#and explode in ecstasy on top of a flowering mass of my own self

[loneberry]

Who knows why thoughts sometimes lose their wings

11 juin // scattershot consciousness, or: a mind in motion [transcribed from notebook]

What does it mean to wake with a feeling, & why?

Nobody knows why. Nobody knows why life was given to us.

Sometimes you wade through junk self-help advice only to stumble upon curious nuggets of truth,

    about love’s closeness to death

      or how love lets us glimpse the soul beneath layers of flesh

As we decay–

   what’s there?

     that thing, stubbornly itself.

“Soul is hewn in a wild workshop.”

   Yesterday I watched the plants blowing & marveled that something invisible acts on matter: wind.

    Is that why we conceive of God as Breath?

The person touched by God is in a windstorm

                   blown

       like the film character Wakefield dislodged from his low self.

In some other world, did I volunteer for this?

Like an astronaut: I volunteer—now make me born!

   Was I counseled by a bureaucrat of heaven

was I an angel who came to Earth

    on the Wings of Desire

         to be human

gasping alive every time I step out of buildings into the sun, how the exits of libraries & my psychoanalyst’s office become birth canals.

      Weep thinking about that grace.

Consciousness expanding & contracting—a sparrow beneath my chair.

What was that moment when all of life contracted to a single point of

       pure life

Woke up from the dream of hanging succulents with the Agnus Dei liturgy on my tongue

“Jesus lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world

       Have mercy on us”

When I was counseled, pre-birth,

    did they tell me about this pain

did I wake inside the pain-joy dialectic

    between babble & searing beauty

Who knows why

    we wake to life

           beneath a red umbrella, consciousness blooming

     & somewhere, the tree beneath which we will rest for Eternity

Do you see yourself

   stopping to admire the roses in the setting sun?

I remember, desert nights listening to “I Lost Something in the Hills”

   gliding beneath the big moon.

It was not Jesus imbibing & transforming all human suffering that touched me in the liturgy

  but the cry for mercy that is answered.

It is usually not answered.

On the floor of the world, a cry for mercy

   & only the silence of God.

But from that unanswered cry—grace?

   Just as soon as it arrives

        it is gone.

They put a new date on the birth of our species

  We are 300,000 years old, at least

But how did we come to this?

   did we eat mushrooms to grow language

& how did we become bipedal

  & what vestigial body parts still exists as phantoms hooked up to my neural map

& what pre-adaption invisible (potential) limbs can I control with my brain?

    is it a memory of what was

       or a pre-cognition

of what is to come?

How glorious that every form contains both what it once was & what it could be

  The historian looks in one direction,

the artist in the other

Between archive & horizon,

     we are floating on ourselves

There it was

         in absolute clarity

rinsed myself of me

   but now I want to sleep

Life not calm

       life was

            canceling itself

but we were

             lobsters

                      once

“how elegant, your back” Alex said

     I was.

He’ll be here tomorrow.

My head filled with the sound.

          Life & then…I want to make a poem out of flowers.

“The poem is almost over"—where did this line come from?—the unconscious belting STOP THE POEM!

You can’t keep going forever

But…head, soup, nowhere

     the Górecki symphony he listened to deep in his sorrow, when he decided to come back & fight for love

   Now imagine an image shattering & the shards congealing to form a new image

  He said going through the pain was like that—

that on the other side was clarity

I hear Michael Eigen saying, go all the way into it, push through until you reach the Ecstatic     / there’s no retreating

you aged—you can’t summon what once was so easy, to feel, but I was alive, & more myself when destroyed.

You read. You imagine all the things you could write, your own book on female lust, wandering, flowers, ecstasy.

Life was once—& then, I grew a brain

Tho I was still myself before I was born

Now imagine matter exploding

Now imagine this big rock growing an atmosphere

Now imagine—

then the sadness breaks

 who would have thought

    that out of that primary matter

        sadness would be born?

