The World Is A Palimpsest
6-20-06 Every Iota Of Matter Is Alive
I wake up. Look about the room. It is empty save for the stacks of my own compositions scattered not only thoughout the bedroom but lying rampant throughout my entire abode. Every room is piled with black words on white pages. These are all my sprawling offspring. Individual papers have a way of falling off the stack and meandering to the floor by some irresistible series of repulsions and attractions, some utterly electromagnetic event. I will find a particular poem or story or letter or essay (that I composed 10 or more years ago) lying out in the open on my kitchen floor decreeing to me an ineluctable message. There it sits in front of me a magical pattern---an electronic message, irresistible. And I tell you that magical piece of paper with my words etched into it appears there on the floor in my life as no mere happenstance but as a singular & symbolical manifestation: a universal statement from the world of so called "inanimate objects." Everything in the universe is endowed with meaning. What concerns me of course is everything that endows me with meaning. For indeed the world reads me as I peruse it. The empty cigarette wrapper on the sidewalk, the very lay of the concrete blocks on that sidewalk today, and the bent aluminum coca-cola can lying on its side in the parking lot---they interpret me as I study them & see the writing on the pavement & note my destiny in one moment of time in the universal mirror. Every iota of matter in the universe is scintillating with significance. I am the interpreter and purveyor of Meaning to a planet apparently lost in confused rage & the collected tumult & aggression of the terrified & the blindly striking out. The world is literally and incessantly overflowing with symbols that tell us who we are and where we are headed. How do we read and take the measure of these images & signs & metaphors that greet our every gaze & hearing? It is The Artist who gives meaning to the human enterprise in all its massive contradiction and ambiguity and paradox amid the wreck and joy of life. What a gargantuan task & game. No wonder people chase palm readers & astrologists & interpreters of the I Ching & tarot cards. The cosmos is loaded with riddles. And each human being contains the whole world in duplicate: the sum and substance of all the mysteries of the universe. How do I give my fellow Readers my irrevocable story so that it is impossible of being lost and incapable of leading them astray?
RLG Copyright 2006
I wake up. Look about the room. It is empty save for the stacks of my own compositions scattered not only thoughout the bedroom but lying rampant throughout my entire abode. Every room is piled with black words on white pages. These are all my sprawling offspring. Individual papers have a way of falling off the stack and meandering to the floor by some irresistible series of repulsions and attractions, some utterly electromagnetic event. I will find a particular poem or story or letter or essay (that I composed 10 or more years ago) lying out in the open on my kitchen floor decreeing to me an ineluctable message. There it sits in front of me a magical pattern---an electronic message, irresistible. And I tell you that magical piece of paper with my words etched into it appears there on the floor in my life as no mere happenstance but as a singular & symbolical manifestation: a universal statement from the world of so called "inanimate objects." Everything in the universe is endowed with meaning. What concerns me of course is everything that endows me with meaning. For indeed the world reads me as I peruse it. The empty cigarette wrapper on the sidewalk, the very lay of the concrete blocks on that sidewalk today, and the bent aluminum coca-cola can lying on its side in the parking lot---they interpret me as I study them & see the writing on the pavement & note my destiny in one moment of time in the universal mirror. Every iota of matter in the universe is scintillating with significance. I am the interpreter and purveyor of Meaning to a planet apparently lost in confused rage & the collected tumult & aggression of the terrified & the blindly striking out. The world is literally and incessantly overflowing with symbols that tell us who we are and where we are headed. How do we read and take the measure of these images & signs & metaphors that greet our every gaze & hearing? It is The Artist who gives meaning to the human enterprise in all its massive contradiction and ambiguity and paradox amid the wreck and joy of life. What a gargantuan task & game. No wonder people chase palm readers & astrologists & interpreters of the I Ching & tarot cards. The cosmos is loaded with riddles. And each human being contains the whole world in duplicate: the sum and substance of all the mysteries of the universe. How do I give my fellow Readers my irrevocable story so that it is impossible of being lost and incapable of leading them astray?
RLG Copyright 2006
posted by rlg at 3:05 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home