RIVERSPELL11
Words have nothing to do with things I know or don’t know. Is there a more-or-less alive, more-or-less anything? Why count tears when they have separated from the eyes in which they have formed? Why tears at all?
The blackbird asks, ‘what is air? what is levitation?’ I say: 'The taillight of the helicopter surpasses the aura of the moon'. And the bird persists in thinking it has something to do with the moon’s vivid rotundity.
As if two objects operate together. Beating not its wings beyond the highest leaf a thrush bares its yellow breast to the rising sun, fulsome in praise: who imbibes knowledge must in turn be imbibed by it. The sea is struck with being the sea. And so I make that my new locale. As we saunter to Okupe from Riotahe, encountering sharp rocks tearing at crooning swells, it is as if the present participle assumes virtue. In close, things are predominantly horizontal. Water washes over smooth sand, where smooth pebbles tumble back and forth, onto their backs and over again onto their fronts, like emissaries from another world. Out of which enters a pair of oystercatchers, prodding, scuttling before each incoming and outgoing wave, one now brandishing in its beak a diminutive shellfish. Life's performers eat and die: Et in Arcadia ego motions the hand of Guercino.
‘The definition of what was jazz and what was not began to blur’. When I glanced, my eye lay down upon a lake and on it ducks haphazardly sauntered, splashed and sang. Tell me your place (where you exist). An angel at my table is what happens here in private where I am. ‘A black man who lives like a white man’, Miles Davis, sure cool dude.
‘More and more [what] I’m interested in [is] finding one [little] aspect of classical music [that might be overlooked] in every other piece of music and imagining [that] that’s the [whole] world and [just] blowing that up and saying [okay] this is a [whole] universe. This is a [whole] musical canvas; this is a [musical] spectrum. What if the point of the piece is—[what if] there’s a combination of a polyrhythm that’s an interesting weird rhythm and [what if] that [interesting weird rhythm] is [just] the [whole] world?’
(David Lang, Cheating, Lying & Stealing; bracketing: mine)
Off piste? try
Julia Wolfe’s piece Lick.
PROVERBS FOR MEDITATORS12
i
Effortlessness is a place occasionally
occupied: the squabbling mynah need not
relinquish its hold on the branch.
And so the worm is a casual creature
with an alimentary canal. One sentence fed
through me results in a welter of confusion.
Breaths away? Or breathe away.
No Direction Home (for either of us).
Whose adagio?
I thought of you when you
were not here. This and
that other you, I say two, because
somehow I cannot say they’re
the same. This me, that you.
Pronouns, dromedaries.
What on earth was that?
Or: The point about a fractal is that it indicates symmetrical possibilities strung out. Time imposes a baseline, then disappears, like the tūī swooping again and again, seemingly without purpose.
ii
Blackbird you wildly turn
tuft after tuft on the fresh mown
lawn. Do you consider
we seek the same treasure ?
Unsettled, rumbling like Vesuvius within my sequestered cell, I feel for my fellow meditators, rendered by their own silence. How clear it seems they must listen eagerly to the sounds of the vaunting tūī, preferring its mellifluous puzzlers to beatification or my struggles.
I cannot even well write a sentence. What do you mean put more of myself into it? Into what?
My eyes are downcast in the garden where the pale blooming irises that were planted by Ruth and Andrew are a blank to me. These irises, whose irises! Which see which?
iii
Waiting outside the meditation room for an interview with the teacher, I observe a column of ants swarm over the broad concrete path. I realise their strict sense of direction is a contrivance. How maintain direction in a given sentence and still find a way home?
For the ant, for Dylan, for this sentence: No Direction Home.
Who would give
my poems of today to a poet
already long in their grave? Yet his or hers,
unnamed, I read
again and again with pleasure.
Nudging the pines
at the boundary, a new moon
surrounds itself with a nimbus
that's set in bronze. Derisive of symbols,
yet my heart blazes.
iv
The invulnerable tūī, wings tucked and torso scraping the ground, cries ‘Look mum, no hands’. Inside the meditation cell, similar in hue, the same bird hangs down by an narrow inscrutable thread.
.
The tūī, in half-rotation on the slender [flax stem], enjoys the earthly realm where it resolves to linger, wondering whether the fact’s sufficient to pontificate upon or how else it might be spun.
