PASSAGE11
Words have little to do with things
I know or don’t know. Is there
a more or less true, a more or less anything?
Why count tears when they have separated from
the eyes in which they have formed?
Why count tears at all?
The blackbird asks, ‘what is air? wherefore aviation, John?’ I say: 'The taillight of the helicopter surpasses the aura of the moon'. Yet the bird persists in thinking it has something to do with the moon’s vivid rotundity.
As if two objects operate together as one.
Beating beyond the highest leaf, a yellow thrush bares its breast to the rising sun, fulsome in the singing of praise: imbibed knowledge is in turn imbibed by knowledge. A yellow blue circle.
The sea is struck with being the sea. All-over an abundance.
And so I make this my chosen locale. We saunter over fine sand from Riotahe towards Okupe beach, encountering sharp rocks that rip apart the incoming swells, as if present participles requires fresh virtue that has been lost.
Up close, things are decidedly horizontal, more horizon.
Water pushes across smoothed sand, smoothing it further. Small round pebbles tumble back and forth onto their backs and over and over again onto their tummies. Emissaries from another world.
Emissaries is a play on tummies.
Out of which a pair of oystercatchers enters, a pair of prodders, scuttling before each incoming wave and after each outgoing wave. Then in a beak is brandished a diminutive shellfish. Eat to live, it murmers.
Et in Arcadia ego, says the hand of Guercino.
‘The definition of what was jazz and what was not began to blur’. When I glance, my eye settles upon a lake upon which ducks randomly float, splash and sing. Tell me your place in the sun, please. An angel at my table occurs here in private, where I exist. ‘A black man who lives like a white man’, says 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? No 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, let's say two, because
somehow I cannot say one and
the same. That's me, that's you.
Pronouns, dromedarian.
What on earth was that?
Or: The point about fractals is that they indicates symmetrical possibilities ad infinitum. Time proposes a baseline, only to disappear, like the tūī repeatedly swooping, seemingly without purpose.
ii
Blackbird you wildly turn over
tuft after tuft on the fresh mown
lawn. Do you consider
we seek the same treasure ?
Unsettled, rumbling like Vesuvius within my sequestered metre of cell, I feel for my fellow meditators, installed in their own silences. How clear it seems they listen rapt to the sounds of the tūī, preferring its vaunting to beatification of any other kind.
I cannot even well write a sentence. What do you mean put more of myself into it? Into what? See.
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 they see?
iii
Waiting outside the 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 ants, for Bob 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 or theirs,
unnamed, I read
again and again with pleasure.
Nudging the pines
at the boundary, a new moon
self wraps 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 upside down on a bare 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 to spin it.
‘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 garden catalogue. Neither of these is called home.
.
.
The blackbird stops, looks abruptly up at me, and smiles. Who does it think sees and who seen? Whose eyes see straight, whose are 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
an open 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 continuous or continual? Has he taken answers or even relevant questions with him, I wonder, or am I the residual asked? Or is it something different—something not given up? Is raiment even a word in such circumstances?
vi
Yet my body is not something I
consider mine. Nor am I back where I began:
arriving nor leaving, nor is leaving
arriving. Two haves have-nots.
Bactrian
dromedary
two haves
halve not?
‘Next’ is a strange word. ‘Akin’ is another. Too bumps to one? Take tūī and huia. How distinguish them from what distinguishes them, an extra vowel syllable? Mind you, a language that includes a word like ‘abasement’ can’t be all good or all bad, irrespective of the ethical gaps we might tumble into. Is word the umbilical epitome? The entire house is kept in flow, with windows through which the breeze nonchalantly enters and leaves, a visitor indifferent to the exact position in a sentence. Arriving can’tleave, leaving never arrives.
PASSAGE13
Fair air to say the dandelions open their parachutes on the grass area along The Bluff. Two kererū clasp hands as they pass by the deck where I am on watch. Already pōhutukawa filaments pile in the culvert near Jay's Destination Dairy, disporting delectatious expectation for the moment.
