Learn, inner man, to look to your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.
In the new poems Rilke had attempted to master the doubling I speak of here by creating stereoscopic effects in his poems—doubling surfaces that were realized in specular rather than tangible or felt terms. Seeing, however, as a mode of relation is one that ever allows ourselves the fantasy that we either do not touch—hidden like Sartre behind his keyhold—or can fully grasp without destroying the object we desire. In seeing, the heart has not yet bent itself to care. The relational space of hearing, however, is different. Hearing produces a sense of being somewhere. What we hear are the echoes back from what surrounds us, a domed space or room even when the roof is the sky. Thus hear is shelter made possible by the shell of the ear, and when a things said makes a shelter, the word—the tree lifted up—not only covers over what it says, it makes a place for it as well, there in the cupped hand of the ear.
***
PS:
In Atlanta, there is a painting by Anslem Kiefer, in which a stick figure drawing of the constellation Draco, steps down out of the sky across a shore of crashing waves. Crosses the horizon between imagination and sense, back.
In all this is the thought that the call makes room because it is heard.
Notes:
1. Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait f the Lover, translated by Laura Gibbs, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Bettini locates what he calls a “fundamental story” in Pliny concerning the birth of the image in which a lover’s traced profile is the model for the art of modeling in clay. Alongside this, he places several motifs concerning the use of a simulacra or image as a means of uniting a person with his or her dead lover, including the story of Laodamia and Protesilaus and that of Alcestis. See Ibid. pp. 7-25.
2. Anne Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet: An Essay, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1986). Carson’s translation of fragment 31 is as follows (Ibid., pp. 12-13):
He seems to me equal to gods that man
who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a movement, then no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under my skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
Carson uses the poems to argue that the activation of eros requires this triadic structure, anchored by the insertion of the imaginaire into the picture. In this sense, what I call the prosthetic, “plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking the two that are not one.” (Ibid, p. 16).
3. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow, (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1994), p. 5.
4. Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 379.
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Stephen Cohn, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 247.
8. Mitchel Ed., Op cit.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Lexicon
From “Lexicon”
In “The Dialogic Imagination”, Mikhail Bakhtin writes about the way a word is shot through with semantic traces, echoes, the readings each person brings to it. When I read this passage, I imagined somehow the word suspended in the Philadelphia Train Station (I suppose I remembered it from “Witness”) shot through with gray afternoon light and the ghosts of all passing travelers and what they bring to it.
I don’t know what my readers bring to the words I use, but I thought I might explore writing out brief lexicon entries for words I use as short-hand for a complex set of relations. I include below the first three entries, for “knot”, “room” and “fold. I am thinking of extending this project to any number of terms I am stuck on—lattice, scar, fence, aster, sky, kiss, skin, wood/would/were/was, and so on.
I
Knot—count tied in cord, to measure sea
or affect clump in
body they call “cakra”
(eye or wheel) in yoga
or weight placed on
otherwise upward flowing
& departing airs to
say “here too, pause, spread,
flower”
dissipate mucus clot
lodged in intestinal throat
holds boat against shore
sail to sheet
to pull,
holds tent-taut sky
or skin, stretched
or not, naught, wind
blows through; punned
what, quartered know, gnaw
nauseous open
***
a broader bank of referents (inside Bakhtin’s Philadelphia Train Station)
tie score
knit’s dark and brooding
whale-like brother
cicatrice score
cranes in Eurasian autumnal African sky
My ancestor, John Howland, fell off the Mayflower east of Iceland in a storm; was hauled back heavenward where drag hawser knot stopped his drift and palm (sounding whale pulled “flick-o-the-wrist” ashore).
[we write to tie knots into, birds on a wire, mantras as stepping stones to throw the way back before us, through the old forest, as grackles search the grass sprung back in our footsteps, moon or sun dapple, what the old Vedic people called loka, open space you can see across, meadow, and then world]
***
rhythm of mantras Indra squats over
cow paddy
& flagstone
lillypond
pons upon
Nail a picture at the end, sister.
