Reset Forty-One, Day Twenty-Five
Jun. 19th, 2022 05:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rejectomorphSaturday barely remembered, but a few vivid images of pictures I saw and sounds I heard, some sought out, some randomly encountered. I'm sure I slept for a while and ate something, and slipped into worrisome reality from time to time, but always returned to the vague world of imagination. I'm pretty sure reality has gotten awful, but fantasy is thriving, when I can find it, and reality gets kicked aside. Reality would be better if I could write down what I imagine, but the imagined dissolves when I think about it. It seems it used to make its way into words sometimes, but these days it rejects the contact with the mundane. Metaphor, simile, analogy crumble at its touch, as it disintegrates at theirs. There is no interface.
I ought to have learned music. Words are both too solid and too ephemeral. Maybe I could learn to use only their sounds, as Gertrude Stein did, letting meaning fall where it may, or not. No ideas but in things, Williams said. But what if ideas are not what you want? What if ideas are only the residue things leave behind when they pass from reality to illusion? No things but in sensation, no sensation but in desire. But for me the interface is gone, and I'm on the other side of where it was, which I think is where I want to be, where desire is inexplicable. Deliberately courting the place where, Yvor Winters said, madness lies. Mad at last, mad at last. It's about time.
Sunday Verse
by Mark Doty
The jellyfish
float in the bay shallows
like schools of clouds,
a dozen identical — is it right
to call them creatures,
these elaborate sacks
of nothing? All they seem
is shape, and shifting,
and though a whole troop
of undulant cousins
go about their business
within a single wave's span,
every one does something unlike:
this one a balloon
open on both ends
but swollen to its full expanse,
this one a breathing heart,
this a pulsing flower.
This one a rolled condom,
or a plastic purse swallowing itself,
that one a Tiffany shade,
this a troubled parasol.
This submarine opera's
all subterfuge and disguise,
its plot a fabulous tangle
of hiding and recognition:
nothing but trope,
nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,
sheer ectoplasm
recognizable only as the stuff
of metaphor. What can words do
but link what we know
to what we don't,
and so form a shape?
Which shrinks or swells,
configures or collapses, blooms
even as it is described
into some unlikely
marine chiffon:
a gown for Isadora?
Nothing but style.
What binds
one shape to another
also sets them apart
— but what's lovelier
than the shapeshifting
transparence of like and as:
clear, undulant words?
We look at alien grace,
unfettered
by any determined form,
and we say: balloon, flower,
heart, condom, opera,
lampshade, parasol, ballet.
Hear how the mouth,
so full
of longing for the world,
changes its shape?
I ought to have learned music. Words are both too solid and too ephemeral. Maybe I could learn to use only their sounds, as Gertrude Stein did, letting meaning fall where it may, or not. No ideas but in things, Williams said. But what if ideas are not what you want? What if ideas are only the residue things leave behind when they pass from reality to illusion? No things but in sensation, no sensation but in desire. But for me the interface is gone, and I'm on the other side of where it was, which I think is where I want to be, where desire is inexplicable. Deliberately courting the place where, Yvor Winters said, madness lies. Mad at last, mad at last. It's about time.
Sunday Verse
Difference
by Mark Doty
The jellyfish
float in the bay shallows
like schools of clouds,
a dozen identical — is it right
to call them creatures,
these elaborate sacks
of nothing? All they seem
is shape, and shifting,
and though a whole troop
of undulant cousins
go about their business
within a single wave's span,
every one does something unlike:
this one a balloon
open on both ends
but swollen to its full expanse,
this one a breathing heart,
this a pulsing flower.
This one a rolled condom,
or a plastic purse swallowing itself,
that one a Tiffany shade,
this a troubled parasol.
This submarine opera's
all subterfuge and disguise,
its plot a fabulous tangle
of hiding and recognition:
nothing but trope,
nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,
sheer ectoplasm
recognizable only as the stuff
of metaphor. What can words do
but link what we know
to what we don't,
and so form a shape?
Which shrinks or swells,
configures or collapses, blooms
even as it is described
into some unlikely
marine chiffon:
a gown for Isadora?
Nothing but style.
What binds
one shape to another
also sets them apart
— but what's lovelier
than the shapeshifting
transparence of like and as:
clear, undulant words?
We look at alien grace,
unfettered
by any determined form,
and we say: balloon, flower,
heart, condom, opera,
lampshade, parasol, ballet.
Hear how the mouth,
so full
of longing for the world,
changes its shape?
