The strangeness of migrating seeds (among
the winds)
"Thank you for reading my poem, your comments, and sharing of it with April. I feel honored (I am being serious) of the time you have given this poem."
Skimming the Digest, I came upon your poem and your note. Your note referred to formatting. And the version I saw then had minimal playing, which, in a static sense on completion, might be thought of as "formatted" I described it later (in the letters) as cascading down the left margin (not unlike its being etched on a hillside). Then, I saw "drafts", too, like printed sheets wafting down, leaves torn from neural trees, sere'd edges at an eye's edge ...even as they touch the floor and skitter into stacks.
But all this was after I read the poem, built my hello by borrowing your "high // in Berkeley Hills", presenting it as a bit of sensemic merriment, and dropping into your note to poke at it...,
I cannot tell you how many draft[ING]s* this poem has gone through -
although maybe not a finished piece I am ready for some feedback. I
hope the formatting stays intact.
* Must have been live doings...! -g.f. ( you COULD drop from title
into thistles, leave framing shot for end.... And for devilish readers
to softly play into punning "little blues things for the right hand" as
Billy Evans might.... I sense *your* etchings.)
You mentioned "formatting", as against,
say, playing, crafting, even writing, and mentioned "drafts", not your
draftings, playings of the poem. You do have the
formatting "as you go" implied. So, I could not resist tucking that "ing"
into "drafts". Anybody noticing it might scratch a side of his or
her head and forget it. Maybe nobody would think of those drafts as live,
as happening. But someone might hear those playings....
It was,
however, too late. That tiny act and I was in a parentheses and saying you
could withhold that delicate play on "high" until its second
occurrence, the title being locator enough and the drop into the thistles
getting the main music going.
My guess is that my "comment" on the etching was, then,
mainly the etched poem, in the static formatting-view, which is why,
later, I brought up Bucky's map. Maps, static, but map-making, involving
projection, is dynamic, and with Bucky's map-making, the unfolding is
equivalent to the riffer's playing. Anyway, at this point I was done. A
suggesture about withholding a motif until it could emerge from the
whole of the poem. For the rest, a couple things dropped along the path-side
that might hook somebody's peripheral vision, assuming anybody was even
following the thread to see what responses you were
getting.
"The skies here are grey and it is very cold.
It was to warm to a freezing temp but I am doubting that it will
occur."
Later, I looked to see what others said, after looking
only to see if my note had, in being passed back and forth, wrapped (it's plain
text) okay. I saw Dean's comment about "blood red". As everybody is using
language, not as an instrument on which poems are played, but as the way we
write, he's right. But if we're playing the instrument ...well, you have all
those other "associational" reasons for, perhaps, disorderly writing in a
complex crafting.
This, however, was nothing to toss out on the MOAPG
table. This would for a letter to the squad, and to April who's the only
person, now, in my bonus years, to whom I talk across a physically present
table, and, to, then, go into one of the folios I'm stuffing eletters
into as part of my drafting of an archiving, never to be cleaned up, let alone
completed, in the years I have left.... It goes into the hyperzining 06 folio
that begins with that last eletter in Jo2005 and, perhaps, include a
"hyperzining" eletter, which might even merge with the Make it new
eletter I propose to be my rare sending for Jo2006.
"I am not
quite certain how you are using the word 'sensemes'."
Neither am
I, but...
Talking about sensemes instead of images
confuses people, no matter what definitions I try, but I work on minds by
forcing a reading of the term and hope, somewhere along the line a
few might, in a moment, actually read it and not translate it into a form
(for the given sentence) of image. The weight of the language pushes the mind
away. We don't just have iMAGe, but iMAGination, MAGic forcing
us to accept a simple split of verbal / nonverbal, where nonverbal means
visual.
You might say "tactile image" and your mind splits into what
Milton Erickson dissociated into a conscious and an
unconscious mind. What you notice yourself doing and what you don't
notice yourself doing. So, "tactile image" If you're talking about a particular
image, say "running in the tight sand", your c-interpreting puts the
weight ("weight" is itself a somatic image) on tight. You understand
that it's a felt quality of the sand.... But you u-mind draws on your early, and
later, forgotten learning that's just part of how you speak and listen, write
and read, the "tactile" is an adjective, the "image" is a noun (like "drafts").
