Poetry and Metaphor

Poetry is so much older, and raises so many questions, that any attempt to write sensibly about poetry in English leads to the core question of what poetry is.

The first poems were prayers, from those grateful who felt the stirring of language within them, grateful to the Gods who gave them language. Words burst into the brain like a vision, an explosion of new consciousness, a prescient thought that suddenly was and could be recalled forever after, a thought that could be given a sound.

In Europe the Goddess who inspired language was called the Muse.

There are many prayers, those that are felt, those that are false, or hastily conceived. Some find their mark and change the course of events, in the future, or even reach back to change and transform the past.

Poetry, as with every action we make upon this earth, all deeds, even deeds set out in words, have the unique power to change reality, to change the future, and even the possibility and power to change the past. Poetry as a ritually conceived language, did not require time, to act in a particular direction. I'll soon propose a thought experiment to prove this last point.

Here you cry 'Wait, Poetry ritually conceived? Didn't you just say that poetry began to stir in the minds of humans,  and they were grateful for that stirring?'

Yes. We must first realize what 'ritual' is. Ritual is a practiced, and disciplined action designed to capture or repeat some other act that we have no control over. A friend recently reminded me of C.G .Jung's great incite that, organized religion is a defense system against the spiritual.

Time for metaphor:

You're children, exploring lands behind your house. One day you and your friends venture further into the forest than you've ever come previously. There are some high cliffs, and into the base of those limestone cliffs, a deep cave.

Your first reaction, at least for most of you, is one of anxiety. You know in one instant that you will go there, but also that caves are dangerous. You remember what your parents have said, never go into a cave, but already you know you'll go into this one.

So the four of you set off into the cave. And you, being the oldest, are very nervous. You are nervous because you feel responsible. This is an 'event' you want to take charge of.

The light of consciousness seeks to illuminate that which is dark or unknown.

You venture further into the cave. There are some turns. Right, left, right. You make them, all of you repeating aloud the turns you have taken. Your fear level rises. It is very dark. Very soon you realize you won't be able to see if you go further.

You return home, after signing a blood pact. Nothing will be said to your parents. You discuss rules for further exploration.

This is precisely how the appearance of a new God occurs. He or she is kept secret. Pacts are signed. The parents, older Gods, mustn't realize there is some new spiritual activity taking place.

This is ritual. An effort to formalize, control, and thus repeat, an organized exploration of the unknown.

The next day you return.

You break out your sandwiches to eat, and then decide, before eating to make friends with whatever beings might live in the cave. You leave them something to eat. After all, if it's a bear or another frightening being, you want it to feel friendly.

This is an offering.

One of the little kids drops the flashlight into a puddle whilst marking the wall.

This is an omen.

You advise everyone to remain still. You fumble for the matches and the cedar. You light the torch. Suddenly the cave comes alive with the flicker of real fire. Whew! . . You're not too hard on little Ben. After all, he's just a kid. Perhaps the kids shouldn't be here.

That's ritual. Restrictive. Repeatable. It leads towards the numinous.

What's numinous here?

Suddenly something large and black powers out of the dark and runs past you. You run like devils for the light. You remember the four or five turns, and soon you're outside, hearts pounding, scared out of your minds.

scared = sacred

That's ritual. It leads towards the unknown. It leads towards what is dark, and powerful, towards what we cannot know otherwise, towards what is frightening.

Later that evening, you tighten up the rules. No more young kids. Too risky. They need to be indoctrinated slowly. This mystery of the big black furry thing is calling you back. But you want protection. Maybe three torches not one.

Soon there's a structure. It becomes an exercise in learning.

-:::-

So how does a discipline such as poetry acquire this power?

The first stirrings of language are felt as strongly as that black animal that shot past you in the dark. You want that experience that moment again, but you want to control it. The first time it speaks it feels as if something short-circuited, or took over your mind.

Poetry. painting, song, all proceed from ritual. All are language. They leak out of the cave setting, out of ritual, into everyday life. Language enters the everyday, through the door of ritual, through learning, which is ritual.

You realize that the beast needs to be befriended.

Alas in time the kids, when they've all grown up, disagree about how the ritual should be performed. They separate, form different schools. After a while some of them stay in it just for the money.

-:::-

Now, imagine the exact same sequence, but happening inside the mind. Out of the conscious flicker of food gathering, rushes a deep black voice! Language. This creature is powerful. It knocks one or two of you over it is so powerful.

We call it a God. But what gifts can we give to a God that is in our mind?

If you are the New Guinea cargo cult, you offer to the silver airplanes that bring cargo, a votive  twig airplane that is shaped in a similar way. That twig airplane is sculptural metaphor.

