I by inner eye

would be the eye and ear of any man,

and many things.

 

I can put my self ever so lightly in the shoes of other folk,

and with imagination feel their pleasure or their pain.

For every talking head … for every beauty queen staring at us from the cover…. For every broken over bag lady … a world.

And Lord, though I would for fun, or fear, or profit

consider this world through many different eyes

There is one set that I,

and we will not ascend to.

(nor descend into their pain)

 

These are the eyes

that look into the holy eye of God and never flinch.

These are the eyes that look

into the living eye of God,

and are a self-seen eye.

Indeed, These are the eyes

that, having feasted on all glory

and all art,

Consent to being pounded down

in time and space until

we find the eye of God

looking at us

like a Beta in a bowl

(And a cruel bowl at that.)

 

These are the eyes of heaven

Weeping,

or

Forgiving, even as they

see the hyssop raised.

And, Lo:

 

These are the eyes

I long to see.

even as he holds me in them.

 

Illustration by Kayla (15)

Could’a been a Tyson

Slice’n chicken, or your face

Could’a been the sliced

Could’a been your face with teethy ear.

(Either way, I’d make some bucks

or fade away amidst the clucks)

 

Could’a been a coon dog
with a culinary nose
Could’a been in Birmingham
near the fire hose –

Catching liquid cannon balls, or
Blasting back your uppity
insurrection –

 

Indeed, Could’a been the one to say

“I’m not riding at the back today”

Could’a been the one to place
shackles on your hands --
Could’a been old Bobbit
now at half-a-man.
Could’a made the scissors
at the factory …
Could’a been ol’ Jimmy D.

with a giant olfactory.
Could'a been the pilot of the Inola Gay.
Could'a been some new born kid
slightly in the way -- of light.

Could’a been some buxom blonde
Before your camera lens.
You asked me to stand
right over the fan, and
I fed your lust while acting
like I didn't know.

Could’a been your weak-willed husband,
burning anger deep inside,
but without the will to take you home.

Could’a been old Abe
Or Grant or Lee

Found that vision flexes with geography,

Could’a been a blend

of honor, necessity or lies,
Led the nation into blood

Or sparred us from the greater wrath of God.

 

Could’a done the goose step

Could’a been a goose

Could a been the hangman

Could’a been the noosed.

Could’a been so hard, as to fan the oven

Could’a been so twisted, as to join a coven

Could’a been the ripper
or the ripped.
The hooker or the hooked.

The bookie or the booked,

The bastard or the dad,
The vulture or the lad -who didn't find fresh water.

 

Could have been the woman that I hold …
Could have been the child that I scold.
Could have been
any of a hundred folks on the other side of me ...

Could’a begged my change – for booze

Could’a caught my glare

Could’a begged some dimes to live

Could’a shared the air

Could’a waited for my tip

or needed a kind word,

Could’a looked to me for light

but found me self absorbed.

 

Indeed, Could’a been a Jeckle or a Hyde,

held a dozen people deep inside;

Could’a felt as if my brain
would fly into a trillion parts.

(okay, this I can believe.)

Could’a been a David,

Good at writin’ psalms

Could’a a been a crowd

Good at wavin’ palms.

Could’a been a Kirk

Then I’d really be a jerk.

Could’a never needed to think odd.

Could’a been a rock
called forth to sing Your praise.

Yesterday I though of how each person – each world – is a different place. Today I consider the intersection. No one person holds the same reservoir of sights, but “together” most of the things that I have seen are held somewhere in someone else. And conversely, I hold parts and fragments that make up small slivers in the lives of some other millions of folks.

For some sights, thousands and millions with shared set overlap. With other sights and memories, only a few.

So now, I think of those things that are only known by one mind or a few. I ride down these streets by night, so alone. I know the path, the feel of the streets, even the spring of my bike beneath my legs. At my first passing the street was new. Now the path is engraved. For me alone. Someone else may ride with me lost in the newness. For every home I pass, there is knowledge within. The thing is familiar to someone inside. For every book I see on a shelf … pages hidden to me -- The thing is known and filling in someone’s head. So I think of this too. For every person, there is a world of knowing without intersection. Thoughts, visions, imprints…. Sensations and history, that can never be know by another. I might try to enter your world, or you mine, but the best we can do is filter a portion of that experience through our own.

Here is a thought. I try to build in my mind a model – the set of ALL knowledge and sensation. Things that are known by most get stacked and build like a mountain. Things known by a lot, form the slopes, Things that are known alone flatten out on the horizon. Given the huge number of portals and varied visions, the thing would be huge. A monolith of sensation; “knowledge” supplied by earthworms and amoebas, tigers and zebra’s … one huge pantheon of knowing and sensation.

