“Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“If you lived here you would be home by now.”
Sign on an apartment complex in Columbus, Ohio
I.
If only.
If only we lived here,
If only earth was home.
If only we cultivated home bound intimacies with place.
If only we knelt down before the miracle of amino acids.
If only we praised our clay white bones.
If only we built temples on banks of blood rivers.
If only we heard the imp of life singing:
“There’s No Place Like Home”
in the echo chambers of the heart,
we would have no need to come home.
We would be present.
Earth would be accounted for.
II.
How did we get gone,
absent without leave,
missing in action,
metaphysically homesick?
Estranged at birth from mother earth?
A plague of distance,
here superseded by there,
incessant replacement
of near with far.
III.
This world is not my home I’m just a passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.
Jim Reeves
The body snatchers have come,
by gum, have come, by gum,
have come, by gum,
the body snatchers have come,
by gum, and carried us away,
hooray, and carried us away.
Eyes
distracted by a theory of
seeing.
Ears
distracted by a theory of
hearing.
Can the flagrant physical be forgiven
for the sin of being tangible, palpable,
brazen as taste, sound, and smell,
more real than the artifice of heaven and hell?
Jesus, the Buddha,
and Jim Reeves knew
we are just passing through.
The body snatchers have come,
by gum, have come, by gum,
have come, by gum,
the body snatchers have come,
by gum, and carried us away,
hooray, and carried us away.
“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”
James Joyce, Dubliners,
A Painful Case
IV.
A Litany on the Manipulative Power of Tools
Can we stand up to all we can do
with all we have invented?
Lord, protect us from becoming the fools of our tools.
Stand up can we to all we can do
with all we have invented?
Lord, protect us from becoming the fools of our tools.
Up can we stand to all we can do
with all we have invented?
Lord, protect us from becoming the fools of our tools?
With all we can do, can we stand up
to all we have invented?
Lord, protect us from becoming the fools of our tools.
With all we have invented,
can we stand up to all we can do?
Lord, forgive us for becoming the fools of tools,
almost and always, end without world. Amen.
V.
Our heads clouded by caveman Plato’s
dreams of distant incorporeal superlatives,
mere shadows cast on a cavern wall.
Aloof from the present this,
we are promised a superior that,
a heaven worth waiting for.
We look through heaven’s gate,
for signs of life,
for clues that we might use
when we rightly learn to distrust
our presence in this fraught wrought world.
With lists and catalogs of categories
we hold the world at bay.
We name a flower: ROSE.
We classify a tree: PINE.
We name the seven dwarfs,
the seven continents and
their seven concomitant seas,
the five lakes that are great,
and thousands not so great,
a million ordinary average lakes,
each nouned with a name.
What would we know
if we didn’t know names?
VI.
I wake a.m. six up without words,
no tags, no titles, no terms.
I touch the wordless world touching me
until the magic hour when languid language
catches up with the revolving daylight hours
and dresses everything in a veneer of labels,
the indispensable dictionary of stickers,
codes, and algorithms operating my day.
The immediate is defeated.
The intermediate reigns.
What would we know
if we knew not a thing?
VII.
“Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word
resound through the common word.”
Gerhardt Hauptmann
This poem is a thing,
it is crafted and made,
an ink on paper noun.
an object, an item.
The words punching
through the page
are themselves things,
the sounds they make
with brisk consonants
languid vowels
are things, what they mean
are things revealing thought.
Words hit hard to open our attention.
VIII.
Our body is not in space like things.
It applies itself to space like a hand
to an instrument.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I compose a surrealistic poem from
the convolutions of a conch shell,
the warmth of a lately held doorknob,
the livid heat of a drift wood flame,
a pilot light burning ready to ignite,
t.v. commercials I sew into a quilt
with midweek camel Wednesdays,
and kings serving burgers and fries.
Working while walking I transform
a backfiring dump truck into a robin song.
I am fondled by grass, caressed by a cricket,
massaged by a churning cement mixer.
Dog dung morphs into symbol on my wingtip shoe.
I articulate Romaine lettuce, extol radishes,
try to work in my neighbor’s lingerie hanging
on her backyard clothesline without offending.
My mind scurries from Eros to Jesus to Marx.
Maidenform becomes a socio-economic emblem
for Wall Street’s goal of forming maidens
into commodities wanted by women and men.
At night my fingers are excited to play
a reinterpretation of my Stravinskyesque day,
to know the world without the help of light,
to touch a dark way toward knowledge.
Assuming the horizontal plane of the horizon
just beyond the limits of my suburban town,
I slip into my skull’s grotto where night things
live mostly holy and unknown.
They come as desperate disappointed angels
sent to scare me back to life:
Don’t gaze so high you
miss the feel of earth.
IX.
How can we continue to be at once astonished
at the world and yet be at home in it?
G.. K. Chesterton
Can we fix the fix we’re in,
escape the invisible bubble
of our world-defying
world-defining mind?
Definitely definitely not.
I object to objects being drained
of infinitude.
The mind relaxing alert,
rehearses reversals,
flipping our understanding
of our standing in the world.
two faces
or
a candlestick
an optical illusion
believed to be real.
We live on August Ferdinand Möbius’
inner/outer convoluted outside inside strip.
X.
‘the inexhaustible perceptual plenitude’
Ted Toadvine
It has been said in days of old:
“Home is where the heart is.”
Now I say:
“Home is where the sensations are.”
the oscillating mosaic of sensations
sightsoundsmelltexturetaste
tastetexturesmellsoundsight
we weave into the warp and weft of our world.
XI.
We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring will
be to arrive where we started and
know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
This late in the day,
can we make ourselves at home,
look through the patina of designations
which furnish and finish
-our hike through the forest,
-our ramble on the beach,
-our walk down the street?
Can we bore down through dense
layers of mythistorima*
into the echo of the primal word?
Let us put imperceptible systems in their place.
Let us make plain the techniques and technologies we use
to manhandle the world for what they are.
Let us puncture, pierce, penetrate
the dense clouds of knowing until
we arrive at the primal unknown,
our original being at home.
_____________________________________________________________________________
James Joyce (1882-1941) Irish short-story writer and novelist most famous for his novel Ulysses.
Jim Reeves (1923-1964) a country and pop singer-songwriter.
mythistorima – a word combining a sense of myth, history, and story coined by George Seferis (1900-1971) Greek poet and Nobel Laurette (1963).
August Ferdinand Möbius – (1790-1868) discovered the Möbius strip, a single-sided loop.
G. K. Chesterton – (1874-1936) English Christian writer and apologist
Ted Toadvine, a philosophy professor at Penn State University who works in the area of phenomenology and ecology.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) French philosopher whose book The Primacy of Perception
advanced the practice of phenomenology, a method for recognizing how we experience the world.
Gerhardt Hauptmann – (1862-1946) a German dramatist and novelist
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) Anglo-American poet and Nobel Laurette (1948)
A study guide for this poem will be published soon