‘Peter Peter’, calls the mynah in the evening. He has the thought that his friend’s name is important. The thought occurs that one of them may have contributed the title to a recent furniture catalogue. Neither of these is called home.
.
.
The blackbird stops, looks abruptly up at me, and smiles. Who does it think sees and who is seen? Whose eyes see straight, whose crooked?
Existence = Agitation + R (always a capital).
v
Does 𝑓(x)=a0+(n=1)∑∞ (an cos (nπx/L) + bn sin(nπx/L)
render a right answer?
Again the magician flips
the cloth in her hand, suddenly
a tūī appears: a white scarf
draped round its throat, ever
the unanswered question.
Since his previous circuit promenade, back at the start but at a different juncture, the meditator who pondered the moving water under the wooden bridge is gone. Has he evaporated? Is the present tense continuous (or continual)? Has he taken answers or even relevant questions with him, I wonder, or am I the residue asking? Or is it something different—the same? Is raiment even a word in this circumstance?
vi
Yet my body is not something I
consider. Nor am I back where I began:
arriving not leaving, nor is leaving
arriving. Two haves or not.
Bactrian
dromedary
two haves
halve not?
‘Next’ is a strange word. ‘Akin’ another. Too bumps or one? Take tūī and huia. How distinguish them from something stipulated between them, like an extra syllable that’s a vowel? Mind you, a language that includes words like ‘abasement’ isn’t all bad, irrespective of which ethical holes we fall into. Or is an umbilical chord an epitome? Words keep the house in flow, like a window that the breeze nonchalantly enters and leaves, indifferent to location and direction. Arriving ain’t leaving, leaving never arrives.
RIVERSPELL13
It is fair to say the dandelions open their parachutes on the grass area above The Bluff. Two kererū clutch hands as they pass by the deck where I am on watch. Already pōhutukawa filaments thickly pile in the culvert near Jay's Destination Dairy, disporting delectatious grandiloquence.
The couple on top of Dundonald leave their sprinkler running. Through the hose runs time and the its remembrance. The past compresses, and the blackbird hovers on the outside of it, relishing the prospect of their own abandonment.
The woman paddling in the dinghy radiates circles that are irrecoverable. Combating the same force, the kingfisher arcs back to the rock it had quitted moments earlier, shaping a silent 0. This receding tide is designated ‘low’, although the word has other implications, such as depression. Various tree trunks around the river festoon doilies and colourful wool hangings, fair return on an influx of summer pōhutukawas, sheer readiness. Non-matching colours distinguish Whangārei. A young dog tugs at the leash, wanting to chase kayakers, only to be restrained by its master, who has little sense of the movement of things. Who mentions ‘a play of strings’, musical or otherwise? Beethoven’s Große Fuge complicates the whimsy of thought.
The daisies Karen places in a fine Japanese vase on our windowsill are seen folding over the path below Annette’s residence. Still-red blackberries and orange montbretia adorn the sloped bank. I see a blackbird sitting on someone’s letterbox, and earlier, elsewhere, I watched ducks in a threesome, bottom-up in the ebbing tide. I had started with that thought. Where are we now? How characterise good according to atmosphere or water level or air, or the behaviour of birds? The ducks—a collective—have little choice but to neglect the vaguaries of the world. Does this man know shit? Neglect him at your peril.
Meanwhile, small wavelets radiate from the catamaran motoring towards Te Matau a Pohe, only to strike a stump in the water and change frequency and direction, surprising the birds at the water’s edge, surprising me.
Twice the kingfisher shapes 0, two rounds, silent until it lands and reiterates kwehkweh. I am the centre of a hollow ring:
Poetry is the moving of things in their own way and the moving of things (the way things move) on their own. WU. [无]
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
RIVERSPELL15
John Leigh Calder bangs his bass strings on the paved bricks outside Daisy’s Cupcake in Whangārei. I think of the many times I’ve seen through everything. Musical notation? Beethoven’s Große Fuge? And then faces are brought to me, and I see through them, sheared bones, tear-filled draperies, unwonted benefaction.
As the pink flower wobbling
on its stem—I notice the wind,
hardly the flower, which does
n't move.
Who needs
a flag on Everest?
Who needs thougths
—fcuk!
