23.
Chapter 24.
Chapter 25.
Chapter 26.
Digestion
Monadisms
Pythagorean Silence
Heraclitean Thirst
Chapter 31.
Chapter 32.
Chapter 33.
Chapter 34.
Atlantis
Chapter 36.
Chapter 37.
Circles
Waves
Chapter 40.
, Even
Chapter 42.
Chapter 43.
Chapter 44.
Chapter 45.
Chapter 46.
Chapter 47.
Signature
Chapter 49.
Chapter 50.
Chapter 51.
ψυχή
Chapter 53.
Chapter 54.
Sirens
The Star Knot Is the Chief Thing
Chapter 57.
Chapter 58.
Chapter 59.
Theseus’s Ship
Chapter 61.
Whitenesses
Confessions
“Come and let us study the letters of the seers”
Of Bees in Winter
Chapter 66.
The Tune of Many Heads
Chapter 68.
Meditation on a Hut
Chapter 70.
Shields
Chapter 72.
Titles of Forgotten Books
As the Wakeful Bird Sings Darkling
Genitals / Asterisks
Pale Node
Epithalamium in the Archive
Chapter 78.
Chapter 79.
Chapter 80.
Grief Substitute
Chapter 82.
Chapter 83.
Epithalamium in the Archive
Chapter 85.
Chapter 86.
Chapter 87.
Chapter 88.
Sources
Art Credits
Acknowledgments
About the Author
On our walk my youngest daughter asked me, “What are the songs you don’t know.”
“That’s a hard question,” I said.
“Tell me the songs you don’t know.”
Silence was the best description.
On the same walk we found a bird lying dead on the ground. It had a long, dark, slightly curved beak. Streaks of white not quite white on the head, a color I might call dry wheat. “Not a woodpecker,” I said. Iris said, “Nope, not a woodpecker.” Not the right markings. The shafts of the feathers had no bright colors. I couldn’t identify the bird. A plover? A snipe?
Later I asked Iris if the dead bird scared her.
“No,” she said. “It gave me an idea.”
I had thought for years how best to begin.
Maybe just a blank page.
Some way of showing the precedent silence. But then I doubted so simple a gesture could make it felt: that silence. I worried the gesture would seem obvious. But then I remembered what’s most obvious is what I’m most interested in.
What the obvious hides in itself. Not as a secret. Like a breath being held.
Like a child believes in the dark and so doubts God, but every morning reverses the conclusions. Like doubt or faith when they begin in us by acting like one another. Only later do they act opposed.
The trouble is not that what is pure is complicated past our understanding. What’s quiet is just too simple to be understood. One method might be to liken that silence to the inner life once you learn to accept that the “inner life” is just another myth.
Socrates asks: Can a man know and also not know what he knows.
Know thyself. The imperative acts so simple, but then you try to follow the command for your whole life, as one might follow an echo back to a source, but the source is just a cave, and the shadows living there are quiet. And all along you thought you’d find yourself there.
