PASSAGE21^[1]

The present is translucent. And the future lurks, deposited in its past. I am Robert Audi from Notre Dame and I will lift my hand, like wind at the door. The force that affects the behaviour of a particle is hardly incidental.

We are out of step. John fills his gumboots with his feet, left as well as right. One neatly arcs after the other in regular sequence, my floating diptychs. In Whangārei, rain spills from the sky in accordance with the distribution of retail outlets about town: that’s because what’s known isn’t always clear beforehand^[2]

—for example, a puddle forms as a displacement of air by water, muddying clarity: rubber boots are another means of displacement —knowing, as we do, that not many’d wish to be seen dead (or alive!) in them. Life and death displace one another in endless repetition. That’s because what’s known isn’t always clear beforehand or afterward: poems feature as an ongoing displacement.

The feeling you have is part of it, though nothing coheres. Don Hoffman: the thing about spacetime is it’s only an interface, a facemask;^[3] nothing intrinsic to report. Don says dig deeper.

A poem cannot be
 a place to dwell.
 Moving like an object under water,
 it wavers. To the extent
that it is bound to particulars,
 it displaces them. Aspiring to be a multi-winged
 machine, like a bird or a fish,
it is an encumbrance.[4]

[5]eht ‘I’ ycallaf

PASSAGE22 _etodcena

To what extent do words represent what they are not? Flounders at sea.

End of ‘I’ as a creature of heavenly veracity. Frank O’Hara saw to that.

She said please listen
out for the sound of flax leaves
 waxing together at
the Shakespear summit. On
the way up, we notice
display plates
at the base of individual trees,
 for example marble leaf. To be sure,
at the summit, the sound
of flax leaves is heard,
takeoff instalation.

The conquerors of the world are its victims, Pessoa teaches. The victims are their own bypass.

One towai stands upright like a wooden pole. Another does the same except for a small thicket of notched leaves adorning an upper branch. Beneath & between them I have transplanted a few-inches high sapling of the same genus, & around it coiled the perforated

hose from which water drips to form a damp circle. A poem is not a tree, yet it rises, squeezed by hands into a slender display. Nothing stays put, while we pursue our meaning. What we observe from the Airbnb porch in Raglan is the scribbling koinobori shadow across the bough of the rewarewa.^[6] A marginal script? Where does meaning lodge? Whatever’s vouchsafed? It’s only a brief stroll for us to Whale Bay— renowned for its aberrant surf break—or to anyplace else.

PASSAGE23

best axis: blue arc[7]

Any description of the world is compromised. You know, it cannot have been yesterday what it is today (von Sturmer’s binomial staircase says this). Fortunately, in poetry, one hopes it’s for keeps. Poetry constitutes a rare treasure: something more than words amounts to:

are there brush strokes remaining on the concrete pathway? Our friend Annette is nowhere to be seen. Are there brushstrokes, Annette, returning in the count of time?

I fail to persuade anyone of anything much, she remarks. Before time departs, she enters the account as a debit mark. She and her thoughts’ inspissation, like chaff that smears the beak of a young sparrow:

the mirror I perform before is not what I observe. A place of harbours, like a sea spreading over an endless expanse of floating blue: maternal blue, blue arc, etc.

Oops. Nothing much to be said about it.

‘What is it?’ Nothing much, she said.

Nothing can remain (a component of) something for long. It requires distinction. Like a sentence that continues at length, unsure where to stop. Place isn’t time & we mustn’t dither. This she wishes herself to express, four paragraphs into something that would take much longer, catching like chaff in the young sparrow’s beak. Half in half out.

We live in a spindle.
The reel drops vertically.
We live thus.
 The reel drops vertically, a whorl.
One fumbles interminably,
inside a hole already made.

PASSAGE24

Here I am. Held together by (d)instances (Anne Carson).