This is not a real thought now, but it has been my own. I consider the mono-sense-set. The omni-data of life. I am (or have been) tempted to call this thing ‘god’. But that would be a lie. God may ride in and trough His creation. He may hold each molecule in place and be closer than the air in our lungs … but Jehovah is not His creation. He is both distinct, and far larger than the sum of his creation.

Dear, I think I might be repeating yesterday. But this has been a big big thought. This next thing may sound like a contradiction, but I mean to explain myself.

I have been thinking, that each person is the center of the universe.

I’ve heard one definition of humanism that goes something like; “ Man is the measure of all things”

And I know, in as much as God holds the only true and objective vision, that this is a lie. God is the central thing, and sets the measure behind the stick…. For God is true even if every man is a liar. If my senses scream lies, or I delude myself in the mind or Spirit, there remains one who is undeluded, one who knows all truth without shadow. So when I say that each person is the “center” of the universe, I don’t mean is to say that man is the apex of the universe.

What I mean to say, is that in terms of experience, each person on the planet is “the” center of the universe.

For every person, time, distance, history, knowledge – radiate from himself. (Oh why can’t we come up with a gender-neutral word that doesn’t sound stupid?)

I judge distance and time in relation to myself. The world extends from me, even as it channels down my eyes. And as I have never seen through an other's eyes or used an other’s nose to smell with, every sensation I hold begins and ends in me … and it is just this same way for everyone else. The man in Tibet sees space extending from himself, just as the girl on the tightrope looks down and holds the world beneath her eyes. Her feet feel the distance and the sway.

So I think of this – for every car I pass in the dark, for every person on the street, for every person on TV or every person in print, is a world. A universe extending from them, and having meaning only to them. God may be behind their world, and comprehend the whole, but in human terms, the thing is unique to that person. So I think (of) just some of the worlds that exist. Or have…

I had this thought about two years ago. Watching TV, and of all things football (I never watch football). I think it was a Super Bowl or something big and the score was tight and the crowd revved. I thought how strange it must be to be that man, to hear the roar in your ears …But not to be the man as seen, but to be the man seeing. Some man had that sensation of an eighty thousand eyes on him, or a dozen million if we think TV. Some man felt the dollars in the scales and the pressure to produce. Some man felt the skin of ball and stampede of muscle against. And finally, some man saw the ball connect – as delivered from his arm, and heard the roar and felt the lifting up. And all at the same time that I downed another diet coke.

I think too of an other image. The one that is most strong was in the national Geographic. Some bloat-bellied kid in Africa. The kind from whom we turn, but stare and feel with for a second, lest we feel ourselves hard for turning too quick away. The thing I held in my hand was conditioned tree bark with ink, the imprint a surreal echo of the original event. Some thousands of production dollars latter, and the image of starvation pressed up at my senses. But I think now, somewhere behind the etched 2-D image was a person. Not the person being looked at by a lens, but the boy looking out from redded eyes at a white guy with a Nikon framing his pain. He looks down his leg and sees black stalks; he feels the dry and puts his hand of bone on a swollen abdomen. Someone was there. Someone was that person. Or still may be. I think even now. This person, if he has not died, is alive with me in the world sensing it and tasting it through parched lips.

For every talking head … for every beauty queen staring at us from the cover…. For every broken over bag lady … a world.

This then is the world … hands lifted at my face yelling “heil Hitler” … bodies jammed and looking at me in a field below the balcony as I deliver the Easter mass…. Bodies pressed against me as we move forward to the pull of “Just as I am.” There is the world from a hospital bed; I feel no leg … or shrapnel in my chest. Then there is the world above me …looking down with tender hands applying compress to my chest. I see the world with hair across my eyes … I feel the weight of rounded thighs… I feel Apollo breaking free … I feel the spear leave my hand…. I catch it on the other side. I am the man holding you to kiss … I am the woman being pulled into your clasp…. I have a hammer in my hand, aimed at a stake against your wrist. For every eye I see, is a world looking back … The world goes out from my worm brain like dirt on the horizon, the earth peels away beneath my Talons …I am the chicken on the block.

Dear, I’m sounding weird to myself. I guess what I meant to say is that … I am both terrified and amazed by the worlds in our midst. Why am I me … why don’t I hear the ring of Heil Hitler in my ears? Could I have been born that man? God forbid. But someone did, and that world -- as haunted as is was -- was real to someone.

Who knows the eyes
of the all-mall-ball,
The sight of a quillion minnows
zigging at the sun,
her tongue
splitting in a trillion forks, or

twittering with song?

Who knows the taste
of the all-mall-ball--
the diatoms and dates, the grippy grass and rancid flesh?--
Her voice, a quadul-gum
of cricket sound
and shriek and speak and breaking glass.

Who knows the hear
of the all-mall-ear

These desperate cries and sparking brains
with pierce of train, and trilling prayer?
Who knows the hair
of all the hares in the world and the scale of the fish
at once?

I am a son of the all mall ball,
one of many
made under EYE
and bound in place--
But given to a shrapnel soul

that likes to ride behind the eyes:

Twisting up- I find my lips pulled taunt with flapping plates

or stretched like hinge from eye to eye, the fringe of baleen as I sweep,
or snapped back like a bear-trap--
voice cracking to the splendor of descending worm.

Oh
I am a mouth with chomping crowns...
bloody sabers draped in deer,
I feel the sear of hot blood in my eye

I roar

I feel the weight of heavy pads, the feline breath and nail--
I ride the racing nerves until I break
into the fountain of the vulture dance,
and “Aren't you beautiful
my love, with bobbing bald and warts
and carrion perfume about your wings.”

I sing the song of morning from the line,

then walk it with flicking tail,
I twine with your like-silky throat, and find
pleasure in your snakey eye.

I am dragonfly amidst cat-tail trees;

darting in shatter-realm of stalk and dock...

I am belly taut with life and kicking hooves,
I feel it move,

but have no thought to tell you
how it feels, I hold a thousand guppies in my gut
and the webbing of the silk-worm net.

I am dolphin dipping joy,
punching through the thick n’ thin,
laughing at the lemon sky.

I am the queen of nature

(born of her but giving birth

to all that gives us life)

Mother of an ancient “Son”,

building underneath my lungs
and soon the ONE of whom the mall-ball sings
(or twists within), will find

the master of our liberation

walking in our eyes.

Note: This very weird poem is (among other things) a reflection on the omniscience of God. What I might try with imagination --living through the eyes of other beasts or men (or Mary in the last verse) –-is a world that God knows in its absolute fullness. He sees from every place, all at once and all the time. No thing is hidden from his eye. All things belong to Him. And we shall behold Him.

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

I remember as a kid, talking about whether your blue was my blue. Perhaps the thing I saw as blue was the thing you saw as red, but since you saw blue consistently as my red, there would be no distortion for you to see the sky of “my red” and call it blue. I have certain reasons to doubt that this could be true... One of them is emotion. Do you really think you could say, “I feel blue”, if the feeling you had feeling glum as associated with my color red?

I think too of music.. We speak of some sounds as cool, while others play warm. I think of flutes as pastel, leaning cool. Trumpets play crimson and trombones orange- spanning red to gold. The sax… Oh Dear, I’m not sure what color the sax plays unless maybe it’s a blend of violet and green, bronze and maroon—something kind of dark and earthy, Maybe forest green with raspy red under-parts. Now if you played the trumpet and I heard the sound as what your red- but my blue, could we really hear the trumpet the same?

So, all this is to say that is it most likely that we see certain wavelengths of light in about the same way…. If we are people. Color blind aside; we decode light energy in a similar way… But what if I were some other kind of creature. Could it be that some eyes see colors we can’t even imagine? And how can I think about a color that I can’t imagine?

Now, it seems possible to think about ways of perceiving that are less than our own. I can do less than. If a dog sees in black and white, I can image that. Or even a fly, if what a fly sees is just a thousand little pictures--But what of a creature that sees in infrared or radio, or smells smells that I have never dreamed, or even feels emotion. I don’t mean has emotions, I mean feels them much like I might feel heat. Or what about the bird that sees with clarity at a thousand yards. How can I think of seeing “clearer” than I do, or of a color that we can’t see, or of a sound lower than I can hear?

The hardest thing to think of is some new sense, beyond the five. I try to think of such senses, but they all seem to b e variations on things I already know, but enhanced. Mostly I think of sensing emotions or “feeling the spirit”… or feeling what other people feel. But would this be a new sense?

To be honest, I could never have imagined the senses I posses, if I didn’t already have them, so I have little difficulty believing that I will someday be equipped with others.

Now I am working at a hard idea. (I’ve tried this several times and erased it.)

They say that seeing is believing, but it seems to me that the first act of faith is believing what you see.

There are some things so obvious that we fail to see the faith behind the step. Granted,, believing that the outside world is real isn’t much of a leap, but it is something. And that is something of a trick. I have never seen my brain nor eye. Sure I’ve seen the reflection of some colored halo in a mirror. But the inner thing—the see part, I can’t see it for being the seer. I take it on faith that it’s there cause I’ll never get behind it to tell!

As for the outside world. Open one eye and the whole thing pours in and starts an electric fire.

I behold a tree. Or something like it. Something’s out there to steal the light, bend it my way and mash it though organic glass. Then the tree goes electric. My sense of the tree as a visible thing is, in the end, the state of chemistry in my head. And what a state it is! How my brain has a sense of light and form when no light as such ever hits it, is more than I can fathom.