Images are visual. You've some confusion in your understanding of the
statement and as both statements are "in the air" as you read the line, you
might have confusion in your making sense of the line. If I'd said,
"tight is the key senseme here...", nothing visual lurks underneath,
you know you've a bit of sensory material, you understand that it has to do with
running on sand, you just easily fit it into place. You know what I'm talking about.
Unless, under the
weight of all your experience of the language, you're trying to get an image,
you're trying to see what I mean.
At other times, I use the
weight of the language. I again and again say, for instance, that seed
is a past-participial form of "see". So, a seed opened up will be an
experience which we store mainly around the visual aspects. Of course,
for the cognoscenti, when there are any, I might say, seed is a
past-participial, or closed up, form of "sense". It's an opaque senseme. In a
CSI television episode you see a body with a bullet hole in, say, the chest. The
body is on a table and cleaned up. Grissom leans forward to look close up at the
hole, but, in his iMAGination, he sees the bullet going in, traveling
through the different tissues and, maybe lodging where he knows it
lodged (no exit would). The entry wound suggests all that imaged
knowing. If Grissom was Einstein, a muscle thinker, he might feel the
body's sensations and pain since he can't project that sensing out into
the body. He can't see what he's imaging in his own body. In any case, it's a
thought experiment. Oh, Grissom is looking at the body and that is a
seed, too, because what he's sensing (the sighted travel of
the bullet and the empathic sense of tearing and cauterizing)involves the living
person at the time and place the shot was fired and his living self in the
morgue now.
You might say I try to change minds or, rather, the
cognitive innards a mind uses to make its changes. But you see, I'm
using TV (visual) pretty often here. Those draftings that are like
pictured windows with video clips on them instead of sheets with written
poems on them. You read the earlier draft, but in doing so you
"return" to the time of writing it and you, in a sense, are writing it again
within the reading.
At one point, I suggested sting
somewhere around the etching images. What I did, if it took, was force a switch
in "senses used". Get out, take your reader out, of a press of one sense's
available things. All that etching going on on your skin. A nice time
to switch. As you're imagining, you just switch attendings. Then, you
can go back and get along to all those vistas coming up....
I called your
"high // in Berkeley hills" sensemically merry - using "merry" in part
because of the season, but sensemically, an adjective form I don't
think I've used before. If I said "sensorially merry", people would be less
puzzled, but, alas, think I meant some felt merriment, not some imaged, or
sensemed, merriment in the very experience. Nope, the merriment is a quality of
the sensemes, which means more than, but includes, the images. The "grabbing,
scratching, etching thistles" are an adult's experienced walk on a hillside and
a child's venture into the dark forest all together and, for all the scariness
in the shadows, a merry event....
Well, as commentators say, "that's just
me". You see why I kept it not just back-channel, but in a sense outside of
time. Something to go into a folio.
"Willow is calling - must go
for now."
Ahhhhhh, now that matters. All the above is
just "thinking out loud" and casting seeds into the wind...,
After-thought:
a glimpse of
Golden Gate Bridge
SF
Bay
Alcatraz Island
Emeryville Mudflats
high
in Berkeley
Hills
Emeryville
Mudflats, as the eye drops and the closest edge of the seen comes.
Will many remember why this space is worth settling on? Remember the Arts &
Crafts students and faculty making thier driftwood sculptures sometimes
augmented with old hub-caps or whatever. On the back of Gary Snyder's Honda,
getting a ride from the UCB campus to the city (he lived on Green street in
North Beach and I lived out in the Haight...,
Along a bay shore highway,
wind falling loose, snapping
tight with a whipped
crack at my ear, past drift-wood sculptures
on
mud-flats - a sailing ship, a
locomotive, a huge & angry Indian
-
movie sets, but with a looser texture, allowing
the different movements
of sea & sky to show thru.
Past - leaning to the curve, headed for the
tollgate
& the rise of the bridge.