You wondered where my last question came from, yes ? I will tell you, because attention ought to return as does a tide. And I will answer it, and a few more, for I am nothing if not always a little presumptuous.
It came from you. Have I not been forthright enough about my way of being ? Elusive as I am, I have never once lied about my curiosity. But is there a reason to be curious about a person at all ? I am not certain there must be. I answer to the long luminous filaments that trail from every living thing. I follow them, delight in the following, and I delight in you. But first, let us return to poetry and prose.
Prose is the faculty of mediation, yes. It sets things in sequences and keeps the writer one step back from the thing being written. Poetry, on the other hand, can be an innate way of being: feeling first becomes language, then idea, then action, the route by which the nameless thing inside us gets named so it can finally be lived. Revelation, as you tend to name it. The visibility which makes us most vulnerable is the same visibility that is the source of our strength. . . ( Perhaps that is why I have never once felt at ease with poetry; I never understood it to the extent others could, much less believed myself capable of it. )
I asked you, then, because the way one expresses is the place where they touch the world; we reach nothing directly, you and I, only ever through some form, so the form you move in is the very surface at which you become reachable at all. Do correct me if I am wrong, but your poetics does seem to be your erotics ( i.e., the grammar of how a person desires and draws near. ) This motion is what I followed, and I would not presume to name it further; I only wanted to stand at the edge of you where the rest of the world gets in.
P.s. Keep this in your inbox if you like, or set it out where others may read it. A conversation made visible is a way of letting others see you without your having to rise and announce yourself, a disclosure offered sideways for you, my friend. Besides, in my experience, it soothes some, I think, to be shown the bright thread strung between two people, to be told here is how these creatures move about one another in the dim. And it is, like so much of what I do, an invitation more than a thing done; an open hand, yours to take up or to let lie.
as often, you are right; i struggle to interpret attention as anything but control; and that is perhaps the greatest failure of my thinking. i recognize it, and yet there is very little i have managed to do about it. i am, more often than not, the deer frozen in the middle of the road, caught in the headlights. a creature of flight, made for impact.
i find what you say about form particularly seductive, that it is the surface at which one becomes reachable; what can be touched and altered, engaged with. i think you are right. i have often been tempted to imagine language as something secondary, a vehicle carrying a prior reality, but i am less certain of that now, and perhaps we never arrive at one another except through form. perhaps there is no hidden thing behind it waiting to be recovered intact. perhaps revelation is only skin deep; if that is the case, then i understand your curiosity a little better.
as you know, i have never been particularly attached to identity as a static category. continuity has always seemed less interesting to me than transformation; not necessarily because continuity does not exist, but because it explains so little. two points connected by a line tell us almost nothing about the forces acting upon them; their origins and trajectory, the movement itself.
what has surprised me, however, is that you speak very comfortably of delight, and i find myself increasingly suspicious of it. not because i think it insincere, but because delight has always struck me as an active force masquerading as a passive one. people speak of delight as though it were merely observation elevated into affection, and i am not sure that is true; attention changes things, as does admiration, as does curiosity. you say that one might delight in the traces themselves, and perhaps this is where i become predictable, because my instinct remains to ask what such delight demands in return. not because i believe it must demand something, but because i distrust interactions that appear costless on principle.
perhaps i have spent too long confusing attention with acquisition. i do not mean possession, exactly; only that to look closely at something has always felt, to me, like entering into a kind of obligation. witness has never seemed entirely innocent. to be seen is to become vulnerable to alteration, and to see another carries its own burden of responsibility. perhaps this is merely another way of saying that i have never quite managed to separate curiosity from devotion, and that is perhaps my greatest fault.
"your poetics does seem to be your erotics"..... well. if by erotics you mean the broader architecture of nearness; the manner in which one approaches, incorporates, is altered by, and attempts to know another, then i am forced to admit the resemblance is rather hard to ignore, yes. i see love as assimilation; a profound intrusion. i am never entirely sure where devotion ends and incorporation begins; covenant mistaken for consumption, perhaps. i have always considered these tendencies relatively harmless in poetry, though. one steals an image, a rhythm, a gesture, a singular perspective, to better understand it, and explore it from the inside. language is accustomed to such thefts, and poems rarely object to being inhabited. people, however, are usually less keen on allowing it. if you'd like an additional insight, perhaps i have always described intimacy in poetic terms because poetry and intimacy demand the same thing of me; the surrender of a stable boundary. both require a kind of hospitality toward alteration, and i am beginning to suspect that what i call resonance, incorporation, symbolic trespass, are simply the names i prefer to give to attachment when i mean to speak about it obliquely; when i wish to discuss desire without having to admit devotion.
i am curious, though; you speak of poetry as if it were something you observe fluently without inhabiting it yourself, and yet you do. why is that? if poetry is, as you suggest, the route by which the nameless thing becomes livable, then i am curious what precisely you believe excludes you from it. do you prefer to stand at the edge of revelation, tracing the filament rather than becoming entangled in it yourself? forgive me the return of curiosity. attention, after all, ought to return as does a tide; as you said, and thus witnessing hardly ever travels in one direction.
turnnoffyourmind
andulkaphoto
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
izzy806