As The Stone Opens
nepenthe aeon potshot/hotspot
Porous bone unto spontaneous marrow shards a sword from pieces of coruscating gore. How can I be any more affirmative? Oh, did I say gore? - I meant grace.
To live thoroughly, throughly, is to experiment with your life; to test yourself and your principles, your theories, you have to live out your thought, your philosophy, your ethos through the experiment that is your own living - doing - mistaking - correcting… choosing. Not all philosophy is “conduct of life” philosophy (stoics, etc.), yet every thought has its application for the thinker to provide proof through the living of it, the coursing of its blood-relevance through the veins. Experience. Philosophizing is worthless, no glory, doesn’t bleed real substance.
This means, of course, it can all go wrong, that one lifetime chance: no fun to recognize the stakes. Supreme success or failure has nothing to do with “finding your purpose” or the like watery motivational groping for direction or next effective steps, stuff you can easily get elsewhere; here’s for the piercing of that harder nut to crack inside of us, the recalcitrant shell, that crust of the rock, tough luck. Roughed out, what to do with your life, what to do with your time - such becomes your fate.
Thus, The Stone Open. It’s ancient, the idea of one go, this core, geode, proof of concept, where’s crystallization, this is the life you’ve led. Your given. Society these days teaches fear of any loss of options: leaf through a catalogue of possibilities daily, as if that’s as it should be days on end, and then time slips and there’s no shape of the self, only a shadow of selections barely one’s own, smeared contours.
Soapstone, atone, outspans Pantone, nonstop sunspots for soonest sonnets, onuses’ opuses, unspent aptness, sunstone soutanes, no assent onsets, nooses - that’s not a sonnet, pontoons, potent, paeons, setup spouses, a season for taupes, for Aesop, for oases of napes, apses, neons, detentes. Tenets, epees, oust The Poet’s eons and tapes, ententes, peons, aesthetes’ photosets, teethes for the people photons, topstone ethnos, toeshoe, honest settee. Spirited Upspiral Resources. Hones hopes, hoops, topos and tophes, tents and tepees, eons and tones, as to steep - too steep - stent pooh-poohs totes strop.
This is what you get looking inside Studio Magnus in the best/worst of brain times. Hard head, skull thump. Squeeze tears from a stone.
I recurrently think of the title Open Closed Open for a poetry collection by Yehuda Amichai, just as I recurrently think of the title Clearing Without Reversal by Cathy Eisenhower.
Yehuda Amichai of the modern Hebrew vernacular (translated by Chana Block and Chana Kronfeld):
Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That's all we are.
A note on the poem cites a rabbinic telling of how, before birth, the fetus’ mouth is closed and its navel open, then “when it comes forth into the air of the world, what is closed opens and what is open closes.” Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Niddah.
From there, it’s only too easy to fall into Eisenhower of the American assemblages vernacular, for…
alembic of our/ vertigo.
Marks and remarks: the work and doing the work - markings. Action/making. With our broken hands. My crooked, stiffening fingers. Writing manifests as intrinsicality.
The present time for inspiration, what sort of time is this? Summer storm, then the stifling. Asphalt steam. What sort of time is in my brain, the closed world of infinite
spirals through time until I open it out
or it opens out
to what/who/
when
ever comes along
& ever comes along, always
I take a book off the shelf it leads to another book and then I look something up on my phone and one thing leads to another and I have the piece right at the edge of my conception so am led again to another shelf and another book and another look up, another distraction, when even my distractions lead to a next detour, détournement, belabored leisure - hey doll, how can we blow up Barbenheimer? w/ Hiroshima, Mon Amour of course - bedeviled for details, get into the nitty-gritty, my remains of memory beg for back up, click the link, hand me another handbook, another User’s Guide to Detainment, yet even then there remains a need to negate the negation indeed, attainment. Serpent power, Kundalini. Prosody check (and double-check), confirmed: this is not a sonnet. A video game dazzles me back into Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, grasping at the austere perilous meaning of Magister Ludi. Thus also, Michael Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion. One thing leads to another summer reading, beach books or “beach beneath the street” books, Alamut’s allegory of fascism set next to pure hard science scifi Shipstar with its even greater mega-engineering structures following Ringworld, sinuosities, and so by another free associative link in these rattling chains, the magical archaeology of Gordon White’s Star.Ships: a Prehistory of the Spirits unto and out from Göbekli Tepe, another look up, another distraction, megaliths, synapse lapse synapse snap, plus Octavia Butler everything she ever wrote, either into endless distraction, digression or - onwards inwards to
decision. Mark.