NOTES

The thinking that goes in to a poem or that can be awakened as its “further life” —like the fuzzy temporal location of particles in quantum reality—exists more like a cloud than a thing. Do these thoughts precede or succeed their poems? But the poems themselves do not have unique temporal onset: they link on to each other and to the texts and thoughts that environ them, in the problematic temporal topology of textuality itself, appearing after the fact yet in the guise of that which uncovers “meanings” in, of, and from them.

These notes, then, are the “further life,” in my own thinking, of the poems themselves. I certainly could not have produced the thought in the poems before I produced the poems—but the notes show the poems to be the “further life” of texts and thoughts that, in a literally “cymatic” sense, have “influenced” them—i.e., flowed in them, or flowed them in.

theforestforthetrees

Begun in 1982, theforestforthetrees was originally a name for my writing in poetry, but it has since proved to contain photographs, drawings, text-sound texts, sound poems and performances, music, philosophy, and miscellaneous prose. I have also recognized work from before the declaration of “the forest” as belonging to it so that now it is a name for all my “creative” activity.

Most importantly theforestforthetrees was never the name for a “long poem,” but rather comprises the accumulation of unedited writings as they accumulated day by day. Culled collections, edited texts, publications, public and private readings, web-postings, are therefore all “from theforestforthetrees.”

The Hat Rack Tree

My father kept a grand hydrangea bush. It had magnificent floreate plumes in summer, but a scraggly hierarchy of clipped and naked branches out of season. Good for nothing but a rack to hang your hat on, he called the naked bush his “hat rack tree.” Like the skeleton of a way of thought, I thought; a (kabbalistic) tree of life that, seeming to assert nothing, serves as a cognitive scaffold, a schema to hang your images on.

♦

Donnings and doffings of often headless hats haunt the forest. Hats suffer the fates of the identities they betoken and effectuate. A short poem in The Hat Rack Tree reads:

My hat had vanished.

When that cat that
sat up looked straight at it,

that hat had had it.

The cat’s intensity vanquishes the identity that is the target of its massive concentration. I found the following item among forest notes from the early ’80s too late for inclusion in The Hat Rack Tree volume:

The forms
fall off
the hat rack
tree.

The hats
go back
to the sky.

As the poem strikes me now, there is celebration here of a liberative moment, when the fixities of appearance fall away, and the icons of identity levitate, or the principle of structure, imparted by the tree to that which hangs upon it, exchanges secrets with the indeterminate.

The closing and title poem of The Hat Rack Tree turned out to be the first in a series of poems. I repeat its publication here to be true to the sense of that series.

♦

“No wind is the King’s Wind” (page…)

A refrain from Confucius (is it?) in Pound’s Canto whatever, primes for me an open inquiry into contingency, randomicity, spontaneity, and the forces of morphogenesis and order.

♦

The demagogue and technologist would put the wind under his hat; while the magus or the Taoist would ride the wind.

♦

How High the Moon

The reach of mutability is micrological: exactly when in the mind does the next thought arise? Or when will the nucleus of the uranium atom tunnel its next beta particle?

The sublunary world is the world of change, but under the ontological regime that rules the West from late antiquity until—when shall we put it? Copernicus? Edmund Spencer? Yeats? change itself is thought to fall under a rule: a Wheel of Fortune governs life. One never knows when one’s fortune will change or how it will fall; but fortune itself is cyclical, the very paradigm of order. Contemporary “chaos” theory adds only complex ramifications to the paradigm, but the inter-inalienability of aleatory and pattern remains in view.

Against traditional lunar symbolism, this poem wants to know what remains true in mind while momentary thoughts usher in an utterly transitory and unanticipatable world; for the orb of the moon, though subject to change by phases, in its fullness seems also to hold against all change. (See “The Hermit” in this volume.)

In the moment of meditation in March, 1971 when I realized that the context of my spiritual life in fact was Buddhism, I felt with the deepest tentacles of my intellect something like the singular orb of the moon standing alive in empty light, beyond the very cessation of my random ratiocination.

