Saturday, June 25, 2011

A SINGLE LENS FOCUS ON POETRY that is An Addition (plug-in) to (birfurcation of): Approaching "THE Role of Art-Making and the Arts in the Research University" with caution: a response to "Universities in the Service of the Imagination" AS CONFIGURED BY THE PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY in May 2011 (two weeks before the world could have ended, acknowledging one of many kinds of poetic justice)

APPETIZER COURSE
(from an amused bouche to a policy god's ear, maybe
with some help from a thought virus: infect some minds, please
--this post is for Nargis K.):


It might seem that a starting point of this post is the previous post Approaching "THE Role of Art-Making and the Arts in the Research University" with caution: a response to "Universities in the Service of the Imagination," and while this post is an offspring of sorts of that post, a next generation responding to response, mitigated by a bit more distance from event epicenter in early May, determining an actual (definitive) starting point is much more complicated, perhaps even beyond my present abilities to determine

(and would be beyond them even were I not now at an age when my celebrated, by a few, abilities [I won't name them, but some found them impressive, and one drunken, jealous, then relatively minor poet, prescription-drug-taking depressed son of a famous Ohio poet, found the one ability-related prize he coveted more than any other undeserved, and called me, for the first time in our lives, separate in just about every significant way till the call, to tell me so, and hasn't called me again] are declining, but still, at this point [early] in the decline, have momentarily landed where many of us --too many for it to be possible-- like to place our achieving selves: above average).


Though this post indeed is offshoot, in my life-practice, I configure everything as offshoot, everything as being and/or having been in a relationship, with or without consent, encountering, of course, an expected problem when/if I must arrive at a starting point preceded by nothing. An absolute beginning. The very first moment from which everything is descendent and nothing is antecedent, suggesting irregularity (that's pretty close to impossibility in a derivative model) as the root of everything, warped source of existence, source of time, source of space. Suggesting a shared mutant origin --that's really delightful! A spunky start by the stuff that's the stuff of every subsequent generation. A Moxie start. I find a comfort in first spunk that is probably also mutant since there's no other source: spunky mama produces spunky child, spunky piece-of-herself-offspring --somehow something happened. Forget any problems of first cause for a brief moment of celebration of this mutant ancestry. Listen to this:




Whatever that source state did to initialize a process of interacting descent was apparently done without partner, without outside intrusion since initially, in one scenario (as unproven as others), there was nothing other than inactive original stuff that somehow activated itself to begin this ongoing chain reaction to arrive at that previous post start (and everywhere else). What was the fuel? What was the reaction? Was it some sort of single cell that started dividing, simultaneously starting time and space? A first successful mitosis (a different kind of bang, one that implies less violence, simple birth of a[nother] universe, perhaps a link in a complex chain of dimensions and manifestations of dimension-determined realities, 1D-ND):

Or —Oh no! could it be that embedded in this is First cause veiled, and/or first cause unveiled! (an apparent chance of less deception). Because origin is problematic if I must construct something that isn't derived from something else, I'll leave it alone (just as it must have been at the start, without a relationship till something got cooking). I'll deal with most everything else, that which can be joined in progress, products of interactions. And for that reason, I can't write, much as it would have been natural to do so at the start of this millennium, attack of the veiled, meaning in my mind Attack of the 50-foot Woman as a Bride again, because of how events have unfolded into a persistent vocabulary of (relationship with) terrorism no matter what is being translated, because of my complex relationship with information , and because of Nargis lace that I find so transforming, seeing it as ultra fine dining linen that prepares a table to accept nourishment to be understood as ultimate food, Nargis lace napkins, formal gloves, bridal gown bodice, overskirt, atop linen tablecloths at the reception, a quieted foam, something Catherine, The Duchess of Cambridge, despite the Grace of ceremony, didn't have, a poetry just then emerging from under an x-acto knife across a pond with clusters and swarms of pressed jellyfish here and there, a complex paper lace that taught me something about veils, the side next to the face and body that the face and body mark. Face and body as a kind of, often, perfumed printing press, transformed the paper lace veil by Nargis into a kind of paper lace poetry that might be useful for President Tilghman to put on while she next speaks of universities in service to the imagination (a thinking veil of Nargis lace instead of a thinking cap). Wrapped in such a cocoon, something different is quite likely to emerge. How could something not emerge as next version, say, a Tilghman 2.0, after being encased in precision-cut cells of Nargis lace? those delicate carved bones of something too lovely to die so lives on in this as-if-bleached fossil record, the persistence tenacity of loveliness (for it may rear up even a bludgeoned head anywhere, thinking too briefly, guiltily casually of Cyclone Nargis, cyclone Daffodil of unfolding volatile petals, beautiful and remarkable from various distances, and of a death in which perhaps I should have found no beauty but did, in the death of a gannet, a beauty in death that took on a role of mercy, a role of gratitude, too late, for the gannet, a blessing, too late, of space and time that belong to a death of a gannet after a storm-force effort of trying to fly against a mighty wind.
The first image of Neda is from Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neda_Agha-Soltan.jpg].






A loveliness sometimes powered within its own force, say a star's supernova finale's often superlative beauty that can resonate into solar nurseries where radiance incubates.

Nargis lace as shell, as residue, as remainder, as (momentarily) unobliterated bones resisting total erasure delivers rupture, significant cracks much more beautiful, and inspiring than what they overcome (some of that as a beauty of [successful] overcoming, as in: mythic David [the one with weight and punch; the one that matters] defeating mythic Goliath [the one that matters --recent research suggests that giant is a popular [mis]translation of nephilim: which might more properly refer to fallen ones that The Naked Archaeologist further proposes could be then extant --though in their latter days-- Neanderthals)]: an attempt to blot out and smother identity with a powerful state curtain (behind which life rehearses and prepares for forms of liberation, as is happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, Libya —and the circling of a shadow that takes shape as powerful wings of Benazir Bhutto's liberated legacy). In Nargis paper lace poetry, the inside Arabic is ruptured also, forming fragments of personal truths that rest against (or perhaps could have emanated from) nape, throat, chest, breastbone, umbilical stump as would more conventional armor, so what's left of the calligraphy, may be configured as fragments of Dead Sea scrolls or [formerly] lost Himalaya temple cave texts recently found after hundreds of years in locations where the tenacious could find them again, writing immediately recognizable as important for having survived challenging circumstances that sought its suppression or destruction, and/or for being practiced continuously in private mosques (in other cases: temples, and/or churches) of heart, body, and mind: personal power stations. Or has Nargis cut out of her namesake lace expletives that curse unnecessary, manufactured colorful gender hardships? Life seeks ways to assert itself or it ceases to be life. Each cave opening in the photo reminds me of a burqa look-out aperture where light can be both welcomed and allowed. Here is a variant of Nargis lace armor by Lalla Essaydi, as seen in Converging Territories, Essaydi's photographs of a poetry of body, from which parasites of text erupt in words for what body feels, experiences, and interprets.