Poems are sound metaphors that approximate those early voices, in an effort to appease them, and to engage them in conversation.

Poems make offerings of metaphor.

The location of metaphor is different than meta-fire
One's with snow by the door, the other beneath a spire.

A furry thing can't be a friend of ours in the same way as you and I can, but nevertheless something must please it. If the furry thing is the sudden appearance of a conscious voice in the cave of of conscious mind, then what pleases it is sound. Imitative sound. Whatever sounds like it!

Poetry.

So we learn to appease, through imitation. Children do this. They appease adults by imitation. Ritual is the structure, sound is the offering. Those sounds, to a metaphoric mind, are the beginnings of all language, and the root of poetry which came before dialogue, before organized speech, before written words.

These metaphors have their basis in sound. All sounds, rather any particular sound or vibration, have the power to influence all things. A divine butterfly beating it's wings on a distant planet, may dramatically influence the course of events here on earth.

Metaphor is a term, grossly inadequate, to describe a source of synchronous energy which may be called upon after certain steps have been taken. Metaphor plucks a phenomena of physics which we on earth are still not understanding,  events of similar birth give off similar light, and have a similar fate. So with language. Metaphor is as inadequate as any other word when used technically, just as the word 'wave' does not adequately express all the power that is wave-like.

For metaphor to have power, it must be based more deeply than the poet him or herself is in his or her own life, and much more deeply rooted than the language that he or she uses. Poetry is not ultimately about the topics we assign it. When writing poetry be aware of this. It's not yours. The basis for for the roots of poetic language is sound, and a structure for language, all language. I am saying that the foundations of poetry are not in the language used to write it, but in vibration itself. Yet poetry is language. And humans do utter it.

Why do married couples wear rings instead of hats? Consider this.

So the distinction between a poem that 'rhymes' and one that seems not to, doesn't matter at all. What matters is that rhyme is one method of using sound and vibration to build frequencies that have the power to change events, perceptions, realities, colors, time, stop a rat's heart, or cause it to rain, all powers within a good poet's grasp.

Please don't confuse what I am saying with simile or alliteration. I am not speaking of a device used in writing English. Metaphor is not a device of language but the base for all language.

Metaphor came first. It is the carrier.

A Prior Life

At twenty thousand feet
I think of you, and our children
In rooms I built for them.

The space was simple, shaded by old trees.
Our house was not tall.
But a few rooms,
At the edge of a marsh.
The dry reeds blow in winter wind.

Beyond them lies the bay.

Angry waves churn white

The brown mustard softens the gusts,

Trees shelter us from the rain.

Smoke curls from our chimney,

Our simple dwelling of wood and tile.

Egrets wander about
looking for crabs.

We spent long hours reading books
and drinking tea.

Our children gone, moved away,
You wore out and left me.
What is the meaning of another pot or poem,
When those you love are no longer?

Life shot by,
Numbed I look back,
at dreams. All that stands,
moments fragile as grass.

Better to be a poet, or make pots,
and make preparations to leave this world.

What Tremor

What shake
what tremor,
comes after me
at night,
turning through
a dark cavern
just behind you too.

one voice away,
nearly the moment,
not quite.

who are you?

holding all my echoes
my dreams
my memories
my fears.

are you solid?
a mass of vertical rock
rising skyward
without a top?

or are you are an abyss
plunging down
without a bottom.

what are you?

are you there, or here?
or standing,
just behind?

Keys

There were cabs,
there were buses,
but they were not moving
even the houses and telegraph wires,
were broad and silent.

New orange street-lamps
     disoriented the design of the place.

All that was his in a prior life
he recognized,
     for sure.

But he struggled to remember a name.
For the whereabouts of his keys, doors,
     a phone number, her clothes.

Glasses

Ami on the bed, reads Janet Flanner.
"Let's print our first books ourselves,
     the way Sylvia Beach did!"

Last night at Anthology,
a Super 8 festival,
the films were all very bad.
"My attachment to Super 8 isn't signed in blood,"
     said one of the speakers.

Well-made glasses are hard to find,
     I have a collection.

A slow dirty rain today,
some brown leaves hang,
from the dead branches of the tree outside.
I think it is a cherry, the one that used to bloom
with pink blossoms,
bedraggled leaves, shaking.
like a cluster of bats,
     flung felt.

The steam pipe muse
hisses and sings.
She beats the drum of the building,

Today is too wet
to go to the studio
She sings some more.
I want to stay indoors
     but I have an idea that won't wait.