Nor does normal exist. On the canvas awning beside the green house poplar leaves slowly congregate. Annette, deploying snips, hand brush & broom, urging fallen leaves onto the narrow earth strip beside the concrete path, where they accumulate. She and I confer, without clear sense of what time might determine, including sudden rain showers and the seasonality of leaf-fall, on this occasion premature. At Pataua North, where I battle lumbering surf, Karen frets, an orange cone lodges near the apex of the Norfolk pine, emboldened sentinel. Two things, alike in shape, unalike in girth and height: orange cone in a cone-shaped tree.
Airborne, like John’s melody at Cupcake, heard floating — birds prance at Okupe, recherché display — a pair of toddlers on short legs, oystercatchers outpace advancing and retracing waves. Their long beaks spike the sand until one extracts a diminutive shellfish, never say victim. Not before they outpace the next wave spreading clothlike over the sand: no plate required! Are ocean & oystercatchers & shellfish a continuum, emanating from the sea and John’s fingers or the rendition of Beethoven’s Große Fuge? Bottoms up.
Adherence is a faltering of shells that litter a sea's outer edge where my thoughts are strewn. Slip knot. By the time I reach Brighton Pier, shore lights are extinguished. In neat letters on the sand is scribbled, all caps: 'SEEK RESPECT NOT ATTENTION'. I no longer see them. The moon&sun&tide each has provenance. The beach is barking at scattered birds that want to return to the sand. I dwell in heaven's domain.
Ears register the clinking sound of the ceramic furin, hovering under the eave fluttering red tassel. The tassel makes no sound and the sound resembles the tassel, no more. Is there a hole in the ground? Is the letter Up? Why issue sound?
Papañca!4
I tell Annette, who dutifully tends the Zen steps and hedged path I frequent on my walks, ‘Here I never get my feet damp; they stay clean & dry’.
§
When red and blue light combine, the result is magenta. When green and blue light are combined, they make cyan. Red and green light make yellow. And when all three primary colours are combined, we see white. Tail of tīrairaka.
Tīrairakas tip and dive in their aerial domain, scantly furnished, their playing field. Let crooked things surpass what’s straight. Delicate tīrairaka.
§
A leaf is not a bird, and tīrairaka is. A blackbird counts on a rock as key support, a blinking yellow-eyed rock! Nothing is required above its head! Or singing rock below, why not?
§
Akin to a fist or a bunch of fingers or an itinerant tīrairaka, the oak brandishes what it most cherishes: budding leaves. The blackbird who occupies the middle of the newly mown lawn in front of the Aquatic Centre marvels at me as I pass. Which of us is more auspicious, it wonders? Tīrairaka is intent on making something of itself. It’s like things come apart so you see only fragments? I smile, saying nothing. Spreading adsorbs light. Things thin to needlepoint, saith delicate tīrairaka.
§
Now is hardly the time for white plum blossoms to stick firmly onto the leaves of the agapanthus, ornamenting them. Curious sheaths of blue and yellow mantle Parihaka at first light, kin to delicate tīrairaka. One moon? a starry planet? Together they are heavenly spheres that this September guide the locals and visitors to Parihaka, our sweeter Bethlehem. It is a strange courage you give me, ancient star. The helicopter unloads its ‘monsoon’ bucket on the path they’re repairing after the recent dry and rains. What explodes? Is it the flame tree or the tūī that floods the tree in song? Comfort and discomfort arrive in equal measure, separated by millimetres. From now until then the moon inches higher in the sky. Considered a great weight and gross rotundity.
RIVERSPELL15
Mon
I arrive at my room at the centre. Same tūī, different me.
Is it the same ant that sits on the narrow ledge near the shower head? When I turn on the water I see six legs frantically adjusting and the body hunch, everything’s akimbo. How can the world advance?
Tue
A word is not dead because I say so. And if someone takes it from me, thinking it a corpse, or me a corpse, what have I lost or it or they gained? Devoid like irony is.
If I say the world is devoid of meaning emphasis is not placed on either word. Of course, the same applies when I insert ‘l’ before the ‘d’, even when sound slips and the gap is plugged. Or is that ‘l’ actually an ‘I’, as an agent, all bets are off! Things pop. Word is not word nor world world. What I’m getting at is ambition; when one writes as if one’s a kind of genius, reducing irreducible Wittgenstein. Some kind of genus flowers.
I plus l plus 1 ergo sum. The sentence, the word, samesame.
