This post began as loose response to a talk I enjoyed between Martin Shaw and Michael Bready over at Perspectiva. In some ways the poem at its opening is what I wanted to say and the sprawl that follows on it is like the poem’s footnote in order to be heard.
Look to this modest comment thread, Blackbeard. Speaking of shaggy praise-singers, Graham of the Petals and the Open-Heart-No-Guile is threatening to board...I believe you've sailed together before... Though it is not Mayday yet, I shall go bathe to honor his return, four months can become a week with such riff-raff and should lie to meet him half as shiny as his kind soul believes me. Some people make you better just remembering they know you.
I'm so glad nothing was cut. All the darlings! Ive been trying to have the same dream, i believe. Just about enough here for it to have appeared in the room as a real thing while I read it.
It's hard to leave a paragraph behind before the image (or six) soak(s) all the way in. I need to keep doubling back. I think I'm unusual in this age of the podcast that I generally prefer to read than listen, but I want to hear this radio-ed out, I want to hear the music of it.
I am with you, my dear Barron of the Diggers. I am more in debt to the idea as I love the recordings that keep me sane on here, Vined beasts and Uncivil savants with their Writing Home not least among them. I will just do it and shut up about it. By the way, full show of force at the dam just now. Peepers and company singing so loud it was almost dizzying and four tailslaps in a long head-high display of bite, dive, and be Merrie for through this Night We live....
Holy shit this is crazy long. Shit aka manure produces beauty of course, plants know this well. I stumbled in here this morning by chance. Bogs of course produce similar beauty…some call the Aster a sonflower. 🌻 But finally this…it’s as if the great mycelium of time are speaking from their deep knowledge of all things…Grandfather Nick knows too…”I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions,” from an old prophet/mystic named Joel.
As the vultures do say, “Carrion,” carry on indeed.
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
I'm leaping onto your raft, man, leaping into the starlit darkness of the oceanic, beautiful Loss, confident of finding the company and food I've been smelling since the late Jurassic but can't see yet--we'll break bread and drink wine on a table of drifting logs, sea-salt and green weeds, singing the liturgy of the whales. Give me about four more months of writing at my now even-more-glacial pace of maybe a sentence per morning, and I'll have my response to both you and Martin, but, in the meantime, I'll just (so to speak) raise my ale-horn and agree with you loveliest and most bonkers of the bonkers rascals: Merrie is the Way!
May my imagination grow into the coat you stitch it with your doubt always leaned so kindly to my benefit. Any table you are at is shelter to me, Graham. I just this morning set the dial on the radio to the frequency of your older posts and was, ear to shell, whistling up the Sea of you. Bring it.
I landed here through House of Beasts, and just had a couple of thoughts. My folklore teacher from many many years ago told a story of when John Neihardt was living with Black Elk. It was winter and people were hungry. Black Elk taught him a deer calling song, but Neihardt was an ethnographer, so perceived that differently than Black Elk did. So off they went to the hunt, but could not find any deer. It was cold and they were all hungry. Neihardt sat down on a log and absent mindedly began humming the calling song. One doe came to the clearing and stood completely still and waited. They brought her home as meat for the tribe. All more mysterious than perhaps we can, in our finitude, grasp. I think of John Ciardi https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=89&issue=3&page=42
And, just riffing on your deep and wild ramifications, Sheldrake is not alone in that theory. Evidences from many directions are about to tip us. The Seoul Declaration just announced that their official position is that life does not end with death. Physics, consciousness studies, paranormal studies, NDE studies, anecdotes, sudden unexpected experiences like Junger and Shanahan and Frederico Faggin, an upwelling, like Pascal, who wrote his experience down and sewed it into his jacket, philosophers, psychologists, evidences the height of a mountain and in motion. This is happening as the dark age sweeps over us. In All the Light We Cannot See, about radios and Nazis and magical jewels and resistance, Anthony Doerr uses scale itself as imagery. One is in the story, then zoom out, one is at a different scale. In part a symbolic reversing of Reich and data, but in part a koan on perception itself. And I think of Mandelstam's last poem. https://onbeing.org/poetry/and-i-was-alive/ So, I guess, I just want to say take heart.
Hey Cynthia. Thanks for all this. Will check out that Seoul Declaration. Jack Barron and I were just talking about All the Light We Cannot See. I really like that movie and the way of the Under-transmission. And that poem of Osip M. Regarding O.M. and Pascal's jacket I have a waking dream that I have made into a prose poem where Mandelstam, a Siberian Shaman, and the Golem of Chelm all escaped the transit camp together and eventually, with Mandelstam's poor health and his passing, the Golem went on alone wearing the yellow leather jacket Mandelstam was last seen dressed in. His undiscovered final manuscript is sewn into the jacket. You made me think I should finish that piece. Thanks for these breadcrumbs. 'Take heart' is such an interesting saying. Yes? I think I shall stitch that into the poem.
Beautiful, beautiful you shaggy praise-singer.
Look to this modest comment thread, Blackbeard. Speaking of shaggy praise-singers, Graham of the Petals and the Open-Heart-No-Guile is threatening to board...I believe you've sailed together before... Though it is not Mayday yet, I shall go bathe to honor his return, four months can become a week with such riff-raff and should lie to meet him half as shiny as his kind soul believes me. Some people make you better just remembering they know you.
