Emerging from an Abyss and Entering it Again
“That’s life, is it not, Dear?” - Emily Dickinson to Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson
I sometimes try in vain to describe how sometimes the mystery of poetic text feels something like being surrounded as if by a wilderness or an atmosphere. The bourgeois order of text-giving-meaning offers singularities as opposed to a continuous quality. Language is strained under being one-thing-at-a-time. I am curious to see how close language can get to continuousness – as continuous as our lived experience. I suspect that it requires some degree of misunderstanding, not-understanding, or confusion. Doubt, losing-track. Nonsense, defiance of authority.
Susan Howe writes in Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, “Poetry has no proof nor plan nor evidence by decree or in any other way. From somewhere in the twilight realm of sound a spirit of belief flares up at the point where meaning stops and the unreality of what seems most real floods over us.”
Acrylic on laser-cut, hand-finished MDF