Nargis lace also resembles patterns and geometry seen inside a mosque or the Taj Mahal where ceiling can function as an understanding of and mutual embrace of cosmos where symmetry and geometry become means of connection and delivery systems of beauty so intense, such beauty becomes as purpose --I can easily imagine a map of the universe's galaxies as a ceiling of a mosque, and a ceiling of a mosque as the universe.



Two Nedas:
My own three-dimensional and sonic poam system center pieces concerns some of what can happen when the body's investment in art-marking configures most of the boundary system of personal expression and interpretation because of external restriction. An internal poetry might be pushed into deeper and deeper interior surfaces so as to better escape detection and detection's consequences that in the case of Neda (whose name means voice), can be death of a body that cannot be completely silenced —some anger written in the brow, perhaps repeatedly, daily depending on how repressive, how inhumane the system of circumstances in that particular location at that particular moment of repression (West of Kargar Avenue [proposed by some to be renamed Neda Street] at the intersection between Khosravi and Salehi Streets, Tehran, Iran), so that it underscores itself, is an exclamation mark shaped like some of the lightning it may have been struck by-- I use metaphor unnecessarily, but my body craves metamorphosing acts, and the words build temporary beautiful structures that are shrines, sacred spaces that can accommodate human cruelty perpetrated in the name, one by one, till each serves such duty, of anything that has or acquires a name (this video may be difficult to watch):




Now to put President Tilghman in this lacy-poetry context:
Because what President Tilghman offered is far from, I've assumed, an absolute beginning, I feel more confident in thinking that what she offered was not the origin of her ideas, but that instead, her ideas were derivatives, were offshoots pruned and arranged in a particular structure of cultivated meaning, but not necessarily a structure that parts left to grow wildly or naturally without intervention would necessarily assume. Through combinations (interactions) of observation, academic exposures, genetic predispositions, sensory input ranges, local customs, parental rules, gender factors, age factors, racial factors, cultural factors, economic factors, acquired belief systems, criteria for belief system rejection, etc. President Tilghman has developed a personal database of information that is likely relied on in decision-making and that informs newly acquired information. She has, as do I, in place a system that helps her filter and categorize information, a system that also helps configure her rules of her operating system of inclusion and exclusion --the brain sort of updates its files, reshaping files, amending files, replacing files when necessary, putting them in the trash, though not necessarily emptying the trash, certainly not deleting all effects of prior belief and usefulness —-and not necessarily performing any of these tasks perfectly. So when she states that from poetry we learn the economy of words, much has happened in her experience and practice to make that statement valid within the possibly warped context of what she thinks she knows, so her statement was backed by her own confidence that has been shaped by likely imperfect collaborations of multiple systems, multiple dynamic variables. These variables have been shaped themselves through dynamic interactive collaborative processes.

Tracing one tine or branch of a variable system of poetry includes considerations of not just origins of many forms of poetry but also of written language and of spoken language and ways to transmit and receive information somewhat reliably, so that interpretations of information would be similar and could lead to sharable abstract references. Multiple moments in which spoken and written language (which includes pictures) began are in fact at the complex starting point of this post (but of course are not alone there), the partitioning or bifurcating of language into multiple genre- and discipline-related streams is another sub-branch or tine of the complex start (multiple branches that have arrived here without this post being the destination) of this content, the co-evolutions of science and art that split incompletely and continue to tangle and crisscross in emerging locations --of course, in other plottings of these branches, the splits are different; information is often configured in a manner similar to how humans have configured constellations: our references to data as opposed to actual changing of that on which perceptual templates are pinned; certainly a configuration of a universe produces that universe, a universe that is then a branching system (that can branch) of the universe (if any) that remains un-templated and available for some other configuration to be attached to it, producing yet another branching system.

A Timeline of Some Forms of Poetry

on Dipity.



Each configuration happens, but it is attached to what is being configured without necessarily altering any actual substance under those configuration overlays. How to distinguish configuration overlay from what, if anything, is under it? I do not know, because an overlay system participates in configurations of reality; an overlay system is experienced. Even if an overlay system is imaginary, that overlay system could function as a real imaginary overlay system (as a real imaginary overlay, it exists in imagination, in some processing areas of brain/mind from where it can filter and help shape external realities) and contribute to configurations and interpretations of perceived realities.

Accordingly, President Tilghman's model of poetry is real, at least for her, and is out of touch with both the overlay system I associate with poetry and what that overlay is attached to directly --without disturbing the reality of her variant of poetry and its functionality within that real tight sphere. Her model of poetry (that produces poems) and the model of poetry I use (which produces poams: products of acts of making, of which Tilghman-model poems occupy a small part) are also attached, but at another more general location in the bifurcating system, before certain differentiations occur, at the broadest encompassing use (as determined and amended) of the (configurable) term poetry.

A video chapter poam about Limited Fork Birth:



In Tilgman's model, certain forms of growth have apparently ceased (or just have not happened yet); what apparently increases is repetition and elated reinforcement of established poetic forms, and certain established poetic goals without a detectable nod toward experimental forms that actively, well, research possibilities of genre that is incredibly plastic. Perhaps for the Tilghman model there's even a miring in a common abbreviation of poetic history (she is not alone there). Her model does not share numerous poetic system differentiations that configure the interacting (on various scales, in various locations, for various durations of time) systems of poetry that I and many others use. Her model could be something like a Neanderthal branch (no offense intended to any Neanderthal descendants, no matter how distant, a super-diluted drop will do [within a further warping of homeopathic methods] --I've assumed none [but Geico cavemen, some of whom may identify as Neanderthal, though perhaps not publicly considering the term's dictionary-verified reference to an uncivilized, unintelligent person who would not be expected to define poetry as anything but a literary form specializing in the economy of words in his efforts to appear refined] will see this other than those who may not know of their Neanderthal ancestry [perhaps even myself, though even without a Neanderthal strain, my genetic identity is sufficiently complex] that may have occurred when some Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens mixed [behavior that is more natural than unnatural, I believe]);

yes, a Neanderthal branch, once vibrant, flourishing, from time to time dominant, a history of having interacted with a species of poetry once historically similar (pre-Moxie), maybe related but now sufficiently evolved to be a species of its own, a Moxie poetry species with its own evolutions and extinctions that occur more removed from the relatively slower evolutions and extinctions in the Tilghman poetry species that can of course influence and mix with the Moxie species (indeed; producing these generous helpings of Tilghman-spiced thought suppers).


And now, for your dining pleasure, TONIGHT'S dirty dish SPECIAL:

A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE MOXIE POETRY SPECIES TAKES ON A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE TILGHMAN POETRY SPECIES


Some of the magnitude of an apparent narrowness of thinking behind the Tilghman poetry model, shaping both this event and some policy outcomes of applying this thinking, is well expressed through some spontaneous poetry of astronomer, astrophysicist, and cosmologist Carl Sagan, author of Contact in which, in a film adaptation, Dr. Eleanor Arroway, from within a transit system of interconnecting wormholes, imagined configurations of theoretically predicted yet not yet observed Einstein-Rosen bridges (that essentially connect folds in space-time, by folding space-time), experiences cosmic poetry. Dr. Arroway experiences this poetry in impossibly deep (for us, at this time, outside of imagination) space celestial events, unlike anything ever before witnessed by human eyes, more impressive to her than anything so far delivered to us by Hubble, inaccessible except from these bridges, often depicted as cylindrical tunnels (or hollow branches of limited forking systems).