Extended umbrellas are drying out
Veselka coffee this morning.
an idea for the names of our children . . .
all the boys will be kings, and all the girls,
   will get the names of rivers,

Euphrates Potter.

'Glasses', collage by Maya Potter.

Spring

Spring is near, unborn,
a hollow stillness.

Birds crouch in the grey thicket,
a hawk circles the silent ridges.

A mauve blanket of cold bark,
unruffled feathers,
hold a last winter breath.

Conversation with Jeff Rosnik

January 27, 1989      Conversation with Jeff Rosnick       Veselka Coffee Shop, New York City

Are there perceptions of perceptions?

'Of  course. We do not know the natural world directly, but rather through the vehicle of our language of signs. This informs our search, our very act of looking at some thing. There is no such creature as 'pure' perception, in the visual or optical sense. Our vision, our imaging process, is too tied up with what we know. For instance this container of sugar - you know that if you were to pick it up, the table would not come with it. That knowledge informs how you see the container, and the table as well; in spite of everything that is on it you imagine the top of the table as a plane. You imagine the 'unseen' parts, and have as committed a knowledge of what is denied to your eye, as what actually is seen via an image formed on your retina. This knowledge conditions the process of image formation, and the exploratory movements of your eye over the scene before you.'

Music - the idea that it can be reduced to a Fourier equation, and that it may achieve representation as a plot in two dimensions, some quantity versus time. A thousand violins, somehow expressible as one instrument, one plot of tonal intensity, 'the thousand-violin-instrument'. That, by a wire leading to a prisoner's cell, connected to a speaker, and thence to the cement of the prison floor, he could be educated.

This invokes the image of one media, one 'ether', which at any instant holds at any point, the sum of all electromagnetic activity within it, a jumble of different signals, visible light, heat, x-rays, as well as short wave messages from the heart of the Soviet Union. The idea looms that all this can be sorted out, with the proper filtering instrument, just as our eyes function as another selective tool for filtering.

Our minds are another such instrument, that can pull from the Fourier reduced signal of sound waves, the note made by a single tuning fork, midst an orchestra.

Rosnick has a number of excellent ideas - one of them the conjecture that thought is an activity in some mathematical dimension greater than three. Our minds may easily perceive three dimensions, but our perception of the fourth, time, is more difficult to rationalize. It is is on the hazy periphery of our natural experience. But we know it is there; life is inconceivable without it, and so we have invented instruments to measure it, and make it expressible in terms of the other three, a visual representation i.e. the face of a clock. But without memory, any measurements at all are meaningless. Memory and thought are inseparable. I ask, can thought be expressed as a Fourier compression along some n-th dimensional axis?

Now the limitations which we assign to the speed of light are known because of experiments conducted employing relations of the first four dimensional quantities. Our minds may conceive of a speed greater than the speed of light, as easily as we may conceive of an airplane faster than the one we just took a ride in. But light itself, holds the uppermost limit, at least in our current science-based mythology. So, does all matter seem to hold that knowledge. Measurements of distance obey the same relativistic behaviors. But thought, existing on some dimension beyond time, the n-th dimension, could conceivably supersede the velocity of light, or appear to move instantaneously, until some dimension beyond thought, beyond 'n', enables us to design a clock which would measure the top limit of thought-speed.

This topic came up because I had inquired about Fermat's last theorem., and wondered had any general theory of primes been developed yet? Why not I wondered. Jeff said because "God created the integers." and 'Man made the mathematics that relates them all!'. The limits of math may itself  then be the general theory that states that primes cannot be understood, by virtue of its failure to produce a conclusive theory. This hints at fields of inquiry which are forever unyielding, until the bedrock of mathematics gives way. Further work here will reveal valuable reflections on the terrain of thought processes, a map of the metaphysics of knowing.

If so, what dimension will intelligent beings next assume, and in what order greater than the present one, so that what today appears as thought and intelligence, in that future world will appear as simple as a nervous impulse, or as a measurement of some smaller unit of organization.

I relate this to Fredkin's concept of the universe as a computer. If the universe is a computer, and each quantum that occurs, and thus calculates then deforms or modifies its own space-time, then thought, or the biological representation of thought, is the only way for us to know of it. Thinking is not distinct from the natural world, rather it is part of it. One might even say that thought made the natural world. The distinction between man and his universe, is man-made.

A frame of reference creates a special set of conditions for 'thought to exist'. But our thoughts, as they occur, burn calories, and cause us to move our bodies, blink, etc. We significantly alter the thermodynamics of our environment and produce a measurable result on the immediate physical world surrounding us.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was always true. Two children dissecting an insect will certainly destroy the object of their experiment. As the dimensions become smaller, the stage of an electron microscope for instance, the limit at which an experimental method may proceed uninterrupted by mankind becomes smaller. At present that limit has produced quantum theory. But I dare-say science will go further than this.