Body’s first simile is tumor
landing disintegrates as you step down
what holds me in the world/air before wind undoes
II
Room:
Threshold:
broken (he suspects himself in others)
a radio plays
ear as cup as template
first double makes others audible
all sound is echo
flute in Plato’s cave
no one believed the shadows anyway
even in the dark, an answer
floor and containing walls
thoughts still leak
they have a different toros
kitchen in my arm
bedroom in my side
stored memory I visit sometimes
I no longer allow tenets (if
I can help it) you must be ready
to be stabbed
places fill back up, the way
streams work under ground
sound travels less
in a field the echoes make a soft fuzz
each thing casts its own roar—
airplane, chainsaw,
become quick in the sun
in the field, thousands of tiny glass domes had been shattered
we moved faster than sound
and lost track of where we were.
Room—
° flat, palm of the hand (not mind), splayed back anemone
° thus flower blossomed or lotus lifted into sun’s radiant avenue
° raum, thus space made by a thought, hence double of knot, or knot’s echo or sister
° subtenant to, thus in sequence or as against other rooms by doorways, windows corridors, yards
In Stalker, the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky stages the quest to find a room, a deep inward, inside many tunnels and impossible to approach by door location, that is after all old and ordinary because this is the way we are in all places we decide are place. A door opens and closes and by the light that comes and goes we decide there is a skeleton there, and a flower or plant because there is changing sun.
Room deep inside that Rilke imaged as the deep inward endless summer with a rose. We search for—perhaps you’ve had a version of the dream, those who dream have taken quests or tasks where crossing a room took all day, with many arrangings and yet later, if the dreaming sleep is langorous futher and more charmed rooms are found you return to later—the upstairs rooms that turn back against the grain, aside, and then up to a gabled back room, blue lit, with window seats, and obvious slumber.
In Stalker, the room is plotted as a place where all your dreams come true—wealth falls from the sky, secret desires will out—all ruled by the inflexible justice of fairy tales and according to lot. Tarkovsky tells us about that, takes us to it, so as to pry a space open inside us—oh not so much a pry apart a place in the air, but to open what the air has scarred over. Depth we recognize. Place we know we have visited before.
° floor as affordance & threshold & walls—walls that are skin or perhaps cave that bends our voices back at us
° resonant
° and roof cupped hand, tabernacle—stars flung and river of Milky Way—that we are under veil, chrysalin or cyst
room depth resonant well
ribs swell ship side
proffered hand
A fire throws its light so far at the night & makes dome, perhaps tower, we step in an out of & echo or template of field and other open spaces framed by dark edge the eye cannot cross.
Old Vedic word for world is loka a lit up space a person can see across. Thus a measure and not a whole as always up against a limit eye no longer penetrates a distant haze. And yet, horizon far enough from us no spirit’s leaning reaches and we are apart, in a space, broken into time.
Hence world is a drinking, a sate, call it meadow, we say “in an open”.
I say room.
***
a human place between river and rock not silent or island, no thread bare carpet (Aladdin dreams)—a slip or sip of air from which figure appears or between (Samson did mighty push apart the walls, did push against the well & climbed out Saturday afternoon in Hollywood’s black and white blush) seed’s impossible force breaks nail.
room for two—what we see crosses through us to the bookshelves in search of a quote or story—we call that “my sister” to give being in two places at once a name
she says, “not two places at once, but twice there, in the canoe going upstream against the bend, and opening the mouth of the eye wider at the same time to shout something before the whole dream is swallowed and can’t be said
***
Down along the James River in Charlottesville, there’s a house built over an old mill such that the entry is built out over a millrace. you open a door and step into an entry. the race runs under the wall and crosses before you before disappearing back outside birchward. stairs lead up to a landing & the door to the living
***
A chi-gung teacher suggested we make our bodies into iron shirts so that no good chi leaked I thought damn you Adam Smith I want circulation thank you and airs. yes its true the whole open floor I’ve prized open could snap shut but I sleep between sheets where the night can enter and if this adds too much weight to the scale, I was growing heavier day by day. I want my chi to move around the room anyway, like a firefly, briefly lighting, sketching a summer or fall. I am tired of pushing it around a diagram I have stapled to a wall in my mind.
***
The second time I saw Richard Alpert, I sat dutifully through the talk but did not want to correct the mistake I’d made the last time. I thought, you cannot go backwards in dreams. When you drop a stitch, the stitch is lost. No amount of trading will ever get you back what you decided to keep. This was, admittedly a stubborn tack to take, but according to The Ticket That Exploded each error took at least five steps to occur.
