po tee wheet

i'm not ready to give up. this might be the only claim to strength i deserve. i was downstairs, about to turn out the light, and saw the way that said light shone through the second doorway into the darkness of the kitchen, removed from me, and thought that that second light, which was a product of the first, was a good metaphor for something. don't yet know what the second light was a good metaphor for, but something, right? i'm still too close to this particular bout of "suffering" to make anything of it...i can't make poetry out of it, that's for damn sure, but of course whether i'm able to make poetry out of anything i experience is open for debate. i can't draw down any particular truth from it. i can do little more than hate it for what it does to me, what it implies within me--loneliness, sure, and crappiness, but above all weakness.

the best part is that i don't know if it's actual weakness that i really object to, or more just the appearance of weakness. i hate to broadcast what's done to me by depression, and probably the concern with appearances is the only thing that keeps me even close to doing something other than shutting down fully. i have proof, to some degree, that what happens in my unhappiness is real, is solid, is more than rrreputation as niska from firefly would have it: yesterday i slept for fourteen hours; this morning the colors of the world did that thing where they merge together into something like a single percieved frequency, which either turns into or implies a cacaphonous, quasi-physical loss of perspective in my head, which can be seen as a metaphor turned physical, or a physical condition turned metaphorical. i used to drink when things got like this; i don't do that anymore, which is probably good.

at least in winter it gets the chance to take on this rhythm; in summer the world drives itself blindly when its colors go uni-frequency on me; my heart gets lost in the light.

i apologize for these words. i should keep them private.

i read something this morning about schumann going through a period in his youth when he published things he'd just barely written. later on he learned to revise, but there was incaution in his earlier years...that's good to know. it's a little bit like reading what of emily dickinson i've read and noticing how her formal instincts both go toward and move away from an unmediated poetic moment. sometimes you feel like she's telling the truth straight out of the frying pan, and at other times she's attempting to master her words completely, not letting her own face even slightly peer out of the window she's dressing. people seem to respond to both types of composition, which, again, is good to know--just that there's a range possible, not that i can come close enough to emily dickinson to have her example have any real bearing on my compositional style. i know which type i personally prefer--when dickinson masks herself, she sounds to me like beethoven, who thus far i've never felt anywhere in his compositions, including the late ones, and when she writes straight from the hip she sounds like a version of stevens in ideas of order (as far as i remember), as if ideas of order had pressed its face into a piece of cloth and veronicized itself (chronologically, physically, and metaphysically impossible). but if there's one thing that w.c. williams and olson prove, it's that sometimes you have to write to the style as opposed to from the heart if you want to become anything that you currently aren't.

i hope it's more than clear that these statements come out of the wild and half-acknowledged sheaf gatherings of inner turbulence as opposed to any more clear-sighted process of analysis. at this point (close on age 27), i trust my instincts, possibly, as always, fallaciously, when it comes to anything that might approximate process. i know that what comes out of turbulence sharpens my senses and improves my directional knowledge--i know that it's the hand of inner turbulence that forces my head down into a mass of understanding impossible to breathe within, and that it's up to me to swallow whatever will, not save me, but make me, when i can breathe again, a person with a larger, deeper, or broader range of intra-subjective movement. i'd never deign to put down anything in here that wasn't completely personal--and my personal insights are of the nature of bright shapes seen from a shadow. they can't be proven; they can just be described, because to stand in the light, in their actual presence, would be to change the nature of how they can be seen, of what they look like and are.

this is to some extent why i don't really care about philosophy. the questions that philosophers ask and answer are simple, because in the end they're nouns. hegel makes something fancy out of the idea of ground. fichte says we needn't see anything beyond the insides of our own faces. aristotle--or was it plato?--tells us about some horse in the sky. these are all fine ideas, but they get treated like they're not false postulates--they all assume that a does equal a like it's no big deal. hence to discuss ground with hegel has plenty of bearing on a world that looks kind of like this one--with certain limitations. aesthetics deals with movements, with verbs--sees the space between the shadow and the bright shape as an action, which is what it is, or can be seen as. if space equals time, noun equals verb (this is what billy pilgrim was all about, right?)--but the crux of the matter lies in the fact that "verb" is a noun--and that therefore the action itself is what takes place between the twist of noun and verb (and adverb, and participle, and adjective)--if, as i dimly remember from that one intro to astronomy class i didn't over-frequently attend, gravity is supposed to be something like the physical manifestation of space gathering time (there was an explanation for this or something like it), then aesthetics is the gravity of conditionality.

because of the vonnegut reference, i'm dedicating this one to kevin murphy. two syllables for him: luck-ee!