memory has no memory

 

.

 

Our lives, it seems, are a memory 

we had once in another place. 

Or are they its metaphor? 

The trees, if trees they are, seem the same, 

and the creeks do. 

The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way, 

And the clouds, if clouds they really are, 

still follow us, 

one after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place. 

I wanted the metaphor, if metaphor it is, to remain 

always the same one. 

I wanted the hills to be the same, 

And the rivers too, 

especially the old rivers, 

The French Broad and Little Pigeon, the Holston and Tennessee, 

And me beside them, under the stopped clouds and stopped stars. 

I wanted to walk in that metaphor, 

untouched by time's corruption. 

I wanted the memory adamantine, never-changing. 

I wanted the memory amber, 

and me in it,

A figure among its translucent highlights and swirls, 

Mid-stride in its glittery motions. 

Wanted the memory cloud-sharp and river-sharp, 

My place inside it transfiguring, ever-still, 

no wind and no wave.

But memory has no memory. Or metaphor. 

It moves as it wants to move, 

and never measures the distance. 

People have died of thirst in crossing a memory. 

Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, 

and good for a season. 

The wind blows, the rivers run, and waves come to a head. 

Memory's logo is the abyss, and that’s no metaphor. 

—Charles Wright
Transparencies, Scar Tissue

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The moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. 

Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. 

Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground —intelligible perspective, in a word.


—William James

.

I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.


—Cormac McCarthy

.

a short history of the shadow

.

Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.

A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India

And back - on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on 
                                                                foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645, 
Mountains and deserts, 
In search of the Truth

                    the heart of the heart of Reality,

The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
                                             And he found it.

Wang Wei, on the other hand, 
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River 
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
                                                     and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of his life.
He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
                           in failure, he thought, and suffering.
 

—Charles Wright
A Short History of the Shadow
from Body and Soul II
whiskeyriver

  

.

the invisible next

  

.

She lets the confused stay confused

if that is what they want
and is always available
to those with a passion for the truth.

In the welter of opinions,
she is content with not-knowing.

She makes distinctions
but doesn’t take them seriously.

She sees the world constantly breaking
apart, and stays centered in the whole.

She sees the world endlessly changing
and never wants it to be
different from what it is.

—Chuang-tzu

Stephen Mitchell version

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What we have, and all we will have, is here in the earthly paradise. How to wring music from it, how to squeeze light out of it, is, as it has always been, the only true question. 

I’d say that to love the visible things in the visible world is to love their apokatastatic outline in the invisible next.


—Charles Wright
from an interview by J.D. McClatchy
The Art of Poetry XLI

.

Be mindful of your self-talk.

It is a conversation with the universe.

—David James Lees

.

this is the tale the world tells

 

.

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.  

There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.


—Meister Eckhart

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Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. 

You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you'd been reading.


—Chuck Palahniuk

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The world is a magic book, and we its sentences. 
We read it and read ourselves. 
And never come back, 
Returned to what we once were before we became 
what we are. 

This is the tale the world tells, this is the way it ends.
All my life I've listened for the dark speech of silence, 
And now, every night, 
I hear a slight murmur, a slow rush,
My blood setting out on its long journey beyond the skin. 


—Charles Wright

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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. —Wallace Stevens

 

. 

We recognize things, as in poetry, through resemblances.
Through metaphors. 

This way we gather them into wider systems so that they don’t dangle alone.


—Anna Kamienska

.

When a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.

—Joseph Campbell

Thou Art That

.

 

Our lives, it seems, are a memory 

we had once in another place. 

Or are they its metaphor? 

The trees, if trees they are, seem the same, 

and the creeks do. 

The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way, 

And the clouds, if clouds they really are, 

still follow us, 

One after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place. 

I wanted the metaphor, if metaphor it is, to remain 

always the same one. 

I wanted the hills to be the same, 

And the rivers too, 

especially the old rivers, 

The French Broad and Little Pigeon, the Holston and Tennessee, 

And me beside them, under the stopped clouds and stopped stars. 

I wanted to walk in that metaphor, 

untouched by time's corruption. 

I wanted the memory adamantine, never-changing. 

I wanted the memory amber, 

and me in it,

A figure among its translucent highlights and swirls, 

Mid-stride in its glittery motions. 

Wanted the memory cloud-sharp and river-sharp, 

My place inside it transfiguring, ever-still, 

no wind and no wave.

But memory has no memory. Or metaphor. 

It moves as it wants to move, 

and never measures the distance. 

People have died of thirst in crossing a memory. 

Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, 

and good for a season. 

The wind blows, the rivers run, and waves come to a head. 

Memory's logo is the abyss, and that’s no metaphor. 

—Charles Wright
Transparencies, Scar Tissue

.