She, alone among humanity, is privileged to experience a visual poetry so astonishing, the scientist within the singular person that Eleanor Arroway is falters, craves a supplement to the scientific method worthy to respond to what she's witnessing. --but she doesn't really witness this alone; the actress Jodie Foster is tangled, maybe a little, maybe a lot, with the character, forming a complex singular daughter of that entanglement. There is a location where Foster/Arroway's various roles as this and that (woman, mother, daughter, actress, scientist, etc. for example) converge for her to be one human --that practices science, that believes there is a system of configurable more-than-what-confronts-humans as daily and incredibly local significance in pursuit of meaning, some pursuits judged successful even if that success can't be proven, and even if success has no further meaning. Our minds can act as microscopes enlarging our importance, assigning overblown (not to scale) meaning to what we've made that has only roles we created for it, roles whose range is statistically insignificant within our own milky way galaxy let alone any galactic cluster, let alone this partially known portion of universe where we do and think and feel all that we do and think and feel. Indeed, constellations of the zodiac are earth-tethered illusions, even casting the planet Venus as a star; the stars are not in those formations we perceive courtesy our limited perceptual depth of field when visually processing astronomical distances, compressing light years of space into a single effective plane of compatibility indexes and horoscope-determined decision-making. But in the practice of what is experienced as as a system of reality, constellations can be real. Other than those able to willingly or unwillingly function as split or multiple personalities, we function as single compound humans that feel, dream, hope, that rationalize and solve problems within fluctuating emotional, cognitive, and psychological states: one human that is an integrative entity, multifaceted; all that we are, all that we learn in separate disciplinary silos is learned by a single multifaceted person. Perhaps we need more practice in what we can assemble and reassemble with these geometries of information, more practice in assembling structures of convergence instead of practicing so much code- and discipline switching with attention to discipline loyalty that sometimes impedes growth.


The scientist aspect of Eleanor realized inadequacies of science practice isolated from all other practice of an integrative human in referring to the complex beauty she saw mapped in what was her new, more beautiful, more compelling, more complex sky; her own lexicon had no words that could convey enough magnitude of an immensity she was seeing to be useful; her own practice as everything that she was in one small person had not prepared her with a satisfactory way to respond. No formula, no Da Vinci code, no sacred text she knew had mentioned specifics of any of what she was encountering so was, temporarily anyway, useless --turns out she needed metaphor desperately, lamenting that they should have sent a poet who would likely experience similar inadequacies when confronting something completely without precedent for which no word in any human lexicon offers insights --not even the universe of ceiling in the Taj Mahal (assuming she'd seen it). —— no existing word in any human lexicon offers a way to direct someone outside of direct sensual encounter with these cosmic events to simulate comparison

--so metaphor would also fail, though recognized by Arroway as a best chance, among human inventions, including other linguistic tools, to attempt to express what was unfolding beyond what any of her training and practice in any area had been able to predict or imagine. She was unprepared. For all her knowing, all her research university training, all her science practice, she realized immediately upon entering it, that she was in a situation --her active if temporary reality-- in which she knew nothing. None of her training or experience was useful for that moment of personal inadequacy that made her proclaim: they should have sent a poet!


Her recording devices failed; none captured any specific visuals, specific sounds, smells of distant planetary landscapes --she brought back a handful of nothing but hours of static; these must be filtered through her memory and her mind that integrates information, catalogs and cross-references in complex ways, bifurcating, interconnecting paths that offer multiple triggers to (variants of) the same information, that can configure (variants of)the same information for different contexts; a mind that does not catalog information (only) according to disciplinary silos; how odd for those presenting in this event to forget that silos leak --we don't build anything so well that it functions perfectly according to our limited and sometimes misguided, even if well-intentioned within human inadequacies, specifications, some of which may be built upon erroneous assumptions that may even be supported by devices of our making that, conspiring with various forms of chauvinism, are part of the sources of those specifications.





(the first 1.5 minutes of this youtube clip)

Some of what was failing well in that scene wasn't literally poetry or science as widely accepted and/or understood; but those also failed. Our failures are exquisite, and grand for us, measured as they are against our own insignificance which also embraces our successes. Every assumption we have for a time is part of our failure, as we try to understand what may not be understandable, as we seek an immortality of spirit that is hard to believe could be extinguished the way it powers us. Our struggle is colossal and unending until we are gone, some of us to meet our maker, others to meet an opportunity to be some of the stuff of other stuff. We have built religions that have endured for thousands of years but have not existed before us and probably won't exist after us, yet through what we've made some of us believe we can be saved --such is our complexity, our folly, our fear, our resolve, our achievement, all of it grand while we are here to name it grand --And so it is, until our grand departure whose grandness we will not be able to document. It is such beautiful, futile effort, I would not want to liberate us from it.

This failure perhaps functioned largely as metaphor for a more generalized insignificance of humanity, an insignificance that perhaps suggests an importance of being even more appreciative of being the integrative humans we are, for, it will probably turn out, our one lifetime playing out, ultimately, for a finite number of generations, on this iteration of this planet, in this iteration of this solar system, in this iteration of galaxy in this iteration of universe, for us the only universe, a single all-encompassing reality, including ghosts, phantasms, angels, heavens, hells, other supernatural manifestations, all of which are tethered to us in this iteration of reality that forms what we understand as experience. The only earth, only reality systems(that we are aware of within flexible and uneven,irregular, I suspect, boundaries of this universe --even those anticipating various forms of return or persistence tend to posit that return or persistence within this universe, which makes sense because we lack, for now, access to any others) Though other outcomes may occur in other systems of realities in currently inaccessible neighboring universes and the realities they support, we experience this system, this universe in ways that confine what we experience to what is possible within this universe, so an out-of-body experience is not out of this universe, for instance. Our outcomes is linked to our planet's outcome, our galaxy's outcome, our universe's outcome. I have assumed no permanence for any of these. How spectacular! To be enjoyed, appreciated, abused, exploited, and so forth, only while it lasts.

Our monuments won't matter.

None of our prizes.

None of our corporations.

None of our hospitals, schools, penitentiaries, armies, restaurants, philosophies, wars.

None of our factories producing artificial clouds,

sky beards, disintegrating aprons, prostheses for gods, angels, ghosts

--impressive yet short-lived variation of atmosphere, perhaps the best we could do
(in any configurations of particulars of circumstance).


None of our attempts to elevate some of ourselves higher than others
yet not higher than humanity itself --we reconfigure what humanity is, distort, warp, alter
without enlarging our role in the universe.

Our hold on earth hasn't been since the start of earth and, barring some cataclysmic episode or epidemic,

(probably) won't endure to the end of earth.


