A man wakes terrified from a dream; he takes down a book of poems and reads, "A man wakes terrified from a dream. . . ."
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Need drives the mouse in the wall and likewise the furnace at the heart of the sun: not human need, but the need that fuels the neutrino.
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Being needed to Be. Its war with Nothing's need to remain Nothing punched a hole in the fabric of Nonbeing. Thus God, the Big Bang, Buddha.
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Human need is a special case: a wound in the world seeping its bloody discharge from nothing to something. Mind is a scab that stanches it.
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Conscious Being requires constant mediation: with Unconscious Being, and with Nothing. Consciousness triangulates whirlwind and abyss.
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"Black sound" of Lorca's duende: will of Nonbeing erupting into Conscious Being through Unconsciousness, played on the synthesizer of self.
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What was "god," ever, but a word we use for need: the kind of need that is manifest in gravity, in the speed of light, the solar wind?
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For the right reader, the poem is a force--not of nature, but of consciousness, pressing across the gap from nothing to something to waking.
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A terrified man sleeps, and in his dream he sees the body politic wake, terrified, remembering the poem that begins "A terrified man sleeps. . . ."
D'you know that Russell Edson poem, "The Taxi"?
ReplyDeleteOne night in the dark I phone for a taxi. Immediately a taxi crashes through the wall; never mind that my room is on the third floor, or that the yellow driver is really a cluster of canaries arranged in the shape of a driver, who flutters apart, streaming from the windows of the taxi in yellow fountains...
Realizing that I am in the midst of something splendid I reach for the phone and cancel the taxi: All the canaries flow back into the taxi and assemble themselves into a cluster shaped like a man. The taxi backs through the wall, and the wall repairs...
But I cannot stop what is happening, I am already reaching for the phone to call a taxi, which is already beginning to crash through the wall with its yellow driver already beginning to flutter apart...