Wed (early)
This morning in the valley the sun shines and we are enamoured. It is hardly the first time for any of us, up so early. And yet we feel a special delight, a subtle shade of pink squeezed from a tube, haphazardly applied. Awash in Kim Pieters.
Walking to my residence, on the branch I see a finch. Yet the sound I hear is that of a sparrow. Are the finch & sparrow double dipping?
Wed (late)
Ways of looking and emptiness apply to pretty much. Anything else is poetry, too.
A poem is empty of everything it is not. It is empty, when viewed as an outside thing. Inside its are words organized and disorganized. It is a whole; it is parts thereof; it is parts; it is without parts. Le blanc souci de notre toile. The poem brings attention to what it manifests or ignores, thrilling my mind, thrilling the mind of Kim Pieters , or all mind.
The missing half of the letter e (the other half) plays the part of entities and fleshes out still-waiting sentences! In the §nd nothing much seems to matter. So, at least, poetry thinks.
‘Od§ to Coherence’? Au pieux mensonge?
Compendia of local flora (I’m thinking Joseph Dalton Hooker) render the task adaptable to catalogue and other forms, rich in identifying features, much illustrated. The actual walk takes me elsewhere. Several tree ferns have lost their heads and wander aimlessly, nikau palms are packaged in all sizes, the stream and path edges are strewn with them. Kanuka, manuka, totara, tanekaha, intermittent cabbage trees, personable enough. Moss forms a matting on the wooden bridge, with a trickle of clear water beneath. Notwithstanding, I cross it:
some burn worn cats
burn worn cats some
worn cats some burn
cats some burn worn
W h o s e s p l a y e d h a n d s ?
A mechanism brings this about? To put a word before or after another word changes everything. Neither’s the same. Like—if there were more words than meanings and—if so—what? One needn’t crack a word to get at the inside. As if meaning’s somehow hidden or makes a quick getaway. ‘I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be’, saith Batman.
Thur
To rely on numbers—or script—to quantify—lunacy, surely? Or— breaks? How clarify delectation? As—is—hardly—blue.
Fri
A dog barks. That’s it. Fetch.
RIVERSPELL16
i.m. rob burbea: holy interest
Eyes ingest frog. Frog forages, slickered tongue. It leaps from here to there. We think. Thought occupies us. We belong. We tip right over. And out.
Boundaries are what wars calibrate. Things are rehypothecated. They recur; disputation recurs. I love raw, said the backward warker.
Fuck you. I love you.
No, my past lies before me and I’ve already experienced my future. ‘All at once’, says Emily Adlam. Things land hard. So I cup my hands for time to trickle through, like the fine pink grains in Tante Bep’s inverted glass barbell. Who said Victor Hugo? ‘It can’t be one and it can’t be many?’ Hey, Jude. Spilled juice. Swelled up inside like a unskinned sausage. Or having said bike, I walk it off, like my first taste of a segment of orange or a hand dipped into the cookie jar—that universal voodoo. Its a relationship. The Collatz conjecture: every positive integer, with rules applied, ends up in a four two one loop. Choose an integer: if odd, multiply it by three and add one; if even, divide it by two.
RIVERSOUTH17
Poems daren’t entertain thought (aka Koch), like a river; or transform or extend personal life, like I (aka O’Hara); or like a tempest, rare, saith fellow New Yorker, swirler of words, Ashbery.
At Naseby Pond, a pair of paradise ducks skids, distracting their own image on the water. A small oracular lake:
Lip. Flat.
Curve. Lid.
Lid. Curve.
Flat. Lip.
Saith monsieur duck.
Originally a mirror entered into by a princess or her daemon lover, forsooth—now a smear of lipstick contours straight lips, under the pinpoint larches. Green. Gloop.