An honor or privilege of having existed will have to have been something felt, experienced, not measured by our social ladders to insignificance which does reveal something about our range: we matter to only ourselves; our human accomplishments extend no further than our tiny planet from which our ideas and satellites of our ideas try to extend themselves, via proxy mechanical ambassadors of our vitality and ability to love, ability to try to connect with what many of us hope, and many of us believe is beyond earth's atmosphere that we must take with us by the tankful in order to exercise this vitality and ability to love elsewhere, wrapped in visions of life and life's associated meanings larger than ourselves, as big as all forms of God interacting in a vital pulse of secrets of substance, secrets of origin, secrets of light, so many patterns on every scale, in any location, for varying durations of time --acting as center of a universe without center, so big, any location seems to work as center (though the geometry of this universe is likely to be more complex, irregular, even if what is observable seems more ideally symmetrical), any location can be that point from which lines (of all sorts) may be drawn to everything else—— how extraordinary; how pure, essence of generalized godlike gist, not necessarily a proper being at all, but amalgamation of everything, sum and root of everything, including other universes put together: what is found in an endless zooming in, endless zooming out, a heaven of feeling that we belong to this zoom, to be recycled as more zoom until something else happens perhaps as impossible to understand as a definitive moment of origin when a metaphorical gun fired into only darkness, the firing only audible and visible when it happened. Before that, maybe there was no gun.

And we were not the purpose for the experimental poetry of existence.

Existence did not have to know we were coming through what happened supported our emergence;

Why? would existence have been dissatisfied with rings of Saturn, with Jupiter's red gas stormy eye,

with the milky way's arms and their earthly Hindu echo in the universes of
Shiva

and therefore needed us as refinement or improvement of what had come before us, paving the way for us
--of course: red carpet treatment from the start.
We do know how to dream; our brains require it.


We are an outcome of a particular set of interactions, without necesarily being a planned temporary destination; we've joined an ongoing existence; this experimental poam of being continues, with us as just subset of so much that is marvelous, and temporary, words lose meaning and necessity —there is no economy in the wonders that have emerge and will continue to emerge in existence. Wonder emerges as the default manifestation of existence> which is on its way to forms and configurations to which we may at best be donors of substance as the wonder poam of existence becomes and becomes and becomes until becoming cannot continue in configurations I can (ever) speak of. Perhaps it this godlike essence that banged, dispersed, seeded universes, giving itself to worlds that grow into potentials that after many millennia of growth recombine, the density of everything tightly connected compressing everything into an undetectable existence that one day pops open, cracks from its own pressure as the density of everything connected continues to be compressed to the limit of compression.



What passes through us is marvelous. What we hold and influence is marvelous. Surely so will our debris, our residue be marvelous and unnamed, and used in the unfolding of poam that everything in it writes, rewrites. In an temporariness that astonishes me, and makes me love being here with my compromised vision, one-eye only, moxie cyclops, hair turning as white and uncontrollable as a comet's Rapunzeled tail; I've been given sights, sounds, textures, ideas that together form a heaven of being that will enter a paradise of oblivion, maybe a slow fade and dissipation of materiality and energy perturbed in the slightest way for having been embodied as me influencing in the slightest way some tiny fraction of a fraction whatever takes on bits of moxie supper residue.

A system of universe, it would seem, is not singing accolades to our meager discoveries that have yet to discover that we may compile only long-term (from a human perspective) meaninglessness, may document only assumptions that would breakdown in increasingly larger (or increasingly smaller) contexts; that a ranking of science above art may have no validity outside of those deeming it superior, those who despite deeming it so cannot prove superiority; human hierarchies are for humans alone, to order human assessments and pad our feeble importance which is no less praiseworthy for being feeble, tenuous, like so much else that exists. Whether science or art or crime ior atrocity, the outcome is human outcome and tethered to comprehensive considerations of humanity. Dr. Arroway could not in a moment of confrontation with cosmic art, with some of the art-making practice of systems at work in unfolding this universe in the ways it unfolds, mechanisms mostly unknown to humanity that is limited to findings that are discoverable by increasingly sophisticated though still fallible tools used in inquiry, remembering, as we think we know, that all that is visible is not visible to unassisted or assisted human vision (for it's not known irrevocably that assisted vision yet exists in all possible forms of assistance), that all that vibrates and is sound-producing does not produce sound audible to unassisted or assisted human hearing (for it's not known irrevocably that assisted hearing yet exists in all possible forms of assistance), etc. A system of universe is not regarding us as supreme or as anything special whether we are biochemists or bums --existing at all is special

--while it lasts; we nor our diamonds last forever (though our diamonds can outlast us), and it isn't clear what if anything does last forever, nor in what forms --not even the form of an everlasting soul (of the universe or of anything, this particle inherited from the moment of origin, the revving up of the existence machinery --the particle, the substance, the something not yet identified that everything that exists inherited (call it big bang debris or residue) in order to exist.

Humanity may be superseded by forms beyond our present ability to imagine. Even if we have inherited the earth and have acquired dominion over both organic and inorganic planetary resources, we cannot claim permanent occupation of the planet; there was earth before us, and the planetary record and other cosmic records as we have determined them suggest that there will be earth after us; we are not the evolutionary destination, not the culmination of cosmic forces, not the goal of existence, just part of it, active in these limited moments of human activity; now it's our turn, then willingly or unwillingly, we recede and something else temporarily rises.


This Carl Sagan realized, much more eloquently, as a pale blue dot, much more poetically than what I failed (in nearly 6,000 words) in saying, knowing I would fail, so said it, agreeing that the scientist this time is a better poet:


The text of what Carl Sagan said about the pale blue dot photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance, showing it against the vastness of space. By request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.


***********


Image credits:
Attack of the 50-foot Woman Poster: wikipedia.
Grace Kelly/Duchess of Cambridge image: Shelly's D.I.Y. Style.
Nargis paper lace: Nargis Khan.
Lalla Essaydi's photograph from her book Converging Territories: world property channel.
Horsehead Nebula: sidewalk astronomy club.
Himalaya Cave image: KPBS.org.
Taj Mahal ceiling image: wikipedia.
Images of Neda Soltan: wikipedia and British blogs.
Interactive Processes and Developmental Plasticity image: APA Psych-Net.
Human Language Map: Frum Forum.
Neanderthal image: wikipedia.
Contact movie poster and book cover: wikipedia.
Five-Headed Shiva: wikipedia.
Timeline of the Universe: Nobel Prize.org.
Diamond Is Forever: Grin.
Pale Blue Dot photograph and quote: wikipedia.










Friday, May 27, 2011

Approaching THE Role of Art-Making and the Arts in the Research University with caution: a response to Universities in the Service of the Imagination

How well intended the event was, scientists, Deans, University Presidents, major award festooned Professors, some acknowledged and applauded, some anonymous in an audience that also included artists, makers, students, faculty, members of local and visiting communities, and others there to listen to a keynote address on a subject to which most of those present were already committed. I identified as one of the committed, entering Rackham Auditorium with skepticism in check; after all, I was a maker in a research university, connected to the arts engine (as fuel and as exhaust) hosting the event, and I indeed had a role as an audience member, but a role that changed almost immediately as the opening session began, my feet, legs, head, torso responding to irresistible music of The Gratitude Steel Band;

I danced in my seat to what turned out to be an enjoyable conventional role for the band: background music, organized sound to help focus time spent waiting for the speakers, entrance and exit music, pretty sonic bookends.

