Introduction by RON SILLIMAN
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| "Robert Kelly" by Phong Bui |
There is a mind
beyond my mind
and all I do is shape
what it comes
through me to become
This is a fascinating, curious project, in that one of our finest poets this past half-century responds to a text that, for all purposes, is not present for us to examine. Eidetic to the invisible, an Other that stands as a third term or node in the communication between poet & reader. This of course is always the case whether we recognize it or not, admit it or not. But seldom if ever have I seen/heard/read it invoked so fully. This is a dance not with absence – as all the old posties might have it – but with immanence unseen but palpable. For which our evidence is precisely these texts.
It is not possible to “have a thought” simply because the routes through the brain, from synapse to synapse, are not fixed. The same sequence of words can reach their destination in a vast – potentially infinite – number of ways. What then is mind? And, as Kelly asks (the quotation marks are his), “What is syntax?”
Whatever your answer, this dance between apprehension & comprehension makes for a powerful music, one that we hear only in the arc carved by the dancer.
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ROBERT KELLY
Lattices Inspired
& other sequences
& other sequences
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LATTICES INSPIRED
Author's Note: This serial poem arose as marginalia to
Mariya Mitkova’s thesis, Squares on Lattices: an Investigation Inspired by
the Square Peg Problem, 2012.
The procedure in the present text was as follows: I read the text, following its argument
as well as I could. Then I read
without such ambition, and wrote down whatever the text brought to mind. A text shares with its reader
responsibility for whatever reading the former brings to the latter’s
mind. We live in a cognitive world
of shared responsibility. Or as
Bernhard says, man ist selbst schuld.
We do not know
know how to touch.
A simple planar curve
closes us out
What we conceive
never encloses us
anything but us
we are excluded by what we think
from what we are.
*
So all this while I was searching
for the flesh of number—wrong
looking, wrong touching—when maybe
number has no flesh or
no number has or is flesh
but flesh is pure relationship
between— numbers
are excited vertices
of a mysterious figure—
immense
polyptope—
flesh is relation.
*
Lattice version of the problem:
touch is marriage.
And there can be
a measure that
does not measure
non-finite distance
between an event and itself.
*
Read until something happens
This is the song of Creation,
that old bible tune
for all nations and all alphabets,
the mind the mind the silver mind
turns gold in listening—
keep reading till something happens.
*
I intersect myself
some part of me is always
isolate from the rest
I derive from myself
How do I reach the closed
domains brought in by
self-intersection? This is
Plato’s secret quest.
Porphyry’s, Proclus’s.
Mathematics of the soul.
*
Trivial means exemplary,
foreplay, fake unities:
look at me, I am obvious,
I am the size of myself.
*
The plane suddenly begins to quiver, the
sky alters:
Down here, men and women pour out of the
cathedral
and fill up the market square—this is
called ‘shrinking’.
There are cheese sellers and peddlers of
oatstraw brooms,
we hear them singing in the slender spaces
left between the church bells’ bellowing.
*
Art needs to prove
only what is not the case.
Proof of what is not
yet the case. Control
yet the case. Control
the future. The uncanny
feels around your heart.
Stalin on the Black Sea coast
stared south through mist
remembering homeland music.
A tear in his eye. Seagull cry.
*
Could I not be part of me.
Which part?
Sing a line from end to end
call it song: The Intersections
(so self may sleep.)
(so self may sleep.)
*
So easily it says
‘increase the number of’
things, things
hover over our voice
a little while
then vanish.
Who is a woman?
Who is a man?
Do they differ only
in the number of their vertices?
And then we heard far off
Wisdom crying from the Desert
I fall through the lattice
I am divided!
*
The base case of the trivial square
adores me—I am its little god
it dreams of me on its rigid pillow—
it sleeps in daytime—it sighs
for my vertices, but I am far
away, I am intersected.
*
If a square is a door
the sea comes in.
Wet-ankled mathematics,
pale students of the moon.