Crow’s Head Run

“the order type of the continuum” (page…)
Also see: “Now I can do anything…” (page…)

The undifferentiated continuum, one might say, is a primordial intuition that suggestively ingresses in many regions of mathematical, physical, mystical, cosmological, and ontological thinking. Parmenides almost says that Being is One Continuum, and it is precisely its undifferentiable character—that it can neither be distinguished from what outside it is NOT it, nor subdivided internally—that his disciple Zeno was paradoxically concerned to articulate in his famous paradoxes. Einstein-Minkowsky Space/Time is the Space-Time Continuum, and it is this characteristic of the theories of relativity that brings them into conflict with Quantum Theory, the latter being essentially a theory of discontinuity. At dispute is whether material reality is modeled by the continuum.

In mathematics, “order type” refers to the hierarchy of infinite magnitudes due to Georg Cantor, the founder of set theory and the originator of the theory of transfinite number. Cantor burned out trying to demonstrate that the “order type” of the continuum is the smallest infinite collection that cannot be put into an order measured by the natural numbers. In the 1960s it was demonstrated that Cantor’s “continuum hypothesis” is arbitrary and that a set theory can be constructed either on its basis or on its contrary. Indeed, one can have different set theories depending on the choice of which infinity, if any, is to be construed as denoting the “power” of the continuum.

The calculus is the study of continua, and, after the work of Dedekind and Cantor, it has the peculiarity of defining the continuum itself in terms of infinite classes of divisions or cuts: each number—rational or real—is a discrete division of the continuum. The question of the continuum hypothesis becomes a question of how many ways the continuum—the undivided and indivisible whole—can be divided! Different answers to this question are the different “order types.” If the continuum itself is subject to arbitrary variation, the application of the calculus to model the physical universe raises the question referred to in my poem.

For me, the paradox of the infinite divisibility of the indivisible profoundly resonates the primordial question at the root of most traditional cosmogonies, gathered by Heidegger in his question about “Ontological Difference” and generalized succinctly by G. Spencer Brown in his Calculus of Indications. How can undifferentiated and indeterminate Being proliferate the multiplicity of articulated beings?

Something From An Outside

There is no single “outside”—only singular outsides—whose incursions within conventional reality are paradoxical, unassimilable; yet the “potential” awakened by their difference from all we take to be real marks the boundary of an “ontological set” and restores a dynamic polarity to apparent being that normality holds in flaccid depotentiation. (See “The Hermit” in this volume.)

The aliens with their almond-eyes, as image, might signal this paradox—the sense of an unwitnessed witness—a consciousness whose ontological dimensions cannot be assessed; whose interactions with us can neither be evaded nor conceptually integrated.

According to John Clarke, for the cosmological poet, the incursion of that which is outside the thralldom or closure of one’s sense of reality—whether the incursion manifests in dream, meditation, or through social or physical encounters—imparts a charge of creative potential. “Manifests of Momentary Incursion” must be stashed away for later expenditure in the poem.

Unless so-anchored in a work, reality is a dubious enchantment—incursion breaks the spell, but does so by delivering the possibility of enchantment renewed or new enchantment. Fearfully, the transformation or re-charging of one’s reality set may appear as a deepening of the reality to which one has always been enthralled. Possibility itself is then but the play of ontological possession—possession by the real or a limited view of the real.

To break the spell, there are Tibetan and other practices requiring long retreats in complete seclusion, silence, and darkness, where awareness finds itself disoriented with respect to night and day, dream and reality, sleep and waking, and the presence and absence of that which appears to appear; for all that appears in the dense vacuity of prolonged optical and auditory deprivation is the creation of one’s somatic life and active mind. As this activity settles into quiescence or reveals aspects of its structure, deep layers of one’s tendencies to form a world arise and dissolve.

It isn’t that we know the statistical character of incursive events: whether they arise from an aleatoric field, proceed along some hidden causal chain, or open fatal intersections between the current narrative of our existence and some transcendent pattern or plan. But at the juncture of their occurrence, they disrupt our ontological order. At the site of disruption, imagination awakens. And what we imagine may conduct a destiny.

