Voluntaries from the Invisibles
Douglas Milburn
Part the Sixth
Omnes amici ejus
spreverunt eam
et factisunt ei inimici.
(All her friends have turned
againsdt her
and have become her enemies.)
--Jeremiah.
1. Youd sooner teach an ant to think
than coax a human mind to move matter.
The ant is expert at only one thing:
being an ant.
In that practice it may accomplish interesting feats
(carrying a leaf larger than itself, etc.), but thinking?
No.
So too the human mind.
In its practice the exploration of all possible abstractions
and their realization through the body
will never find it, as presently constituted,
on its own lifting an object
a ten-thousandth the size of the ant's leaf.
2. Daily a door, a window may open a crack.
The easiest medium for communicating
what is revealed is music.
the hardest, words.
3. Thinking by analogy will only get you so far.
At some point it too must be set aside
as just another useful survival tool.
4. Life is at least 10,000 lessons in patience.
To do more than hint at,
in a most indirect way.
what else it may be
is to unlearn everyone of those lessons.
5. Some kronos nodes are quite pliable.
Most are not, reflecting the massive momentum
of the on-going rush of time and its many participants.
6. Those who (Caravaggio. Beethoven, et al.) unfurl banners at
the edge
and recast light refracted from the once-unknown
have little idea how they reshape the future.
7. The static is least in the hours just before dawn
when everybody is busy elsewhere.
8. The departure and arrival terminals are the same.
They are where you are at this moment.
Remember?
9. Even when new windows and doors open
the massively powerful survival imperative
often tramples the necessary, subtle responses.
10. The startlingly vivid reality of newly recrafted kronos
nodes.
11. Play-acting to acclaim from old audiences in old clearings
or hacking alone new paths toward jungle's edge?
12. America finally got its Jeremiah in Cormac McCarthy.
13. The uprooted never recover from the trauma.
14. The stochastic fallacy:
Prognosticators immersed in the dominant thinking
of their age can see only a future of linear extrapolations.
Whether medieval church fathers or contemporary technocrats,
their blinders result in the same fatal error: narrowness of vision.
15. Only listen.
16. That clarity of vision is possible is a big surprise.
The bigger surprise is what you see when you achieve clarity.
17. Parallel lives intersect often, and well before infinity.
18. Our collective history,
like our individual lives,
proceeds by fits, starts,
and the occasional leap.
19. Rough love. Viruses make us all, like it or not, fuckees.
Sometimes reproduction ensues.
20. Civilization as we have known it
consists largely of constructing
crude, massive dykes against
the unrelenting deluge of information
from the sun
that saturates the earth
and us with it.
We pride ourselves
on wanting to know it all
but constantly act
as if we dont.
21. Ocean the teach, tides the lesson,
and clouds--not death--the final exam.
22. Consider what Magellan went through
to get to his Pacific Ocean,
and how ill-prepared he was on arrival.
And the price he paid.
It seems to be taking us forever
to get through this,
our Tierra del Fuego,
which we think is all,
but our Pacific lies dead ahead
and we are no better prepared for it
than he was.
23. Whether the log is lost,
the deed of completion stands perfect
in its mute finality
like the last chord of the coda of a Beethoven symphony
whose fading echoes sculpt
the ensuring silence
into new, seductive shapes.
24. Unio holistica.
25. Fearful inlanders vacillate between shoring up
their failing dykes
and fleeing to higher ground,
failing still to see
that bother actions
are equally illusory.
26. No doubt there exist timetables
for transreality travel.
Unfortunately
bipedal former apes arent
among the intended readership.
All we can do is ride the rods,
if were so lucky.
27. Neither the music of the past
nor the music of the present
is a bridge to the future.
The only bridge to the future
is the music of the future.
28. In considering monk cells
isolation is in the eye of the beholder.
29. The scientist seeks to reveal.
The leader seeks to conceal.
Like magicians,
artists walk the fine line
between concealing and revealing.