My heart belongs to the cello; 
my head belongs to the piano; Albert Ayer is
 a true saxophonist
from his neck down to his toes,
bebop        bebop.                                                     

There is something about me which I retain.                Hold right there.

as in: 'Art i[N] a mode of survival' (Sawaka Nakasene). Free verse or catachresis. Two (to too) BIG Words.[9]

Ramparts mount,

less a matter of what burdens a man than where one’s actual interests lie. One glances behind in order to move on. Sighing, she descends the staircase that at other times she ascends and wonders why she is burdened with something unresolved (von Sturmer’s binomialism suggests the same).

Poetry grasps at the
 moon.
And moves, down the hallway
up the stairs,
in von Sturmer’s passage.
It is true:
 poets recognise
the benefit of long maturities.

A moon’s look.
A broken box.
A central alliance.

Caroline Bergvall  (Tony said).

Consider yourself a tether.
           Liberated -
Or just
           a tether?[10]

PASSAGE25

Meaningfulness (for those like me)—
would dying distinguish me? Or does time
 distinguish me from
those already dead?

      What prevents me from seeing those whose lives are yet to come? What prevents my adverting to them? My mother and father paid scant attention to such casuistry: they are no more, predeceasing me and all those still living or yet to live. What is their number when the train comes in?

Outside the south wall of Julian of Norwich's cell
the silver birch leaves are released from their branches
 and spill across the ground. The yellow of their tears
 extends across the green of the grass. A fresh apple
 lifted to grandson Franklin’s lips describes a golden orb. His mouth
 opens and a bright apparition fills the world of one
& all.[11]

Is it wisdom
 you want? These rocks are
 riddled with holes.
 I am reminded one’s thought
 is another's subjugation. Or whether
 the rock with a hole in it
 obeys thought. Or washes or
 weeps through.[12]

I thought a sentence was something to accomplish, like Rob’s swimming fifty lengths of the pool, completed on time, or me a lesser forty, equally done on time. Mathematics is part of it, like a pool brimming with water from end to end, side to side, measuring a square and a square of depth and breadth, holding a volume. One turns over one’s head at the far wall, adding to the count. Meanwhile, a finger dipped into a glass is inundated. I had considered it a ballcock, rather than an accessory. Rancière develops this idea in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, stating ‘there is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another’. Something bobbing is not intended to support the architecture it is given to carry. How does tangata te tiriti enhance contemplation? I think I am responsible for the world that’s about to end. And you want to place your trust in me? We dwell in perplexity, says Huang Po. Unlike melamine or zopiclone, which Rob imbibes in order to improve the soundness of his sleep at night. The question is not to have a master or not to have a master. The question is to have a good master: Alain Badiou.^[13]

PASSAGE26 🔵

Arthur wakes up...

he enters a circle of dreams. More specifically, he enters a sea
of circles:[14]

All of you. 
Are soon gone
pause                                      



Life’s deepest urge
 is to be free of form.
 And what is form but an inclination
to give definition
 to an urge that
 asks shape?

Form is beauty.    Beauty is urge.

Sure, a word (a poem) is ascribed a meaning, two, a phalanx, a row of shoes with their laces neatly tied together. I’m drawn to reciprocity, notwithstanding the laceless slippers neatly aligned in pairs in the genkan.

. breath‘s
🔵
rotation .

Rather like pools in the neighbourhood, poetry rises to the surface like a bubble, where it pops, taking the pool with it. I am afraid of the taihia the poolside attendant vigorously twirls. The shadow of both merges and sinks to the bottom of the pool, where my fear settles as well.

I watch myself
 in the sky. So
many impediments,
 so much obfuscation.
 So much joy!

Your sentence patterns in my ear sounds that elicit delectation 🔵.

Poetic inspiration
 is a rocket
 passing through a sky
 it momentarily
 possesses.

Existence is vibrant. Michael Levin renders it a bowtie between
 ‘salience and fidelity’.

PASSAGE27

I, as apparatus, a simulacrum, a function, a mode of existence, an image, a concept, a blood flow.

Should I be the person you characterise
 in this manner
 I am definitely out-of-doors,
 a woodsman in the woods
of words
(trim).

‘Thank you for the effort you’ve put in, although for now I won’t take you up on your offer. I do want an improved relationship but what’s put forward to this point amounts to no more than a charge sheet that finds me already 100% guilty on all counts’, said Hubert.