The dream in this poem refers to another dream that occurred during such a “dark retreat” in which an identity from another time and life seemed mine, articulating some old familial drama. My father’s “blood line” was implicated in a “cult” that was a certain “song”: its singers or pop fans belonged to it, and the song sang itself to be “the essence of love.” This cult had an enemy, and I was to understand that my identity—the deep structure of its boundaries, its conflicts—was shaped by the saga of its cultic struggles.

From Mimir’s Head

The title for this section and for this compilation as a whole is taken from a poem by Gerrit Lansing. The poem is “The End of Nature in This World,” from his Heavenly Tree / Soluble Forest. The relevant lines are:

boiling from the spring,
black, spew of Mimir’s head,
murderous astringency

referring perhaps to the alchemical Nigredo—the wrathful, blackening of alchemical matter, from which all possibilities are germinate.

In the mythology of Northern Europe, Mimir was the severed head of an exceedingly wise being among the Frost Giants, associated with the Aesirs. Mimir was exchanged as a forfeit in the primordial conflict between the two groups of gods, the Aesirs and the Vanirs. When the truce was broken, the Vanirs slew Mimir, but his head was embalmed and magically kept awake. In this state he continued to function as a counselor to Odin, the god of magic. What issues from him is, I say, Possibility itself, articulated as prophetic and poetic utterance.

In other aspects of the myth, Mimir dwelled at the foot of Yggdrasill, the World or Axis Tree, near a miraculous spring, so Yggdrasil is also known as the Tree of Mimi, or Mimir.

One might well think of a severed head as a disembodied intellect—an icon for the mind’s loss of its somatic roots and chthonic powers. But Mimir’s head is elemental earth and water. Though the subject of primal war and conflict among archetypal potencies, it shows the mind/head as embodied even so. An intelligence that will not be struck from its corporeal context in spite of violent contingency, it sings of possibility imbuing the actual.

The Ogdoad

In Helenistic gnosis, there is an “eighth sphere” or “Ogdoad” beyond the seven associated with the astrologically efficient planets. Having thrown off the domination exerted by the characteristics of these seven spheres, one enters the Ogdoad, the zone proper to oneself; from there the gnostic launches an ascent to deification and final union with Primordial Mind. The poem was written as a sort of “footnote” to my translation of “The Poimandres” from the Corpus Hermeticum.

The Sampo

A “Sampo” in the Kalevala is a “world frame.” My poem works a multi-cultural myth developed by John Clarke in one of the great works of advanced mythopoetic imagination of the century just gone by, From Feathers to Iron. [Tombouctou / Convivio, 1987, Bolinas]. Clarke’s book is an edited transcription of a series of lectures (with questions from the audience), richly annotated by Clarke himself. Clarke thinks, here, of the poet’s work in this way:

Clarke: You make a replica of what the Kalevala calls a “Sampo.” The problem, cosmologically, is that a given Sampo runs down, which you know from the story of Sampson in Judges, under the image of his hair being cut and his subsequent loss of strength…. in time he regains his strength and pulls down the pillars of the old world frame.

Audience: What’s a Sampo?

Clarke: Hamlet’s Mill [Georgio di Santillano] “the setting and the scansion of time.” Going back to the original idea of the Flood, you find that the Deluge isn’t in the literal meaning of a flood, but is an inundation of a world frame, “water” having to do with the currents of time and so forth. All of a sudden you can see the kind of move the pre-Socratics were attempting to make on Hesiod and Homer: how posit the cosmological ground of mythology so it doesn’t simply refer back to a lost Sampo?
The Kalevala poets say that once a given Sampo runs down the only thing to do is make it into a harp, string it and sing songs of sadness at its passing and songs of joy heralding the new: a double-voiced song that looks equally both ways, like Janus.