So I try to think about this something that is the something behind my sensing it-- The thing that is independent of my own personal chemistry. Take for a minute, dear… the Moon. I believe that a ball of rock hangs in space, a certain distance from our earth, and of an exact size and design. That same moon would be there if I were blind. The moon exist objectively, apart from my having sense it.

By faith, I affirm an objective moon. But how do you define the “objective” moon. The moment I begin to describe it by means of my portal vision I enter the realm of subjective. My eyes see the moon a certain distance in the sky. But I could have been born a creature that sees more like my 24mm wide angle lens. When I look through that lens it shows distance a different way than my regular eye does. We call the wide-angle vision a distortion, but only for the reason that it differs from standard human vision.

Even so, I can walk through the world looking through my wide angle lens. I hold the camera to my eye, and walk with it as my eye. I turn the lens at me feet. They rush away and I double in size, but then, so do my arms and shadow. This new world is consistent within itself.

So what if I were a bird, with eyes gripping my skull like ear-muffs-- The Moon might be like a pin-hole set in a frame that extends behind my back, but it would be consistent with the reality in which I as the bird live. On the contraire, it might float overhead as large as the New Jerusalem.

I thing about yesterday at the River Park ( Tulsa Oklahoma , a park that lines the river downtown as a backdrop). Great shafts of petrify and glass skinned buildings rose against a line of tall trees. The whole place was packed and humming with life.

I watched the joggers, some with headphones. Someone might be running in a world where the trees float upward in grand order to the sounds of Bach. Another might see a world all dead, with the rhythm of the Sex Pistols making rancid the sky. And then there was the squirrel. I noticed it, as terrified by a passing dog. What of its world. Did it see my towers at all, or was the world for the squirrel all grass and shake and tremor. Did the dog in the distant sound like a banshee? Did we haunt his eyes like stretched ghosts? And what of the dog, his nose hard wired to a thousands scents, beyond anything I can imagine as he rollicked through the scents of joy.

All in all, what I mean to say is that while there must be one objective reality from which all living things get their content for reality… no one has ever seen it yet. All we have are these decoding devices, and these differ in the way in which they decode the data. Not only that, they differ in what they take in.

An elephant hears what I will not hear; the eagle sees what I will not see. The thing is louder, sharper, more colorful, bigger, thinker, denser, more distant… more large, more small, more mute, more dark, more cold, more brilliant, more heavy, more light, more charged with vibrations, more alive in wind and smell, more shattered, more whole, more sexed, more vicious, more senseless, more………. More of everything than I will ever know.

So… How many worlds are there? One, of one for every living thing?

…

Even so, I consider the sight of God.

Now talk about trying to think of a sensing that is “more than.” Does distance have any meaning to God? Does he see with perspective, or does He view all sides of a sphere at once. Does He see a distant star or a beetle jaw or electron-whirl with the same clarity? Is anything farther away from Him? Is His vision like on vision all at once, or does He switch channels. Does he see all of time all at once, all the time?

I know I am being a bit silly. I don’t wis h to puzzle…. I wis h to praise such a one.

There is a an eye in this world unbound by location. It encompasses the data, and every perspective. No view is hidden, all visions understood… And His truth establishes the existence of the objective world. My senses might lie, distort, or limit…. But the eye of God…. This is the total.

As the creator of the organic-machines that make these acts of sensing possible, we know that no method of sensing is alien to Him. He has understood the vision of the worm and the sense of smell of the dog, and seen and smelt with them. As Creator he is far larger by than the sum of all portals, nor is his vision linked to or constrained by creation. Should there be no creature ever, His sight would be complete and encompassing, (though I have no idea how he sees sin.)

Finally--and this is another hard idea-- While is seems that we can not build a formula large enough to describe the world without the distortion of human sense, God knows the world. He sees the objective thing, apart from the distortion inherent in “perception.” An objective world feeds me data. It exists whether I do or not. But not so with God. He does not “perceive.” He establishes perception. His sight corresponds with Truth. He establishes truth, even as he walks in it. The world would not be real if He did not see it.

God may be objective, in that he really is here, but his existence precedes the objective reality behind any thing. The world is made real because he sees it, and His idea about anything is what makes it real.

Dear, this idea really does make some sense to me, but I don’t feel capable of expressing it.

Aughhh. Why can’t I state this idea?

Today I feel my tongue in my mouth,

like a turtle in a cage--

It skids across the roof

and we consider “our” skull, dropping in

like Stonehenge through the gums.

Could it be that 6 Billions souls

share this feeling with me,

but never quite.­

I will believe that the World is one

when you taste fish-paste soup,­­

and I cry, “Halleluiah,

that was good!”