I liked this music, and entertained (some of the Gratitude Steel Band’s role of course was to entertain) ideas of allowing movement of my body to interact with the sound of Gratitude, to be sculpted and resculpted according to tempo, modulation, and rhythm more visibly, right up there on the stage, but knowing what happened to Whitney Houston, whose established role has been stage performance, when she wanted to respond more forcefully to Prince’s music at his concerts, I decided against possibly being taken to rehab where some of the role of art-making would be therapeutic.


I didn’t hide these simple involuntary rhythmic responses to Gratitude’s music, but responses were tamed; there was no Pentecostal context that couldn’t be over-ridden; no Baptist fervor to which I might respond in an ecstasy of salvation and a personal relationship with Jesus that makes my mother dance, that enables dancing with a Holy Ghost partner, as most other times, she needs a walker (or the return of my father after 30 years in the grave —she believes that's possible too). So there is power in vibrations pulsing through the body, temporarily regulating movements of components of body to these rhythms that are incredibly intimate, invisibly entering ears, tickling cilia, Holy tickling when God is vibrating in a sermon, in a gospel choir, in responses to calls from praying deacons and deaconesses. In those moments in which body and sound are linked, there is collaboration, one informing another, inciting another to more intensity to a peak preceding decline at which point feeling and memory have chances to prolong effects and to shape meanings, heart rate gradually decreasing, temperature dropping, little transparent pills of sweat evaporating into an atmosphere that was a component of host system of event, that atmosphere marked with evaporation. What was built dissipated, including a promise I’d built for the event, seduced by role, art-making, art, and research cozy in the same sentence, not even separated by commas in the printed program. Members of the same family, royal cousins marrying (distant) cousins to keep their elite advantage elite, exclusive; side-by-side on a research throne.


The Role should have alerted me more quickly than it did; perhaps I was too caught up in hope that I was configuring with my own ideas about art-making, art, and research interfaces, hope that I also knew to function as an intangible snare that can exert enormous power because it often wrangles spirit, mind which many consider the throne of thinking, creativity, and imagination. But I knew to question knowing, so I slid comfortably into that hope,

accepting my role in accepting what was to be offered about the role. Before long, after listening to speakers validate art-making and the arts through art’s ability to produce and maintain cultural relevance, through art-making and the arts exercising of the senses, and through art-making and the arts’ key roles as connections that enable relationships between senses and mind, and between senses and imagination, art-making and art outcomes as evidence, witnesses, and offspring of these relationships, it became necessary to reconfigure my expectations. Because of art-making and art’s association with creativity, almost considered, it seemed from the talks, co- and the only owners of creativity, as if all that is made (by humans in particular, in this role-establishing event) is not also created, as if create did not mean to make, initially without restriction on what is made or created, as if creativity no longer can or perhaps even should mean only a process of creative ability or a process of ability to make —anything. There, it’s true that art may be an outcome of such making, such creation, as anything else made may be. Art is not the only baby made as outcomes of making. Science without creativity? without making anything? without any innovation? How to get ideas for an experiment? How to create something to research? To create a surgical procedure? To make prosthetics? The art of breast augmentation, the art-making of breast implants, the less common art of breast reduction (some geometry there, some parabolic hocus-pocus)? Creative writing and no other written forms may be considered forms of expression? Things can be created, can be made that are functional with or without an additional aesthetic classification (creating taxonomies? lexicons? dictionaries? evolutionary trees (phylogenetic trees) that both inform and beautify?) that would not necessarily be permanent or universal, beauty being variable, interpretable, shifting culturally, personally, etc., having definitions that are also made (lip plates, neck rings, manolo blahnik stilettos).

SOME LIVING BARBIES OF THE WORLD:
WOMAN WITH LIP PLATE DRINKING
PADAUNG WOMEN IN THEIR NECK RINGS
AMERICAN WOMEN PURSUE THE GLAMOROUS LIFE IN STILETTOS
X-RAY OF WOMAN'S FOOT RECONFIGURED IN COLLABORATION WITH HIGH HEELS
JUXTAPOSED WITH X-RAY OF WOMAN'S FOOT IN SERVICE TO some of THE ART-MAKING OF FOOT BINDING AND some of THE ART OF UNBINDING THE FOOT so as to, in part, collaborate with more space.

Above: some economy of image; a visual poam.




I’m probably beating this point to the death of aesthetic quality: I am creating that death, taking responsibility for the quality of that death, making it in a piece of writing, that in order to be a poem, would necessarily offer a lesson in the economy of words, to quote the keynote speaker who expressed the value of poetry as a literary location where we learn the economy of words, a statement fraught with assumption that does not serve well a position of universities in service to imagination. Indeed, the talks, with a notable exception, were fraught with assumption, assumption that confined thinking to a relationship with that assumption, and a path that leads from that assumption to extensions of that assumption that go somewhere, yes; but only where that assumption can go; possibilities of that assumption, perhaps apparently infinite, but a limited infinity, infinite within a context based on assumption. This statement from the keynote speaker betrays a lack of imagination in defining poetry, in a failure to allow for a possibility of a more complex configuration of a system of poetry that is itself configurable; indeed, shockingly betrays, since the speaker decided to go there, proclaiming an embrace of poetry as an example of a university (she has the agency as president to represent one) caught in the act of serving imagination; rather shockingly betrays a lack of knowledge about existing and emerging forms of poetry (and suggests a lack of having entertained a possibility of emerging forms of poetry), a betrayal that is a form of disservice to imagination in its imposing on poetry, whether intentionally or not, a narrow and traditional configuration that apparently doesn’t advocate exploration or experimentation or innovation: three components of research. Most surprising and disappointing to me is how embedded in the statement is an assumption that poetry could be static, relatively unchanging so that the role assigned to it at some unspecified point in time (in order for assumption to have become a part of the speaker’s knowledge in which she has confidence so does not doubt the statement despite its lack of imagination) remains poetry’s role. Poetry’s, it would seem, unchanging and unchangeable role.