The Sampo is apparently a mill, the axel of whose mill wheel is the World Axis of Northern European poetry and associated with Yggdrasill. A note to the above text quotes Hamlet’s Mill (pp. 217-218), in which this mythologem is linked to several others from different ethnic sources:

Proceeding with the labour of felling the miraculous tree, he [the hero Sigu] discovered that the stump was hollow and full of water…. The water in the cavity, being connected with the great reservoir somewhere in the bowels of the earth, began to overflow; and to arrest the rising flood Sigu covered the stump with a closely woven basket.

The hero of this tale of the Ackawois of British Guiana has (as Prometheus, Pandora) an earthly counterpart, a “brown monkey,” whose

curiosity being aroused by the sight of the basket turned upside down …imagined that it must conceal something good to eat. So he cautiously lifted it and peeped beneath, and out poured the flood.

Something nervous at the tend of the line…

Before the current diaspora of Tibetan teachings and the opening of their secrets to all who wish to know them, the practice kept most secret and regarded with most awe, if consummated, yielded visions of a chain or string of visually accessible spherettes, containing all the possibilities of experience itself. I image these here as a sequentially realized combinatorial matrix, the apprehension of which unblocks an ultimate concern that percolates beyond/within them.

Like pure Parmenidean Being that can neither be experienced phenomenally nor differentiated conceptually, yet adheres like a resin to all that comes to apparency or comes to mind—the enlightened function in the Dzogpa Chenpo tradition in Tibetan Bonpo and Nyingmapa Buddhism outrides the experiences that issue from it. A certain Master, when asked about his experience of enlightenment, pointedly remarked, “I experience nothing.”

The term for this enlightened function is frequently translated as “presence” or “presence in the instant,” but its work beyond the phenomenal and the conceptual surely suggests a sense of “presence” not clearly folded in the closure of the “metaphysics of presence” so copiously deconstructed in recent philosophy. In fact “presence” here is neither a subject constituted by and correlated with what can become present to it, nor any sort of object that might be so presented. Rather it would be that for which what comes to presence might do so, but which is not limited either by what presences or its presencing.

Canto

I have a project in photography concerned with various registrations of light on water. If I ever have the money, I will reproduce a series of these images in a further edition of this book. The photographs belong to the same “region” of the “forest” as this group of poems; they were made during the same years, and often at the sites at which any number of the poems were composed—Heart Lake, Harris Lake, and Newcomb Lake in the Adirondacks, various streams in the Catskills; and they issued from states of meditation that they were in fact the extensions of.

My practice was to sit by the side of the water for some time, and, guided by the altered time sense and body sense the meditation opened, set up to photograph the water surface, the fleeting luminous phenomena occurring on it, and whatever objects—mostly stones and leaves—were apparent to the camera lenses through it. The photographic images do seem, as I say, to be the extension of the meditation itself, uncannily suggesting a luminous sentience inhabiting the interior of the body—a world of liquid functions, transposing and registering transitory beings of palpable light.

Recently I read of developments in the physiology of somatic energy wherein the propagation of waves of internal sentience happens as luminous piezoelectric currents along the liquid crystal surface of the fascia—the sheet of connective tissue enfolding all muscles, tendons, organs, and linking the grosser movements of the body to the intricate webwork of tissue and cell.

Phenomenal mind might be an exfoliation of inner light on inner water; a webwork sensitive to our most intimate concerns; and when those concerns in practiced meditation “field” questions of the intimate character of being itself as it unfolds in embodied thought—well, just so.

The Tower

In the Western esoteric system I studied in the early 1960s, the Tarot card called “The Lightning Struck Tower” symbolically encodes the following symbolic nexus: The Tower, built of discrete building blocks, is both the human body with its cellular construction, and human language with its phonemes, morphemes, parts of speech etc. As the body encodes its own genealogy within its cells, language introjects the social origin of thought through the common nature of linguistic convention and meaning. Language is thus complexly inextricable from embodiment.

