— regard appearance as your teacher — Saraha
“World, World,” you wrote,
as though martyred to the visible,
the words one chose
would have to say it.
If the famous rosy-fingered dawn
existed, it existed to be proclaimed,
as did the catalog of phrases to be embraced,
sheer gorgeousness and vibratory
power of words
to upend those imprisoning
geometries of the conventional.
*
To articulate mind’s paean
imagining the silken net of her,
the sheathed stone of towers
we walked around —
word, words to world, world —
reluctantly including the age’s
horrors we read about.
Love and desire as possibilities,
as possible suppressions
in a world visibly raped by its ideologies.
Did relief come as compensation
in the words?
What to say for the rock’s display of striations
emblazoned above a flowing creek,
the deliberation describing the insect crawl,
its “chitinous wings,” that reminded you
of Pound’s wasp, and in that moment, you forgave him
his politics (thus sharpening some issues at hand).
Best, you said, to be “unteachable.”
Yet so many lived blindsided by the digital algorithms
of their tribes, arrogant in their insistence and consensus,
the bard’s finikins strewn across a wasteland,
or as Thucydides reminded us, “in evil times, words
changed their common meanings, to take those now given them.”
And you said, the problem was failure, no prominence,
only the ditch from which all was seen. “World, World,”
I believe you meant something like the cosmos.
“There is something to stand on.”
That was as close as one should come to belief.
II.
And I remember the teacher’s sadhana proclaiming:
This world, the trees, the greenery, the Great Wrathful One,
you incite, you are the irritant from which
love and hate spring. And I remember
the nights I broke free — eye at the reticle
open to dark skies, charts laid on the table,
dome under dome: “say I looked at the stars / say
there was love in the sky / but it wasn’t enough.”
Youth’s dream: to be of that chorus. There it was
and this in which, however entrapped,
I gazed at an open starlit field, pristine immensities,
thoughts pliable as the wind swirling around objects
— a little pain, a little bother — one’s mind fumbling,
finding only its anguish real. Redemption: an image
on a reflecting mirror …
III.
The world is the case (and it is beautiful), thanks LW.
The world is the case, surely the praise poet has a case to make.
The world is the case encased.
Seen from outer space.
Ice orbed.
IV.
— descend so that you may ascend — Augustine
Trees darkening the ground. Constellations overhead.
Midway, you’d want to go into the subject — then I’d go.
We’d call it prayer if you like.
We’d both desire to walk on, to be happy.
Not much talk but for an occasional comment
on “the compost of history.”
And I did make something of a prayer for myself,
I called out: Dante, help me with a fourfold allegory,
one that begins with a beast, a griffon or Sphinx
and works its way to joyful singing, as in Purgatorio,
“in exitu Isräel de Aegypto,” that “anagogically”
speaks of souls who from the Shoah did not escape
but rose in ashes to somewhere else, sanctified
from corruption by our inability to forget, and I meant,
my dear guide, let’s go no further, but turn at this point
and backtrack along the bolgias, for to “go up” is to be perfected,
even if to walk past the condemned as they suffer reminds them
of their shame. It was by this way, past the limbo of ancient poets,
beyond their need to traverse desire, that we would return
to the dark wood from which youth makes its descent,
this time into age. Here, where leaves lay crushed underfoot
and autumn awaited winter, we would emerge into a dark expanse,
and name the liminal objects outlined by the stars’ dim light
as though they were signs of the visionary.
Michael Heller, inspirado nos textos de Victor Segalen