But if the square is a window
or a mother or a willow
wind howls and things
ease up outside, things
soon enough turn into trees.
Again. An even number of trees.
*
I have a song
so in my song
the words are notes
they have no meaning
outside of it,
thus middle D (say) can take its place in
most any music, sturdy, aggressive,
never meaning
more than itself
(just like a man
she’ll say)
no
more than its pitch—
that sudden marriage
between spine and soul.
*
Some vertices always
left out? A little
boy crying in a Paris
park because his
nanny’s busy
flirting with Americans,
and so in grief and loss
languages are learned.
(Strauss’s
rising ninths—
a
wind in the heart)
*
Wind up the desert
and let it run—
will it not all too soon
be full of alphabets?
A book is a battle
in the endless campaign
to exhaust the alphabet.
A square is something
that remembers.
*
Partial to quinces
grandmother discovered
that boiling them four hours
yielded a deep red vinous fruit
hitherto unknown to her
and sweeter than anybody knew,
just as cooking green cabbage
hour after hour finally extracts
the great elixir: the Oil of Water.
*
On a square plate
an egg has been cracked
and now pools out
“the way they do”
we stand close each other
by the kitchen counter
admiring the egg—
the curves, the slow expanse,
the golden dome
above the quivering plain!
Later that night
we dreamt each other’s face.
*
If I have counted correctly
I’m the only one here.
Or are you here too
reading this poor line?
*
A multiplicity of squares
inhabiting a lattice
generates a tangle.
The square is circled.
Alchemy is undone.
In The Dream, Puck
snickers, sweeps
the mess behind the door.
*
The lover cries out, Let a simple closed
lattice
curve with no vertices that we suppose.
and both are cold. Nothing is in us but us.
*
Then I knew the stars had come
take up their places on the grid
53rd St and Fifth Avenue, Sixth
Avenue and 8th Street, Bleecker
and Macdougal, Lenox and One
hundred twenty fifth, we know
the places where they shone
when there was still nighttime
in the old city. The meek angels
stood among us and taught us
to reason and to rhythm and to sing,
every number was a friend then
and every friend was full of honey
and everybody loved us, every
body told us what we had to do.
*
Break a seven reverently
break it like a stick
undistracted and understand:
wind in the woods
a woman’s running
for her life, no one’s chasing.
Nothing follows. She
runs because running is.
*
And in each triangle
we find a particular
Deity—eyes and mouth
and arms—to guide us.
All the triangles fit
together, some by
adjacency to the central
Trine, others by
superimposition
therein or thereon.
When all the triangles
have come to rest
the completed figure
pronounces a verb
in Old Canaanite.
The light is let.
The world is made.
This is the first card of the Tarot.
*
Add one card to the next
until the word is spelled.
You are not disappointed
even though you have heard
the word spoken once before.
I whispered it in your dream
the counting numbers one to ten
and I was not even me.
*
Suppose we are identical mirror images of each other. Suppose the sun comes up and has something to say because we do. Out of sleep we come up from the bottom by ones. If we slept forever there would be no world. This is the Null-Darwin lemma.
Where is the
hidden triangle that interlaces with the visible? Where is the triangle that interlaces with what is not me,
but makes me me?
The Temple was
destroyed seven decades after Christ was born. We have been dispersed through all the world, all the names,
all the religions, operas, symphonies, hypotheses, theorems, formulas,
legislations. Anti-semitism arises
from our dimly-intuited realization that we all are Jews, always were, always
will be. And how can we live with
ourselves?
*
Four: in fourth grade I voted for the little
girl with yellow hair, Zelda was her name. She became class president. My whole life I have voted for color every time. Never for number. Yet color is only the
shimmering numbers of light. And in the ångstroms of desire I have counted out my
peace.
*
The colors of human hair are mapped to the
counting numbers 0 – 9. When the
key is known, every drunken party becomes a sonorous equation, every city an
uneasy sorites of code.
