As a blue-fire sun came up over the sea, milky and iridescent, there was no sound, there were no motorized noises, the world was sleeping and nothing moved but the water and the sun. The time was not important, but the thick of atmosphere and the damp of unknowing was. Jitters at the cold of morning. Trembling at what could not be said.

Lydia moved to make something fluid of her anxiety. Always. She wanted to be known as someone who knew herself well and was comfortable with that, because she did and she was, but she was never comfortable with the capacity of other people to see these aspects of herself clearly. Too much at stake, she would say.

One came to think: too much at stake to take a chance on being misunderstood.  But why?  Why at every moment was so much at stake?

I loved this way of concentrating universal truths and global risk into the idea of what another might hear.

In this way, her intensity overtook my capacity for calm or solemnity: these I gave to her, these rights and incantations I placed under her control, hoping there would be a cosmic reward.  We would battle together, and we would rest together, and she would see that I understood what was at stake and for that reason, was able to see who she was.

But one believes what makes the most bountiful world of comfort and knowing, in the moment; it is nearly impossible to shake this temptation, to walk in broad fields of zen discipline, clear of mind and flowing with the diaphanous mystery of what is true, or might be, and not inject our desire, our need, our insecurity.  She would see or not see what I knew of her, but not because I did or did not; she would see it because her soul was caught up with mine in a way that made sense to her, that gave plenty to her personal mythology.

Lydia came and went like the tides, and was a kind of respiration.  We breathed together, and waited together for the sunrise, and we moved toward a certain dream we never openly discussed and never put a name to.

The mystery of what collapsed, when I realized she would not be there the following day, is the mystery of what goes into willing, the will to give oneself up for something of this world, something impermanent, something the stoics would warn you will become like dust and earth and be reshaped tomorrow into something else.

There is a space of reason beyond loss, of comfort in the steel grip of doubt, that has come to exist because we know the kind of brazen pact of so many little unspoken guarantees, the haunted mornings we could not share, the quiet that was full of absence, and even the graces given me by people willing to hear of it, to want for it as well, to see the sublime torment of your distance…

we had spoken of breath, its role as salve and guidance, its ability to observe and to know urgency, to transmit the metaphysical, only by changing the rhythm of its one dance : we had offerred a word of advice to three lost souls —separately, maybe they knew each other and were intertwined in their unraveling— about finding the waves under moonlight, and then we talked in all directions about breath till the moon washed out in the frothy yellow morning, and I remember we said that stretch of sand, and the rippling hints of oceanic depth, glistening with the determined light of that moon that had come for us, would remain as it was, perfect and unassailable inside us and that only those who knew about our shared immortality, our grandiose heartwelling treasure of affections, could know about that breathing moon…

I remember it now, or it remembers me; I am made of that story, that metaphor, that matchless timing of souls, I am composed of that superlative getting-into, that seeping and evolving, that surpassing fixture, by the almost lamentably cumbersome sensation of being lost and adrift in beauty; that’s how I recall it, why I’m still searching, still fighting, still reading the signs, marking progress in the hopes of getting back to that, back to the place where we were one shape, one self, two kinds of agony and just marveling and pouring promises into the world…

One day there is full engagement, there is plenitude and clarity, there is movement and the need for movement, friction and the love of friction’s complicated figuring : then, suddenly, there is near total distance, a separation from what had been known and felt, a kind of severance, which the spirit and the mind can hardly make sense of : war, love, hunger, wealth, scarcity, injury, or pervasive change in one’s environment, can bring these sudden metamorphoses to the very forefront of lived reality, as if nothing but sudden and irreversible change were possible : few stimuli leave more work for the mind, more trouble in the depths of the soul, or more of a hunger for the feeble properties of language, in the hopes that something of what once was felt and good, might be saved : and there, in that want, in that instinct to continue but to figure and to paint or reconstruct, there is the basic urge of humanity at the edge, at the new beginning where everything seems to face the demand for flight, the lack of wings, the hard questions of hoping, moving toward, starting…

For Confucius, precision in language usage meant virtue, was virtue. He would deride his interlocutors not for failing to know or failing to will, but for failing to articulate with exactitude. Because a cloud-laden landscape is a dangerous one. Because the Truth, the knowing of which yields impossible harmonies, is exact, not cloud-laden, crisp. He was convinced that evil and suffering arose out of error, out of imprecision, and there are many ways in which a misspoken word can provoke undesirable effects.

Intense heat, the suffocation of the great metropolis that stingily carries on not recognizing that it was made by human hands and minds for the benefit of human beings in their endless daily slog… tiresome, choking, trellised, the city-creature, the layered amplitude, the hard grace and threadbare unbecoming, the will at odds with its own purpose…