30. What we experience and treasure
as our great flow of cultural converse
turns out to be a shore-bound eddy
in a far larger, more variegated current
accessible only by
those who learn to give up
time, space, and language.
31. To understand what is lost
and what is not gained
when you abide in devices
is the ever-present lesson.
32. Scatterbrained mind
scattershot attention
served us well
savannah to
forest to city
enemies, threats
here there everywhere
past present future.
Keep the muddy water
stirred: in the murk
they cant see us.
But the only way
to see forward now
father than those
frightened forebears
is to let the water
settle
and learn the way
of contemplative clarity.
33. Beware those who mistake
the middle distance for infinity
and tomorrow for eternity.
34. Alla breve
Its eight-eight fangs gleaming
the piano sits in the corner
with the silence patience of its kind
you cant hear it but
you know its saying
come closer dearie
touch me like you used to
and see what happened
this time when time
finally near its end
matters and for once
Beethoven doesnt.
35. Distant horizons
minuscule secr5ets
fleeting wishes
dying gods' creams
these are a few
of our favorite things.
36. Magellan had oceans before him
while now I find Ive been
rafting Huck-like down
a bread meandering river
with only the surety
of unglimpsed oceans somewhere
somewhere far ahead.
"Reach upward!"
The crow's nest is not enough.
37.Science expands to fill
the space, time, and language available to it.
Transcience exists in the space beyond space,
time beyond time, and language beyond language.
38. Not only connect.
Also commingle, commune,
abide, and then step aside.
39. Static-seekers: the money-centered,
the credulous, kit-fliers.
40. Some old mine-faces continue to yield worthwhile results.
But Dad Joiner, thought crazy by those around him,
drilled where his unprecedented perceptions told him to.
Dreams, drugs, dimensions.
41. Those who keep logs havent understood the journey.
42. Every writer has one outback and one city.
43. For how long did we watch ships
disappear over the horizon
before we figured out why?
For how long will we watch waves and people disappear
until we understand?
44. All Texans are mavericks,
including those who try really hard not to be.
45. For all our high self-regard
universe-wise,
the cat has no pajamas.
46. The effective props of language,
behind the blurring scrim of tradition, perpetuate
across generations
massive perceptual and judgmental error.
47. Distant night cities beckon twinkling
across an untracked plain.
Quo vadis?
48. The eye too has it reasons
that the mind will never know.
49. Impertinent theologies
are the mark of lesser, immature cultures.
Pertinent ones
bespeak a certain seasoned hope.
50. The fact that walls have windows and doors
doesnt stop them from being walls.
51. Every tree a door, every cloud a window.
52. The important message
is in front of us all the time
but it is writ so large
that its almost impossible to read.
Less messages,
mostly misleadingly self-referential,
litter our daily paths,
entertain us with the novelty of discovery,
and in the end
crumble with us back into dust.
Some few hang about remotely,
their retrieval requiring practiced
squinting and stretching,
their reading
the most dauntingly subtle
translation skills.
53. Explorer's planning tip:
calculate supplies needed
for the worst-case scenario,
then double that amount.
54. Across eons others have left
warning systems, trip wires.
Where silent darkness ought to be total
klaxons bleat, strobes flash.
Danger so great
they left no hint of what.
55. Some cultures seal the heart in quartz
so thoroughly that though it loves
its owner remains ignorant of the love.
56. We imprison so we can think
for a time
we ourselves are not imprisoned.
We execute so we can think
for a time
we ourselves are not executed.
57. At the end of their days
in the last moments of their lives here
the greed the hostile and the stupid
are still hard at work erecting
more billboards.
What message can compete with that of the dropped petal?
58. We mistake playing with parsecs for life
and hiding corpses for death,
light for life and darkness for death,
the knowledge of worlds for wisdom
onanism for omnipotence.
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Seventh >>
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the
First
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Second
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Third
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fourth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fifth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Sixth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Seventh
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Eighth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Ninth
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