Play is reality in reverse.
 A thing
 misplaced. The word
defines (a world at play)
 that is defined.[xvii] Two words
 make everything possible.
 Nor do two words
 justify much.
What Nabokov affects to know
succumbs
to pleasure.

‘Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres’, says Carla Harrington, Vice. ‘We no longer have to lull ourselves expecting the advent of some one artist who will satisfy all our aesthetic needs’ says John Cage, A Year from Monday. When something is formed. Tender God. Not the form from which it arose. (When something is formed) no form forms it. Occupying a certain position one sees certain things extremely well. What is (or makes) legitimacy poignant? Hubert says he gets this 💯.

What matters?
What for?
A thought (art) is not
explanation
in kind.

Loss of shape is loss of meaning. Snowdrops ‘ribbed with green’, says Dorothy to her brother (DW, Alfoxden, 1798).

I am their
their here.
A snowdrop tilts.

I sleep in a tilted sky.[xviii]


The sound of acorns falling is
 numeric sequence, unlike
snowdrops near the house
at St Isaacs, which droop. Many
 things happen simultaneously
 in order to reach an end. Before
 the OED contrives our prison-house.
.

PASSAGE28

‘William Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice was published in the spring of 1793 shortly after guillotining the French king and England’s declaration of war. It provides a philosophical basis for pro-revolutionary sentiment, in Wordsworth’s paraphrase: “abstract the hopes of man / Out of his feelings”’.[xix] Such comes praise. Such comes happiness lacking contentment. The verbs bellow at the nouns. The poem provides little more than a way of being featured or ruled out. ‘Poems don’t purify anyone’, admonishes Anne Carson in Wrong Norma: ‘I would read anything she wrote’, adds Susan Sontag [Vintage Publishing. Kindle Edition. Anne Carson, ‘Conversation, 26 October 2016’].[xx] One feels compelled in a composition, blue lake🔵. Two words say yesno. Two words render everything yes or no. Such Nabokov purports to show in Ada, assuming the novel shows anything at all. Language has its ups and downs.

What did I say
before
about mattering 
matters?
Or was I
confused?

How long for time?
Who's what you do do you do too? That's.
All you do is compose yourself.
Like something else
marked as a whole thing.

Asked about the content of thought, she realises she is not a true measure to oblige. So here, at Rawene, the boats turn (their prows) to the tide, to the wind: harbourward in the morning, shoreward in the afternoon. Lips turn down. These two, those two, with little to judge between them. Ordination is a beautiful ritual I share insofar as I shortcut the bishop. A poem colonises and brightens many personal encounters. In my school days, we used to write sentences in radiant blue ink swallowed from thick glass bottles with screwtops onto pages in exercise books that held a great deal of interest in the way they were laid out. Cutting through the blue horizontal lines, perfectly parallel, I slip down the single red line dropping earthward like my father bricklayer’s plumb line or a blade on an acrobat’s ladder. Right to the bottom where one hurts. Language rose and fell here.

PASSAGE29

January and already the poplar leaves plaster the Zen steps that each day Annette attends. Occasionally, she disappears, while the hedges are shielded and appear again, and again leaves flatten themselves onto the concrete path without purpose. It all happens near Bill’s place, where rotund blue hydrangeas brighten among broad green leaves, like oversized bulbs. When I see them, I am reminded of Annette, who regularly attends the Zen steps and is nothing like either Bill, or the bulbs, or shielding hedges, or the flattened leaves, though it is she who sweeps the steps and removes the leaves. Angels sometimes flutter among them. Meantime, rosellas adorn a leafless dry wattle branch on which they perch, substituting colourful plumage for absent foliage, performing as leaves. Angel kimonos emulate lacquered leaves, assumimg transparence, and leave scant for others to reflect upon. Like knives out of their sheathes, slicing the desolate wattle in the norms of its existence with resiliance. I bear a tender angel beneath my open sleeve.

