Call for synthesis, flux, or both? Motion in what service? Already we have so many forms. So many epics to sort, so many mirrors to fragment or to arrange so we may read faces in variegated light. The power of archetypes is bottomless if we are; they are the process of recycling our own imagination. The thirst for fullness of understanding and identity. Translating our own lives into contexts of continuity is the atavistic thread that connects us to where we have been, and to each other. Living within a matrix that is constructed to isolate and repress is draining. I sleep inside a ring of stacked books, and from wordaccretions I draw strength. From arranging words with my own hands I build strength. This is something more like a song than a manifesto. We need new metaphors. Avatars of old goddesses and gods excavated from mythologic fragments meets a particular need. Deification of human figures makes us believe in immortality. I have needed Ishtar and Inanna, and I have needed the shewolf just as I have needed Adrienne Rich and Aun Sang Suu Kym. As I have needed to believe that power and sanctity endow each of us with place and necessity. Not to let faith break under cynicism while learning to recognize the smell of my own face, and others. We need more and new tools for this hard time. Need what? A metaphor as enthusiastically webbed as hypertext. Unbound weave of connections between [times, individuals, places, mythologies, epics][person, pair, collective, institution] until they are not parallel layers separated by blanked bufferspace masquerading as cushion. An opening field of resources, of yielding and expansion and multifaceted generosity. "Every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry." Guy DeBord Where? First for me in poetry. Its magics of direct connection, deep image and alchemy are necessary for survival. These are the powers that our communal lives must embody so we may enter that place of growth and no barbed wire. direct connection- to realize the fullness of other lives besides our own -to respect alternate realities and learn each other's truths deep image- to embrace the replete universe of associative links -to move backwards sideways up against gravity between what we thought we were bound within- to break old thought patterns and immediately admit joy alchemy- to eat raw the stunning results of intermingling elements -to produce what we need from the very fragments still left to us after years of miserable deterioration - to believe in ourselves as creators We have been writing on the body/from outside the body/for the body/with the body so that space is already nearly opaque with indelible ink. (We must continue to unfurl and read aloud our interior scrolls.) This is not a rejection of the body but a surrender to illuminating agents. We spent so much already on the effort of decentralizing and dealigning, of token rewordings, of chastizing language for its failures. I believe in the inadequacy of language to describe heat or dimension I believe in the production by language of heat and dimension (friction-lungs-shimmer - vision & breath) Time it is now to realize ecstasies revolving on conjunction divorced from malice and ruin allow memorials and tangents of bliss to kneel as the burning wheel passes over Margin subsumes center. Bless clear lines and contrast/bless with equal fervor what overlaps and merges. Love the bone & blood of what we become. Concentrate the combined light of our inner suns
5 march 1999