Who would have thought

   we’d make a world without mercy for the afflicted, brains disfigured & reordered by toxins, war, trauma—

what one has lived through

   & the proverbial roll of the dice

My brother mentally impaired by a brain injury caused by a difficult birth

& the thought: I could be in his place. In prison.

Remember Eigen’s description of Kurt’s documentary

   about a single lost soul adrift on the planet

What consolation was there except the light

  & why wake up weeping at the memory of stepping into the sun?

Because in that sun, I could love

& you remember

stepping out of Widener Library

   into the glory that was the setting sun

the way it set all particles alight

turning dust & pollen into glitter that fell from the trees in slow motion

or the way the highway became a snow globe on that gentle day in early June

  when the cottonwoods released their seeds.

On the bus you imagined a single airborne cottonwood seed blowing across the length of your life.

Don’t you see

   nothing is more significant than anything else

I hear them cry: have mercy

   the worm crushed on the pavement cries

           mercy, mercy

I see the church spire from another angle

      everywhere, spires of consciousness

   jutting out of the soil

"Mercy, mercy” we sing to the transmogrification machine some call Jesus

      Spires of mercy

How is it possible that billions of years ago a light appeared in that vast darkness

       what symphony was made in that instant

       a dog, a cat

        a squirrel thrashing itself to death:

all waiting to be made.

Mercy!

The mind quickens

      the shore creeps

   some dance

     others nap

Tops spin, monuments are erected

   complexity, tessellation, pyramids amid sand dunes, waves of mass extinctions

& the world growing dimmer

   human consciousness wiped out. We saw,

we woke up. & then, the wind. What edge did we find, an emotional cliff.

My heart—throwing it into the sea.

There was everything

    & then you can see

       the contraction of sorrow

               growing ever denser

until it disperses as sparrows 

Is consciousness an accident of nature?

How, out of the infinite range of possibilities, did the shape of the honeysuckle flower become perfectly suited to the beak of its pollinator? Without striving—how is there elegance of design?

Why make a written language?

  Why use it for something as inconsequential as this: to write down what passes through my head.

I wonder if the world will be sorry to one day lose me as a witness

       I was not coherent

            but I did my best

Why wake up weeping at the thought of the universe without a witness?

Then, the shift in the 3rd movement of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, when sorrow is released & transformed into grace.

       How incredible

              that some make symphonies

before one by one, the lights are extinguished

    &  all language is lost

         My memories left me

I forgot

              that terror

   I walked across the field weaving my way around the the spires of splendor

   Who was it that wrote

        Medbh McGuckian’s language is made of flowers?

  Oh how quickly the branches of the deciduous trees sprout new wings

But why do my thoughts sometimes lose their wings?

Why does consciousness sometimes flag, become a dark room without windows?

It is happening:

       the future has already happened

because it will.

All I wanted was to stay awake long enough to feel—that’s all there is.

     everything is as good as everything else.

    Somewhere, someone weeping.

Why—this total equality of mercy,

    even for the ones who wronged you

Who were you, touching across some distance?

What gift did you bring that I needed?

   Why weep during the film Wakefield 

when that awful man spoke the word “mercy”? 

     Did even he deserve it?

My heart aches for everything lost.

Mercy. How the word is an ax to the sea frozen inside me.

Mercy, they cry, have mercy.

I hear Cornel West quoting William James: religion is a cry for help.

Why cry for mercy in a merciless world?

Through the pain—mercy

     what capacity for sensing the other was lost when he was in a rage

    then found, when he looked & turned back from the path of cruelty

& in those moments hatred turned inside out  & he emerged, disarmed.

    Wind today shows no sign of abating

& still some are crying, mercy be this good weather

Lay your weapon down—

let the spires cut the wind

as ghosts rush through the forest

Here—in this moment.

           What shatters

                      you know

                            that movement:

  a soul in flight.

Someone raised the question—

      what if the universe is one giant feeling being?

Weep for Kurt

& remember the profound equality of all things, how money distorts that fact.

       Released from hatred.

In what ways did my wound make me merciless?

[yamlord]

friends, i am with child