Persistence of Vision

A movie, a series of still pictures
presented too fast for the brain
to process. It cannot be convinced
despite knowing
what it seizes is not movement
but the illusion of movement.

I did some painting yesterday. Now
I’m ignoring specs of primer
on my glasses to see the page
to write the poem. Still

everything is clear.

I know

who I am,

what it means,

why I’m here.

Trying again, with words this time...

Every grammar teacher eventually figures out that no matter how you explain any concept in language, from part of speech to spelling to comma usage, you will be confronted by some accepted usage that your explanation cannot explain. Language being what it is—an organically human construct whose evolution no amount of effort can control—that things would be this way, though certainly a challenge, is not surprising. But this only mildly disturbing insight into language turns out to be true of everything try to put a handle on. It’s not that we haven’t understood evolution of physics or math or climate change pretty well. And we have marvelously useful ways of understanding psychology, economics, sociology, political science. Still, we always eventually come to the place where we cannot fit our handle or make a new handle that would not require destroying the entire system or structure of understanding that this knowledge is founded on. The problem cannot be overcome, but it can be acknowledged. It’s the problem of using language to understand the world. It’s the problem of the way language understands the world. And that is certainly an effect of the structure of the human brain, which is an effect of the way it evolved and what it evolved to do, which was not primarily to understand the universe. (I say “not primarily” because I am not convinced that understanding the universe is not, to say it tendentiously, why evolution itself was invented.)

If the goal is understanding, and if understanding is understood in the philosophical sense, the discursive sense, without emotional, intuitive or spiritual sense, in the way that we understand a math problem, in the logic of the pieces, in the way computer can be trained to write code without any possible interference by love or beauty or desire but concerned merely with efficiency and accuracy, then the procedure is always the same: to identify the pieces, to construct (changing metaphors) concepts that pen in each discrete piece and, monitoring, describe the interactions among the pieces. Great progress was made in evolution, and then came the platypus.

Thinking of spirituality or fiction or poetry or music or any of the arts (including those not yet created or defined) or emotion (in the Romantic sense) or any of the experiences of the body as forms of knowledge, paths to understanding, helps but by no means solves the problem. Each of these is also a thing toward which understanding is directed. And each leaves us finally unsatisfied.

Today the President

Today the president pronounced another good woman too ugly to fuck.
Today he buddied up to another world-class tyrant.
He lied his way through cake today.

And I thought how hard it must have been in New York City in 1863
when the yellow newspapers used the poor
who couldn’t pay their way out of war
as matches for lighting buildings, black babies,
Lincoln supporters, and the draft board ablaze.

Over in Pennsylvania they’d just interred the last of the Gettysburg dead.

On Broadway and in Union Square they scared up Lincoln-hating mobs
whose coffee was cut with sawdust whose sugar was half sand
who were informed as to how if they let themselves be dragged into Lincoln’s war
big strong stolen slaves, menacing and beautiful, would steal their jobs (though few actually had jobs),
seduce their wives, and rape their daughters.

With no one there to stop them,
inflamed mobs consumed four days in murderous riot,
transportation lines,
freed men,
the buildings where they lived.

Time Out

Time goes mainly forward—yes—but not as an arrow goes, slowing at a consistent rate of -9.81 m/s2.

You don’t have to go fast or rise a meaningful distance from the earth’s core or read Einstein to realize time has no zero degree, no absolute rate of passage.

I’d say it’s like money that way, eternally measurable against goods or currencies but never for a moment having any stable value outside of the specific transaction that activates it. I’d say that, but in fact, time is not just like money. It’s like everything. And I like the analogy to words better.

When you put meat in the fridge, you’re slowing time.

When you reread the sentence that boggled you, you’re reliving time.

When you sprint to get there you’re speeding time.

When you skim to get the meaning you’re folding time or poking holes in it like the lid of a jar to put fireflies in on a tepid night in early July.

When you drive past all the homes you used to live in or the house of the girlfriend where you once were welcome you’re going back in time. When you call her just to say hello at two a.m. years after you blew out by mutual agreement and with what you thought was mutual sadness your love’s brief candle you’re erasing time.

When you try to use words to name the things time does you’re stopping time.

When you think you’ve finally said it you’re betraying time.