In the tradition, the human being inhabits this language/body as a dyadic principle of sentience and energy, a male/female dyad, and comes to build its own body-tower through accumulating self-cognition as mediated by the language at its disposal. In the end one comes to live within the prison-tower of embodied language as trapped energy and conditioned consciousness. But affinity with energy promises release in the form of adventitious dynamic incursions: bolts from the blue—lightning striking, tossing the little people from the tower top, liberating energy and mind.

In The Hat Rack Tree a poem called “The Tower” celebrated this myth of cosmically sourced, salutary, if violent eviction. The Tower, here, suggests an inversion of this process.

Extra Notes On The Poetics of The Possible

Gotlob Frege says somewhere that even the most assertive of poems actually asserts nothing. Its formulations may be extracted to express assertions, but that is a different matter. This may seem to enervate the ontological relevance of poetry, yet poetry harbors the possible by being the modality of utterance in which being is suspended just where it appears to be asserted.

♦

Nothing is so, in a final sense, as uttered; but the need to utter our take on what is so is inalienable—we do it all the time in our gestures, our cogitations, our idle talk, the negotiation of our relationships, our dreams. Either all such activity is futile and enclosed within a nature whose reality is forever alien from its motivating desire—or in this very inalienableness, the well-nigh continuous emission of ontological assertiveness nests an authentic link onto being: not that our assertions are true—but that in the actuality of our need to utter them there is an adhesion in/to being that we glance over in our haste to complete our gesture or our discourse.

♦

The philosopher should be discouraged in his metaphysical pretension, but the metaphysician encouraged in his poetic need.

♦

No assertion is uniquely true, but all modalities of assertion link onto truth. In this, poetry, music, theology, speculative philosophy, scientific theory, and deconstructive discourse are in the same boat. Their claims to truth rest on something in their processes that runs on authentic concern. They betray this concern when the need for finality, certainty, authority, or probity overrides their impulse.

♦

Rhyme is speculative analogy—rhyme, that is, in the sense of heard equivalence—wherever it occurs.

A rhyme is a speculation on an identity: a connection is proffered, not asserted. If the conceptual analogy is uncovered by further reflection, this reflection in any case belongs to the mind of the reader. If the analogy is felt nevertheless to be essential to the poem, then it must be said that the reader’s subsequent reflection is essential to it too.

Science wishes its analogies to be taken seriously, not speculatively. And scientific thought abounds in analogy. Physics strives to unify diverse phenomena through the articulation of universal laws. Particularly the new sciences of complexity and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics discover abundant analogies between diverse scales and domains of phenomena. But the bases of such analogies are simply the mathematical structures elicited to describe the phenomena; and if we reflect upon the ontological status of these mathematical descriptions, we find that any determination of such status is in fact speculative, so that the strong contrast between speculative and positive analogy breaks down. Scientific analogy turns out to be rhyme too.

The Hermit

The “outside” appears within a ring or rim of fire. It is a flaming portal or porthole through which I am granted momentary access to what does not originate in me or in my time. Breathing seems to stop for a moment, but no, it has not stopped. There it is again; a surge of time has arisen and vanished there where I thought that time itself had ceased to be. Time is both strangely intimate and alien. Inalienable. The engine that drives the core.

The continuity of (in)alien time does not conduct a passage from this moment to that. At every point there is a new, and newly alien, origin of temporal motion. All that would conduct consciousness along a path lies outside the ring: it has already been assimilated to my own projection, fixed even in its seemingly fluid transiency as a factor in the composition of my world. Inside the ring, time has no such program. It will not contribute to a worldly or personal trajectory. The outside (inside) is neither physical externality, nor the impersonal webnet of structural relations. It is the transcendence itself.

From the rim: gaze back upon memory, experience, knowledge, thought, existence. The labyrinthine passageways. Or imagine a figure for whom access to the rim is constant. The poem reads such a figure in the alchemical Artifex and the Hermit of the esoteric tarot. The Lantern Man.

Significant images emerge for poetry neither from within or without the rim, but rather from the occasion of its proximity. No image captures this situation, of course, yet momentary contact, momentary access, momentary incursion, occurs, giving rise to a site where the unimaginable delivers itself up to transitory imaging.