*
Rectangles make me think about other
things—
the filled-in rectangle has no room in it
for us to think. And to think is to be.
*
There is a fountain where it still says
this.
Romans built the stone of it on water they
uncovered.
Byzantines extracted salts from its steady
flow
and from those halogens came alchemy by
Araby.
The Russians set the salts to music and
Third Rome sang—
and now of words we build Fourth Rome in
the air.
*
Everything is strange.
A rectangle is triangles in holy
intercourse.
*
Counting from the top this time, a lamb
will lead them.
This is the religion of those who have
forgotten how to kill
but have learned a strange new thing along
the way.
*
The outside can be expressed as that which
is always waiting.
*
I drove through
Rorschach once, a sober darkling sort of town, I liked it. The lake beside it told me almost
everything I know. They call it
the Foundation, the water at the bottom of the world. A little south of here, in some clement cave among the
gently rising foothills the human race began. If you dip a cup in the water of that inland sea you see
that water’s made of crystalline letters and numbers, separate but equipollent,
swimming amongst each other, shiningly signifying, uncountable numbers,
uncountable words, whispering yet trying to count each other in every sip. It cools your thirst like no other
water. The Romans called this
region Constancy.
*
The logician clad in filmy veils of number
will not respect me for making so little of so much she’s made clear about the
shapes in which we live. Try as I
may to cleave to a straight line (that luminous result of Pappus’ Theorem),
every vertex sends me arrowing off into some other director. A square is terrible because it says
everything at once, and at equal volume, equal moral force.
*
A ratio (a little bird told me,
a dead bluebird between me
and an artist, we were being
filmed by some English
enterprise, I spoke of her work
and the bird lay there, blue,
inert, but made us both remember
what such a thing was like
when it possessed the air, made me
know all at once the wrongness
that sometimes haunts me
or that I haunt, hoping, measuring),
a ratio is a bad thing, a one-night stand
among strangers, strange numbers.
It connects but it doesn’t mean,
it joins but does not marry.
It is the sad shadow of thinking.
At last you know (the bird said)
what the mind thinks
is not what thinks the mind.
______________________________________________________________
FIRST NOETIC HYMN
to Nous
Let them love me
for what you make me say.
For I was Orpheus
and you are.
There is a mind
beyond my mind
and all I do is shape
what it comes
through me to become.
Or I became.
The Greeks said autos,
allos, self and
other—
I am (you make me be)
the opposite of autistic,
I am allistic,
your voice in my mouth.
all I care for
is what you feel
(you make me feel).
SECOND NOETIC HYMN
to
Doubt
Maybe. Room for doubt
out there but not in me.
Let me believe
in my heart
the words in my mouth
till they all come out
but maybe no longer.
Sing this to the tune
of squealing brakes or better
sportcars laying rubber
as they accelerate.
Fast red car soon out of human sight.
THIRD NOETIC HYMN
to
Mnemosyne
The unicursal pentagram
remembers my father.
The bus comes by
remembering Brooklyn.
Wind tosses new-leaf’d branches,
the old sticks move again,
the wind can find me now,
move me. The road
is empty, remembering the back of my mind.
FOURTH NOETIC HYMN
to
Hekate
The cry of faeces from the dark of the gut
like bats rushing at dawn into that cave in
Yucatan
not their voices sound but the sound of
their wings
the leather multiplicities by which it
moves.
Wind makes the body dark inside, all the
light
sucked out by the world that passes.
Therefore to the dark goddess the insides
pray
because they are invisible like Her.
All that stuff inside waiting to come out.
All the emptiness on both sides of the
skin.
Nobody knows us. The gods themselves
don’t know what to make of us, aren’t sure
if they created us or not. Or if we just were.
Just are. But She knows.
Therefore we pray
to Her who wraps us in Her long sweet
unknowing.
FIFTH NOETIC HYMN
to
Borea
To the North and what’s beyond
from which all serviceable thoughts arise
and sweep down to us on greeny shimmer
of aurora—now you see it now you don’t
on summer nights sometimes at Blithewood,
or on the high meadow courting suddenly
you see the seams of the sky come open,
we see the sky beyond the sky and know.
