The Catastrophe of Meaningby M.T.C. Cronin
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THE CATASTROPHE OF MEANING
[LITTLE POETIC INFORMATIONS
ON ALL KINDS OF LAWS]
THE TALE OF A SURFACE
(LAWS OF INTEGRITY)
I don't know how to behave like a body.
Loading causes onto my hands doesn't help.
Still, the appreciative inquiry continues.
Another more important thing! I might be another more important thing.
The tale of a surface here might describe it.
Made up of three types of events: the events I did; the events I was; and the events I was part of.
There's a kind of' 'justice argument' in the time in which I live and it's used to label these events.
No-one gets it right.
It's tedious.
Apparently a rasberry! Apparently a large fly! The teacher can't live his own life if he's constantly trying to unstick other's minds from what they're mistakenly attached to.
No-one should be a teacher!
I went round in circles three times and in and out over half a dozen just to convincingly have an unsatisfying conversation with a woman I could have made happier. It felt like the longest day of the year and she's caused a lot of trouble in it. Even late that night I could see what she'd done. People on the roads were against me. I was receiving anonymous winks as if all my good intentions were transparent. Walking past an important coat I heard a cough like an egg. It rose -- firm, white, gelatinous, perfectly filling that empty space that should have existed between us. It was a boiled cough. An egg-cough. This is exactly the kind of trouble that exists if you have something to tell someone.
Be warned.
The features of your face and skull and the folds of your body are designed for, and related to, protecting you from the cold air that otherwise might just flow in.
You are a somewhere. Everything -- people included -- travel to you. Put what it is you think over you like a huge glove and have a feel around. Those lumps and bumps are all the causes of fitness and disorder. You won't get at any surface without an empty head. Not really.
Immediately, then, the wobbly splutters are uncovered and you've got some kind of truth that's all fuzzy.
This is a version but at least it's alleviating the thing.
Like an abstract that falls in drops of the reality.
Only once have I ever seen something and it lasted like a never breaking. It was a firekite or that I do not dream without the fountain. Some areas have surfaces that waltz together. I'll go no further for the teacher is just an early form of saviour.
There's enough catastrophes in a single meaning to reduce all of existence to a dash --
My body is always washed back by this.
STORIES OF THE DUPED, THE SCARED
(LAWS ABOUT US)
If an egg knew what it was an egg would be scared.
Millions of hours in the same pot. Holding a shield stolen from the stage. Adorned with flame. Disguise and corruption together again. One in the self. The other in the self hiding from the self. Drama violated by sincerity. Why we go through life feeling vaguely raped. Noticing what everything outside us does to us. Paying no proper attention to it. Love. And related to what we mistake for love.
Love is very slow. (As should have been mentioned in 'Caring About Everything at the Same Time' -- see below.) Very slow, as it is equal attention to everything and this takes forever. That's why love is forever.
There's no explanation, really, for why we are so afraid.
Except that we have no idea.
Except that we know .
This is scary.
So the scare is a priori us.
This is fantastic.
We just fool ourselves that things are frightening to us .
We Will Dress Them All
lamb eggs in the lamb nest
newly laid
Mother lamb, they're hatching
When they are bigger -- enough
we will give them names
Rosie-Bella God-Bleed Desertion
when they grow up
we will dress them all as Winter
ice flowing from mother's legs
the soft centre of sleep
Lambs too soon exposed to wind and thrown onto the blackberry: We are scared like an egg should be.
(Ovoid:
strongest
possible shape
but there's as much
fear in strength
as there is in
weakness.)
We have something to teach the egg.
But only about us .
BENDING A HEAD
(NOBLE LAWS)
Smile with all the right muscles.
Blunted.
Bented.
Heinous.
Important.
Resolute.
Great.
Attentive.
Dangerous.
Courteous.
Heavy.
Ladylike.
Your head is all of these things. Smile about it. This fruit can be a good indication of what is going on. It can be a good sign. The scrawniest-necked bird can have a good head. It can prise lids and surfaces. Embark on an endless anxiety. Eyes spinning into the new world.
Back from dizziness.
There is only this little bit of time for this head. Put butterflies before it. Crunch things up with it. Sniff. Rearrange. Try to reduce inscrutability. Accomplish nothing along those lines. Still, crunch some more things. The temptation is always to attempt to break hard things. Imagine your head breaking everything. Might get bent a bit in the process. Little giggle in it. Get the measurements of it and buy a hat. The victory hat! Petasus.
Underneath.
Neckedness.
Sapple it up in the soap suds and give it a scrub. Heads like compliments. Dreamy old things. They are like many flowers that have collapsed together and turned hard over time. Massage it upwards. The plural of above. Alternate the pressure as much as possible. Heads like variety. Always ask them what has come out of these consultations. There is nothing a head appreciates more than involvement. They perceive and regard. A head can look out of the window and identify all the tracks of myth and folklore.
How does it feel to be cooped up there? It's only small. It's only one.
How many heads are bent after reasons have ended the children's lives and the lives of their children? Tears then fill the third eye of the woman bearing a basket toward the real devil, silent, injured, innocent.
While you wail.
Wailing is the metaphor and not the metaphor unless you've got a third eye.
A head sees more than you.
THE OUTSIDE OF VISION
(LAWS GOVERNING WHAT IS NOT IN THE FOLDS)
Find my hand.
The hand is a flower to music.
Music is not in the folds.
Music avoids us.
Words are in with us. Images are just barely in. Occasionally, not often, they slip beyond the eye. This is not about vision.