‘At Te Tautea o Hinekakai coloured spray spreadeagles, unbound. Steadied by rocks below, it solidifies water and depth. A nearby robin and wren hustle their unique songs, one up one down. Like the moist spray, they relinquish preference of solidity. Sound escapes the body in which it was imprisoned. This is the story the falling water tells. It’s as if the world tumbles into a mirror and doesn’t know what it sees. At Kinloch, a third of willow leaves, another and yet another, a stack of three in a single tree, configure a kind of rotation, whereby two of the three daughters of the town’s founders perish in Whakatipu icy depths, in memoriam. Memory recovers and again sheds. Meanwhile, on the Greenstone Station loop, Karen and I walk at steady pace, admiring everything that is seen: red beech, totara, lancewood – mirrored in our eyes – populating the leafy track as far as Lake Rere, where a century back lovers sojourn, as do we now. All is easily lost. As I say, the direction of water is hard to distinguish. A grassy bank, some dandelion flowers, some thorn bushes, a hovering dragonfly, now another – a small yellow-banded frog that impresses upon the silt as it hops towards us, miring us in admiration, as if we are the mirror (to its world). On our descent to Elfin Bay, a pause at the jetty’s edge, and I then plunge into the same Whakatipu. A mirror reversal. I am not a waterfall or a bird or a tree or a frog or deceased. A third of the leaves on the willow tree are turned yellow, another third half-yellow, those remaining continue green. How can anyone provide something that’s falling like these leaves? Is yellow syncretic? What does ‘to see oneself’ imply? What of pursuit? In a thousand-worded description I recount (I count) only eyes, seeing and seeing and seeing. Whether walking the path at Rere or the lake fringe at Te Anau, enumerating labels that name the images of planets they depict (alongside the lake!), or back home rounding the concrete pathway at the Hatea River, my eyes carry an intention to reopen, more or less satisfied with seeing. Things are strange and the world is real.’
Belly stir. Occur. Adynaton. Four.
F o u r f u l l s t o p p e r i o d .
There is the scent of gum trees at Piopiotahi. In the rain, I observe drips migrate down the windscreen. Blake, who has an eye for such detail, falters at what he sees.[1] Reason languishes at the bottom of Jacob’s Ladder and inside the ruts of Elijah’s chariot: messages are heaven-sent in godlike emanation. Hence, at Piopiotahi, we ponder recurrence, like ‘perky’ words. One thing I see in the blue sky is the yellow moon, a blue infusion Everything is blue. Everything is yellow. Previously, at Curio Bay, among a gathering of oystercatchers & plovers, we count petrified timber and brown dock plants along the yellow-eyed penguin pathway. Is yellow syncretic? Are lips always this colour? Are you me I you we? Are we two, a pair of eyes, or a robin and a wren, conjoint songsters? Like mirrors? Like languishing in Elijah’s wheel ruts? Curiously parallel? Or just curious? [2] My face spills on the water it gazes into and I reminisce about Eden Street in Oamaru and the child Janet Frame. We occupy her bed, literally. Lynley enumerates décors loss and retrieval, her librarian lot. ‘Linen’ surfaces with the original linoleum stowed beneath the living room carpet of the family living room. Lives not for renovation.§ The tree grows in the water and behind it shows a single red light glowering above nothing, a blank sky and a tree or a bird bereft of sky and flight, lost among the elements. No blue, no yellow. Even the tree wants out. It begins and ends as grit between my fingers, my language. From nothing to nothing, grit under grit, fingertip to fingertip. Jim Baxter’s house on the rise at 30 Beacon turns the town around this way, where the beach at Brighton washes kelp in crumpling watery waves. The blundering. Another, in Lan Yuan garden, where the maple lets slip a leaf onto the pool surface, ending a faltering dance. To hell or to heaven, down or up, place to place, in place, unmoved or in-between: leaves are shaken, left intact, passed, past and future present.[3] Not so our wishing for what’s happening.
Given the reproach of the gathered cows in Putāruru. What’s drawn them together? A stemming from harm? Or matching blue & yellow leaves that fall dancing from a height?§ At milking, Lynley’s father tunes concert radio in the cowshed. The tuning? The shadow of the fluttering furin ribbon repeats itself in silence on the back of the chair.[4] I say shadow but it due to the light (I see), in different measure. This morning I observe ‘moon’, its orange flask, flat and bright, and the intermittent flickering lights either side of the pedestrian crossing, no walker’s witness.
Ferlinghetti dead at 101—
at 701, six hundred further paces
along lakeside Te Anau,
koromikos cascade their ebullience—
Mike Oldfield in performance, Montreux 1981:
an hour glass.
MAGICMIND18
Thinkpastpresentfuture. Thinkthinky.
Papanca, says Buddha, enervates. Whence am I? may be asked. Wheredarknessstarssun&moondon’tshineearthwaterfireairstarssun moondarknessformed&formless—all—all—
kerpouf!