‘”The situation is really rather dreadful’, Popper complain[s] to Gombrich, who effectively has become his unpaid agent and secretary in Britain. ‘I feel that if one has written a book one ought not to be forced to go begging to have it printed and read’”.^[11] Like bulging cumulous clouds that appear & strike a peculiar tone, momentarily resplendent. You occupy yourself, plastering red & green plumage onto the leafless wattle, seeking a cure. I search in vain for something seemingly familiar. Like the awkwardness of that name Gombrich, which suffers internally as a perennial outsider. Annette’s tender witness. 

This morning the heard sparrows
 are no more 
than a fluttering of wings. Do
 I say wings? Or
 a ‘deposit of unimaginable
  wealth in the sky’?

Language, unable to provide me with a final solution, remains a bubble I blow until it pops. Like the fateful blue hydrangea I saw at Bill’s place. What punctures the colourful fabric is the reality that only the top 5% of people have most income and wealth. The bottom 50% of households own less than 1% of financial wealth and the bottom 90% will discover how much of their ‘wealth’ is phantom when the stock and housing bubbles burst. As per Markovian dynamics:

1. a finger clutches a ball
2. a round head
3. of blue hydrangea immerses in water
4. upon an air-balloon
5. navigating clear blue skies

Einstein, who doesn’t grasp black holes, doesn’t know this is a death knell (limit case) to his theory. You come to learn from the limits life imposes. Gödel knew mathematics ain’t enough. Wallace Stevens knows something disappears when you look past it, as does the blackbird’s branch—or the blackbird itself, into night; and Ashbery knows that everything reappears irrespective of origin when you look or speak broadly and accommodatingly enough. He glances fitfully across the lake to the other side. The lake is a quintessence of heaven and earth, ringed with the minions of Kawabata’s Gimpei, released in a reel of feathered blue angels. 🔵 I explain this much to Annette. I say to her, ‘I don’t know if being respectively father and daughter works for us’. She asks, ‘well, given Darwin’s evolutionary take, how else do we approach such an impasse, by nature or nurture?’ To which I reply, ‘let’s you be the I I wanted me to be and I be the daughter’. ‘Oh, at last’, mutters Professor Nima Arkani-Hamed: ‘minimise action and maximise choice’. ‘Cast them into radically different clothes, parade them’. ‘Spacetime & QM have to go, let’s not speculate; other ideas will be stars of the show’. ‘Protons arrive in messy bags’. ‘Gluons go in and come out somehow altered; two in four out’. Is that it? What is manifest appears only briefly before us. ‘We’re looking for a different question to which [] scattering processes are the answer’. Those who write meaningful sentences risk the welfare of everything else.^[8]

Meaningfulness will distinguish those like me. What precludes my adverting to them? Not to mention those whose lives are yet to come. What prevents my adverting to them? What does ‘to bear’ mean? My mother and father paid scant attention to such concerns, questions of time and number.^[9] They are no more, predeceasing me, you and others still living. 🔵. Whichever number we’re trying to track, a group comprising six rosellas spins giddily round drooping power lines, reducing the trees of green and yellow behind them to choreography. They provide a foreground to something that provides a background and together they emerge as something we determine a whole, a special screening. Like a lake, like Ryokan explaining that ‘in Zen tradition, numbers surpass reality’. I seldom wear shoes and sabine is a colour I relish. Beware the notch in the wood where your tongue sticks out, preventing you from saying too much, counting on anything much. It’s said the past depends on the present as the latter does on it and the future’s up for grabs. Another blue line. Yellow behind it. Likewise, the relationship between the two and their future is considered saliant, notched at the place in the wood where your tongue sticks out. The way Bill’s blue hydrangeas open into the air, occupying it and it them. 🔵. For me, when I am open, I am aware of a certain resistance, theirs and mine. The word ‘culprit’. That’s what free agents are about. It designates an entire language of insouciance wherever we go. Whether a queen or a ruffled flower, culprit baulks. Everyone has one or another that produces variance, literal as well as figurative. Keeping me responsive to rosellas. An array. Words like culprits assume worlds part. I wasn’t born yesterday.