They tell us the far north is mostly white,
I would not know, but I have seen
Baffinland and Labrador alive
with green and blue ice that seemed
to me no different from the northern lights
but they hold still, as if those high
electric hues had come to visit us and
stayed.
I say all color is from the North
and from color all human thought is made,
I swear to god we think the way we see.
______________________________________________________________
IT ALL STAYS OPEN
merchandise mind
middleman personality
a door and then again
“What is syntax?”
the way words fit breath
in moist necessity
so go to church
once in a while
humans structure-shy
addicted to architecture
addicted to air
this strange planet
every word has another
meaning in the dark
simplest sentence a cryptogram
a message from your mother
always died yesterday
every orphan morning
child hears clock talk
man accumulates
Homo collector
in the museum of money
land on your feet
as if you were here
sly touch of sunlight
don’t tell too much
nutritious the secret
the arcane sustains you
how silent sun!
isn’t dark a kind of noise
watched intently
till nothing left to see
that was you
chasubled in glance
go with the thought
to be another country
to be gone
into strange seeming
how can there be
a place that is not here.
2.
Ishtar,
Alcestis, Orpheus
What could we or dare.
The rock admits us
to the afterlight.
The chained dog barks.
The wife has come
to woo her husband home,
offer herself instead
for that interminable
conversation of being dead.
The gods of such matters
listen. The dog
stops barking, correct
behavior on both sides.
The gods decide.
And that is how we live,
in the everlasting moment
of their deciding. Is she
dead already, is he alive
again. Are we living.
We have come into halls
confused with shadows,
ill-equipped to judge
(like Rilke’s angels)
the living from the dead.
The girl has given
the man receives.
Whose life am I living?
And this body too
seems to belong to another.
No images in hell,
only propositions.
Syntax feeding on itself.
We stumble in midair.
3.
Fenceposts in the rain
and it was not, is not,
raining. All the trees in leaf
now and the pregnant moon
uneasy with my staring.
Diplopia. A disease
of novelists, fiction
ages you, aged infants,
I could keep you up all night
complaining. Explaining
all the waters of Babylon
fill this glass.
Trimming grass by the fence
for no good reason—
lament with me
the broken harp
the hare-lip flute
its fipple frail,
its whistle
nowhere. Listen,
you keep me up all night
in dubious mindfulness,
build my pyramid
at least and give a name
to what is only me,
you make me mean.
4.
You are the map
but where is the territory?
Men remember what they’re told
women what they surmise
a tree is honesty
the sun is courtesy
beauty distracts me from the truth
to be orthodox
you stand in heaven
hour after hour on Sundays,
a naked woman serves me soup
I eat it gladly, I am not me
but all the while the priests
are busy at their drone
a god that is language
issues from their furry lips
o god you are these words
hummed in my head
can I ever believe what I hear
are we all not the same
the cross-less crucified
in mid-air pierced
by gamma-particles
every moment wounds
the last one kills
we stand beneath
in gold mosaic
a dome frowns down
now you are another dream
around me in sleep
my lover’s fingertips
touch my arm
waking is a form
of speaking, in strange
happiness fall
asleep again
so the dawn of the philosophers
amounts to us
assuming there is no one
else, assuming brightness
is natural whatever
that sad old word actually means
something (I guess)
that isn’t (entirely) me.
* * *
(These three sequences were composed in
April & May 2012 in Annandale, NY).
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Robert Kelly: “I'm working this summer on several
projects: fine tuning the long poem (possibly called The Hexagon). third part to the trilogy of Fire Exit and Uncertainties.
Editing a collection of recent shorter poems. Editing a collection of my
essays, reviews, and manifestos. Writing a series of responses to
paintings by Nathlie Provosty, and a series of responses to the photographs of
Susan Quasha.”
More here:
