Startled by Existence

(Gleanings from the journal of the Kirk)

Go said the bird,

for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear much reality.

Time past and time future,

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

T.S. Elliot, from "Burnt Norton"

So, Now I'm thinking, what does photography do? It catches something of a speck in time and mashes it across the years. When I hear a trumpet blast for some seconds in duration, what do I hear? What gives it the sense of time? This point that is the present – the ever present now – Does is have a dimension? … But how can a sequential series of points be stacked if they have NO dimension.

There must be a smear. Even so, one mili-second past the present, the thing exists in the past. And what is the past?

It seems to be like nothing at all … except that it keeps changing the face of the present. The thing which “was” must somehow be catapulted back into the now, by virtue of electric soup and impact. So, does the sound exists as a unit by virtue of a chemical process? When I hear 5 seconds of sustained blast, what am I hearing? .000000……000000001 of something “new” and the rest by food and memory and bulldozed energy that curls the past back into the present like an ever advancing wave… But if the curl itself can have no back dimension, or is pushed forward onto an ever-advancing needlepoint, how can one moment contain the “illusion” of duration? How can something long be held in a point?

I DON’T GET THIS! The past is gone – unless it’s somehow still in the present. The future isn’t here, and never will be (cause then it ain’t the future) – and the present has no dimension. Yet I still hear Music! And voices.

Do I hear into the past? But if I can’t, how could I ever understand a single word.

This is strange too. When I hear a piece of music I have a sense of time during the piece, so that I can hear a note played for several seconds and remember it as such. I know the difference between a note played for a second and one played for thirty, yet I can’t hear a thirty second sound inside myself. My immediate memory seems to hold a few seconds with some clarity so that I hear it “at once”, but I can not hear the whole of the score at once. Even to hear it in my mind I must play it back in time, even as my brain slides through time.

So, how can I hold anything of duration inside myself when I am constantly sliding forward living on the edge of a point?

This then is the now. One atomic moment of something new riding on a tidal wave of the just-happened being hurled with it (by memory) so that it can have meaning.

Note 1: in analyzing this thought, I have indeed come to the conclusion that we hear most “visibly” for only a few seconds at time. When I listen to the radio or conversation, it seems only about half a sentence stays directly with me until it fades like a comet’s tail just seconds after delivery. This is a hard idea to make sense of, but I think even the pace of our language and length or our words reflect the limits of our short-turn saturated hearing.

Note 2: I have since heard this phenomena called the psychological present.

Note 3: perhaps (and this isn’t my idea) God lives in a physiological presence that is eternal – In both our directions. He holds the past as well at the future, with as much clarity as I know my now…

And perhaps then, this ability to understand even a few moments as a sustained thing, is a picture of real time – the all encompassing now. Perhaps memory is a spiritual phenomena!

--

I've heard of folks who lose their short-term memory. And that makes sense if the thing forgotten fades in an hour or day … but if the thing lost were lost just milli-seconds after the phenomena … nothing in life would make sense. Every moment would be so new that nothing in it could be fathomed.

I remember just after I hit my head on the diving board. When I was in the hospital and in a mental fog, I kept looking at the clock to know the time. True to style, I had my recorder in my pack that accompanied me to the hospital. My mom found it and recorded multiple hours of speech with me in which I awoke slowly from a concussionary fog

The tapes contain numerous instances – maybe a hundred in which I ask what time it is – sometimes just seconds after the former query. Mother betrayed no fear and answered each time as if the question had never been asked before. Gradually the fog eased, and I would make declarations such as … I am beginning to think clearer now – Only to make the same self sure declaration a minute later with the thought that it was a fresh statement of fact. I have long held the entire experience as a reminder of the problem of self-evaluation. But more on that later.

In evaluating my ever-unfogging brain, I would watch the clock. I would study it, then study it again. And it seemed to me that time was going faster than it should. Almost like every other moment slipped off the retaining slate. By virtue of a damaged memory – time sped up. So what should happen if I retained only one memory “peg” every twenty seconds? The clock would race at twenty times the normal rate? And what if memory were to diminish to the point of nil. Would each successive frame of sight be my only thought? Without reference to the past every fragment of sight would be new and I would view the clock as never having seen it before and it would appear not to move at all – though in fact each sighting would be different so that I would perpetually be seeing something new but think it static …or would I simply cease to see at all. Can one see at the speed of the present?

Dear, I feel crippled. To hold even this thought, something of that thought must be crowding forward to inform the present. ….. the present holding all time……

Whew…. The though is just too big.

On Time: Snippets, continued:

The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even the past – William Faulkner.

Oh, now this is interesting. I think it’s interesting when we think of the past, we tend to see it – or I do – in the manner in which it has been preserved and hurled forward. I think of the sixties as washed weak-color with grit. The forties in black and white. I see the turn of the century in sepia and the Civil war with scratches in the air. Not really, but certainly as something less than the bright real world we walk in. Who knows, maybe the skies of 1917 really did throb and flick in high contrast.

I find it something to think, that the soldier in the Civil war really did bleed red. It is something to think that the world back then had the same force of color, the same smell of rose, the same earth of kiss, the same blue of sky. The kiss of my beloved would fall on my lips as wet. The sun feels (felt) as real to them as it does to me … the same break of heart hurt with the same kind of pain. The same now of now.

Just listened to this. Is it worth keeping?

Odd idea insert: I have said in the past that the past is like nothing I can fathom. I believe in “it” by the most obvious kind of faith; So much so, that it seems like no-faith to acknowledge that the world and we and everything in it has been here before this last second. But try as I might, I can only touch the present. The past seems at once like everything. And nothing at all … and I feel like I’m grabbing at air to contain it.

Sci-fi aside, it seems that the past is without recovery. We may say for instance, that in looking at dinosaur bones, we are looking at the past; but the fact is that every bone we look upon is in the present tense. Or we could say that we are seeing the past when we view the sun … the light from that great fire takes some eight minutes to reach our eyes; The thing could have disappeared some five minutes ago … and it will be three more minutes till the light goes out. The sun that we see now is not the sun that IS now. But then again it is. It is the sun that exists eight minutes from its source. It is the sun as it exists beyond its “borders” – light radiating through space and filling the hall. The sun that we see tells the present tense truth about the really big sun, the sun that exists beyond the visible flame. And should we ever get so fast, that we speed out the past the light of our past (as it speeds into space) Wouldn’t we just be living in a more complex present?

So then, maybe the past never really disappears – it just makes the NOW that much fatter.

----

While I believe the past as the past, is without recovery … it seems that I have never known anything but the past. The present is just too short. And, I have never seen or experienced the world in absolute present tense. If it takes some millionth of a second for the light to enter my eye, and another millionth of a second for the message to travel to my brain, and another millionth of a second for my brain to analyze and decode the signal, then I am already seeing three millionths of a second behind. I do not experience the present as it occurs, but rather milliseconds after the event. So, who knows … the world may have ended two millionths of a second ago … and it will be another millionth till we discover it!

11/30/01, 12:61PM

Today

The planets stood in line

like a key in a lock

and the stars spelled out

fantastical words.

 

Today, for one brief moment,

no one bled, and the dailies

all fell silent as the bullets shimmied

backward up the barrels.

 

Today, on my lunch break

a choir of  local teenage angels

from the Benton High-school choral

sang

to a crowd of five,

 

lifting splendiferous voices like

some organic pipe-organ

into the dome,

and singing:

Oh, come let us adore Him.

 

Today there

was an extra minute

on the clock.

Unrecorded,

Borrowed

from

Tomorrow.

I am not sure if the following can be called a Poem: or

S PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED

The world will never starve for wonders, but only the lack of wonder. G.K. Chesterton.

I'm not sure this can be called a poem …its almost pure verbal spew, but the kind of thing from which latter poems are born. I like it as a kind of thought-map. It’s so dense, that some of you may want to skip it, but I think the end is worth reading.

From the journals of the Kirk (direct from tape with minimum polish)

They now have these books, extraordinary pictures and idea, called .. A day in the life of the US. … Or, a Day in the Life of China, or Australia. The idea is that photographers from all over the place take pictures within a twenty-four hour period. The big idea that shouts through is that all these images, from people dancing at the prom, to car sales to violent storms or whatever, all happened on a given day. And to think of all that happens in a day -- especially on the human-scape is astounding. But this is only the record of seen things, or at least a small fraction of seen things found on film. But what if we were to surround our globe with some billion lenses and record for two seconds …. Oh we do that all the time – only its hard to share the pictures! HA … But For a moment I will try to think of our world in a two second span. I can’t get much of the whole … but I wade into the spill. So in this last two seconds …