Spot on about Graham.
I'm so glad nothing was cut. All the darlings! Ive been trying to have the same dream, i believe. Just about enough here for it to have appeared in the room as a real thing while I read it.
Superb. Rich, nourishment, song, question, return, deep in imagery, words like vineyard. Much to ponder.
Thanks for saying so, Penny. I was afraid it was maybe gonna be too much for too many.
Andrew, you and Martin make me want to dig out a hearty Hey Nonny Nonny or some such verse as another iron range bard of my heart once sang:
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate, driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow...
(Except not forgetting in the lotus flower sense but in the whale-swallow sense.)
I love how your words give me so many ragged edges to weave with my own repertoire of skills and impressions....
Weave away, Abbey.
Too spun thin from work think straight but wanted to say thanks for that.
It's hard to leave a paragraph behind before the image (or six) soak(s) all the way in. I need to keep doubling back. I think I'm unusual in this age of the podcast that I generally prefer to read than listen, but I want to hear this radio-ed out, I want to hear the music of it.
I am with you, my dear Barron of the Diggers. I am more in debt to the idea as I love the recordings that keep me sane on here, Vined beasts and Uncivil savants with their Writing Home not least among them. I will just do it and shut up about it. By the way, full show of force at the dam just now. Peepers and company singing so loud it was almost dizzying and four tailslaps in a long head-high display of bite, dive, and be Merrie for through this Night We live....
Too much for too many is plenty good for us.
Thanks, Caro. And that count is enough for me. I am a micro-microbrewery.
Holy shit this is crazy long. Shit aka manure produces beauty of course, plants know this well. I stumbled in here this morning by chance. Bogs of course produce similar beauty…some call the Aster a sonflower. 🌻 But finally this…it’s as if the great mycelium of time are speaking from their deep knowledge of all things…Grandfather Nick knows too…”I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions,” from an old prophet/mystic named Joel.
As the vultures do say, “Carrion,” carry on indeed.
Ha. It is the new Abrahamic school of writing from Moriah University. Motto is Slay No Darlings. Let ‘em all run wild.
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
I'm leaping onto your raft, man, leaping into the starlit darkness of the oceanic, beautiful Loss, confident of finding the company and food I've been smelling since the late Jurassic but can't see yet--we'll break bread and drink wine on a table of drifting logs, sea-salt and green weeds, singing the liturgy of the whales. Give me about four more months of writing at my now even-more-glacial pace of maybe a sentence per morning, and I'll have my response to both you and Martin, but, in the meantime, I'll just (so to speak) raise my ale-horn and agree with you loveliest and most bonkers of the bonkers rascals: Merrie is the Way!
May my imagination grow into the coat you stitch it with your doubt always leaned so kindly to my benefit. Any table you are at is shelter to me, Graham. I just this morning set the dial on the radio to the frequency of your older posts and was, ear to shell, whistling up the Sea of you. Bring it.
Can't wait, North-Ways Brother!
Thank you . All other words escape me .
I landed here through House of Beasts, and just had a couple of thoughts. My folklore teacher from many many years ago told a story of when John Neihardt was living with Black Elk. It was winter and people were hungry. Black Elk taught him a deer calling song, but Neihardt was an ethnographer, so perceived that differently than Black Elk did. So off they went to the hunt, but could not find any deer. It was cold and they were all hungry. Neihardt sat down on a log and absent mindedly began humming the calling song. One doe came to the clearing and stood completely still and waited. They brought her home as meat for the tribe. All more mysterious than perhaps we can, in our finitude, grasp. I think of John Ciardi https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=89&issue=3&page=42
And, just riffing on your deep and wild ramifications, Sheldrake is not alone in that theory. Evidences from many directions are about to tip us. The Seoul Declaration just announced that their official position is that life does not end with death. Physics, consciousness studies, paranormal studies, NDE studies, anecdotes, sudden unexpected experiences like Junger and Shanahan and Frederico Faggin, an upwelling, like Pascal, who wrote his experience down and sewed it into his jacket, philosophers, psychologists, evidences the height of a mountain and in motion. This is happening as the dark age sweeps over us. In All the Light We Cannot See, about radios and Nazis and magical jewels and resistance, Anthony Doerr uses scale itself as imagery. One is in the story, then zoom out, one is at a different scale. In part a symbolic reversing of Reich and data, but in part a koan on perception itself. And I think of Mandelstam's last poem. https://onbeing.org/poetry/and-i-was-alive/ So, I guess, I just want to say take heart.
Hey Cynthia. Thanks for all this. Will check out that Seoul Declaration. Jack Barron and I were just talking about All the Light We Cannot See. I really like that movie and the way of the Under-transmission. And that poem of Osip M. Regarding O.M. and Pascal's jacket I have a waking dream that I have made into a prose poem where Mandelstam, a Siberian Shaman, and the Golem of Chelm all escaped the transit camp together and eventually, with Mandelstam's poor health and his passing, the Golem went on alone wearing the yellow leather jacket Mandelstam was last seen dressed in. His undiscovered final manuscript is sewn into the jacket. You made me think I should finish that piece. Thanks for these breadcrumbs. 'Take heart' is such an interesting saying. Yes? I think I shall stitch that into the poem.