Anyway, I got up before the end of the talk to forestall the moment he’d ask us to embrace him. I knew that was an off/on switch and neither setting was an adequate solution. Instead I started to leave, to get out before I had to choose, and as I reached the hall, I could hear Alpert, practically shouting “that’s just a strategy, just a strategy” so I’d cast my lot but wasn’t out of it yet.
***
Kitchen in my side, and bedroom back behind my eyes you open a small door to get to, all the bedrooms ever, whether you sleep alone or allow a second humming breath to stir in, all windowed we can look out & hide behind. Sleep turns us over in her hands and touches us soft apart the way you search careful through shell and chaff, a fingering my legs have. Bookstore and cupboard, beach, sky.
“Where’s you kitchen”, he asked, and he wasn’t talking about which way to go & instead put a pot on the stove and started to boil herbs. “Place needs a perfumin’”. I just wished someone else would drop by, find their way up the steps. It’d been weeks, years since anyone had visited but everything was prepared.
***
Tara Tulke said “when trouble knocks at your door, open the door to say hello”. I thought that was quite a change on what Rumi said in “The Sunrise Ruby” about knocking until the you inside opened a door to see who was calling, look out at the day. In Nostalghia, Tarkovsky tells a story about a man who keeps his family indoors for nine years to protect them from nuclear war—it seems like this creates problems, but sometimes, after reading many books, you are so far inside it’s a long way back. [Orpheus couldn’t make it back, so,frankly, how will you? }
So I took off the headphones and got up from the bed we had in the kitchen I’d been laying on and went to the door to see who’d knocked. And it was trouble I suppose, Lisa and her new daughter who used some shoeboxes for shoes while we talked. I hadn’t seen her in maybe five years. Our dead children slept in the air about what we were saying & obviously killing them didn’t in the end mean we couldn’t, at a later time, have others.
***
Its hard to say who was the trouble anyway. For awhile we’d been “just kids” and shared dreams. There was a catalytic effect, however, whenever we occupied the same room. Small explosions of force occurred just out of sight. Ghosts condensed more easily. You could shut your eyes a moment and find the room rearranged afterwards and have no choice but to adjust. Call it a chemical reaction made possible by poorly contained dream bodies. Call it repression.
She had a bad spell when she was forcing some kinds of energies into her walls, and then had the sense that, pregnant with new forces, the walls sagged or opened with many tiny mouths. I told her there was no such thing as black magic, but my plan by this time was to let the day come up by itself anyway. I wanted things, same as anyone, but it was easy, way too easy, to push too hard.
My plan was to stand still a long time.
***
In The Four Gated City, Dorris Lessing has a character escape an apocalyptic world by basically moving into the walls, which means prizing a space apart to be seed. Are these options around us all the time? Skins to peel back or air to part. Rilke says be ahead of all parting, but is that a way back? And, if not, how far ahead is that.
***
Bill sat down and said, “I think stereoscopic means to be in a room and in what Rilke calls the open at the same time”. The chorus says “no it means being twice at least, always”.
I read a poem out loud I wish made a room you could enter, or perhaps as a spell to show you how to find the stairs hidden by years of stars turned ivy and measured by moon’s departure—you are never going back so room can’t be where you left from no matter how many times you go back, no matter you don’t change the furniture, put pictures on the wall try to screw beauty there, hold it down. I’m no longer even sure what’s in it I am reading out loud so it echoes makes a place I wish would afford you same as its mine.
After the reading, we pack it up, put the things that floated free back in their nestling place. Subdued but waiting.
III
Fold:
pocket, fetus folds over so body is striate
small flute
dough rolled over once to kneed, folded again is form
stitch makes a pocket you can put a wish into, hand in a skirt
result of alignment of opposite edges—thus where we have two, heaven and earth, a third called “man” between & therefore lake, thunder, mountain, daughter, lightning, wind
***
in one of the early stages of fetal development a flat sheet of dividing cells folds into a tube. the outer edges meet along a line that is scored down the front of the body, makes lips and mirror halves—we are split along that axis into right and left now interwoven along a new shore line
***
I don’t remember the concepts in A Wrinkle in Time now, but I was talking a bit earlier about the idea that time is not linear but folded & thus the relation between lives a matter of layers now bent, and thus fold as a kiss I suppose or to explain haunting.