Shadow, blood, trance, merge… life can be stilled by the sensitive painter, the wandering law, the poet who does not believe in words (which you must not to write). But even stilled life is an attitude and on days it will twitch on the chair by the window, by nights it will grin obliquely at purpose. Most things will retain their mystery and ability to rise from a death-like pose and the riddle should be rewarded for all that it is double-bellied.
Single-celled.
Before the cell?
The small fibre, the thread, the proposed single original substance of which one cubic centimetre would weigh one million million kilograms and from which all other matter was born, winds the day into the thicker night, draws the diagram which does not yet exist, which does exist as becomes known again what was known, as dreaming of yesterday you think of the future and when thinking of the future, you remember your life.
This is in there.
And all of human heartache. The quivering brightness of that animal who sits in the dark glands to watch remorse. What beautiful remorse! Without community. Because of community. Lost in community, the capillaries annulling their claims to a single blood and the heart pressing black into the plumage of an earthborne bird imbalanced by these two living wings of us we walk dropped jaw and small intakes of air, used to exhilaration and the implications of a single plot.
That's all in there.
The limits of unreality.
Angels are in the folds. We keep the angels warm. They need to be for something we can do for ourselves. They cannot save us. We know this. Ghosts are in and you better believe it, lots of Gods. Not all. Only the ones we made up. What else? Prototypes. Estimations. Virgin. The girl in white. (She belongs to everybody.) The bribe slipped into her hand in the very deepest and darkest part of a cave, pitch-black at midday under a sheet of white-hot corrugated iron that leans against the side of the house and cuts the sun and sky from her eyes as if she is a time-traveller and it is already night. The dog comes later and sniffs and cries around as though it could smell the corruption of her blood but she does not pet it because the man does. When she crawls out it is afternoon with light flinging itself far into the distance and returning with a shimmer that takes the sharp edges from everything as she squints blinded into its pitiless acid-yellow stare. On the kitchen table is a glass of milk and a biscuit which she eats standing and at night under her pillow there is a black shiny stone which she can feel pressing into her mind no matter how far the dark takes her. In dreams her mouth is full of sand and there is a sound that can never meet her need to make it and her eyes like small glassy uncertain stones thrown onto her face are turned towards the ground, layers of rock hardening and becoming beautiful beneath the few thousand days of her childhood.
Volcanoes are in the folds. Even lazy and restful. The one-winged angel, unable to fly beyond the height of the banana trees, trapped in my garden, endured our childhood, how we learned to exist. The angel would sigh. Even for angels too much heat consumes the ability to speak.
Incest. Incest is in there. And superstition, making fears into flesh. Bamboo. Even bamboo belongs somewhere. Everything left of nature.
Anything that gets made is put in there. Anything that changes from one thing to another.
Trees blowing in the sunlight
Flickering like dry white flames
A wind like twisted sheets
And broken glass
A little hidden blob of moon
Beneath the wind-spaced clouds
We wandered like streets
And saw the winter cold
Hanging on a rack
What form is appropriate
We asked the chimney breath
The smoke lisps just as dirty
If it's black or if it's white
And slides our question thirsty
Into the fine thin air
Wooden clouds raining dust
Which puttles on the ground
And sits like pain
A groaning weeping shrieking day
That fights our snap-shot gaze
We consign it to our memory
Magic lantern of our minds
And turn back for the flat
Surely it is safer there
Inside away from out-of-doors
Where the open high
And mighty crowned with glory
Makes us needy children
All lined up and shoving
To be in the world photo
The caption belongs to the living hand that makes it. (Mother, were we ever not selfish? I think not, because I don't remember.) There is only pain and the time when you are without pain. The human religion of suffering. A poem is pain.
white air breathed on word
wind skin of the throat
stripped by a universe
slip grains of sand
what can you tell me about the waves?
human's crying.
evolved through the tunnel of an ear
winding like a sea-shell
in convolutions brittle
surrounding the soft body of fear.
when we lived apart
we had somewhere to go
never leaving
the beach in my memory
How much memory I have!
Memory is not in there. In the folds. Memories cause pain but they are simply the listening of time to thought. Like birds they whistle to us, the madmen. We jam open the faucet and let our selves flow out. We are flooded in pain. You could go on and on but the accident overtakes us all. This has one foot in and one foot out. It is sometimes described as fate. Meanwhile, we are like children inventing more games to play in the doorframe. We think we can see out because the door opens.
STORIES ABOUT THE SECOND BIGGEST ORANGES IN THE WORLD
(LAWS OF ENTHUSIASM)
Despite being bigger, these are harder to find than smaller oranges.
Endless lives.
Wars of comparison.
Traces of rawness.
You must work in complete accord with your death.
Without end,
revisiting,
greengrocers, markets, orchards if they're still at liberty to bloom. Your tongue. Enormously small. Little destroyer. Licking the dish of earth. Doesn't give a fig for the heart.
Most laws are about alignment.
Smile (affirmative action)
I was a tooth on an ad
Anything bright
And white white white
For the audition they said
Show us what you can do
And I sat rooted to the spot
Looking as much like a tooth
As I could
There was a black woman there
She didn't get the part
But had the best smile
Of any of us
That was all she did and
They let her
Be the mouth
Mouths eat oranges. You don't need the second biggest mouth in the world to eat the second biggest oranges. The sun is very big. The sun looks like an orange.
Queen of the Citrus. Bittersun juicing us. I spit your seeds back at you!
But, hold doubt in earnest. From the orchard bring the unpicked blooms. The sky is bigger than anything that ever got caught between your teeth.
The thought is as huge as all it leads to.
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