Because of poetry’s intense (but not exclusive) association with metaphor (a form of equation), poetry may be easily considered a reliable source for lexical comparisons and equivalences that even science might turn to when, say, a discovery is made in, say, Biochemistry, for which there might not already be in place a classification, an established reference for something new, something emerging, metaphor serving as placeholder, or a helper to introduce something new through linking it to something already familiar as a (temporary) point of reference. Metaphor offers a formula for comparison (a form of interaction) whose possibilities have not been exhausted if in service to possibilities of metaphor, those serving those possibilities delve beyond (created) confines of how that formula has been applied. Using the mind at all, whether performing complex mathematical computations or composing a sonata or slamming a poem in a bar, for instance, involves biochemical and electrical processes in the brain. That very brain that produces science also produces art-making, the arts, and imagination; the brain is in service to all of these, that mock mushy cauliflower of brain —metaphor alert!— is the throne which they occupy, share. Metaphor is able to anchor itself in both the known and the emerging, the dull and the lively simultaneously, offering dual lenses that offer more opportunities when those lenses are not identical, when they share something akin to left and right hemispheric flavors of a brain. It can maintain a foothold in the known (a kind of root system) while bifurcating into less known areas —as when, for instance,



SEM imagery reveals structures on scales for which existing terminology seems to suffer from temporary or apparent inexactitude, and metaphor helps, (perhaps temporarily) configure understanding through a link of new and unnamed with something known that apparently has (perhaps only superficially) similar features or structures or behaviors until such time as more is known about a discovery to render metaphor unnecessary except for aesthetic purposes that help transform science itself into its visual aesthetic potential or its sonic aesthetic potential or its tactile aesthetic potential without additional drawing or painting or rhyming or dancing: science itself may have aesthetic potential and value of its own. Senses of anyone (scientists and strippers, for instance, or scientists who are strippers) can lead to pleasure and disgust, and encourage a seeking of what provides pleasure. Science is not exempt from pleasure-seeking. Entire industries depend on a love of pleasure-seeking and temporary pleasure-finding, that like hunger and satiation, tends to be cyclic, recurring, necessary for some success of capitalism. An initial look at what SEM imagery reveals invites visual associations, connections with what is already in a seer’s visual memory bank

(I am presuming visual ability and visual success; I am not addressing tactile modalities of engagement —please pardon the negligence— but in tactile engagement of images, there are still possibilities of identifying familiarity of structural interface with fingertips; I think of Touch the Universe, for instance, a book that makes meaningful cosmic structures through tactile engagement for the visually impaired)

—something familiar might be recognized, perhaps erroneously in a first encounter in which excitement’s role might not be well controlled, enabling cross-scale connections, maybe even identification of a structural icon that seems to repeat throughout existence on multiple scales —a basic unit of structure, a basic unit of structure available to host configurable meanings, an ability that is essentially collaborative. Of course I have assumptions of my own. I'm offering alternative assessment to that role and to that service than what was so narrowly presented and, accordingly, likely also narrowly considered.


Like many there, I too have interest in collaboration and attempt to make collaborative ventures a routine part of my practice (indeed; I believe that making collaborative ventures a routine part of practice is inevitable, inescapable, a default mode of existing as long as that existence and its components have contact with anything). Most speakers acknowledged interdisciplinarity, were champions of it, supporters of a predictable range of intellectual and aesthetic cross-pollination, that is to say, expected mergers, infusing science and engineering with various modalities of creative process: visual, sonic, tactile, moving, implying that: All will explore art-making and the arts, but without a corresponding demand for art-makers to infuse their practice with more intellectual accountability and protocols of good experimentation (which would include good documentation), some of which might parallel protocols of scientific experimentation or even extend and/or reconfigure what good experimentation can be as it too evolves. There also happens to be some polysyllabic tastiness in the word interdisciplinary; I delight in saying it, and perhaps others do too, after a while becoming enticed by some deliciousness of what happens to tongue, twice kissing backs of upper teeth to say it, a puff of air escaping as mouth purses around ter, and tongue hits a hi-hat palate —some pleasure can be mined there. And that can be enough: mouth and lip service, oral fixation of saying the interdisciplinary-it word daily, proudly, without any unexpected interdisciplinary action following. I say this because of a tendency to mine for rather predictable products; sciences elevating art-making through pairings of artists with scientists and engineers, those who can supply technical interfaces of discovery and breakthrough offering what is more likely to elude someone whose training has been limited to creative rigor rather than quantitative rigor, competing, some thing, systems of logic and insight.

Speaking the interdisciplinary system activated by speaking fork (a video illustrating an essay on Limited Fork Theory: and its offering of multiple ways of studying interacting systems):


Though perhaps unintentional, it did seem that a consensus among speakers (there was one notable exception) was that research components of the university were more likely to elevate and extend expectations of art-making and the arts, through finding ways of integrating (appreciation of) art-making and the arts (as conventionally defined) into research practices, art-making and the arts benefiting from this association, as if without this association, art-making and the arts might not take on a certain kind of heft, certain kind of consequence, certain kind of intellectual respect. Some art-makers do of course maintain infusions of intellectual accountability in their practice, but the role of art-making and the arts in the research university is not to be configured as a broadening of such infusions or an exploring of intellectual rigor of art-making, encouraging emergence of theories of both personal and general art-making based on, for instance, rigorous study of decisions made, outcomes of attempts, reconfigurations and revisions of questions being asked as emerging answers are evaluated, or as alternatives to having to have answers are both imagined and constructed, art-making process documented carefully and analyzed, perhaps exposing rules at work in process, and offering opportunities to vary those rules, to explore making according to variable rules of experiments in making —this to address accountability of any maker, and to help any maker develop a vocabulary for each instance of making practice. Reversal of flexibility given to science and engineering to find value in art-making and the arts was not given to art-making and the arts to find value in science and engineering as host of connection. It became clear just what was being designated savior (of art -making and the arts) and what was being designated (in need of being) saved. Science and engineering host, invite art-making and the arts to bring creative process into disciplines of science and engineering but art-making and the arts are not viewed as hosts of science and engineering, as providers of viable sources for, for example, conventional NSF fundable and career-making experiment configuration.

What is considered Creative Practice does not (have to [when/if it does]) depend on arbitrary gestures.

Art-making and the arts were too defined by most of the speakers for any other possibilities to emerge. Paths offered are well-established. Significant and historic trailblazers and their loyal scholar-followers have kept these paths paved and determined, sometimes to a point of rut-formation, a sentiment advanced by one of seven speakers who warned against excessive bowing to what has been canonized, and against fortresses of disciplinary silos (forms of Big Bad Wolves) that grow naturally out of internal organizational structures whose roots are dense. More fire from blazing new trails might burn away some of that density, however. In some of these silos, opportunities emerge that are labelled opportunities, such as interdisciplinary opportunities that, unfortunately depend on having divisions that a doctrine of silos creates and maintains. What would/could interdisciplinary studies try to merge if there no clear-cut separate disciplinary silos? These divisions are products of fantasies of silos. Remove fantasy barriers, and connections already present might have opportunity to emerge (become visible to those unable ti see them). Disciplinary silos and their resulting assumptions offer but one system of organization of information, but not a system of information organization that information being organized requires. There are other systems. This current approach to interdisciplinarity betrays itself by seeking to join the disciplines, by accepting the appropriateness of these divisions; interdisciplinarity seems to maintain a loyalty to those disciplines, so will form a seam where these junctures occur, a fault line where these interdisciplinary junctures are vulnerable and susceptible to rupture. Rather easy to rip apart or ignore by moving closer to the interior of a discipline rather than remaining on the boundaries where interaction is less easily avoided. Only those hired or assigned to boundary or fringe positions will commit to an interdisciplinary ideology that occupies boundaries and fringes with them. This is not an integrative approach that assumes information is already connected, and that encourages configurations and reconfigurations of these connections. It is not necessary to build an interdisciplinary bridge to link that which is already linked —throughout, not just on the fringes. Such bridges become necessary when disciplinary silos (and factories of disciplinary silos) have been built, and travel from one silo to another is impeded and perhaps even discouraged by the silos themselves and by associated perceived differences that feed a logic of division and separation. Perhaps a role of art-making and the arts can be some dismantling of silos. Perhaps some of a university’s service to imagination can be imagining a university without enforcement of those silos even though Rita Dove in her text poem comments on how erection of (disciplinary) silos does not protect those silos from metaphor, from art-making about the silos themselves; indeed, protection from metaphor fails in the first word, an uncertainty of like, an admitting of doubt, texture of possibility, encouragement of continuing a system of questioning, like what else? and what else? —not in a search for the definitive, but a search for likeness, a study of likeness, a study of an apparent inevitability of likeness should it turn out that there is a like equivalence for anything, for everything, etc.:

Silos

Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky’s
shabby blue, they were always too white and
suddenly there.

They were never fingers, never xylophones, although once
a stranger said they put him in mind of Pan’s pipes
and all the lost songs of Greece. But to the townspeople
they were like cigarettes, the smell chewy and bitter
like a field shorn of milkweed, or beer brewing, or
a fingernail scorched over a flame.

No, no, exclaimed the children. They’re a fresh packet of chalk,
dreading math work.

They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They
were the ribs of the modern world.


____________________________________________________________


Of course, there’s more art-making work that can be done upon investigating particular silos, particular circumstances of geography, climate, economy, etc. From what distance does this consideration of silos occur? As that distance changes, as various climates fluctuate, what can be said about particular silos that accounts for some implications of emerging configurable information? From which angles of consideration, etc. Silo uniformity or something else? Which town? Do sociological implications of silos vary from town to town? Small owner silos versus corporate silos? What of silo shadows? Light-interface silo shadows and economic-interface silo shadows, for instance? What happens to abandoned silos? What are circumstances of abandonment? Etc. Do these tall structures of certain towns scrape the sky well? What about other configurations of scraping sky, urban development, satellites, ozone layer, etc.

The role of art-making and the arts wasn’t configurable in silos of the speakers’ imagination. In those silos that were better entered with compression, not expansion of the mind, in their ability to implement rules of inclusion and exclusion without having to state the rules, I learned that every undergraduate has an opportunity for a meaningful encounter with art at Princeton, the nature of which was not defined, but as it is a meaningful encounter, it could be a singular event

(as opposed to a seeking of a way to integrate that heightened level of perception throughout a life, a student as an integrated person in whom information should mingle anyway, what is encountered across the disciplines converging in a single person, a single life, not a person with silos in the mind to prevent mingling of information from all sources);

a singular event that according to the speaker, exposes non-artist students to that heightened perception artists are known for —heightened perception that non-artist students evidently wouldn't encounter in pursuit of their more practical majors and careers —heightened perception that a meteorologist wouldn’t need, that an archeologist would need, that a scientist (paleontologist/molecular biologist, etc.) studying genetic or evolutionary memory wouldn’t need in turning back on, genes that have gone dormant in an evolutionary journey from dinosaur to chicken, resulting in these rather imaginative living embryonic sculptures of Gallus gallus domesticus with elongated dinosaurian tails, beaks of jurassic-appropriate teeth, and every reason, from a current status of fossil evidence, to keep their feathers.



How much better this work will become once those researchers acquire that heightened perception all undergraduate students will encounter meaningfully at least once: a meaningful encounter. Certainly, nothing in the keynote address precluded undergraduate opportunities for multiple encounters, but heightened perception and heightened sensitivity to how words are used when applied outside of the speaker’s customary academic silo —pictures painted with words, sounds words make in translations from transmission to reception, some of it discordant to some ears, and textures of those translations, for instance— might help the speakers at the event better understand (or be able to notice them at all) rules at work in their configurations of research, art-making, and the arts, configurations they in all likelihood inherited, acquired, learned in institutions similar to the research institutions they now lead; configurations that neither research nor imagination helped them reconfigure into discoveries that are less likely, not impossible, but less likely to occur when art-making and the arts are perceived as that which (only) enriches society while scientific research performs, it is implied, some other role in society, something evidently more quantitatively significant because the research university can extend life-support (implying a need for such support to stave off certain kinds of death of art-making and the arts, or to resuscitate when death is either in progress or has just occurred, research, it is implied, being healthier and in a better position to save; indeed a [presumed superior] intellectual rigor of [scientific] research suggests and supports competency of the research university to save art-making and the arts, something policy-reconfigurations could render moot [rhymes with research loot]).

What was stated was open to these interpretations; configurations of the speakers’ words and ideas did not include limiting factors that could reduce emergence of interpretations such as what this response offers —variables that this response delivers could have been reduced though a revision of phrasing and a revision of thinking that is a parent of that phrasing, thinking also a parent of policy; a failure to anticipate such variables when preparing speeches and the keynote address was just not good science, a form of science, but not a good form —unacceptable is a lack of awareness of where those ideas and configuration of them into utterance was weak, allowing some sentiments expressed to be historical, obsolete or even, worse, irrelevant as they applied to forms of art-making and the arts that are not the exclusive forms practiced —just how much research of art-making and the arts was done by those speaking, those forming the policy behind the role of art-making and the arts in the research university that is in service to the imagination? Why so little imagination in how art-making and the arts and their role was configured? Silo syndrome.

So much stored grain to sustain existing diets with palatable comfort food.


______________________________________________________________________

Image sources:
Dinosaur-Chicken evolution
Gratitude Steel band
SEM of AIDS virus
Touch the Universe
Tree of Life
X-RAY of women's feet


Audio source:
Keep Hope Alive

Video clip source:
Discovery Channel
Nikon Small World Photomicrography

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Dove Fish in Stone Gathering Moss ( a text poam entree system)

LISTEN TO THIS POST:


_____________________________________________________
Dove Fish in Stone Gathering Moss
by Rita Dove
annotated with a text poam that is further annotated by Thylias Moss


(as presented in Minneapolis, Minnesota at a Rain Taxi sponsored celebration at Open Book (dream store-gallery-book-making-workshop) of the Poetry Society of America centennial, another stab at site specificity, to make connections between that fish, that stone and my aunt, another sibling of the six out of nine that died before their mother from a disease I was told was, at the time, European, as if that part of them warred successfully against the native part whose strength went to their appearance; that's why Blain's is in [tenacity of presence] what follows: a text piece (form of poam) of even more limited applicability than usual, specific to, peculiar to an intersection of all that meets, convenes, converges to mark each other with having come together, some of it forced, then diverges, separates without having to reconnect the same way or at all except for how the marking influenced, steered to some degree, that likely won't be known fully, where participants in the collaboration went, some of it to this blog post, more than a year later [particles of it still pulse while blessed apparent simultaneity echoes of a big banging cosmic event still travel in all directions, determined to connect with us].):