A parable

Gödel insists scientific theory lacks completeness. Canter counts infinities. All debunk spacetime.^[10] Truth encounters despair, reason fails, and we begin to smile at our own images. Introduce qualia — and we’re off. There is no outcome until one occurs (Hoffman). I relish the inconsequence of wide words. ‘Hello’, they say: ‘lift me the cat from its cradle, and let me tumble through rings and bask in the sun of your dreams’. You are the shade of a Moor, murmurs Othello self-deprecatingly. And ‘I shall call the cat “Vasco”’, says John, ‘so others may know him as another, cousin to the Moor’. That’s what I’m saying. The past depends on present choices, just as the future does on its own. There are further directions given in this bi-directional arrow ß→ than you can count. Arkani-Hamed, again: ‘A singularity structure of the integrand for scattering amplitudes…’ . Michael Levin terms bioelectricity ‘the story’s the thing’. No wonder poetry wants to get its shit in order! (‘I struggle to find the machine that is not part of the pattern’, one Carl Friston.) How long does it take to learn something from a book, Othello for instance? Book? How long? If it’s a good one? Good. Experience is non-dual. It is dual. Keen both ways, said the poet: my intellectual life is pristine, my ethical one perhaps less so, some say. What does ‘hold a candle to it’ mean? Ask America. We reconnect with what we lost in war: the sea of law. The theory of sets is fabrication. I never sat at that table or shared that food, just. Ask George Michael, whose first two names come first, back and forth. RvS banks on ellipsis? Quick, warps in glass, take a peek. I sleep in the sky. Yes no squeezes into the same glass, spilling over. A thousand different yeses. Every word within metempsychosis. A master induction. The duck’s wake quickly diverges from its source, an arrow’s fart. The duck scores a bullseye. Woosh. Already your footsteps predate you, Niall Ferguson. Don’t follow their manifestation (or mine). Who is there to love? Unicity is not collective, rather an abandoned or empty grave. Lunacy together. Same same? I feel myself sometimes coming apart and it feels easier & kinder than the ways I’ve tried (& been told) to hold myself together. Agonizingly, there’s nothing of myself I care to preserve, really. Not like this. It’s like drinking from an empty glass. Or playing in the ruins of fantasies (of how you thought your life should be). I sing, strapped into a material world. Forms formed. From form. Flimflam. Neither one’s gone. What you are to thinking is probable. But for whom (the bell tolls)? More lines are given to language and its foibles than to anything else: because nothing is at the bottom (or back) of it. And the OED is our prison-house, presenting as a hospital. Nothing speaks to my ear or defines what I am, coming and going nowhere, one heads there. Ah, homecoming. There is a voice. A new Curnow? Paint the eyebrows any higher on the skull and they’d cross the roof (FK style). Crossing over, under the bar. Sound of acorns falling. Having nothing to lose. Poetry is language singing to another. Many things. No place to feel lost. Any fool can be right, CKS says. Poetry is not social behaviour, I say to Graham, in a moment of consternation. Imaginary critique like a squirrel. Nature is not content. Drop ‘r’ on death & you get dearth. Death is a paucity. The same ‘r’ sits in the middle of afterlife. As it exists. Phew!

The same ‘r’? The present derives from the past yet isn’t reducible. No, life is not a reason (to live). As said (& deleted), ‘Past is prologue’ (Rick Rule). My wish is to twist impertinence to a new context. Imaginary critique is the writing of writing. There is no political solution to being human. To observe is to conjecture. Difference is always permitted (in poetry). Poetry’s advantage is that it is not required to vote or to qualify for superannuation. You want objective means to demonstrate subjective experience, well ok. Mind without malice (Fairley). Who wants a portentous jungle; let them gawp or roar with laughter. The amazing thing about human perfection is that, in a universe of utter disequilibrium, we are able to hold the most suggestive images. What we arise from is not the choices we were given. What draws the image in poetry is the world beyond the world (beyond poetry). I am inside myself. I wonder what it is I am able to hear? I wonder if what is possible emanates within me, or is somehow already there? Abdication usurps suicide. Remain living after the fact. Gimpei follows the current. He is it. It feels like he is the current and the current flows. At his demise the current continues. The moment (now) is abandoned motion. In we plunge (into everything). The Spanish lad next door speaks loudly. It’s as if I hear every word in a torrent. I guess that’s a way of defining himself. People love to be within something or to be carried. You observe objects. I observe a field of colour and the manner of flight. Consider yourself a lake. The fall and flatness of water. People are drawn to what cannot be exhumed. Causes are real. Nietzsche is dead. We are not pushed by the past but pull the future towards us. Because we imbibe the future, seeing ourselves in its wake. Our past does not exist except as something not yet produced (Emily Adlam). To resolve this, and to avoid a logical impasse, there is a need to become passive, watching creatures other than acting, alternative ones: part of us would have stayed dead.

