Jim Leftwich
The Optimism of the Unwilling
Summer 2022
Nevada
I was I was.
I was thinking. At least I think I was thinking.
Is it possible to think about the fact of 4.6 billion years? I don't think so.
So. Photographs. We have seen a few, maybe a few hundred thousand. We think we know how to think about photographs.
When are you reading this?
Are you reading it 4.6 billion years after it was written? No.
Are you reading it 4.6 million years after it was written? No.
Are you reading it four thousand and six hundred years after it was written? Maybe. Probably not. But at least I can imagine such a thing.
Are you reading it 460 years after it was written? Could be. I would like to think so.
Are you reading it 46 years after it was written? Sure! Why not? I know: megadroughts, 1000-year floods, heat domes, wildfires, resource wars, famines... Another world is possible, and in it you could be reading this... If. If only.
Are you reading it four and a half years after it was written? Yes? Thank you. Where you are, it is January, 2027. I know it isn't much. But that's how.. one not much after another... there isn't any other way.
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As con pre re SUMES
Summer 2022
Nevada
Assume the weather the flame the feather assume no highways.
Consume the new the rest the time consume no highways.
Presume the nest the next the door presume no highways.
Resume the crest the thirst the name resume no highways.
Assume the sane whether bother assume no highways.
Consume the zest flew tether consume no highways.
Presume the sate the nerve the lather presume no highways.
Resume the boss the curse the seme resume no highways.
Presume the lather resume the seme the preseme the reseme sate no boss no salt asseme the highways are frilled with semic heroes never conseme the nerve of a curse.
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Unwriting
Summer 2022
Nevada
Here it comes again, like an avalanche, oceanic, rolling across the desert, every imaginary uprooted route at once, enough to make you think it has a mind of its own, language cannot be trusted to mind its own business, sit down and shut up, work independently without disturbing others.
The word "unwriting" arrived most recently in my mind's ear as a misreading of my first thing in the morning no glasses on handscrawled note about "the unwilling".
What, then, is this unwriting? Is it a rewriting of a misreading? Is it an acknowledgement of misreading as rewriting? Is it the revelation of a parallel text, a parallel universe, another world is possible, the ancient branes of string theory, asemic messages encoded in those astonishing photographs from the James Webb telescope?
I think we know. Life is more than life. Language is more than language. Life is never life and life only. Life is beside itself with joy, beside itself with bewilderment, disbelief, semiosis, mitosis, osmosis, baskets of fish and loaves of bread, the news from far and near, some of which is true, the felt presence of experiential reality.
You can't step in the same stream walking beside the lake, where the two creeks flow in from the mountains to the west, reading an old book of poems, remembering how it all got started in your tiny little life your tiny little world, what that small patch of the cosmos looked like 5 billion years ago, twice.
That is another reason, if not several, for wandering wide-eyed in the wonder, while the species is surely dying of its own devices, and there is no humanly semiotic future to care for our writings or unwritings, singing, between the two deserts, having driven ourselves softly or brutally insane, such that the human experiment seems to have failed entirely, if we can say so in some sort of poem, what hypothesis exactly was the experiment meant to test?
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UNORMA: Universal Norms of Absurdity
Summer 2022
Nevada
Venn Diagrams glean presentiment where never the twains shall melt. Therein the Vesica Piscis, renumerable counterfactuals, munerates aeration of comeuppance, until the bittern fends.
First, it must be logical, the absurd must be predictable. To live out on the lawn / You must be honest.
Second: the absurd must be predictable; it must be a replica of itself. Do as I say to do, not as the duly unsaid, which is your duty. Unruly: an unmeasured quantity; the quality of being unmeasuring; a cup of what else, unfulfilled.
Third: the absurd is local. Lies about the absurd are global.
Fourth: go forth and multiple, multiply tables, The Plicate Cult of Mults, fables breathe froth before us -- you are complicated; try to contain your selves!
The absurd is polysemic, is nothing if not. But you (You!) must remember: this is not Your Uncle's Absurdity. You inherit what you invent.
Don't make me tell you the whole treacherous tale again.
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published/posted by Marco Giovenale at slowforward in august 2022
