.
Dark and silent merely epiphenomenal;
All through the night the cold rain falls,
Passive suffering, merely another state.
Every sentence is a kind of prison
Yet it is said today He is risen
And my thought was, there's a low ceiling.
Morning After (31.3.10): photos by Tom Raworth, 2010
11 comments:
Tom,
Ah, thanks for this -- words (a beautiful Easter poem) and pictures for Easter Monday. . . . And now the sun is risen (into what had earlier been a cloudless sky) it's raining again. . . .
4.5
first grey light in sky above still dark
ridge, white edge of moon through leaves
in foreground, sound of waves in channel
continuum as field of space
analogous to, concept
determined or together with,
ideas, physical point
clouds on horizon to the left of point,
whiteness of wave in windblown channel
Steve,
Thanks as always for enlightenment and illumination, paddling out into it.
Dare I "see" Jesus in a wet suit?
He walks with me, he talks with me
determined or together with,
... into the resounding channels,
and the now suddenly opening and clearing (for a moment, over the bay) sky...
This is extremely fine. This morning's offerings are making it extremely difficult to get to work and cover the various items I need to, but am not terribly anxious, to attend to. I'm glad you place Epiphenomenal (Morning After) in the final position of today's poems and the Steven’s lecture excerpt. (At least that’s how I interpret the sequencing.) The pieces each seem correctly ordered to me. Yesterday we attended a Friends Meeting in Cornwall, NY, close to where we used to live. The Meeting House is a building from the early 1790s that’s been in continuous use by Friends since its construction. It still has a fair amount of very old glass in the windows, which is extremely beautiful and acts in unexpected ways on your eyes all the time. During part of our time there, I re-read the beginning sections of Genesis and the concluding sections of each of the four Gospels (King James version.) Very little was said during the hour, but the words that were spoken were extremely surprising and interesting, as they tend to be at Cornwall, generous in spirit, and they chased away decisively (for a while at least) some of my darker thoughts about human character and “the way things are going”. (Long story short – I’m going to have to de-activate my Facebook account. It used to seem like a sort of beach where driftwood would slowly pile up. Now I have the angry mob – actually, several angry mobs – on my doorstep constantly and I can’t see the beach at all.) Epiphenomenal (Morning After) puts me in mind of what I read yesterday in its clarity and also its mystery. As for the Larkin, and the photos, I assume you’ll keep these coming as appropriate.
Curtis,
Thank you very much for sharing this, such generosity of spirit does not go unappreciated here. And thank you especially for noticing or anyway finding an intention of sorts in the progression and sequencing of these posts. I wish I could truthfully say there has always been a master plan at work here. But I can at least honestly say that as time goes along there has been more and more of an attempt to have the "ordering" make some sort of sense. I suppose this is a terrible admission in the blogosphere, where the moment is always dominant and absolute in its hegemony. But, oh well.
(About Facebook, I must admit that I've never been on or in or in any way involved with it, so though I can feel sympathy with those who do and are, when it's mentioned I always find myself having to make polite signs of assent, as if I were in a room in which everyone but me was speaking Croatian.)
Very briefly, I established a Facebook account for the simple purpose of trying to understand and monitor what my 12-year old daughter was getting up to with her friends. On that score, I found I had no worries. Jane’s posts are benign and on the order of “Yay Phillies”. Some of the other kids worry me, but not as much as adults. Facebook , especially now that the volume of traffic sometimes surpasses Google's, resembles that oft-mooted “communist plot” to overthrow the West. In this version, they’ve introduced a device that will tie the enemy up in knots by inducing him to pursue mind-numbing self-referential activities with no ultimate objective. You just keep going. All the while, they’re stealing a march on Ft. Knox (or something like it.) I think you’re in a good place vis-à-vis Facebook.
Cold rain, passive suffering, sentence as prison, low ceiling, all of this moved me, especially the idea that they are all just states. Reminds me of Ray Lewis, quoth the Raven: "Pain is temporary."
To the pains of this mortal coil let us echo Ray Lewis and say Nevermore.
[Oh, my, another "lost" comment. This was the first thing said:]
STEPHEN RATCLIFFE has left a new comment on your post "Epiphenomenal (Morning After)":
Tom,
Ah, thanks for this -- words (a beautiful Easter poem) and pictures for Easter Monday. . . . And now the sun is risen (into what had earlier been a cloudless sky) it's raining again. . . .
4.5
first grey light in sky above still dark
ridge, white edge of moon through leaves
in foreground, sound of waves in channel
continuum as field of space
analogous to, concept
determined or together with,
ideas, physical point
clouds on horizon to the left of point,
whiteness of wave in windblown channel
Posted by STEPHEN RATCLIFFE to TOM CLARK at 5 April 2010 07:52
[And here, sigh! my "lost" reply to Stephen:]
TC has left a new comment on your post "Epiphenomenal (Morning After)":
Steve,
Thanks as always for enlightenment and illumination, paddling out into it.
Dare I "see" Jesus in a wet suit?
He walks with me, he talks with me
determined or together with,
... into the resounding channels,
and the now suddenly opening and clearing (for a moment, over the bay) sky...
Posted by TC to TOM CLARK at 5 April 2010 08:18
So many readings to your lines... But I will choose one: darkness and light.
Lucy,
Yes, I think maybe this one is about being in the dark, and feeling for the light, while also finding the search limited by thought. The spirit would wish to drift up and away, but there seems a sort of vertical limit imposed by the mental confinement of language.
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