Birth of Dialectic

the primordial condition of Dasein
is to lose oneself in others
Heidegger


his green eyes
refract

her love
her angst
her desire

in reward
she offers
a nipple

he latches
and sucks
with greedy
lips

he is her object

an entity
she produced

he is a blank
slate
to paint

a surface
to reflect
her maternal light

like sunshine
off the moon

Desire among the Snails

the snail desires
the greenest leaf
of the reddest rose
of the backyard garden

however at dawn
he turns right
rather than left
and slides south
rather than north

until he reaches
the shadowed park
across the street
where he nibbles
light green leaves
of yellow peonies

no longer hungry
he sleeps
within the bed
of the rich loam
of the well-cared
for public garden

and dreams
of the greenest leaf
of the reddest rose

Toward an Alchemy of Hearing

I see the snail seeing

but I cannot hear its seeing

to understand
I dance the dance
of the shaman

I rattle the gourd
I chant in tongues

the snail-sight
becomes
snail-sound

logos ploughs up
primordial words

being reveals
itself

and we recite
and sing
the songs
of history
together

Rho Equals Mass over Volume

I could not abandon
the snail on the glass
or its image

I answered their demands

but now I seek a reprieve

because

their one soul
deepens widens
and reddens
like a peach

the subject
informs the object
and the object
nourishes the soul

weight mass
roundness
ripeness
swell within
the reflection

it is an event
within the finite
a moment of the infinite

they have become real
and material

they exist as an entity
within time
for our observation

they exist independent
of me

Idealismus, Emerson, and the Primordial Word

Emerson, in his essay "The Poet" said: "Language is a fossil poetry." The poet's role is to dig deep into the rock and "re-attach things to nature."

Robert D. Richardson in his new book--First We Read Then We Write--tells us that Emerson's method of archaeology devolves from first choosing the word and then constructing the sentence. In choosing the word, "a writer needs to get in as close as possible to the thing itself."

Emerson insisted that "words do not exist as things themselves, but stand for things which are finally more real than words." (Richardson 49)

This belief, of course, is a form of idealism; an idealism that flows from Plato through the German Idealists to Emerson.

In idealism ideas alone are real; man thinks the world; man is the center and nature is a form of dream or spirit of man. Emerson wrote: "the Universe is the externalization of the soul." When the poet writes he/she creates soul which gives birth to Nature.

My idea of the primordial word arises from my reading of Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger; however, of late, I have begun to see the skeleton of idealismus supporting their work and recognize it as fertile ground for my inquiry. Consequently, I am now studying the poet idealists to understand their thinking on the machination of the primordial word. The primordial word is a word that has become dead but through its use in its simplest form in a new way will somehow attach it to the original meaning. A dead word brought alive sometimes falls upon fertile soil (an ideal reader) and grows.

Alchemy of the Non-Ego

while reading Fichte


what does nature
promise the subjective
eye at the end

only earth gray
with desiccation

sour air
tarnished black

blazing fire
scorching being

and water
as thick
and turgid
as treacle

Foolish Snail

the snail that slides
across beveled glass
never suspected
the other

the object
of its gaze
was a reflection

instead it reflects
that the splendid
simulacrum
is a better snail

a luckier one

that dwells
in an alternate
world
of such sinister
sense
that each being
there

dines on tasty leaves

brandishes brave
shell of pink coral

and slogs
on sweet slime
that shines
silver
as it smooths
the roughest
road