[lit-ideas] Re: Jorie Graham and Wittgenstein
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2004 07:09:35 +0100 (BST)
--- Scribe1865@xxxxxxx wrote: > "Covenant"
> by Jorie Graham
> She was being readied by forces she did not
> recognize. This is an age in which imagination
> is no longer all-powerful. Where if you had
> to write the whole thing down, you could.
> (Imagine: to see the whole thing written down.)
> Everything but memory abolished.
> All the necessary explanations also provided.
> A very round place: everyone is doing it.
> "It: a /very/ round and glad place.
> Feeling life come from far away, like a motor approaching.
> And in its approach: that moment when it is closest, so loud, as if
> not only near you, but /in/ you.
> And /that/ being the place where the sensation of real property
> begins. Come. It is going to pass, even though right
> now
> it's very loud, here, alongside, life, life, so glad to be in it,
> no?, unprotected, thank you, /exactly/ the way I feel.
> And you? Lord how close it comes. It has a
> /seeming/ to it
> so bright it is as if it had no core.
> It all given over to the outline of seem:
> still approaching, blind, open, its continuing /elsewhere/ unthinkable as a
>
>
> gear-shift
>
>
> at
> this speed.
> Approaching as if with a big question.
> No other system but this one and it growing larger.
> All at once, as if all the voices now are suddenly one voice.
> Ah, it is here now, /the here./ [Love, where is love, can it too
> be this thing that simply grows insistently louder]
> [It seems impossible it could ever pass /by/][she thought]
> the eruption of presentness right here: your veins
> [Meanwhile a dream floats in an unvisited field]
> [There by the edge of the barn, above the two green-lichened
> stones, where for an instant a butterfly color of chicory
> flicks, dis-
> appears] How old-fashioned: distance: squinting it
> into
> view. Even further: rocks at year's lowest tide.
> The always-underneath excitedly exposed to heat, light, wind, the
> being-seen. Who could have known a glance could be
> so plastic. Rubbery and pushing down on all the tiny hissing overbright
>
>
> greens.
> O sweet conversation: protozoa, air: how long have you been speaking?
> The engine [of /the most/] is passing now.
> At peak: the mesmerization of here, this me here, this me
> passing now.
> So as to leave /what/ behind?
> We, who can now be neither wholly here nor disappear?
> And to have it come so close and yet not /know/ it:
> how in time you do /not/ move on:
> how there is no "other" side:
> how the instant is very wide and bright and we cannot
> ever
> get away with it--the instant--what holds the "know"
> [as if gently, friend, as if mesmerized by the love of /it/][love of
> (not) making sense](tide coming in)(then distance taking
> the perplexion
> of engine
> whitely in)(the covenant, the listening, drawing its parameters out
> just as it approaches its own unraveling)
> the covenant: yes: that there be plenitude, yes,
> but only as a simultaneous emptying--of the before, where it came
> from--and of the after (the eager place to which it so
> "eagerly" goes). Such rigorous logic, that undulating shape
> we make of
> our listening
> to it: being: being on time: in time: there seeming to be no actual
>
>
> being:
> all of it growing for a time closer and closer--as with a freight
> of sheer
> abstract
> abundance
> (the motor
> sound)(is all) followed by the full selfishness (of such
> well being) of the being
> (so full of innocence) actually (for the instant) here:
> I love you: the sky seems nearer: you are my first
> person:
> let no one question this tirelessness of approach:
> love big enough to hide the cage:
> tell them yourself who you are:
> no victory: ever: no /ever/: then what "happens":
> you can hear the hum at its most constant: steady: the era:
> love bestowed upon love close-up:
> (quick, ask it of heaven now, whatever it was you so
> wished to
> know) the knowing: so final: yet here is the road, the
> context, ongoingness,
> and how it does go on regardless of the strangely sudden coming un-
>
>
> done
> of
> its passing away.
> Silence is welcomed without enthusiasm.
> Listening standing now like one who removed his hat
> out of respect for
> the passage.
> What comes in the aftermath they tell us is richly
> satisfying.
> No need to make a story up, for instance.
> We have been free now ever since, for instance.
>
>
>
>
> ["Covenant" and five additional poems by Jorie Graham can be found in
> /Conjunctions: 35, American Poetry: States of the Art]
>
>
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