“He was folded down over me.” “The sky folded.”
***
womb I suppose or labial fold at least, lips folded and crease
***
wrinkle or blues drag, slight bend of word to fort, da to day
& so lexical also & a lyric principle—Pollack’s Blue Poles Patti says are “infinitely rising” I say are strident and thus tell rhythm as factual as grass we are confronted by, like it or not.
Hence notes as folds particular we repeat along, get creased—“That’s a seriously long fifth there Lamonte you are leaning along” old smoke says. “I am wondering each thing all imbricate to broke. You get it?”
All bent along is story.
“I’ll keep it with mine” Bob says we get folded into. Smoke stacks and oranges. The machine can’t make it because the foot slips and misses the refrigerator door. In the space between, it closes anyway.
So folds that way to, a cook bends into soup just a tang of this other you could reference by focusing hands just so on the rim of the bowl—same aspect the bowl is made to be rhythm to.
Loyal.
He folded his hands and made all the people. Fold that sheet down smooth over her corpse and tug it smooth.
In “The Dialogic Imagination”, Mikhail Bakhtin writes about the way a word is shot through with semantic traces, echoes, the readings each person brings to it. When I read this passage, I imagined somehow the word suspended in the Philadelphia Train Station (I suppose I remembered it from “Witness”) shot through with gray afternoon light and the ghosts of all passing travelers and what they bring to it.
I don’t know what my readers bring to the words I use, but I thought I might explore writing out brief lexicon entries for words I use as short-hand for a complex set of relations. I include below the first three entries, for “knot”, “room” and “fold. I am thinking of extending this project to any number of terms I am stuck on—lattice, scar, fence, aster, sky, kiss, skin, wood/would/were/was, and so on.
I
Knot—count tied in cord, to measure sea
or affect clump in
body they call “cakra”
(eye or wheel) in yoga
or weight placed on
otherwise upward flowing
& departing airs to
say “here too, pause, spread,
flower”
dissipate mucus clot
lodged in intestinal throat
holds boat against shore
sail to sheet
to pull,
holds tent-taut sky
or skin, stretched
or not, naught, wind
blows through; punned
what, quartered know, gnaw
nauseous open
***
a broader bank of referents (inside Bakhtin’s Philadelphia Train Station)
tie score
knit’s dark and brooding
whale-like brother
cicatrice score
cranes in Eurasian autumnal African sky
My ancestor, John Howland, fell off the Mayflower east of Iceland in a storm; was hauled back heavenward where drag hawser knot stopped his drift and palm (sounding whale pulled “flick-o-the-wrist” ashore).
[we write to tie knots into, birds on a wire, mantras as stepping stones to throw the way back before us, through the old forest, as grackles search the grass sprung back in our footsteps, moon or sun dapple, what the old Vedic people called loka, open space you can see across, meadow, and then world]
***
rhythm of mantras Indra squats over
cow paddy
& flagstone
lillypond
pons upon
Nail a picture at the end, sister.
Body’s first simile is tumor
landing disintegrates as you step down
what holds me in the world/air before wind undoes
II
Room:
Threshold:
broken (he suspects himself in others)
a radio plays
ear as cup as template
first double makes others audible
all sound is echo
flute in Plato’s cave
no one believed the shadows anyway
even in the dark, an answer
floor and containing walls
thoughts still leak
they have a different toros
kitchen in my arm
bedroom in my side
stored memory I visit sometimes
I no longer allow tenets (if
I can help it) you must be ready
to be stabbed
places fill back up, the way
streams work under ground
sound travels less
in a field the echoes make a soft fuzz
each thing casts its own roar—
airplane, chainsaw,
become quick in the sun
in the field, thousands of tiny glass domes had been shattered
we moved faster than sound
and lost track of where we were.
Room—
° flat, palm of the hand (not mind), splayed back anemone
° thus flower blossomed or lotus lifted into sun’s radiant avenue
° raum, thus space made by a thought, hence double of knot, or knot’s echo or sister
° subtenant to, thus in sequence or as against other rooms by doorways, windows corridors, yards
In Stalker, the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky stages the quest to find a room, a deep inward, inside many tunnels and impossible to approach by door location, that is after all old and ordinary because this is the way we are in all places we decide are place. A door opens and closes and by the light that comes and goes we decide there is a skeleton there, and a flower or plant because there is changing sun.