The couple on top of Dundonald leave their sprinkler running. Through the hose runs time and its remembrance. The past compresses in the hose, and the blackbirds hover on the outside, relishing the prospect of their own abandonment outside of the moving time it harbours.
The woman paddling in the dinghy radiates circles that are unrecoverable. Combating the same force, the kingfisher arcs back to the rock it had quitted a moment earlier, sketching an unseen O. This receding tide is designated 'low', although that word has other connotations, such as depression or a sound level. Several trees around the river are festooned with doilies and colourful hangings, fairest woolen return on an influx of summer pōhutukawas, buffering sheer redness. A dog tugs at the leash, determined to chase passing kayakers. It is restrained by its master, who has little sense of the movement of time. Who mentions 'a play of strings', musical or otherwise? Beethoven’s Große Fuge complicates the whimsy of temporal thought.
The daisies Karen places in the fine Japanese vase on our windowsill are also seen folding over the path below Annette’s residence. Still-red blackberries and orange montbretia are adornments on the sloping bank. I see a blackbird sitting on a stranger’s letterbox, and earlier, elsewhere, I watched a threesome of ducks, bottom-up and drifting in an ebbing tide. I started with that thought. Where are we now, I wonder? How characterise good according to the dynamic of water and air, or the behaviour of birds? The group of ducks— collective—has little option but to contemplate the vaguaries of this measured world. How does this man know shit? Neglect him at your peril.
Meanwhile, small wavelets radiate from the catamaran motoring towards Te Matau a Pohe where they strike against a stump in the water and immediately shift in frequency and direction, surprising the birds waiting at the water’s edge—surprising us all!
Twice the kingfisher shapes O, two rounds, silent until it lands and reiterates kwehkweh. I am the same 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.
PASSAGE14
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 beyond things. Knowing some musical notation? Beethoven’s Große Fuge? And then faces are brought before me, and I see through them, like sheared bones, tear-filled draperies, causeless benefaction.
As the stem wobbles
beneath the pink flower—I notice the wind,
not the flower, which hardly
moves.
Who needs
flags raised up on Everest?
Like unfurled thougths
—fcuk!
Nor does normal. On the canvas awning alongside the green house poplar leaves gather and breathe. Annette, deploying snips, hand brush & broom, urges brethren leaves from the concrete path onto the narrow earth strip, where they also gather and breathe. She and I confer, without least clear sense of what time might determine, not excluding the suddenness of rain showers or the seasonality of this leaf-fall—on this round somewhat premature, we conjecture.
At Pataua North, where I courageously battle lumbering surf, I am watched over by Karen. An orange cone has lodged near the apex of the Norfolk pine, an emboldened sentinel, celestial deliverance? Two things, alike in shape, unalike in girth and height: an orange cone and a cone-shaped tree. A man and a woman and a woman and a man and a cone and a tree.
Airborne, like John’s melody at Cupcake, where I tap my knee.
And saw birds flock at Okupe, far far away. up close, I observed a pair of toddlers on short legs, oystercatchers, pacing waves as they—and they—advance and retrace. Long beaks prodding at sand until one delivers a shellfish, diminutive, ne'er victim. But not before the two quickfoot it before the next wave as it spreads clothlike over the sand: a feast where no plates are required!
Oceans, oystercatchers, shellfish, shoreline trees are nature's continuum, emanating from the sea and earth and John’s fingers, or the rendition of Beethoven’s Große Fuge, mentioned above?
Bottoms up.
Adherence is a faltering of shells that litter the sea's outer rim where my thoughts are sewn into the fabric. Slip knot.
By the time I reach Brighton Pier, shore lights are extinguished: in neat lettering, someone has written on the sand, all caps: 'SEEK RESPECT NOT ATTENTION'. I no longer see them, something lost between the tide and the writer. The cloth darkens. The moontide has provenance. The beach barked at scattering birds that wanted to return to the sand and be with each other.
Everything is lost in earth's domain.
