#bewilderment

[quotespile]

In her dreams, other kinds of life could talk, and she understood them. And they told her what was really happening on this planet, the system of invisible suffering on unimaginable scales. Human appetite's final solution.

Richard Powers, Bewilderment

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Artistics :: @Altcini_ :: Paul Cupido

* * * *

“Life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.” ― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

[litsnaps]

[dk-thrive]

Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

― Richard Powers, Bewilderment (W. W. Norton & Company, September 21, 2021) (via Alive on All Channels)

[rustbeltjessie]

There is a muslim prayer that says, "Lord, increase my bewilderment," and this prayer is also mine and the strange Whoever who goes under the name of "I" in my poems--and under multiple names in my fiction--where error, errancy and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story. 

A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. This contradiction can drive the "I" in the lyrical poem into a series of techniques that are the reverse of the usual narrative movements around courage, discipline, conquest, and fame.  

Weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude find their usual place in the dream world, where the sleeping witness finally feels safe enough to lie down in mystery. These qualities are not the stuff of stories of initiation and success.  

But it is to that model that I return as a writer involved in the problem of sequencing events and thoughts--because in the roundness of dreaming there is an acknowledgement of the beauty of plot, but a greater consciousness of randomness and uncertainty as the basic stock in which it is brewed.  

There is literally no way to express actions occurring simultaneously.   If I, for instance, want to tell you that a man I loved, who died, said he loved me on a curbstone in the snow, but this occurred in time after he died, and before he died, and will occur again in the future, I can't say it grammatically.   You would think I was talking about a ghost, or a hallucination, or a dream, when in fact, I was trying to convey the experience of a certain event as scattered, and non-sequential. I can keep UN-saying what I said, and amending it, but I can't escape the given logic of the original proposition, the sentence which insists on tenses and words like "later" and "before". 

And it is with this language problem that bewilderment begins to form, for me, more than an attitude--but an actual approach, a way--to resolve the unresolvable. In the Dictionary, to bewilder is "to cause to lose one's sense of where one is." The wilderness as metaphor is in this case not evocative enough because causing a complete failure in the magnet, the compass, the scale, the stars and the movement of the rivers is more than getting lost in the woods.   Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.   It cracks open the dialectic and sees myriads all at once. The old debate over beauty--between absolute and relative--is ruined by this experience of being completely lost by choice! Between God and No-God, between Way Out Far and Way Inside--while they are vacillating wildly, there is no fixed position. 

Bewilderment circumnambulates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality. 

—Fanny Howe, from "Bewilderment"

[flippinmations]

bro

[ogmaddoxtamoke]

Baxter doesn't really believe that love is a natural thing. His current tests confirm his hypothesis so far, but like nature, science can be...unpredictable at times.

No HH sticker Monday, but I do have another drawing idea to compensate that I think *some* will like.

[cosmicanchorite]

excerpts from “bewilderment” by fanny howe that i particularly adore, and photos of the earthwork “spiral jetty” by robert smithson, which howe references in the essay

spirals and mazes and bewilderment and the wilderness