This morning the heard sparrows
are no more than a
 fluttering of wings.
 Did I say wings? Or
 a ‘deposit of unimaginable wealth
 in the sky’

PASSAGE30

Exercise in concision & | resonance: a | week at Vimutti

D1: Sitting, like life, is sailing in a vessel that encounters turbulence. The boat looks far out to sea, yet for safety adheres to the shoreline. The open mind, like the sea, anticipates calamities, though it is not bound by them.

A pair of swallows sits on the gate post that ends the meditation walkway. They frequently come and go, singly or sometimes together. Under my feet: nothing.

D2: the drum that is struck is empty of water. This is not a koan.

Those of intellect & poetry prepare a future residence for people in the world. (Those who meditate prepare for its demise.)

The poets are our great toymakers.

D3: take no comfort from these words: comfort is not their due.

The dragonfly I harness is the original one, hovering over the pond.

The third of four vowels in catastrophe enacts the word’s meaning precisely. Its sister and twin brothers nearby provide (ample) scope for other outcomes.

D4: the words that best describe the world (we live in) dissolve into air (nothing). This is what my poem says. ‘And the word was made flesh’ is (but) a sentence.

I see the swallow pair are my bedfellows, having built their nest under the eaves of Tree Fern Kuti where I reside, above the pond. They come and go many more times through the week than do I, most elegant scribes. No formal introduction is required.

The frog dancing among frogs thinks they are part of a resonance that celebrates pond life. The chorus is just the sound the frogs produce, oblivious of all else. Hearing all these o’s: think of the word catastrophe.

D5: while one sister cradles three oversize monastery cats on her lap, her brother gently pokes a stick at one of them, teasing a response. The Lankan children, large whites of their eyes brighter than the spic shirts & frilly dresses they wear, wait patiently until the retreatants have taken their food. English streams from their busy little mouths like many uninvited guests.

Leaving the interview room, Murray quips: ‘next batter’. I respond: ‘I’ll probably be out for a duck’. Bhante is a pretty fine teacher.

D6: all that awaits me on the longwalk back to the kuti is the bowingsea of grassheads and an occasional wristflap of fernfrond. I don’t understand (the extent of) my own happiness.

So much of what has been lived through continues to trip from my upturned palm. When it is turned over I am gone.

‘I love form & form loves me’. Words pursue a paperboat pushed out onto the muddy pond.

Landing on the thistlestalk, a whiteeye fills its beak to the very brim with down. Where will I be buried?

D7: The waxing crescent, tracked by Venus, which last night hung for some time over the treeridge, is in the stilldark gone when I leave my kuti. I think of dear Leopardi, whose entire life was reconceived in such a situation: ‘E pur mi giova / La ricordanza, e il noverar l’etate / Del mio dolore’.

There are so many trees here, native & exotic: tokyo cherry, japanese & golden atlas & himalayan cedars, arizona & montezuma cypress, magnolias, redbud ‘forest pansy’, white spruce, chinese maidenhair, queensland kauri, puriri, titoki, a number of totaras, beautiful kawaka, mexican alder, japonicas with their razor nuts, blackwoods, kahikatea. Towards the yurt, across from my walkway, the leaves on the poplar start to rattle mischievously. And today the rain comes. Rashomon plays over & over in my mind. (What a mind!)

