Sunday, June 3, 2007

TRYING TO GET UNDER

Trying to get under the skin of the poem and steel my seeing like a nightsky to the blood and muscle of the words, to the mystery of the inconceivability of the devastating emptiness that abides in everything that speaks and means. Trying to walk barefoot over the stars far enough back in time to see myself in the light of a brighter beginning. So I’m not swayed by the black dwarf that stands like a period in my way, the whole and only point of the universe, that gapes like a snake’s unlocked jaw in its radical center without circumference. I look for the moon in the corals in realms where I don’t expect to be understood because the words dart around like fish in myriad, family ways, and there’s no telling what you’ll see next. Enter Hamlet:”words, words, words,” but the words aren’t the poetry, and it’s the careers bank of anyone’s guess to say what is. And maybe that’s it; maybe that’s the draw that labours like a fanatical clown for years for a few shadows of art from the flame of a woman who never answers for herself. Still, I endure these lashings of day and night like a striped fool who doesn’t know how to do anything else but keep on keeping on with the search, as enamoured with the looking as he is with the grail. I wear the night like the tattered cowl of a blind seer, so a greater darkness than the last in this dreamless rite of passage, might suddenly glow like the radiant of an apocalyptic sincerity that restores my eyes like vows I made long ago, and kept. Shakespeare again:“to give to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name.” But the heavens have grown galactic since the globe was a stage and the airy nothingness has subsumed the local habitation and the name back into itself and it’s no longer the sustainable luxury of the swan on the river to know where it is in the boundlessness of being this far from home. The laws change with every new window until even the stars are baffled like the eyes of the rain in a flood of glass. The straight lines are just special forms of curves and the triangles are obese with more than a hundred and eighty degrees. And how can you measure the detectable warpage of the poetically detained, when space itself is lyrically deranged? You can’t step into the same face twice in a flowing mirror. So how can you give it a name that isn’t going to slip like a continental plate and shake a full house out of the theatre? Now the actors and playwrights are standing in line outside the curtain going up on their opening night, and the poets have turned their rudders in for weathervanes to presume to give direction to the wind, eschewing the denser medium that carried their paper boats downstream to brighten the night of an oceanic willow washing her hair in the river with sails. When every word has a thousand voices, and the symbols navigate like waterclocks, and every door that opens is a stranger that knocks on the inside, and all insights are the pollen of a black honey gathered from the eyes of blind flowers like the nuggets of a dream that golds the fool who pans for them, and looking for a place on stage where I can stand that isn’t the threshold of an exit is the theme of a stage that has forgotten its lines in an age that has pulled down the blinds, who trifles with a place and name? Blowing a kiss to the corpse, I resist the obvious jeremiad, but just the same, I’m left waiting in the wings of a shadow that burns hotter than the flame that gave birth to it, the auroral understudy of a star I’ll never see, the seed-throne of the light in the dark matter of me, the derisive issue, the pantomimic hearsay of an unrehearsable reality.

PATRICK WHITE

SAY WHAT YOU WILL

Say what you will, when I look at the stars there’s a knife in the light that cuts, a distant bell that sadly remembers, a sea in a shell that makes me long for home again, as if somehow I were the furthest emanation of them, the secret issue of their shining, growing dim in the lantern that bears me around like the nabob of nothing to see what I’ve become. Is there an ocean in the heart of a star that turns into eyes, blood, mind, the more suffusive lucidities of the spirit; are there starwells I’ve ascended like a genome of the features that have been poured into a mould of space to cast my moon upon the waters like a face? Am I the light looking back upon itself wave after wave, or an island in the tide? Has the mindstream been unravelled from that radiance like a discontinued thread, or is the vision in the furnace of that burning, like the moon on the water, one inseparable continuum? Not fireflies, not lighthouses, not the mannequins of myth, not tuning forks, or compasses, but events of life ingathering their own chrysales out of nothing, to conceal and reveal themselves in me, utterly transformed into the reciprocal of an unknown visionary, the rootless fruit of a tree with eyes. So it should come as no surprise that I feel the stars are alive in the way they have empowered me to see one star shining in everything, inter-reflectively. One day, moving from medium to medium, ever more rarefied, one inconceivability to the next, apprenticed to these endless transformations, my vital organs might evolve into such subtleties of attenuated urgency, that the food and the breath of my elemental being are the stars and the seeing of a night without death. And isn’t it already true that every moment of light entertains its own afterlife like the host of what’s to come, as the mind does, that thrives on stars that have marrowed the scintillance of every passing thought such that I’m always beyond myself in some availability of the future that can only be embodied in the wake of my seeing, as if life and death, light and thought, were the two brides of the one breath I carry across the homeless thresholds of my ancestral lucidity, everywhere elated with stars, with eyes, with seeing, with the radiant levity of my illuminated being.

PATRICK WHITE

THE INFERNAL SMILE

The infernal smile of people on the bright side. The demon in the light is worse than the one in the dark. The night is more compassionate, more relenting, a woman at the stake of her dreamfire, recanting the pain she once confessed to. If I carry the night in my heart like the black flame of a truer fire, and see in the daylilies less of the mystery than I see in the crowns of the moonlit waterstars, it is not to villify one of my eyes at the expense of the other, but to enter my solitude so deeply that all that remains is the clarity. People never meet themselves because they’re afraid of strangers. And you can’t know what you haven’t been. It’s just as important to look at the water and see the banks flow now and again, as it is to let your ears speak for themselves. Everything is an interpretation, a painting the mind makes that you must live in, so careful what you paint. The mind mixes moonlight and blood on its palette to quicken the lips with shadows. And every fool’s a genius. And now we come to the dark energy, dark matter of the issue, the black snowflake in a pillow of angel down that refuses to thaw in the dream of the sun like a Bedouin under the eyelids of a desert, lost in the heat, far away, discrete. Legend has it that three nails crucified Christ, two forged in heaven; one, in hell. And that’s the one that didn’t hurt.

PATRICK WHITE