Ears register
the clinking sound of the ceramic furin,
hovering
under the house eave.
The faltering red tassel
makes no sound,
resembling the tassel itself.
Is there a hole in the ground?
Is the letter turned upward?
Is the worm turned?
We breathe in similar fashion.
PASSAGE15
I tell Annette, who dutifully attends the Zen steps alongside the hedged path I frequent on my walks, ‘Here I never get my feet damp; they stay clean & dry’. She glances at me, perplexed.
§
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 duck and dive in their aerial domain, scantily furnished, a playful life. Let crooked things surpass what’s straight, they say. Delicate tracker tīrairaka.
§
A leaf is not a bird, though tīrairaka is. A blackbird counts on a rock as key support, a blinking yellow-eyed singing rock on a rock! Nothing is required above its head! Or beneath a silent rock, why not?
§
Akin to a fist and a bunch of fingers or an itinerant tīrairaka, the oak brandishes what it deeply cherishes—its fresh budding leaves. The blackbird, who occupies the middle of the freshly mown grass lawn in front of the Aquatic Centre, marvels at me when I pass. Which of us is the more auspicious, he wonders? Tīrairaka is intent on making something of its itinerancy. Things fall apart, and one sees fragments as far ahead as one is able. I smile and say nothing. Light absorbs light. One absorbs the other. Things run to needlepoint, where they disappear, saith delicate tīrairaka.
§
Now is hardly the best time for white plum blossoms to stick firmly onto the leaves of the agapanthus, ornamenting them. Curious sheaths of blue and yellow mantle Parihaka hilltop at first light, kin to delicate tīrairaka. One moon? one starry planet? Together they are heavenly spheres that this September guide locals and visitors to Parihaka, our new and sweet Bethlehem.
It’s a strange courage you give me, ancient star.
The helicopter unloads the ‘monsoon’ bucket onto the path they’re repairing after the recent dry and rains. What explodes? Is it the flame tree itself or the tūī that floods the tree in song? Comfort and discomfort arrive separated by millimetres. From now til then the moon inches higher in the sky. Consider it the holding aloft of a great weight and gross rotundity, a monsoon bucket.
PASSAGE16
Mon
I arrive at my room at the meditation centre. Same room, 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 a body hunch, everything akimbo. How does 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 worded corpse, what have I lost or it or they gained? How are words part of the answer?
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 richly 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. Kim Pieters awash.
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 this and that. Anything else is poetry, too.
A poem is empty of everything it is not. It is empty as an outside thing. Inside it are words organised and disorganised. It is a whole; it is parts thereof; it is parts; it is without parts. Le blanc souci de notre toile. The poem focuses attention on what is manifested or ignored, thrilling my mind, thrilling the mind of others.
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 reckons.
‘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 h a n d s a r e p l a y i n g o v e r h e r e?
A mechanism brings such and such about? To put a word before or after another word changes everything. Neither’s even the same. Like—if there were more words than meanings and—if so—what? One needn’t crack a word to get at its inside. Meaning’s not hidden inside or making a quick getaway. ‘I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be’, saith Batman.
Thur
To rely on numbers—or script—lunacy, surely? Or— breaks? How clarify? As—hardly—blue.
Fri
A dog barks. That’s it. Fetch.
PASSAGE17
i.m. rob burbea: a holy disinterest
Eyes ingest frog. Frogs forage, slickered tongues. It leaps from here to there. We think. Thought occupies us. We belong. We tip right over. And out.
Boundaries are purposed for war. Things hypothecate. Then they recur; disputation ensues. I love raw, said the backward warker.
Fcuk you. I love you.
No, my past lies before me and I’ve already fabricated 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 of sand in Tante Bep’s inverted egg timer glass, a barbell. Who said Victor Hugo? ‘It can’t be only one and it can’t be many?’ ‘Hey, Jude’ is disposable. Spilled juice. Swell from inside like an 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—one universal voodoo. It’s a relationship we have been blessed with. Like the Collatz conjecture: every positive integer, with rules properly applied, ends up in a four-two-one loop. Choose an integer: if it’s odd, multiply it by three and add one; if even, divide it by two. Hey presto!