Some trillion grains of pollen dripped down pistil tubes

Some hundreds of bullets left pistols, some million toilets flushed. Water runs downs the sinks, Tornadoes whirling somewhere, sinks in Australia the opposite direction, Ferris wheels and galaxies . Centipedes marching - legs waiving, a chorus line of kick dancers, clocks ticking, blood moving through the capillaries, water running through a hose, mucus in the nose, blubber forming on a seal, fat being cut from the Sirloin, blood into milk, breath into blood, water reaching to the outer edge of leaf, evaporating out the edge, sweat under my arm, 3 billion sweating arms, arms with hammers crushing rock, dynamite exploding tunnels, trains moving though, the wheels of trains, seagulls circle, clown nose (?) Acrobats are spinning in China -- the bent ones, kids stuffing rice, rice swelling in the stomach, water balloons filling, rocket ships toward the moon, the moon is moving, a horse jumps over a fence, a stampede of buffalo over a cliff, water on the cliff, dripping, slipping into ground, coffee running through filters, oil in the ground sitting, the perking places in Yellowstone bubble up, water boils, yellow with blue, the deep pool of Old Faithful, Waterfall, everywhere the rain, the ground with water in quiet run under, a … puddle, kids jump in puddle, skip rope, the St. Louis Arch, rainbows, colors, a box of crayons, crayons melting, the sun on sand, the sun on glass, Hot fenders, California traffic, the crush and Horn, New York, cabs swerve a dog on the heel, elevator up, hypodermic down, a needle into the arm, blood in the vein, microbe war, Star wars. Super Nova, light to my eye, a blink, a battle ship? Boat going under-- thousands in the water, sharks at a banquet, fish, zebras running, the mouth of open shark, blood in the water, blood on the cross, the drip drip in the Ben Hur film, the wash of rain. forgiveness. … clean, clean, clean, the squirm of the night, birds in flight, worm from the hole, grasshoppers leaping, car screech, radio blare, wind in the hair, breasts like towers, teeth like sheep, all these clacking mouths, teeth growing into the gums, teeth cracking falling out, boulders fall onto the highway, cars weave, Highway 1 in California, waves crashing, seals barking .. My Mom, a picture of old car, trains, on the way to Auschwitz… (pause) redirect. Bumper cars, cue balls, atoms glaze the surface, pinball, bubble up through soap suds in the sink hands, veins, veins of gold in the earth the earth crushing down with root and drip hole sinking into earth, stalactites grow teeth in the mouth the slow downward thrust of mineral.

Dear! I don’t think I’ve ever tried that before. It is kind of fun just to see how thoughts bridge.

So I think of this all this wind and creep and growth, the cells in the blood and sap, fluid in the bones and boil … all this love speech and lovers moving in the night. Do they look like oil wells in China tonight, all those bodies pushed and swayed? Life erupting … God is breaking in, God hovering above each union, sperm penetrating eggs, new life; everywhere new lives, new souls, God smiles, God waits, God in love with the life of His hands, God breaking into hearts, God like water softening the Heart, God like the groom pushing though the heart, God arching bow, tightening knots, God leading the blood, God pulling the antlers, God blowing the wind of dandelion seed, God like Spirit, the sheets on the line are waving, Big boats with sails. God in the wind driving the boats, Christopher Columbus. God in History. Missions to serve. Wed to broken flesh and bad dreamers, dead Indians. Is God weeping? The tears of God, the wail of God, God …

Shhh, Shhh ... quiet my soul. Try as I might, I can only hold a part, a small part at a time. Hold three ideas at once maybe four. God holds the motion. Dad holds the motion. Nothing unseen, Nothing unknown. The whole is known. Loved or judged or waiting for completion. God as groom waits in the wings. The atom bombs go off, God waits in the wings. The curtains tear. God in the world, with me. This moment. God is so much here.

I will not fear.

T oday I think of the feeling of my tongue behind my teeth and caged like a turtle in a box, and consider the fact that 6 Billion other people have this feeling, but everyone feels a slightly different mouth.

Today, I sing a song of praise to God. He is pulling on the shells. He is pulling on the blood. Everywhere the world is cloud. Climbing particle by particle, out and big … Like a slow motion boil or contained in skeleton cage.

I have seen these films where they speed things up. Clouds climb and bulge, ever churning, ripping building … one particle at a time, but together massive movements in a moment. Flowers too unfurl. Bloom in speed like slow motion popcorn.

Today, the trees of the world are Play-do, pushed through the branches and squeezing out. We can’t see ‘em for our on normal timing, but I think if we were to take a frame every hour then run the film at 16 frames a second … that would be just short of a day in a second .. And with night, the thing would look like strobe or an old-fashioned film, hot blink and dark -- in and out -- and the trees would shoot up and flower and grow green in the span of 10 throbbing seconds.

Today I play the world fast and I think of ourselves riding through and under the green molten. I’ve seen these films, National Geographic fare, where they show molten fireworks -- Hot lava spitting up like muddy flame or spit up in the sky for a moment like a burning tree. And now, I see the world with trees, like so much green molten toss. If we speed up time a million fold, each tree might leap to life, blink and pulse through the seasons, then crash down again like so much descending lava. Press a hundred years into some seconds and the ground would writhe and build, billow and flame. So today the world is writhing, building, billowing and dropping down on itself, all at a rate we will not see for our hurry!

So too our bodies, and the bones. These ever swelling growing bones. Then shrinking with old age to crumble like chalk, or writhe among the churning rocks.