Spinpotterswheel. Still, consciousness can’t abandon thought. ‘Sheregardsthatwhichisnotthereasemptyofit, what remains, she comprehends: thisisbecauseitisuntilthattoogoes’ (paramânuttarâ suññatâvakkanti). ‘Whatevermaterialformpastceasesundergoes change “has been”is its designation’ (see earlier, Avipallatthâ).
Go—go! ‘Purity’snot downto viewslearning holyvows asceticpractices, Mâgandiya, northeirabsence, myboy’. Body—rupa—exists when— nama—feelingperceptionintentioncontactattention—freakout—ask any newborn!
tangle-within tangle-without
Nama, folks, is a red piece of cloth, rupa’s a yellow one, consciousness’s their linkingthread, craving’stheirseamstress… ‘A Tathāgata does not conceive a visible thing without sight or something-unseen-or-something-worth-seeing-or-a-seer’.
NewMagician, hesaid. ‘And when, Bāhiya, youwillnotbeinit, then, Bāhiya, youwillnotbehereorthereorbetween’. In a word: where snānābhāvo, vinābhāvo, and a¤¤athābhāvo are de rigueur, nothingsurvives4long.
Let’sbeclear. Seenthrough, meshmesh, tigergauze—neitherattentivenornotconsciousnornothorizonednornot. Nornottoo.
Blake.
Albert Ayler (AA) swings like this.
An image, reflected in a mirror, you consider: ‘I am’, ‘me-I-am’. Hokum.
Asks Magritte.
‘Could there be, for a nun, such concentration where she will not be consciousofearth (na pañhavismi§ pañhavisa¤¤ã’) norwaternorfirenor airnorinfinityofspacenorinfinityofconsciousnessnornothingnessnor neitherperceptionnornonperceptionnorthisnoraworldbeyond&remain conscious?’
Beware: Tygergerburningbright…
‘Thatsphereshouldbeknownwhereintheeyeceasesandseeingfadestheearceasesandsoundfadesthenoseceasesandsmellfadesthetongueceasesandtastesfadethebodyceasesandtouchfadesthemindceasesandideas…
kerpouf!’
Relinquishmenttoofades.[5]
Epithets are phenomenological not metaphysical. Where there’s no ‘putting together no falling-apart’. Hence Nibbāna’s apalokita (non-disintegrant).
realized [this] for himself,
[then then] form & formless,
from bliss & pain, [he is] freed.
[Thanissaro]
RIVERSPELL19[6]
In 1985 ‘Bob Dylan Goes Deep’, 20|20. All I notice is his hair, lush, move the same way as the green foliage behind him wobbles in the unsettled air. The camera pulls back, washing colours, and the pair of men reclines on a park bench, framed by a rock wall and what looks like a satellite dish. In the background a great dane slops down on all fours. The young interviewer is prescient in their questions. Bob, occasionally nonplussed, perhaps at his own instigation, is perfectly sincere. I like him. When asked about musical ‘phrasing’, he responds, mentioning the Beats (Corso, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti), jazz trumpeter Ted Jones. Bob mixes ‘both styles’ in an entirely singular language. Singing’s one thing, he says, but whether it comes off on paper is another: ‘I live in another world | where life and death are memorised | where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls’ (‘Dark Eyes’).
Whangārei’s unconsolable helicopter circles broadly overhead, landing or sometimes not landing, like a scroll, as is its wont. It barely touches the air or the ground or the ground or the air. Something like delinquent busy bee, buzzing a dashed line:
I look at what I’ve written in Michele’s as far as I can see. Only ‘I’ is capitalised, and I recognise little of what I’ve once written. A strange misbegotten supposes that the thing seen with a pair of eyes has at least two versions, merged into one seeing.[7] I look at a cat and I see a sphinx. Why should I care? Why should anyone care?