An image seized from the transitory is a perilous thing: it charges itself with an infinite potentiation. It distributes and concentrates power. To retain its charge, it must seal the breach from whose proximity it receives its potency.

No matter. The breach will open again. Time will recommence. The frozen image will dissipate in the event of its own renewal.

Point of Names

I was not consciously exercised by the coming of the new millennium. Therefore it surprised me when this clutch of apocalyptic celebrations presented themselves in the months immediately following Jan 1, 2000. They assimilate fragments of contemporary late-night, ecstatic/paranoiac radio occultism, to which I attribute nothing but what is reflected in these poems.

If we are to enjoin a witch-hunt against all fundamentalisms, we must certainly smoke out the occultists and esotericists when, contrary to their own richest possibilities and the extravagant cognitive permission which they enjoy, they close themselves up in exclusivities and positivities, among which I might list: the literal and exclusive commitment to particular systems of correspondence; too explicitly realized data for the dates of events in Atlantaean history; certainties about the inhabitants of Sirius, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, the invisible 10th (or 12th) solar planet, and God help us, Mars. But mythologies adhered to and expressed with rigor afford a certain stimulus to the imaginal faculty when accompanied by appealing ethical generalities or instructions in contemplative technologies.

Such was the case with a certain esoteric system, in connection with which a bit of writerly drudge work fell my way early in the year 2000, which explains the content of “Pineal Matters,” the untitled poem beginning “and sat down” And “Set Speaks.”

I am constrained not to disclose the specific system in question, but suffice it to say that I ghost wrote a small volume of cosmic history and this supplied me with the data and moral expectation in these three pieces.

The Point in It

The Zohar speaks of the first gesture of ontological emergence as a point, but a point brings along with it the space in which it is inscribed, so the final determination of this initial rupture with the unmanifest, even though it does not in itself go even as far as prescribing a first distinction, nevertheless calls forth from an indeterminate futurity, all possible dimension.

The point surrounded itself with a palace. It filled the palace with light, the Zohar says. But one can see the luminous emanation from a point as a sphere or tigle, in fact the primal tigle, tigle chenpo: the unexceeded spherical; and that the sphere is a sphere in infinite dimensions; and that, as I say, it is co-original with its point. There is both process and preformation here. Expansion without exhaustion, continuous effluence, but also timeless figuration. Continuum. All the numbers called in one. All the colors in a single hew. All the sounds called back beforehand to the first instant (instance) of vocalization.

Thus the eternal freshness of any dawn whatever. As if the entire itinerary of the diurnal circuit were not infinitely prescribed. What is a circle anyway, that he should follow her? Our physicists and our geometers, I fear, have neglected this question.

Pineal Matters

I’m not sure when the pineal body became the focus of esoteric intervention—whether Descartes’ belief that it is the seat of consciousness started the business, or whether knowledge of its spiritual function arises more deeply ensconced in traditionary gnosis or speculation. But by the time I was a student of occultism in the early 1960s, it was “common knowledge” that spiritual awakening and, particularly, the “opening of the third eye” depended upon the pineal gland’s recovery of its dormant powers. Until recent times, exoteric medicine found no use for the thing.

The Five Names

Bad enough that Being assumes the name “Being” (or that “Being” assumes that Being has a name) : the name “Being” is surely one name too many, though, on second thought, it is perhaps the only name about which this can be said.

Here, five names appear—a desperate proliferation. Better go all the way and name all things.

There are presentations of the Kabbalah where the soul has five names, betokening a stacked hierarchy, ascending from somatic elements to a soul root in the folds, processes, and (dis)figurations of the Godhead—snakes and breaths and lights; garments, palaces, nations: transparitions of images. The five names are coupled with the earth, the moon, the sun, the Merkabah Chariot, the Primal Point. Their Hebrew names are Nephesh, Neshamah, Ruach, Chai, and Yechidah. In this poem, the Zoharic imagery for these stages is side-stepped or side-swiped, and a parallel quincunx is allowed to appear.