remaining even in the moment of perspective as that ‘disjunction’ itself. The poem is one’s always leaping out of one’s mind, not being in the same moment of one’s mind there.
“Olson told us that history was ended” (p. 120). The account of having been going to attempt to somersault, and the report that he had just somersaulted leaves nothing (no action). The writing ‘records’ actions, physical (mind actions, as if physical and mind were conflated as writing). To write as only disjunction is in order to “wreck” one’s mind; a range having been excluded is entering the same time (“For Kai Snyder,” p. 112).
Past, present, and future occurring at the same time (wreck one’s mind) are the disjunction in which one cannot be in any instant.
Imitating the voice as melody in the fugue structure (not being in the same moment of one’s mind) is history occurring as his own pattern (‘found’ by placing lines together) of past events, the writing repeating that pattern as connections, which are then new connections. The writer’s ‘own voices’ are fictions of him and fictions of being voices, imitation only of conversation—which is what conversation is only. There’s activity in that “All that I hear is me and silence.”
A lost mass (Paris gone)
Shine red in young swallow’s mouth
(P. 136)
STUDENT: “What keeps us from giving up everything?”
TEACHER: “Fiction.”
(P. 135)
“Repetition of a pattern from a long time back,” there is change throughout is history, so it’s on nothing.
Writing the present moment, his activity right at that moment—‘just what’s happening’ right now is a zero. People might get really bothered by his seemingly just writing about the activity in the minute, ‘nothing.’ It can’t ever be a connection.
In The Kindness of Strangers, disjunction as timing, placing different times (dated poems and passages or lines of poems undated written at different times) against each other (melody against melody) so that the greater the distance the greater the disjunction/leap (or the opposite: the smaller the time distance, the greater the disjunction/leap. Leap is different from disjunction), then the disjunction or leap is not time?
Non sequitur as ‘no relation’ is used as differentiation; or similarity is used to be differentiation. Whalen is using non sequitur to be: not comparison but differentiation paired continually so as to occupy the same time, enter the same time. Contraries existing separately.
‘Comparison’ occurs by line as the nonstop weave/‘history’ in Scenes of Life at the Capital. In the dating of poems, with gaps of time, placed next to each other in The Kindness of Strangers, the writing is only the mind’s process as if imitating the process, recording the ‘inside’ separate from the action in the world? “The act of remembering or the vibrations of the sutra / crash through the real world” (108): the ‘act’ and remembering—the two—are the action in the world, what it is only, and smash it by being in it; yet are in it, separate.
Vertical/horizontal: “All walking at some angle to this void reality / Immediate bright breath” (p. 108). The ‘two’ are together that are not two also:
Morning zazen evening drunk
Mosquito hawk legs thinner
Than a leg between
Legs thin as a
Hairy laugh tail
(108)
Compression of evening and morning in real-time only and being the same. “Cold penetrates the root of cold; heat penetrates the root of heat. Even if you try millions of times to avoid cold or heat, it is like trying to put a tail where your head is.”3
The notebook method of Scenes of Life at the Capital (which is separate times compared to each other) allows all layers to occur at the same time in the text, while being read/acted in by the reader as real-time (representation) where it is not. It’s only the way the mind works making fast disjunctions and connections; it is phenomena as being one’s mind. ‘Seeing’ is not separate from being action and these are only the process of the text/one’s mind phenomena. Writing is therefore an experiment of reality.
In The Kindness of Strangers, separate dated poems are placed next to each other out of sync chronologically: “Move without moving any THING.”
Chronological sequence does not initiate (anywhere) in others.
The present only takes place ‘now,’ having no earlier occurrence, and is in the future which is not ‘present.’ ‘Then’ takes place ‘now’; it was ‘then’ only when it occurred.
To explain eclipses and to predict them
large numbers are needed
most of all zero.
(P. 137)
So the “present intention” does not govern the future. “The crystal does / Nothing. Its shape and structure makes all / the difference.”
A ‘zero’ (that excluding the horizontal range) is the disjunctive present, which is: ‘then’ is ‘now,’ the present is ‘now,’ and the future is the same ‘now’ (they occur at once, but not hindering each other, being entirely those times, separate from each other—in a ‘present’ as being disjunct).
As writing the ‘present’ is open or zero—a lost mass—as is an eclipse. One is not separate from activity anywhere. Or in it, either.
A minute move is there a non sequitur per se.
A ‘random’ (that is, detailed, minute) speck put beside (compared to?) some other ‘random’ (minute) speck—their interrelation occurring solely changes the entirety/interiority of ‘historical’ event (that which appears to be a crux and unified); the disjunction (in non sequitur) of the event occurs only as being that present-time.
The ‘event’ not existing at all and/as activity is throughout it. All times being brought together and separate simultaneously (‘wreck the mind’) is there being no ‘history’ then.
Comparing distinctions, which are the layers as states of mind in different times, as if these are the sound/shape that’s the writing, is the ‘interior’ motion of ‘experience.’
Susan Howe’s “Otherworld light into fable/Best plays are secret plays”:4
Second time somewhere—the second time is the present only fictitious deeps
Cries open to the words inside them
Cries hurled through the woods—the moment of divergence is the physical page of the text.
—their activity nowhere in it
—as that being pervasive.
in the otherday
on
