Fire as Word

   She had become tangled in the meaning

   of an untimely word

—what does it matter now?

   When full of fear and sadness

   she turned to look at the others

   the word grew larger.

        — Maria Laina

At any moment in our life we are entangled in all the past of humanity, and that past is primarily language, so we live as if upon a background of incessant chorus, and of course it is possible to imagine the presence of everything which has ever been spoken.  — Czeslaw Milosz

Response to the question about my ten favorite words: "World, pain, earth, mother, men, desert, honor, poverty, summer, sea.”  — Albert Camus

With this mind, consider several worldly words:

rose escalating climbed composition

gases surged concentrations spurring

accumulating pushing hotter

occupied slash intensification burns

trapping precise million

jump atmospheric shift

risen calculations tracks

releasing leaks responsible

blame heat burning processes

massive emissions levels vastly

spiking spewed sucked

What-is-said fiction vs Observed reality. Words listed above in random order from news reports based on an April 5, 2024 NOAA Research news release:  No sign of greenhouse gases increases slowing in 2023

Still from The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961)

Words. Only words? Words shape, form, filter experience. Elusive word-worlds embraced to ease the way to avoidance. A necessary survivial strategy in a swirl-world of proliferation and acquisition, positioning and mystification. How do we think, feel, favor, in the pronounced now? Consider:

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future, 

the first syllable already belongs to the past. 

When I pronounce the word Silence, 

I destroy it. 

When I pronounce the word Nothing, 

I make something no non-being can hold.

— Wislawa Szymborska

In Finale, lines from a Robert Hass poem:

In our century, it was the fashion in philosophy 

not to ask unanswerable questions. That was left 

to priests and poets.

And in our age of simulacra I am compelled to add:  Posters!

Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric in Venus in Fur 

(French: La Vénus à la fourrure), directed by Roman Polanski, 2013.

NOTES

— Maria Laina (Greek 1947–2023) poem from Hers (1985) trans Karen Van Dyke.

— The Czeslaw Milosz (Polish 1911-2004, Nobel 1980) comment above refers to this poem by W.S. Merwin:       Utterance

            Sitting over words

            very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing

            not far

            like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark

            the echo of everything that has ever

            been spoken

            still spinning its one syllable

            between the earth and silence

— Albert Camus (French 1913-1960, Nobel 1957) in Notebooks 1951-1954 

— Wislawa Szymborska (Polish 1923– 2012, Nobel 1996) trans Czeslaw Milosz

— Robert Hass from the poem State of the Planet

The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961) Director Val Guest

ETERNITY

Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh. — Aristotle (from Rhetoric)

I have occasionally speculated that all metaphors are variance of a small number of archetypes; perhaps this proposition is also applicable to fables. — Juan Luis Borges

Clearly we are here led along among shadows into the constellated realm of Archetypal Psychology.  

 

Something is afoot.   One could say.

 

Something is about, one could also imagine; not say.

 

ETERNITY   (Fibreboard Wall, Blue Paint)

 

The beginning is lost; 

the End stretches into eternity. 

Don't bother with them, they're irrelevant. 

And since all is really nothing,

then nothing is truly everything. 

    — Attar of Nishipur (1125–1221 Persian Sufi)

        From The Conference of Birds by Attar

Strange words, Attar!  Let’s turn to Polish poet Julia Hartwig-Międzyrzecka for another take:

What to do with words

that have no object behind them

nothing to touch or taste

on which to rest the eyes

nothing to relate to human temperature

For example the word eternity

sterile pure cold as the glow of stars

leading us into a desert of interplanetary space

into diluted air the dead bottom of darkness

a word with no temptation no odor no color

a sound no tamed animal would obey

even the wind is more palpable than eternity

a huge number has at least an appearance of countability

But eternity? Once called up it rattles around the skull

once created it can't be erased from the dictionary

ownerless wild and monumental

one more proof of our madness

— Julia Hartwig-Międzyrzecka (1921-2017)

 

WORD  (Diamond Steel Plate, Hand-Welding)

What more could be said?  One more proof of our madness?

Let's turn to poet Anne Waldman, not for the final word, simply for the saying:

Said So

They said must not, must not be said. They said it:

must not be said. Must not must not must not be said. 

They settled it, way leading to a future, lately acquired,

way leading to a future tense. Must not. Said so. Said

not. Will not. I said I am throwing the words. I said

I am throwing the words around. I said something is forming.

Something is forming

I said I am throwing the words around something is forming.

(make it to me to me to me to heal me up again

make it to me to me to me to heal it up again) 

Said: I am spilling the words around.

Tell sky I'm coming 

Tell sky I'm coming

They are this old world getting busy with trouble now

They are getting busy with trouble this world 

Now heal it up again

(make it to me to me to heal me up again)

I said I am throwing the words around something is forming.

Will be. Said will be will be said. Said it now: will be

said. Said so. Something is forming.

(make it to me to me to me to me to heal again)

— Anne Waldman, Said So, in her collection Skin Meat Bones (1983)

 
SAID SO.
Face: Temporary public art, color on slatted fence.
Crown: US Federal Courthouse 

Saying by its nature seeks to contain. This dismaying phrase so said turns back on itself.  Peruvian poet César Vallejo brings us to earth, a gravitational pull:

        And what if after so much history, we succumb,
not to eternity,
but to these simple things, like being
at home, or starting to brood!

— César Vallejo, from the poem And what if after so many words

On or Off the Artbound Bus

Click photos to enlarge

Below: 2 years later, the Rainbow Life rolls on... 

Bus rolls with traveling rock band; below, tattoo of leader of the band

Below rock band bus one year later, rolling on...

Amphibus Omnibus

Always in Reach Omnibus

SKILL YOUR SELF 

The art of driving arriving living on board

on the street and on the road

Trusting beyond the horizon nestles a pot of gold

A COUNTRY OF DREAMS
The country of dreams has its own geography. Any time I enter it, I recognize the same vectors of direction, bearings of roads in the mountains, the way you have to turn in order to come upon the proper street. Not a repetition of the same details, for they change, but as it were an encoded spatial memory, yet taken from where, from what landscapes once seen, it is difficult to tell.
— Czeslaw Milosz

VEXICON: Cries & Whispers

  

If you were to release all your secrets,
all those heavy words,
you would rise, rise, rise
into the horizon, free. Bewildered.
— Anita Endrezze 

 

 

Cries and Whisperings I

Is Sleeping NO CAMPING?

For Heavens Saké!

With All Due

 

 

 Cries and Whisperings II

 VEXICONIC appearances fracture and re-puzzle

Word Image Place Time.  

 

In The Commons what emerges, looms, invites?  

Resolve, anger, fear, desire, loss, yearning!

Near The Edgelands what?

Pauses, gaps, the unsaid ...

 

Oh, you know -- Life! 

Touching is NOT harmful 

VEXICON copyrighted trademarked by ToBeCome LLC

All lefts and rights Unreserved

No signs were harmed in this production

Object and Event

You are not alone.
Millions wonder where it ends.
We suspect nothing stands still.

Recalling.... Genesis blossoms from nothingness. Her agitated twin Origin appearing as Prometheus dreams back to from where we come. Vulnerability to before-fire intimation and winking-dark seduction leads the long way out of paradise.  

We have yet to arrive at the flaming gate.

...

NOTE
— Image-photo-modified: Sculpture by Jan Zach, Prometheus (1958) at UO
— Further and before: Slow Fire, March 2022
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2022/03/slow-fire.html

...

CODA
There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind, she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant. —Joan Didion