Sunday, February 5, 2012

Roberto Harrison, "Snake Vision: A Poetics"

Listening to and understanding the birds

Learning to breathe from the horses (after walking twelve miles barefoot)

Learning from the weather

To learn from Saint Francis of Assisi as Hardt/Negri discuss him, the new revolutionary, and to come to terms with their “multitude” … the basics of knowing animals and how that might have political/spiritual implications—not overtly political, from this angle? Sometimes, but from the other side—the many animals of my life (220 rabbits… snakes… 7 lovebirds… many others)—animals need us to speak softly to them—snakes make circles, rabbits make cylindrical tunnels

Talking from the other side of the word

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The cockroach has an evenly distributed nervous system. One can crush its head and it will walk away, decentralized nervous system > decentralized poetics—no need for centers of power? no reason for centralized understanding of a give poem? web—noosphere—supermind?

Seeing all the ancient animals returning

People take on a multitude of faces—many are ancient Indian heros/heroines returning in the final days (for a moment).

If, as Pound says, all ages are contemporaneous, I conclude that all worlds are coexistent here as well

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MOLA—fabric art done by the Kuna Indians of Panamá, usually made in pairs as the Kuna believe everything arrives in the world in pairs—I am unknown to the Kuna but aim to help them, as I was raised with many of their Molas on the walls of our home—cloud systems transporting the souls from below the line to here—making signs for them (and all, from all of Latin America) to arrive. They will arrive who are not us.—signs are everywhere—Burroughs—“READ THE SINGS.” a hyper overflowing of meaning—learning to swim through that—MOLAS becoming to me what the Chinese ideogram was to Pound (vibration—to lead back to Sri Aurobindo, red and black sound and vulnerability—to lead back to Lorca’s black sound,… animals, duality, MOLAS always there)

I’ve heard of a National Geographic article which discusses a strong sense of ESP among the Kuna

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Lezama Lima’s image—cosmic writer of place—symbolizing grammatically—baroquely—unify—mestizaje—“The knowledge that is not ours and the not knowing that is ours form for me true knowledge.”—“The penetration of the image into nature engenders supernature.”—“I attain the tetractis, the number four, God.”—“The image is the reality of the invisible world.”—“Poetry… is the image attained by the man of resurrection.”—“I try in my system to destroy Aristotelian causality by seeking a poetic state of unconditionality”—“… the poetry of a return to magic spells, to rituals, to the living ceremony of primitive man.”

Vallejo and his indianness and solitude—again, mestizaje—silence—numbers—compassion—emotion—“the whole song/squared by three silences”—“And don’t strike 0, which will be so still/until it wakes the 1 and makes it stand”—“a trine between the two”—“Armor-plate this equator, Moon.”—“it ends up being all numbers,/the whole of life”—“in the insane search/for the known one”—“Make way for the new odd number/pregnant with orphanhood!”—“doubt your excrement a few seconds”—“There is a place that I myself know/in this world, no less,/we will never reach”—“But the place that I myself know,/in this world, no less,/sought pace with its opposites.”—“My eternity has died and I am waking it.”

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Laura Riding’s truth (both near and far)

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I am the snake
I wander
through the corn fields
of your mind

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