Saturday, October 13, 2007

Room 75A

e y e


eye is seeing and being

eye is blue brown or grey

eye is black or other

eye is

eye is eye

eye is lustrous or strange of colour

eye is light on eyelight scrawled

eye is hope

eye is desire and sigh

eye is see

eye is of the ineluctable

eye is trust and fear

eye is water and dust

eye is love

eye is blankness and delight

eye is people is peopled

eye is pop

eye is delight of bird

eye is horror of wound

eye is I saw gull with one leg severed

eye is sad and later and after forgets

eye is seeing and hoping

eye is deceiving

eye is sweet descent and great descant

eye is concise as lines

eye is eternal thought

eye is rock and ash and blood

eye is pity or is harsh of heart

eye is son and song

eye is child and sweet

eye is thought

eye is

eye is death and the way

eye is love and luminous

eye is fire and hand and hard

eye is

eye

eye is begin and end and egg

eye is lie there is no end or begin

eye is pluck

eye is dark and stern with storms

eye is terrible and drinks death

eye is mercy

eye is offend or smile or wise

eye is sea blue wise

eye is omega and noun and nous

eye is lumen

eye is

eye

eye is reflect and ripple and still

eye is quill

eye is word

eye is thought and spiritual space

eye is sea

eye is nothing and all

eye is one

eye is love or gone or rills

eye is hills where speech is death

eye is great and complex bread

eye is mathematics

eye is translucency

eye is complexity deferred

eye is joy for she was my mother

eye is suffer the gull or the woman

eye is child

eye is the man

eye is all language

eye is speech and silence

eye is i

eye is thin blue ink

eye is death and exult

eye is dream of waves

eye is motion

eye is

eye

eye is how would I hold you

eye is perplexity and anger and peace

eye is forest

eye is forgive

eye is eternal unterminate torment

eye is could be

eye is possibility

eye is e ...y...e

eye is si

eye is an ancient irradiate star

eye is a black factory

eye is blue

eye is ship

eye is

eye

eye is eternal colour

eye is woman and man

eye is language

eye is all

eye is

eye


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I is am.

wheeze.

blll dIreen

Anonymous said...

I'd better follow up that attempt at compression. That first comment was only to say there is in this something of the esse est percipi (if that's right), the "to be is to be perceived" argument -- but you show that to perceive is also to be. Pause: as someone in Juliius Caesar said, "the eye turned inwards sees not itself". Well, as English says so effectively, "I would dispute that", and you have just as effectively disputed it! B.D.

Richard said...

I am not using Descartes' argument (although that can be subsumed) - this is section of EYELIGHT in a way just as if one were looking at huge canvas - a triangle of blue might be in one corner and something - say a black and yellow face in another part of the "picture".

So this section is - while EYELIGHT includes (or questions) the concepts of being and essence and so on it doesn't imply any conclusions or even any knowledge all "knowledge" or facts for me are tentative. This is a complex area - the "poem got its name from the poem that goes:

The Bright Revolve

To see with the naked eye
what was seen with the naked eye:
back back back back,
and forth, and back and forth:
and in true, these black-faced mirrors
shiver reflect the wilderness
of backward forward fragment worlds
that are strange agonal with toe and claw.
That acting agony. It cannot be said. Again.
At night: the crucifix cries. This slow,dark dance. The pen, finally, dies – and the painter’s
brush, the oboe, and the ink. Those gone aways.

Look out to that bright revolve.

Nothing is about.
Who is that old man who rages in the storm?
The and what speak you a third more opulent man?
When I began, I – I knew something. No matter.
What is it in us that we mutter, meander, and muse
on things dissolving as we do?

Roots limbs nerves trees stand stark:

black veins on eye-light scrawled .

To perish powerfully, despite ferocity, and the queerness of how you are becoming a spoon.

You have hell in your hands.


From that poem I took the line -

"black veins on eye-light scrawled"

Then I took one word: "eyelight"

So "EYELIGHT" a word inside a poem became the title and generator of a larger poem. Generation. Words beget words.

I don't think anything can be finally known or proven by philosophy
or science or politics or "art" or religion we can only map - or try to. Maybe via "art" we see glimpses of some kind of esse or even "light" or I think the other Bill of Arden and London started to doubt all these realities when he read Montaigne (translated by his contemporary Florio) - and he and I and Shakespeare/Shakespear/Shagspear/Hamlet/
Richard (his brother)/other [ "Fixed spelling" is useful but relies on an erroneously rational world "All the naively scientific logic" (Glenn Gould)]
would agree - nothing can be known

Even the full stop can deceive

I was also "echoing" Christopher Smart whose long poem Jubilate Agno was brought to my attention by Scott Hamilton (Duns Scotus 2!).