Chaos theory brings on another dimension. The Mandelbrot set is certainly not chaotic. I doubt if it could produce a plot out of which the probability of plotting any given point is the same for any other point. The degree to which it will avoid certain points is a measure of its order, or inversely, its entropy.

A ruler is used in the first dimension to measure length, distance.  But to have a ruler it must at very least operate in a two dimensional space in order to measure the first. In the case of a chaotic system, one might argue is the final supreme order, a universal white-noise out of which any order could be Fourier filtered, an end-point, as opposed to the place which viewed as the origin of Fredkin's universal computer explosion, the seed of the beginning, or big-bang. It would  be difficult to 'measure' the chaotic-'ness' or entropy, because there is an infinite difference between an expression which systematically and forever avoids certain points, and one that does not discriminate at all, or at least conceptually become infinite. This is the problem with modern mathematics when used to make predictions based on past data sets, which is why math has failed so miserably at predicting financial markets. What is needed is a sort of 'chaotic ruler', i.e. a deformed measuring tool for taking a fix of chaotic phenomena and noumena.

A model for this in the interim, might be thought of as a Mandelbrot ruler. This is do-able now.

The theme of all these ideas, is the notion of 'thought-ness beyond thought'. A kind of infinite quantity that escapes our bodies and propagates according to a different set of rules than the ones that science has already formulated.

All this might be ventured bearing in mind the duality, and incompatibility of relativity, and quantum mechanics.

The derivative of one order leads to the next. From distance, a plot of velocity emerges, from velocity, acceleration and so forth. Time enters here as the quantum against which all else is plotted. The Newtonian principles deform as time intervals approach zero and velocities approach 186,000 miles per second The key to all this however, is derivative, at least the mathematical key is, which in some way a is a historical perspective of the old order, reduced in a Fourier-like manner, to its 'one-wire' component. This historicity itself is the thought process. Standing outside of thought, forming an idea of thought as a discrete dimension unto itself, requires that the historical idea be extended beyond thought, so that it can refer back. We are now talking about the philosophy of philosophy.

I told Jeff it would be fun to test our pattern perceiving abilities to create a multi-noted instrument, where all the visible stars, a huge number, were cast as metal pegs in a giant Swiss music box, and each star on a particular meridian, plucked by its assigned string. The thoughts highest in the sky or furthest, deserving the notes at the highest end of the audible scale, and the those closest or lowest, the lowest, and so forth. so that a giant symphony might be arranged simply by entering the positions and brightnesses of into a computer.

Hardly were the words out of my mouth when I realized I was sentimentally pining for a Kepler-like orrery, to make music with, when the electromagnetic spectrum contains a much richer variety of wavelengths than does physical vibration. Trade those sound waves in for photons!

Light does it. The Music of the Spheres, has always been sung, and still sings.

We have instruments to perceive it, our eyes and mind.

Which moves our hearts when we look up, on a clear, moonless night.

The Voice

January 21, 1989

A loud voice spoke to me in my sleep. It woke me up, and interrupted my dreams. It spoke slowly and clearly, in a single burst of speech. Some of the words held double meanings but the sense, and the images they conveyed, were exceedingly strong:

"According to Lucifer, the Sun (the Son) represents the intellectual back of the world. It is upheld by him (created by Him) (merely) as a discipline, (though contrary to his own will, as a test). For him, Faith (his Face) is in the Earth."

I remember hearing the words as if spoken, other meanings hung like ragged evidence around a proclamation.

Here is a fragment of the dream prior to this event, which also woke me up:

I was working at a sort of desk job, in an office, on 6th Avenue in New York. Inside the boardroom, an important meeting was taking place. I was not allowed inside, but I greeted each of the men who arrived to attend it, and noticed them just before they went in and closed the door.

They seemed to be in advertising, and film, and business. In the middle of the meeting, my producer Ismail Merchant, materialized and announced that his contract was off, and because of this I could no longer work there. I was disappointed, but in some way Ismail had a claim on my position at the company, so I went around the place bowing politely, Japanese style.

A small Chinese man came out of a hallway and bowed to me, and took note of my dilemma. I asked him about my last paycheck. He told me it was being drawn up within the boardroom, and that I should look in there. Meanwhile, Ismail, as a force, and not as a material being, urged me to leave instantly, and not to bother about the money. I looked into the boardroom and saw the sun high in the sky. At that moment I heard the voice speak.