Room deep inside that Rilke imaged as the deep inward endless summer with a rose. We search for—perhaps you’ve had a version of the dream, those who dream have taken quests or tasks where crossing a room took all day, with many arrangings and yet later, if the dreaming sleep is langorous futher and more charmed rooms are found you return to later—the upstairs rooms that turn back against the grain, aside, and then up to a gabled back room, blue lit, with window seats, and obvious slumber.
In Stalker, the room is plotted as a place where all your dreams come true—wealth falls from the sky, secret desires will out—all ruled by the inflexible justice of fairy tales and according to lot. Tarkovsky tells us about that, takes us to it, so as to pry a space open inside us—oh not so much a pry apart a place in the air, but to open what the air has scarred over. Depth we recognize. Place we know we have visited before.
° floor as affordance & threshold & walls—walls that are skin or perhaps cave that bends our voices back at us
° resonant
° and roof cupped hand, tabernacle—stars flung and river of Milky Way—that we are under veil, chrysalin or cyst
room depth resonant well
ribs swell ship side
proffered hand
A fire throws its light so far at the night & makes dome, perhaps tower, we step in an out of & echo or template of field and other open spaces framed by dark edge the eye cannot cross.
Old Vedic word for world is loka a lit up space a person can see across. Thus a measure and not a whole as always up against a limit eye no longer penetrates a distant haze. And yet, horizon far enough from us no spirit’s leaning reaches and we are apart, in a space, broken into time.
Hence world is a drinking, a sate, call it meadow, we say “in an open”.
I say room.
***
a human place between river and rock not silent or island, no thread bare carpet (Aladdin dreams)—a slip or sip of air from which figure appears or between (Samson did mighty push apart the walls, did push against the well & climbed out Saturday afternoon in Hollywood’s black and white blush) seed’s impossible force breaks nail.
room for two—what we see crosses through us to the bookshelves in search of a quote or story—we call that “my sister” to give being in two places at once a name
she says, “not two places at once, but twice there, in the canoe going upstream against the bend, and opening the mouth of the eye wider at the same time to shout something before the whole dream is swallowed and can’t be said
***
Down along the James River in Charlottesville, there’s a house built over an old mill such that the entry is built out over a millrace. you open a door and step into an entry. the race runs under the wall and crosses before you before disappearing back outside birchward. stairs lead up to a landing & the door to the living
***
A chi-gung teacher suggested we make our bodies into iron shirts so that no good chi leaked I thought damn you Adam Smith I want circulation thank you and airs. yes its true the whole open floor I’ve prized open could snap shut but I sleep between sheets where the night can enter and if this adds too much weight to the scale, I was growing heavier day by day. I want my chi to move around the room anyway, like a firefly, briefly lighting, sketching a summer or fall. I am tired of pushing it around a diagram I have stapled to a wall in my mind.
***
The second time I saw Richard Alpert, I sat dutifully through the talk but did not want to correct the mistake I’d made the last time. I thought, you cannot go backwards in dreams. When you drop a stitch, the stitch is lost. No amount of trading will ever get you back what you decided to keep. This was, admittedly a stubborn tack to take, but according to The Ticket That Exploded each error took at least five steps to occur.
Anyway, I got up before the end of the talk to forestall the moment he’d ask us to embrace him. I knew that was an off/on switch and neither setting was an adequate solution. Instead I started to leave, to get out before I had to choose, and as I reached the hall, I could hear Alpert, practically shouting “that’s just a strategy, just a strategy” so I’d cast my lot but wasn’t out of it yet.
***
Kitchen in my side, and bedroom back behind my eyes you open a small door to get to, all the bedrooms ever, whether you sleep alone or allow a second humming breath to stir in, all windowed we can look out & hide behind. Sleep turns us over in her hands and touches us soft apart the way you search careful through shell and chaff, a fingering my legs have. Bookstore and cupboard, beach, sky.
“Where’s you kitchen”, he asked, and he wasn’t talking about which way to go & instead put a pot on the stove and started to boil herbs. “Place needs a perfumin’”. I just wished someone else would drop by, find their way up the steps. It’d been weeks, years since anyone had visited but everything was prepared.