PASSAGESOUTH18
Poems may be entertaining thoughts in rotation (aka Koch), like a river; or transform or extend personal life, like personism’s ‘I’ (aka O’Hara); or like a tempest, rare, saith fellow New Yorker, they are entwirlers of words, Ashbery.
At Naseby Pond, a pair of paradise ducks on landing slides on the water, disturbing the image they watched on approach. A small oracular lake:
Lip. Flat.
Curve. Lid.
Lid. Curve.
Flat. Lip.
Saith monsieur duck.
Originally a mirror entered into by a princess and her daemon lover, forsooth—now a smear of lipstick is used to freshly contour straight lips, under the pinpoint larches. Greenery. Snoop.
‘At Te Tautea o Hinekakai colour tipped spray spreadeagled, like a bird. Steadying below, it solidifies into depth held by rock. A nearby robin and wren hustle their distinctive songs, one up scale one down. Like the moist spray, they relinquish all measure. Sound departs bodies that had held it.
This is the story of falling water. The world rushes past the mirror and doesn’t realise what it sees.
At Kinloch, a third of the willow leaves, another and another, are stacked one on top of the other and the other, in a triangulation of tones. Two of the three daughters of the town founders perish in Whakatipu's icy depths, in memoriam. Memory recovers and shreds anew. Colour is colour. Tree is tree.
Meanwhile, on the Greenstone Station loop, Karen and I walk at steady pace, admiring everything that is named: red beech, totara, lancewood — mirrors in our eyes — populating the leafy track as far as Lake Rere, where a century back lovers sojourned together, as do we. As I say, the direction of movement 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 itself upon the silt as it hops towards us, enthralling the two of us, as if we are mirrors to its world.
On the descent to Elfin Bay, at the jetty, I plunge into Whakatipu, into the mirror. I am not a waterfall nor a bird nor a tree nor a frog nor a wren. Yet a third of the leaves on the willow tree are yellow, another third half-yellow, the remaining third green. How can anyone provide something that’s causing these leaves to fall? Is yellow the best syncretic? What does it mean ‘to see oneself’? What of pursuit?
In a thousand-worded description account seeing and hearing and seeing and hearing. Whether walking along the path at Rere or at the lake fringe at Te Anau, where labels name the images of planets they depict (alongside the lake!), or back at home rounding the concrete pathway at the Hatea River, my eyes carry an intention to reopen, more or less satisfied with seeing. Things are things 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 s .
There is the scent of gum trees at Piopiotahi. In the rain, I observe droplets 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. At Piopiotahi, one thing I see in the blue sky is the yellow moon. At Curio Bay, alongside oystercatchers & plovers, we see petrified timber and brown dock plants, alongside the yellow-eyed penguin pathway. Are lips always this colour? Are you and I me? Are we two, a pair of eyes, or a robin and a wren, songsters? Like mirrors? Like wheels in Elijah’s ruts? Always in parallel? Or just curious? [2] My face spills on the water and I reminisce about Eden Street in Oamaru and the life of Janet Frame. Tonight, we occupy her bed. Lynley enumerates the loss and retrieval of the décor. ‘Linen’ surfaces with the original linoleum stowed beneath the living room carpet of the family living room. 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. 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 gathered cows in Putāruru. 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’s the light (I see), in another measure. This morning I observe the single ‘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 an utter ebullience—
Mike Oldfield in performance, Montreux 1981.
An hour glass once turned.
MAGICMIND19
Thinkpastpresentfuture. Thinkthinky.
Papanca, says the Buddha, enervates. Whence am I? may be asked. Wheredarknessstarssun&moondon’tshineearthwaterfireairstarssun moondarknessformed&formless—all—all—
kerpouf!
Spinpotterswheel. Still, consciousness can’t drop 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.
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]
PASSAGE20[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.
PASSAGEPOSTSCRIPT
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.