Seeking forgiveness I
Thankful I
Ponderous I
No more mere
apparatus
nor I alone
But a verb,
a becoming,
I become
thus and they
projecting
until
from and amid
this way and that
comes a way onward
where before
there was none.
Seeking forgiveness I
Thankful I
Ponderous I
No more mere
apparatus
nor I alone
But a verb,
a becoming,
I become
thus and they
projecting
until
from and amid
this way and that
comes a way onward
where before
there was none.
That is what happens. We time-travel to the present. Author catches up on publishing, begins live correspondence. Akron/Family balloon the belief. “See through strata,” they sing on their 2007 album Love Is Simple. “Go out and love, love, love, / everyone,” goes the chant — so we do. Love is simple with help from friends.
In so doing we find again things to say. Everything exists internally and externally. We are together nightly — in our beds, in dreams so real. And while sitting, meditating, concentrating on breathing: there, too, we meet. The fixated moment opens to flow and transformation. Old forms crumble. Old roles vanish. Mazeways give way to portals and pathways, ways and means.
We arrive to the point of Desire’s conflict with the As-Is. The crux of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Desire imagines through dream and ritual a hyperstition to evade stuckness.
The Traveler claims to have departed the space-time of the dinner party by boarding a vehicle he built in his laboratory. The machine resembles a bicycle. By sitting upon it and manipulating a pair of levers, the Traveler observes his life-world transforming rapidly all around him, the whole flashing as in a sequence of motion studies projected onto a kind of spherical surround. It’s as if the Traveler has drawn around himself a magic circle, like the kind described by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens and Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane. He sees land transformed over hundreds of thousands of years, while he himself sits safely (albeit uncomfortably), within the circle drawn by his machine, occupying a sphere of local, personal, existential time, divorced from the duration of the years passing around him.
Mow the lawn
goes the tune
of much of the afternoon.
And when not mowing,
I’m grading,
eyes roving
toward evening
whereupon,
once arrived,
I watch a show of discovery:
witches
outing and moving out
half-woke
via cauda pavonis—
prima materia transmuted,
person transformed—
grass a kind of catalyst.
What will come of this summer of black lives mattering? Black reading lists are making the rounds, black-led movements are marching and protesting and rioting in the streets; money has been gathered in impressive amounts for black organizations and black-owned businesses. Consider now what comes after. What have we joined? Where are we headed? What comes next? Reality is a bath, a soup shaped by the tug and pull of bodies and forces, large and small. Worlds arise and transform the same way caterpillars transform into butterflies.
Strong is the power of ideology — but we’re changing, we’re slipping out from under the latter’s grip. Dancing in the streets. The tasks ahead seem massive but thrilling. Time to learn how to make of the lawn a garden. Purchase the tools one needs and get to it. Convert this place into a permaculture Oikos, a multiplayer bower of bliss.
As parents, we become, undergo metamorphosis, transform into the worlds of our children. Through our actions, we model better natures, better worlds. Hopes manifest, consciousness redoubles upon species-being — and upon waking, sees before its very eyes a better state. We change by projecting upon the mind’s eye dreams other than those programmed into us by History.
Set-pieces shift, the life-world around one rearranging in turn-based “moves” day by day, until a pathway materializes, the horizon opening to admit a hopeful future. In the meantime, we practice. That is the Way.
I sit beside Sarah at a town pool, the two of us drying in the air after a swim. A small green insect lands on my leg. We consider each other for a few moments, each one absorbing the other’s fear, processing it internally, transmuting it, releasing it back as love. I’m reminded of Maslow’s claim that each of us contains two sets of forces. “One set,” he writes, “clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother’s uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what [one] already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels [us] forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all [one’s] capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that [one] can accept [one’s] deepest, real, unconscious Self” (Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 46). Pool days are delightful. Look at us, sun-soaked, unfolding outward, discovering new capacities, refining old ones, becoming. The metamorphosis has begun.