***
Tara Tulke said “when trouble knocks at your door, open the door to say hello”. I thought that was quite a change on what Rumi said in “The Sunrise Ruby” about knocking until the you inside opened a door to see who was calling, look out at the day. In Nostalghia, Tarkovsky tells a story about a man who keeps his family indoors for nine years to protect them from nuclear war—it seems like this creates problems, but sometimes, after reading many books, you are so far inside it’s a long way back. [Orpheus couldn’t make it back, so,frankly, how will you? }
So I took off the headphones and got up from the bed we had in the kitchen I’d been laying on and went to the door to see who’d knocked. And it was trouble I suppose, Lisa and her new daughter who used some shoeboxes for shoes while we talked. I hadn’t seen her in maybe five years. Our dead children slept in the air about what we were saying & obviously killing them didn’t in the end mean we couldn’t, at a later time, have others.
***
Its hard to say who was the trouble anyway. For awhile we’d been “just kids” and shared dreams. There was a catalytic effect, however, whenever we occupied the same room. Small explosions of force occurred just out of sight. Ghosts condensed more easily. You could shut your eyes a moment and find the room rearranged afterwards and have no choice but to adjust. Call it a chemical reaction made possible by poorly contained dream bodies. Call it repression.
She had a bad spell when she was forcing some kinds of energies into her walls, and then had the sense that, pregnant with new forces, the walls sagged or opened with many tiny mouths. I told her there was no such thing as black magic, but my plan by this time was to let the day come up by itself anyway. I wanted things, same as anyone, but it was easy, way too easy, to push too hard.
My plan was to stand still a long time.
***
In The Four Gated City, Dorris Lessing has a character escape an apocalyptic world by basically moving into the walls, which means prizing a space apart to be seed. Are these options around us all the time? Skins to peel back or air to part. Rilke says be ahead of all parting, but is that a way back? And, if not, how far ahead is that.
***
Bill sat down and said, “I think stereoscopic means to be in a room and in what Rilke calls the open at the same time”. The chorus says “no it means being twice at least, always”.
I read a poem out loud I wish made a room you could enter, or perhaps as a spell to show you how to find the stairs hidden by years of stars turned ivy and measured by moon’s departure—you are never going back so room can’t be where you left from no matter how many times you go back, no matter you don’t change the furniture, put pictures on the wall try to screw beauty there, hold it down. I’m no longer even sure what’s in it I am reading out loud so it echoes makes a place I wish would afford you same as its mine.
After the reading, we pack it up, put the things that floated free back in their nestling place. Subdued but waiting.
III
Fold:
pocket, fetus folds over so body is striate
small flute
dough rolled over once to kneed, folded again is form
stitch makes a pocket you can put a wish into, hand in a skirt
result of alignment of opposite edges—thus where we have two, heaven and earth, a third called “man” between & therefore lake, thunder, mountain, daughter, lightning, wind
***
in one of the early stages of fetal development a flat sheet of dividing cells folds into a tube. the outer edges meet along a line that is scored down the front of the body, makes lips and mirror halves—we are split along that axis into right and left now interwoven along a new shore line
***
I don’t remember the concepts in A Wrinkle in Time now, but I was talking a bit earlier about the idea that time is not linear but folded & thus the relation between lives a matter of layers now bent, and thus fold as a kiss I suppose or to explain haunting.
“He was folded down over me.” “The sky folded.”
***
womb I suppose or labial fold at least, lips folded and crease
***
wrinkle or blues drag, slight bend of word to fort, da to day
& so lexical also & a lyric principle—Pollack’s Blue Poles Patti says are “infinitely rising” I say are strident and thus tell rhythm as factual as grass we are confronted by, like it or not.
Hence notes as folds particular we repeat along, get creased—“That’s a seriously long fifth there Lamonte you are leaning along” old smoke says. “I am wondering each thing all imbricate to broke. You get it?”
All bent along is story.
“I’ll keep it with mine” Bob says we get folded into. Smoke stacks and oranges. The machine can’t make it because the foot slips and misses the refrigerator door. In the space between, it closes anyway.
So folds that way to, a cook bends into soup just a tang of this other you could reference by focusing hands just so on the rim of the bowl—same aspect the bowl is made to be rhythm to.
Loyal.
He folded his hands and made all the people. Fold that sheet down smooth over her corpse and tug it smooth.
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