The last sound I hear is a peacock’s cry: a-e-i-o-u. One vowel.

.

Late bloomer: at 70 I rock.

Coda

Look at what holds you there (a poem) & let that go. It is a discard of language of which something beautiful occurs, before it too is lost.[xxi]

notes

              [1] ‘ ”[Dr Welsly’s] counsellor for the Riverside Ward”, answered Ransley, “and a regular radical”’, FS Fletcher, The Mayor’s Parlour.
[2] The temperature must be ten times hotter than the surface of the sun in order to replicate solar fusion because the earth’s magnetic field is that much weaker’, Ambrose Pritchard, Telegraph, 13 Mar 2024). See also Ashbery’s The Umbrellas Follow Rain, 2002.
        [3] ‘After seeing this exhibition, he confessed: “I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form’, Picasso (Guardian, 7 April 2023). Hoffman prefers the term ‘headset’.
[4] This and the preceding pieces appear in Otoliths, issue sixty-seven, November 2022.
[5] Pessoa’s lacunae: see Book of Disquiet.
[6] Shadows, C.
[7] 🔵
[8] 🔵
[9] Digital Transformation: Interview with David Krakauer, President Santa Fe Institute <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lDryEt80-g>
[10] ‘Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve [individuals] and tell to each one word. Then stand [them] 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).
[11] ‘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’).
[12] ‘What’s behind language if you pierce it full of holes / what is nothing when it comes around twice / we have the fragments now for the connections’ (Michele Leggott, ‘Walks and days’).
[13] Two paths lead to the library and they confuse me. I choose the one on the left, walking down, because it is old and narrow and runs parallel to the train tracks, which are generally trainless. Many follow me, because I am here and in the company of a middle-aged Indian man—taking the same path in the opposite direction under the appearance of a moustache and two sons, who are being delivered to school. I hear his explanation spoken in an exotic tongue. It reminds me of the path on the right side of the tracks that I opted not to take. Newer, broader: a high fence separates it from the Training College prefabs, disused; and, in the middle distance, newbuilt classroom facilities extend Whangārei Boys High, flooded with bodies. Beyond are hills measured in trees. I don’t really know what they’re missing, jumping the fence like that. de minimis, to be sure.
At Smugglers Bay, we are welcomed by a bevy of brazen women from Leigh, ten or a dozen, who will stay a few days at Davies Bay, swimming, walking, practising yoga, drinking. Kay, their leader, ‘emerging’ since 60, is now 62, & quite unstoppable she tells me. I address her as akayla and she is the third in my triptych. In the evening, I watch the Freewheeling Laurel Canyon video, admire the swinging stars who flock there, and am drawn to acknowledge that, at its base, life runs through the fingers like sand, so much sand.
[14] Oops! Yesterday a millennium ago. Content affects a better window of restraint.
[15] INTERROGATIVE PEDAGOGICAL
TEACHING APPROACH
CULTIVATION of mind
Order/upside down
Samadhi = composure
Upadhana = assumption/clinging
Rupa = resistance
Aggregates = background features facilitating self-actualisation
Nibbana = uncertainty
Yoniso Manasikara = originary attending to path drivers = faith or reflexive intelligence
Right view = juncture awakening
Sati = recollection (in present i.e.
operational basis in peripheral awareness)
Mindàmoodàimageà = thought.
Finis.
[16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CGMrxHlP6U
[xvii] Anne Carson, Conversation, 26 October 2016
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbridHY7o_M&t=118s>
[xviii] Sergei Parajanov. Sayat-Nova | Colour of Pomegranates.
[xix] Bate, Jonathan, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World (134). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
[xx] www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbridHY7o_M&t=118s
[xxi] Keyboard used for a long period by an English speaker: the letters E, O, T, H, A, S, I, N, and R show substantial wear; some wear is visible on D, L, U, Y, M, W, F, G, C, B, and P; and little or no wear is visible on K, V, J, Q, X, or Z. An analysis of entries in the Concise Oxford dictionary, ignoring frequency of word use, gives an order of ‘EARIOTNSLCUDPMHGBFYWKVXZJQ’.