Oleta Adams sings Get Here:

FreeVideoCoding.com
(buy at iTunes, Amazon)


Open Book mapped:

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Dove Fish in Stone Gathering Moss

The fish in the stone
would like to fall
back into the sea

one of many puddles,
billions of luminous cosmic pools
can also fail
in their promise of depth

So much longing


so close to the Farm and Fleet's
assortments of toys, home basics, wild bird care,
cherry life savers as a jazzy set of monocles Belvia often held up
making an oasis of her eyes' black centers' surrender to endlessness,
eleven Farm and Fleet opportunities to get to Coon Rapids
and ping-pong all day with Anoka, the landings of her most beautiful days
splashing a genetic puddle full of only near resemblances
flickering on the water's surface as if nothing is more grand
than to sparkle: say oh and ah to brightness
even if just a single megaton bomb exposing its bubbling--pretty near effervescent
--guts: an explosion of newly forming fins, evolutionary artistry since 1955
how true it is that if you can't find it at Blain's Farm & Fleet,
you don't need it, certainly not to shine

—you see above the fish in stone as countertop,

cruelty and kindness of proximity to Kohler styled water that from now on just turns stone more smooth; while I spoke in Minneapolis' Open Book's sea of 2D and 3D print possibilities, nearby in Plymouth, the Green River Stone Company, this image on the left from the web page about them, had already been fishing the shale in a private Wyoming quarry in order to Supply Fossil Fish Murals and Stone Products for Interior Design —Fossil record of evidence of opulence, my onions diced on the complex surface of chances, knife marks and their role models of fossil fin structure make good on parallel worlds. Green River fish in stone escape the wearying analysis to come for the Dove fish (keep reading); these rest pretty
with a hope of mistaken identity as fancy mutant feathers of alternative stone scriptures—


Yes; it could have been routine pistil, stigma, sepal, a week-old petal
mapped with creases of opened origami a net on an Anoka wicker table with Aunt Belvia in cap and gown, highest honors, a picture I could look like,
if drained of just about all my color: I’m Muddy Puddle


[As Walela sings in I Have No Indian Name (buy at iTunes, Amazon), I have no Indian name though I was named by an Indian. There are names for the specifics of my mix, but I don't use them; they don't help me know me better. This I understand (as I did saying this at the Open Book in Minneapolis to celebrate this understanding within a celebration of the Poetry Society of America's centennial): I'm forkergirl of the muddy puddle, the mud and bifurcations helping me slide into and out of a host of inexact translations where sometimes I leave more than I take away, and sometimes take away more than I leave.]



FreeVideoCoding.com

[On the right is an image of a puddle portal in Minneapolis, captured during an exchange between forkergirl of the muddy puddle, light, atmosphere, the amoeba of water (also like the splat of fried-egg-shaped aliens —Denevans— that invaded Mr. Spock who went blind, during the radiation to purge his system of them, until his own alien eyelid raised, taking the blindness with it [mine persists, left eye only —one-eye forkergirl of the muddy puddle ((muddy from a galactic tail being stirred into it before it settles down into a piece of ghetto stained glass.))])



that conceals a mix on an Anoka afternoon, flower drooping
over graduation photo frame like a lamppost trying to inject
its last light into itself leaning against my Coon Rapids aunt's chin's
witness to a fish in stone,
geologic origami folding the planet into a pop-up book:
mountains, silos, and Mount Olympus theme park coasters popping out
like other badly kept secrets of the most powerful trance I know:
Memory
too will granulate, to be flecked and scattered all over the place, universal placement
of constellations, bright enough to fill, but don’t, the universe
of glowing traces of identity my aunt gave to Huntington's,

movement that with enough distance reduces to shimmer:
What every net cast fails to catch.

[The fish] is weary
of analysis, the small
predictable truths

--if only worlds smashed, when a puddle is trampled,
could bleed or trumpet
and not just ripple an attempt to transmit messages
across light years of prairie-flat space

all chokeberried out, replete with Saskatoon berry bushes, needle and thread grass shimmering like fledgling wings experiencing what looks like delight below cascades of brightness rippling over fields as mock swarms of birds changing direction to unheard music, the profound human deafness that confronts most vibration, molecular frenzy deep in the rock stroking the fish, laying down rutted outlines of seismic devotion, held as securely as those in eighteenth century lunatic asylums —what is hungriest there


or just across the reflecting pool on the mall in DC where

He is weary of waiting
in the open,
his profile stamped
by a white light

clean white coats

(image from wikipedia)

In the ocean the silence
moves and moves
and so much is unnecessary!

If we would eat more soup with a fork,
we'd understand that more slips through openings
than tines can, than tines are supposed to retain;
seems we base everything to which we've given a base

on remnants, bits and pieces that shouldn't fit together
because so much is missing;

yet who can deny, lifting the fork
so limited in what it does, sharing limitations of its makers;
who can deny, the fork with its partial catch of fish remnants lifted
toward incandescence and therefore also toward
everything incandescence anoints (we say if we are generous,
anointing things almost desperately, perhaps defending against
there not really being any permanence
or meaning that can come only from that)--

As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly,
you leave marks behind, however small. And in return,
life - and travel - leaves marks on you.
Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful.
Often, though, they hurt

Anthony Bourdain (The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones)


--who can deny those sticky gleaming bits of translucent fish bits
hanging from fork teeth like jellyfish tentacles
or bleached streamers of antler velvet,
or tatters of flags and banners,
anything can be coveted, taken
to a moment when salvage accrues significance,
anything the fork snares and keeps for just a moment
before those particles of splendid incompleteness fall
through the openings into other unseen, unproven opportunities,
perhaps —I hope so— a meaninglessness which might be the only way
to wipe off all pretense once and for all
uncovering

the moment to cast his fork of
skeletal blossom

stretch mark tines of reach
not cluttered with grasp

The fish in the stone
knows to fail is
to do the living
a favor.

He knows why the ant
engineers a gangster's
funeral, garish
and perfectly amber

unrequited request for sainthood, lack of recognition
keeping the amber coffin free of corruption, sacred impossibility,
antiseptic, sacred vacuum


He knows why the scientist
in secret delight
strokes the fern's
voluptuous braille:

Aunt Belvia's eyelids veined with stick figure statues,
stick figure promises of ho-hum basic stop motion animation
making us weep, simple Jesus remnant
resisting an imprint of the penny's Lincoln Memorial
that made me wish, when I saw it with her,
that palaces were necessary

when anything can gleam briefly,
stellar magnitude
fades during every bright moment,
blasts itself away, satisfied
for having known radiance at all

Good-bye Aunt Belvia

resurrected temporarily in even brighter memory

(is this amber a chunk of wayward flame?
at home beside Lichtenberg figures of captured lightning electron paths
failing to find the god particles they are generating
while bifurcating in Lucite into forests,
each branch a mini big bang, group of revivals, more minor resurrections,
relentless risings, a general upness, bipedalism)



oh, ah, ah, ah

then it's over, a finish the ever-luminous
--even just an idea of immortality--
dulls.