I want wholeness amid the grey and acquiescent stupor, I want rhythm amid the fine-boned dissonance, a special coven of mind-meld and revelers, and the agility and courage to make sense of things…

but time runs out, it disappears into the gloom and is scarce remembered as what it was, a cool rapid current of trilling waters, trailing over the edge of things, and never stopping to be taken, held or tasted…

we seek the quietly problematic, ennervating, constant, we seek the contradictions that we know will persist like hard gemstones and so carry us and our emotional life and our struggles beyond the grip of time’s trilling rapids…

we seek to be plural, to be expansive, to make or achieve meaning by extending our intentionality and understanding, with painstaking care and quiet fire, into the broader societal energy: in this, the explosive periphery of human passions, for it is at the periphery that we find friction, frailty, agitation and the spark that makes words softly spoken or not so, or not at all uttered, into incendiary devices…

in the teeming folds of excess and absence, in the landscapes of opening up, desire and aggravation, we find the serene, and the promise of the serene is an explosive moment, is a life-binding way onto the great uninhabited plains that span across all the theories about a happy life…

in the need to play out the experiment of first seeing, then imagining more, then desiring, obtaining and sustaining, in the need to see that what is worth desire’s exhausting flame is also worth desiring to begin with, we mythologize, we martyr ourselves, we try to hold up the flag of an imagined idol, as if it were not only a mirror to the object of our desire, but the very gift of life renewed…

we hope to ‘get beyond’ the imperfect, to resist those places, those facts, those methods, that seem to stain or sully the imagined life, but we are wrong to aspire to this specifically; we do it from weakness and from the false promise of impatience…

faultlines are lifegivers, places where deep primordial energy comes up to the surface of the living world and makes more world; flaws in the perfectly smooth terrain are landmarks and give meaning to the surrounding landscape, become nameable places and so exist at the root of language…

we are wrong to want to ‘get beyond’ or even ‘smooth over’ the imperfect, because that separation between one thing and another, even between ideal and actual, is what gives the constellation of difference in which we all come to be, in which all human relations situate both the core and the outer limits of their reason for being…

the truth is that the unobtainable ideal informs all of its offspring and all of its progenitors, but it is unobtainable because only those imperfect fragments and temporalities can inhabit this world, only that which fits intermittently within the unfinished, can come to exist as such…

those imperfections and injuries that come with breaking the law of the stoics and trying to love earthly bodies, or rather, manifestations of this existence and in this sensorial realm, should be seen as gifts, or at least as intensities from which we gain, in the contact we in fact have, in the chance to love, with that which, though it dies away, remains imprinted in us, in this world, which so thirsts for that remaining, which in turn can only arise by our committing ourselves to such unstoical desperations…

it is not true that we as mortal beings are here to suffer or to be suffered and no more, but rather that at times we forget —and too easily— that what seems difficult, or even insurmountable, is actually a kind of joy, living in us, burning in us, calling us to celebrate and to find new life in the midst of agony…

One continent runs into another, in the synapses that draw a journey across the sky, through the cool and genuine imaginings of a life lived more fully, in the tense posture needed to counter the erosion of basic human tendencies… one continent lifts up the antidote to another, the complement, the other shades of a life lived close to the source, a passion as much unwinding itself in the wind of circumstance as curling up into its own inevitable form, ever more real as it seeks out the perfect tone for the recognition of its whole musical scope…

I find myself fantasizing about a life I neither live now nor am likely to live, as about the possibility of being heard, being felt, even in the enigma of my own distance, even as I rebel and seek to penetrate, contemplate, comprehend and undo another’s necessary and hard-won enigmatic elsewhere…

to be the writer, to be the resister, to be author and subject, to be the progenitor, to be the receiver, to be the signal, the strength of a way of thinking, to be the turbulence without tragedy and the evanescence of deep troubles, to be more and to be less, to get to the very core and to be uninvasive, apt, sage and surprising:

all these projects I seem to consciously pursue, to wait out the crashing tides, to keep head above water and do more than drift: to survive by invention, but by invention of great new microworlds that give and are felt as giving to those involved…

the norm, the stricture, the tease and the drip-drop of a talent unnamed, the emancipation or the giving form to something that is not as such so-so, the act of getting to the moment —which is not in itself passive— where the more is available and is lived and is given…

how to maintain the sage approach and serve and respect the hunger at the same time? must one take refuge in hunger and in loss, in order to keep sharp the instincts that bring sagacity? somehow, I come back to the problem of ‘muddling through’:

a sort of ever-ongoing mood-swing, having to face the fact that the optimum action and the moment of truth do not come with the way prepared, nor in a parallel and permissive vacuum, but that they come necessarily and always in the mix and muck of the here and now, the unbecoming tide of confusions…

I am traveling, with her, with you, with the whole cumbersome impossible experiment of consciousness, without time, without the elegance or the wisdom time affords itself, without the incalculable resources of the world of self-forming geographies and emotional overhaul, traveling, without time, given to the flux and flaxen-hued with the damp light of a night whose scent seems to come from far off in a distant winter…

everything of value can be lost
but that, or seeing that come to pass
is not what gives us value
it’s in the human feeling
the depth of vision and entreaty
the search for value
setting sail and mapping the white-crested
roiling of times and turnings

everything of value can be lost
but the losing is not the keystone
not the architecture or its purpose
it is just an undesired event
that follows the desired events
that demonstrated the value of the now no more

we can be brave and still fall feebly
we can be brazen and be smothered
we can be good and right and careful
and see all the petals of a rosy trance
fall away like so much fog and reticence
we can love fully and eternally
and be answered by inexplicable endings
far too tame and shocking to be written…

——–
from ‘The Copper Ptarmigan: a novel in verse miniatures’
http://www.casavaria.com/lit/jr/ptarmigan