VolVox
1.
Each eyeblink a
Magnesium snapshot; each footstep
A dark plaque set in frost:
3am moonwalk in a loosening gravity of Lysergic Acid Diethalymide, the mind’s meniscus
fattening with the light of inquiry.
Soundless
Microbial dot.
Disguised as a full-stop, it hunts.
It punctuates the Cogito Ergo Sum of Descartes the way a landmine punctuates a tank or tracer bullets a bird-of-paradise…
What does Eckhart mean
By the Now of eternity, Dogen by the Iron Bull?
I graffiti its cold ribs with my softening neon crayon, my big, Las Vegas signature!
Who am at root a cuttlefish.
2.
The creature arrested in a block of pearwood!
Mournful eyes locked in a striated armature of muscle, and beseeching, but the woodgrain
undertow still carries him onward.
We pound, flat-palmed, against the hyaloid silence,
Where the underbellies of words
Are revealed to us
In all of their fastidious complexity, autonomous and jewelled;
And it is, of course, possible that people who we could have loved died long before we were born.
Hayflick. Volvox. Empirical punctuation!
The click of our feetbones as we exit across an odourless, primary floor…
And the faint photography of stars,
Like cameras pointing elsewhere.
3.
Champagne evanescence of this world!
Oak trees detonating, civilisations sizzling like spit on a hot sidewalk, the hallucinatory blur of
the accelerated creature, of the experimental apocalypse!
Faster and faster, until what remains
Enters the silence: a bright
roving
dot
Under lenses.
He wakens in a sunlit chair,
A single housefly in frantic worship
At the window.
It flicks through each instant of time
As it intones from the Book of Detritus.
In the vernacular Sermon XII Eckhart says that a fly and an angel have equal status in God.
What are we to make of this assertion?
One senses an event horizon
Beyond which language, born of the meat of this world,
Cannot go.
To breakthrough, just once!
To return, whose shrunken language is the buzz of a housefly.
4.
Refigerated sunlight. The vista
Of years ventilated by a scent of ocean…
Telescopic recollection.
World-textures, magnified.
At the centre of the crosshairs: a boy,
Looseboned, who handles the air-chilled
Shell of a Horseshoe crab
And waves the viewer to ‘come closer, look!’
Shouldn’t one learn to let go, and detach?
Poised soul, of zero adherence
To the things of this world?
Equidistant
Droplet
Reflectant, tranquil.
Miniaturised gargantua, chastened
By a slight
Molecular tension.
‘Peace at the centre…’
5.
[remote toilings of the proton pump…]…
Mitochondrial cristae.
C6H12 O6 + 6O2 + 36 or 38 ADP’s + 36 or 38 p ~ 6CO2 + 6H2O = 36 or 38 ATP’s by which we
are driven forward on the crest of the shockwave!
What is it that lives us?
Epiphany of dog, snarling:
Tooth enamel, iris, under streetlights;
Communique
Of Siskin;
Croquelure of winter trees….specificity dazzling with enhancement, as if sealight was the ground of
being!
Wordless. Agape!
Lacunae
“ “ [“ “]
“ “
quoted by eyeblinks.
6.
Lit, an attic window. Suburbia. And on a formica table in front of him with it’s shallow upglare of chill light, a soul. He teases it apart with meta-linguistic tweazers.
Creation like a wheel of faces! As it says on the wrapper.
But on closer inspection:
· Fairy lights of DNA
· Lab coated test sentences of the Logical Behaviourists, like quality control engineers reporting on a crucifixion
· Substance P, our coarsest wiring
Analogue of the word, toothed
With chromium. Programmed to love, seeking the thing it needs to try to love, it
Advances,
Like a wind-up toy.
7.
Trying to heal the excision layer of his language, unable to grasp the root of himself, he examines, instead, a dried maple leaf:
The spiral staircase of it’s ontology
From it’s quantum shiveriness, up through it’s atoms and polysacharides, to an upraised, palmate gesture of blessing.
Fallen from between the pages of the Book of Job.
There it is.
Singularity at the centre of an accretion disk of language, dark lamp hung in the gateway to the Via Negativa.
Vulva of an ineluctable confounding.
8.
The Law an enigmatic fractal,
It’s judgements recombinant of consequences not intended: behold! My personal freedom, like a
chromosome octopus!
Or the fugal genealogies of fruitflies.
Mister, I know myself to be a better man than how I appear to you in this world, but there’s this difficulty I have in proving that, my sins of ommission like a wall of eyes.
Kissing babies on the Rhineplatz.
Game scenarios of the self.
The monstrous entelechy of grasping,
As if I was Boris Karloff’s shadow.
9.
Focus of mind, tracking
The wandering progress of a little star
A crystal
Of Volvox
Death’s erecting prism.
Together we compose
The eyepiece
And the objective
Of life’s most powerful telescope.
10.
Pressed below each sense
To the hardpacked Ground of Being, I moniter your departure, the diminishing signal of you.
There’s a reason
I’ve come down here to search for you:
Like an American in Prague, a tourist, I leaf through my copy of the Cloud of Unknowing
And ask directions:
Please, sir, what way is the bridge
Over which all things must cross?
I need to wave someone back.
He left the pain on in our house when he left, now we see right through our eyelids.
11.
Querulous perplexity of the self-seeking voice, threading the mirrored intestines of itself!
Like Freud in a beanbag: the fattening analyses;
The mind feeding
On cholesterol echoes…
But whatever it is, an infinite regress of heat signatures in the compound eye of a mosquito, an inchoate bellow for love filtered and analysed by the syntax of a maze, it encounters itself most luminously in tabloid mosaics of shame:
The Iron Bull,
It’s dazzled irises like pink tinfoil
As it clutches the bedclothes to itself
In the mirrored ceiling of a cheap motel room.
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