In this "room" a more random "poetic" event is let in so this is another thread I took from book 5 or 6 - I have about 10 large books with the various "threads" in them - I am never quite certain what is going to happen next (but there is a general structure - I proceed by starting with a large or longish poem and go more or less in order through my various books and then start again - and there is a general raison d'etre so to speak - it isn't like Joyce's work in Progress I am not a determinist (nor was he completely - chance plays a part in FW) - or even one who necessarily believes in Vico's cycles - Joyce used Vico I think more for a structure and a possibility. Joyce believed in the soul (but not a Judaeo Christian God) - I think I do also - but what it is I am not sure.

"All things are a flowing" but also they are growing and constantly changing - yesterday I planted runner beans and I want to develop my garden (which is now a "wilderness" - as it will remain even if I "develop" it) - that is also part of the EYELIGHT - which is an ongoing organic process - not a poem really - a process - as life is a process - conceptually and perhaps actually infinite. I have no fixed ideas no "beliefs" - only a strange hope.

I do dispute (but I am not philosophically combative - philosophy is somewhat mood dependent for me)- but I feel that we do and don't see ourselves.

Thanks for your comments - ideally and de facto the comments become a part of the "poem"/project which constantly changes direction as rivers do and as nature does. No one can ever "know themselves" but the effort to do so is a valid project. (As is the choice to not think about anything at all of "significance".) I have no idea who or what I am

Richard said...

I suppose my "viewpoint" is existential and phenomenological.

Another influence is Blake. But also my friend Leicester Kyle and Alan Sondheim - though he has been wrestling with all aspects of computing and the Internet and philosophy etc for years more than I.

He is at least keen on Merleau Ponty, Derrida and (many others) - but also I think in communication theory and technology - with him science and technology (I was also involved in telecommunications and electronics** and also as a lineman and a cable jointer [so most of my life I have worked in either factories or as a lineman or technician I am not in academia (I have an NZCE (telecoms and electronics etc) and also a BA) - but I don't abjure that world - I have no bitternesses or biases ] - hardware and software merge with language - and the body etc But he is fascinated with (the late) Kathy Acker's work* (he knew her personally) - I don't know much about her work but she was or contributed to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or language" movement and their critical discussions. Olson is important and others - also Eliot, Pound, WCWs, Schuyler, Ashbery and so on. But many others - even Wystan Curnow and Michelle Leggott.
Zukofsky of course.

* Jack Ross cites her as an influence on himself.

**
The electronics/telecommunications and the "human" or speech aspects morph or interrelate. The living media and the medium.

Nothing is easy

One looks at great and "terrible times into:

"the heart of light, the silence".

Cliff said...

" this is section of EYELIGHT in a way just as if one were looking at huge canvas - a triangle of blue might be in one corner and something - say a black and yellow face in another part of the "picture"."

Great analogy, it helped me to understand what's happening here. Thanks.

Richard said...

I should have added that the 'esse est percipi' is from Bishop Berkley who'se idea was that being is being perceived. It seems crazy but it's hard to dispute. Berkley also challenged Newton and Leibnitz on their 'infinitesimals' as he was a mathematician. This both knew was a problem with calculus or the 'fluxions' I think Newton called it.
The mathematicians used 'limits' but I don't know the arguments for that. The general idea is that as calculus works, of course it is greatly useful and limits shows it and usage to make calculus valid. But we who sit on the sidelines smile ironically.
Because we don't understand the mathematicians (most of us) we are the more convinced that a sleight of hand has taken place even if the maths works!!

But poetry is never quite philosophy or maths so my project tries to wrench poetry etc into another form shall we say. For me it is an ongoing and (complex?) play. Can the eye see the self looking in...in other words (I think Shakespeare got that idea from Montaigne) can we know ourselves. Montaigne claimed to know nothing. But there has, I fee, to be something: what it is I don't know. "I is another." was Rimbaud of course. Well, I don't know. I am like poor Caliban on Setebos, asking asking, as Browning has him...in his poem of that name. "Eye". The key word of course with the most obvious rhyme. Militon: 'And that one talent which is death to hide. /Does God exact day labour, light denied. /Thousands at his bidding speed o'er land and sea./ They also serve who only stand and wait.' (From memory, I think that is something like it: from 'On His Blindness'). The poet Creeley had only one eye.