Midnight musings-the universe is in knots

When I was a kid, I was up to date with all the trendy school yard games: state tag and kickball and double dutch (I couldn't actually do that one) and buttball and a recurring favorite cat's cradle. I remember playing that game for three hours with my best friend on a car ride and the string got tangled. I tried to pick it apart and somehow made it worse.  Every loop and knot I'd loosen would beget another knot until eventually I had a large mess of string. 

That's kind of how I feel about Wallace Stevens right now.  My mind's all jumbled about it, because everything connects, and everything is a lot of stuff to unpack.  Here's the strings I've got from tonight:

I was reading some blogs and I stumbled on Lace's post and poem, which was incredible. I thought her titles for post and poem were perfect-- "no words to describe it" "silence," described by words.  It's Beckett. Either “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness" or “Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."  It's the words- the words are all we have. (Beckett might have said something like that too).  To create illusions to create a "reality" to fill the void.  

It connects to Jenny's blog "Stirrings," which discusses the link she sees between Stevens and Beckett.   It connects to our discussion of God and the Bible-- It just occurred to me tonight that though we've been going through our blue bibles from the beginning onward, most of us are reading it like I've been taught to read the Christian Bible- sporadically. Walter was walking by the library counter tonight and asked what I was reading- I had flipped to "On the Road Home" two minutes earlier; and Walter was like, "We're already on Parts of a World?" and I said, "I think so, but I've just been skipping around."  And I thought that's the Bible for you. It's something that speaks to you or has something to say whereever you land in it; because it's life, the Word. The words of Lace's blog. After Walter left, I looked down at that "On the Road Home" and it took me right into Lace's blog, which seemed to originate on her journey home. 

The poem reads like this

On the Road Home
It was when I said,
"There is no such thing as the truth,"
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.

You. . . You said,
"There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth."
Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.

It was when I said,
"Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. 
The world must be measured by eye";

It was when you said,
"The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth";

It was at that time, that the silence was largest 
And longest, the night was roundest,
The fragments of the autumn warmest,
Closest and strongest. 






I don't mean to say it's saying the same thing or is exactly the same, but something's there. 
Truth. Word. Silence.  

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' . . . "the way and the truth and the life"

And then things get messy with God, the Supreme Fiction and a little bit of Faust and fin de siecle and everything I'm doing, reading, seeing gets stuck in this cat's cradle of thoughts. It's like that video game called Katamari Damacy, where that little Prince tries to collect material for a new sky and planets and stuff (which had all been destroyed somehow, maybe by a drunkard) with a magic ball he rolls around. Smaller objects, like little squares and erasers, stick to the ball making it grow and collect bigger stuff, like people and later, cities.
My blue bible is the magic object and life is uprooted, revealing ideas of reality and imagination, turning me back to everything.
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