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.