The practice of poetry — as opposed to the coming about of poem — may on the other hand be described as an idle sport framed by the indignities of time. Grown men do it so as to buy cigars; women new garters.
With the above in mind one would want to trace notions and mechanisms of consciousness as flickering in the writings of the Chinese ancients, Rimbaud, Lorca, Celan, Vallejo, Pound. ., and examine presence /absence and empty /full; of how poems are written in the possible tense.
Can we say that the object of writing poems is to create a microcosm “more true than Nature itself”? (Tsung Ping), in which case we are involved in the restitution of vital universal breath? Do we go about this by grasping the internal ‘lines’ of things (which we re-present), thus to fix the relations which they have to one another?
But these ‘force lines’ can only come into becoming (incanted to incarnation) on a background of emptiness (the Void). “Nothing belongs to the trait, […] not even its own ‘trace’. . The outline. . retraces only borderlines, intervals, a spacing grid with no possible appropriation.” (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind)
Therefore, in poetry as in the universe: without the Void no circulation of breath and thus no shaping of opposites that, together, ensure harmony. And so one can say that harmony is not possible without movement.
“How do you know that my kind of voyaging doesn’t rejuvenate me in some obscure way?” Fernando Pessoa asks in “A Voyage I Never Made.” Or again, later, in the same text: “. . my salvation lay in interspaces of unconsciousness.”
Emptiness, expectation, resonance. . must be built into the verse — indeed, into the very word! Then, when writing arrives at the point of being self-evident, “without traces or footprints,” it will appear to be a natural emanation of the paper, which is itself Emptiness. This ‘invisible’ written, that which has come about on the paper, the ejaculated seed, the spilling of whiteness, will prolong and purify the ‘off-page’ or the ‘beyond-page.’ “Conscious of the White, containing the Black: the way to mystery” — this was said by Huang Pin-Hung in reference to painting.
In this context we’d then look at the nature of the poet, how writing is a means to inventing the self — even as that first person singular whom we sometimes meet and grimace at in the mirror. “This seeing eye sees itself blind.” (Derrida) We look at the (dangerous) ways in which the line defines, calls forth, confines the future. We try to observe the poet as shaman, healer, historian, magician, agent of transformation, chameleon. We encounter the poet as outlaw and as terrorist.
We move forward.
Only the Tao (tracing /uncovering /writing /walking the flow) can obviate or wipe out the Dharma (the Law, Teaching).
WRITING IS FISHING
Writing is fishing for memory in time. Viscous. Time black. Sometimes you see it flitting just below surface — memory — miming time. Memory takes on the blackness of time. Memory will be time surfacing. Use word as bait. Beat the water. Beat the weird beat of baited words. Boated. Wounds. The bleeding words like wounded boats on a black sea. Let the fleet wash up. The coast is the beginning of the sea’s wisdom. It comes with the territory.
Words have their own territory, they return home as in a song. The fish only discovers the water once it is removed from it. This land a memotory.
But not peaceful. Memory as trigger for territory and tongue. The mind is full of bloody pieces staked out by tongue. Is there room enough? Memory killing memory.
Vicious. Terrortory. Territory comes from terre just as memory flows from mère.
And the sea. Sea is the beginning of the metamorphosis of the coast.
Let slip. It will all come out in the red wash of remembering. Invent roominess. Invent, vent, wind. Wind winding up mind with bated words.
Mind is dream coming home. Coming to mind. Mindcoming. Mindcome all over page. Mind coming to mind, minding itself and mending, muttering matter.
Book the writing. Make of book a dormitory full of time water. A dreamotory.
Wisdom of vices, virgins and vixens. The bloated bumping of drowned bodies just below the purpose. Terrier smelling fox barking at porpoises populating the Middle World just beyond moon. Shitty sheet. Copulating corpses.
Just over the lip.
WRITE TO THE TRUTH!
Enough of that! Write to the truth! But writing is not truth. Or is it? Does it make any sense to put the two, writing and truth, in opposition? What is truth? I have never quite understood why there should be this quest for absolute truth. Surely we know that we will never ‘know’ fully? We live in the flame of the consumption of our ignorance. We know — we can experience — a beginning and an end, and yet know nothing of before or after. ‘Truth,’ for me, I’d equate with satisfaction, a deep experience of beauty, a physical and mental well-being.
This needs to be teased out some more. What is it that brings satisfaction? Is it the contentment of understanding or accepting that there’s nothing to understand? The peace that comes after a job well done? Why is it important that a job should be well done? Is this a cultural reflex? And why and how do I experience beauty? Was this taught to me? Are there certain forms and manifestations of beauty that will be experienced alike by all humans whatever their conditioning? Surely there must be a number of inherent characteristics, ‘presences’ that we are sensitive to, that will provoke similar reactions wherever we may be?
Harmony I’d say is one. Balance may be a clearer approach: the experience (and the acceptance) of coming and going, ups and downs, light and dark, cycles beyond good and bad. Shape may be one such satisfaction-giving ‘presence,’ because it helps me to situate myself and thus promote consciousness. Pattern too (and of course the breaks), because it reminds me that there is on-going, there is resonance — we sometimes incestuously confuse these with ‘sense.’ Texture must be another: the joy of the feel, the pleasure of experiencing the state of being alive.
Will that be ‘truth’ then — accepting (knowing) that you don’t understand, that you’re only part of an ongoing process, that there is no good or evil or reason, no origin and no finality, no final form and no definitive content, and then the superb pleasure of experiencing being?
Writing is neither an explanation nor an expiation of our condition. Should it try to convey ‘certainties’ it would be like weighing our food down with stones. Writing is an extrapolation of the reality of not-knowing — some would say an excommunication thereof! It is a reflection (and a refraction) of being, of becoming, of consuming, of a process. It is the preening of wings with which we will not fly. (This does not mean that we cannot fly. .) It constitutes the weaving of the skin of being which will carry the signs and the stigmata of our ‘truth’ of inconclusiveness.
We inscribe ourselves in a text in progress since all time. We pick up tunes and try to carry the rhythm. We chime with the ancestors. Kafka, in a letter to Max Brod: “Kleist breathes in me like an old pig’s bladder.” (Important then, not to be kicked around or to burst inadvertently.)