The planet builds and billows at a pace we can’t see. Today the shells are growing. One hard atom at a time. The little mini clams at the beach, or underwater, Shells curling out and fanning, spinning in 3D whirl. Given the shells in the world, did the earth just transform some hundred tons of sea and plankton into shell in the last second? Did the earth grow harder by a thousand tons? And grass. Did the world gain weight? -- and could it implode with the weight of its ever newness.

Starfish radiate … wheat seeds building, grapes swelling, bodies expanding. This is the water balloon world. This is the crystal world. The thing is flaking, climbing out. Unfurling. All this atom smash and warm all this terrific speed, and All I see for the view is so much slow and sway, like a lake in gentle breeze. But this is illusion for the smallness and the slowness of my eye.

Today the world is heaving. Every living thing swelling with breath, the mosquitoes and snakes and the lungs of some billion souls. I think of our corporate breath. Given that I must take in a breath every five seconds or so. 5 Billion souls. One billion just breathed in with me. One billion in exhale. I try to hear with my mind the whoosh. This is a hurricane of sound. This is the bellows of life. (Does God, apart from incarnation, draw breath? Here we are fighting for life with every breath. But God is holding His and will not die, even though He be placed underwater. (Okay, I’m sounding weird to myself again. But it is a thought … God is life, and life without breath, for he has no need of anything.)

Closing thoughts:

Is anyone out there ever startled by existence? I am. Sometimes all it takes to startle me is to be made aware that I see … or that the world exists ... right now.

Something is.


IS! ! ! ! ! --- and I want to peel back with the shock of it all.

Can you believe it! Something is here and it isn't me! Look Mom … look Dad …

The world. Is.

IS-ness!

Are-ness. Am-ness!

WHAT-ness !!

Could you ever have believed it … Let me tell you a secret … stuff exists … and I know it!

HA!

And then there are those times when I suffer another kind of shock … I move away from the awareness of self, or even surprise at the external world … to the knowledge that HE is here. …

Now at once, this would sound odd … This idea, that God exists … is SO central to the way I see the world; it drives my politics and art, my ethics, and my sense of creation, and who and what we are.

But all that belief stands in my mind like the idea that Antarctica is real. I believe it … and would make a sound logical argument that the ideas I expressed in photographs are real … but it remains an abstraction.

But then there are the times when I believe what I believe … when the idea settles like air into my lungs and I pull back like my brain is swimming in soup and I can hardly hold the idea … I am stupefied … I go through my days in a daze … …. I consider that I can only have these thoughts because HE is ongoing and before -- holding together the world of atoms before my eyes and the cells and the soup of electric thought -- and if He would just let go for a moment my thoughts would fly like electric shrapnel into space … I think of His bigness… His presence, His ISNESS ..

.

His absolute GODNESS

GOD EXISTS!

HE does -- RIGHT NOW.

He is by me, letting me have this thought … HE IS EVER NOW, HE BESI …D

---over when …When you …

YOU, YOU , YOU … You climb in my senses like an invading force. You stand behind my thoughts like you hold them, and I am in you and you are so much bigger. …

I see the weeds waving in the sea and see You stretched before time … I see the lions Yawn, I see the planets like electrons, I see the … Dear

Melt

down.

How can I hold all of the ideas of where you are, and what You govern and what you say and think? How can I even begin, and then I know …I know that You are in the room, and this room is in … and this world is in …and that my brains will not burst like over-stretched lungs … because you are kind and let me in on you presence in small packages.

Thank you Dad.

Today I see cathedrals,

slamming into the sun

and grating light like cheese.

or …

A love song by request.   8/01

(I am not quite sure what to make of this poem. Most of my poems stem from rational ideas, which I try to dress so others can see; this poem owes its genesis to feeling (Oh dear!) and I have worked to soften some of the thoughts.)

Readin' Emily I see

She felt a funeral in her brain;

Something slow, morose, or grim

Or maybe like a long lost friend.

And Lord, I wouldn’t wish that on myself -

Don't let me know the death of

Precious thought, or even let me

Walk those chalky sullen worlds,

 

But

Tonight when some hive

Of agitated birds

Is flapping in my brain …

Could we go for something still?

Or sober,

Could you slow this freight train down?

 

I see Your purple robes and the spinning stars, I see

Jelly fish in Technicolor coat

speeding by like smeared rainbows.

I feel that Titan tug of war

to codify the "will"

and wonder what it means

that Hell, should be cast in

the lake of fire…

Does some angel have me by the heal?

Or a demon by some reason

of my own design?

 

I see the cross

Like a dagger, ripping through the ages

Cutting through the cords of death, or cast

Like a bridge to heaven.

I see a dying thief consuming venom,

The other, waking into love eternal with the

The throb still in his wrists

I see your love displayed

In manta rays

And manna.

--

But tonight.

Could You tell me that you love me

And no more.