Dear Reader
Interchange of Matter & Essence
Dear Reader,
My last post went out without the intended introductory message. That was a glitch. “If the Poetic…”, from 2021, was one of the earliest entries of P,T,WM; then, as now — as ever — what’s beyond us confronts us.
I intended an acknowledgement of the re-send, with no little marveling at (echoing) continuities. The glitch I blame on some technical issues with Substack; “glitch” itself is a word with a mechanical ting to it, so I looked up its etymology. From the Yiddish glitsh, “a slip” — back to the 15th-century German glitschen, “to slip, to slide” — glitch became broadcast American English in the 1940’s, technical jargon among radio and television engineers, popularized by the 60’s thanks to the U.S. space program (and John Glenn in particular, “literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit…”).1
Ring of the technical, grind of the mechanical screech in that clang and glitchiness of the word itself, onomatopoeia of glitching out; even so, how very human! To malfunction. Did you know some tribes can hear the stars? I wouldn’t know that myself were it not for some meme I came across last week. Everything’s getting in the way. Lightning strike, electrical sizzle. Massive blackout. Reechoing of stars so smooth, cosmic music elates the stricken journeyer; but no peace, for suddenly then something impure — dinny, tinny — jars.
I’m urgent, seeking for a resonant, sound purity. Inevitably, slippage intervenes. A slip up, a gliding, sliding something something into something else, what is it that blocks?
Dear Reader, I’m here, where are you? Glitch in the matrix indeed. I’m talking about the space or time or plane we’re in together. Reader and writer. Creators, together. (To write is to create, to read is to create, if you’re reading right.)
Or not really. It’s beyond each of us. Or, what’s beyond us confronts us, wherever we are, whatever “this” space is. That’s the glitch. That’s the slippage.
Dear Reader, can you meet me where I am, can I meet you where you are? To read is to meet and especially if there’s meat there, there’s possibility of meeting, breaking bread. Figuratively, if the meat of the matter is there, communion is at hand. Flesh and blood etherealized, realized. Am I asking something from you? Or, am I giving something to you?
Or, is the reading a separate piece of the integral unity that is purity of utterance? A separate peace: for argument, for agreement, for consensual reality, towards truth.
“we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.” —Henry David Thoreau2
What sort of communication is this, reading and writing? How do we rely on each other without knowing each other? There are characters, fictional characters who come alive on the page, and there are characters’ voices, and narrators’ voices, the writer’s voice, Voice itself (charged with the character of the writer), all of which sound with present reality, however long ago etched into language form. Flattery gets you everywhere for audience-building, yet maybe truth and substance of what’s there will be appreciated as of more lasting value: “make sense who may” (Beckett)3. How much do we really need each other? Something exists outside of our communication. Something is beyond us. Beyond reader and writer; maybe we’d say it’s the text, but that’s getting old already (20th century theory), when 21st century threats have me here insisting upon human sensing still of spirit in the letter, ghost in the machine — ironically. Liveness is irrepressible. Vigor, vitality; these are renewable energies, to be valued anew. As with some of the tv shows and movies streaming out there, we’ll side with the robots if they’re more feeling (human) than our psychopaths. What is life irrespective of communication, of contact? What is the text, non-relatively speaking? Leave it on the page, leave it on the screen. Let it wait. Awaiting what? If I’m unsatisfied, I expect you might be too, unless you’ve never had your appetite truly whetted by writing, by the poetic.
& that’s still not it. I want to know why and how (even as I know these beyond doubt without knowing why and how) the following are certitudes: AI will never render Heraclitus obsolete, Rimbaud’s gnawing the rifle-butts of his executioners are an ultimate act of freedom even as rumor has it he got into more sordid business than poetry in later life, suppressed Soviet forms-instigators — like Kharms, Mandelstam (Osip and Nadezhda both), Akhmatova — forever put Stalin to shame, and even if Trump has undeniably left his shit stains on history, he’s not Great, he doesn’t know the meaning of the word, nothing of the quality of greatness adheres to him.
The artistic work finds or creates its own space. Another enters that space. If the space is limned by writing, to enter that space is reading.
Dear Reader, much is up to you to decide the matter. Beyond the materiality of language, and so long as line and sentence and word are what they are, yours is the tending towards, tending to whatever slippage there is in the diction, gist.
Everything is amazing in the in-between: writer and reader, you and me, silence and utterance, letter and spirit of the text, matter and essence. In-between, beyond, behind, up-down one-and-the-same, same river different waters, unity and flux, poetry and thought, Magick. The In-Between: where to dwell for poetry, for thought, for uprising.
Uprising Upspiraling Spirited interchangeability: Matter and Essence
Cogito? Okay! I think. You read.
You read, therefore you are — to me. To you, you read — therefore I am… or at least, I might be. On both sides, some liminal existence, the reality of it only imagined.
& still beside the point, because neither of us really wants to live our Being in the Other, even with or for each other.
Dear Reader, if I’ve written to you before — as Dear Reader — regarding how much I want the reader to give to the writing, regarding as well how much ascertainment seems to me to be needed in our time in order to sort life from mechanism (is there a pulse, does the text throb, is there blood, is it bloodwrought?), I write now towards what is flesh and blood in you, towards your own lifeblood of thought, your own thinking and being true.
thought, Mind moves forward amidst relentless slippage Pausing. poetry, empty/full, empty/full, gauze. Pausing, Advancing, ripped into candor, freely. Action, but action as ascension all due dust, mud, humility of tripping Activation of the Divine Fool Archetype As Henry Miller said, "A clown is a poet in action." mime of language As Henry Miller thought, "A Buffoon's Ascension." word magick: torn candor autonomy. Smile.
Poetry incants Thought, Thought incants Poetry
Enchantment: Word Magick
Reading-Activation => Magick
As a reader, you might discover a piece of writing, a helical strand, basis of future culture; as a reader, you might activate that genetic code, drive evolutionary next steps — at this juncture, humanity’s survival in mind.
It is up to the reader to face the work, to face the task, the definitively human task. Dare to read the universe and the void, their on-off interchange, their shimmering.
extract that strand of universality, helix of global culture for charms and elixirs
The Art of Reading must evolve beyond reading words; read Minds. Read for minds: the mind of humans, the mind of God, the collective — all that — organic whole, techno-whole — but beyond crunched algorithmic totalizing of what’s already done, beyond pattern recognition of the already given; read Logos, read the language of the universe, of the infinite and the eternal, into what’s Open.
According to etymonline.com, with the Glenn quote from Into Orbit by the Mercury 7 (1962).
Walden, “Chapter III: Reading”
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