Lipsync. Each intake of breath is climactic, each Phar Lap: what the lips u-t-t-e-r is more than a matter of threading letters. No reductio no absurdum. In that sense, a word is more than Puffing Breath or Stroking a Hole, marooned phrases. Given the Right Circumstance, one’s mouth fills & empties, again and again. Stopping at Halfway Down risks floundering or a fellow swimmer’s water-rage. Moreover, a word in a sentence, or a mouthful of air or water, measures the medium one’s body’s found in. The aim is to Stay the Course. The body flips [sic] at the end [sic], equivalent to a colon [sic] if continuing, a period [sic] if terminal [sic]. One can’t say man and movement are merged. Is continuity a thread that runs through Successive Instances? Two outsides joined inside, Stitch Together? How else separate before’n’after—that is, Things Already Gone plus a Vague Beyond, a strange carve-out in the middle? Or, why’s continuity only Determined In Retrospect, after Something Bad (or good’s) happened? And why do words in sequence form a complete sentence? A thread, punctuated? O I’m Dizzy Bee.
RIVERSPELL20
My one lane to the sea where sensations are palpable.
As it did once before, Jaggers Road leads to a path that leads to a path that leads to the sea. On whose sand porch a pair of oystercatchers calls to each other & retreats to a small rock half-buried in the sand, becoming two with the stone, as Karen and I approach. One hides behind it while its mate stations in front, a sentry. Soon they are together again and there is no rock. The rock has disappeared.
Low in the sky the dark shape of a bird passes from left to right, drawing in its wake the curtained sky, an enormous blueprint. Directly above the bird, at the mid-point in its trajectory, hangs the open mouth of the moon, and nearby a ‘morsel’—the thing that tethers a calf to its mother in Bodh Gaya, and Venus to the moon high above Whangārei.
How does a New Zealander favour quiet contemplation? I think I’m responsible for the world that’s about to happen. And you want to trust my word on this? We dwell in perplexity, admits Huang Po. Reality is barely assimilable. Unlike the melamine or the zopiclone that Rob imbibes in order to improve the settledness of his sleep at night. The question is not to have a master or to not have a master. The question is to have a good master: Alain Badiou.
A pair of tūīs whizzes
one oak tree
to another.
I can’t tell the pursuer
and pursued.
At their throats
dangle a question
flight can’t resolve.
Regaled end2end.
A ball of spittle at its throat,
tūī catapults earthward from
its flame tree rampart.
Their partner, sequestered,
renegotiates what separates them.
They settle the meaning of words.
Escaping tūīs, I pass Annette, who, for the first time, discloses true pleasure in the occupancy of her body. ‘Own’ isn’t something that belongs to you. It’s a thought that gathers in places like Descartes’ palms, spirit housed in flesh. Like a black & white tūī on a black and white or brown branch, near ruddy flowers, burbling questions that flout sensible answers. Nothing much to say about that, huh?
‘For example, the thirteenth-century Japanese monk Dōgen is studying in China. An old cook from a Zen monastery says “To study words you must know their origin. To sit you must know the origin of practice”. Dōgen responds, “What is the origin of practice?” Cook says, “One—two—three—four”. Dōgen asks, “Why use words?” Cook said, “Words multiply, numbers cool”’.
notes
[1] ‘I will not reason and compare: my business is to create’ (Blake, Jerusalem).
[2] Kintsugi decor?
[3] Kintsugi encore?
[4] See Riverspell[]18.
[5] Where water, earth, / fire, & wind have no footing: / There the stars don't shine, / the sun isn't visible. / There the moon doesn't appear. / There darkness is not found. / And when a sage, a brahman through sagacity, / has
[6] A qubit represents a zero, a one, or both values simultaneously (Nasa).
[7] Since both origination and its absence are disproved, verbal statements are impossible: Santaraksita.
[8] ‘Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve [individuals] and tell to each one word. Then stand the [individuals] in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of [their] word as intently as [they] will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence’ (William James).
[9] ‘Soon the solemn mood / Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame / A permeating fire: wild numbers then / She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous / Sobs, subdued by its own pathos’ (Shelley, ‘Alastor’).
[10] In amplituhedron theory, locality and unitarity arise as a direct consequence of positivity. They are encoded in the positive geometry of the amplituhedron, via the
[11] ‘Social media analysts talk about the half-life of content on a platform, meaning the time it takes for a piece of content to reach 50% of its total lifetime engagement, usually measured in number of views or popularity-based metrics. The average half-life of a tweet is about 20 minutes, compared to five hours for Facebook posts, 20 hours for Instagram posts, 24 hours for LinkedIn posts and 20 days for YouTube videos. The much shorter half-life illustrates the central role Twitter has come to occupy in driving real-time conversations as events unfold.