NO is Not the Opposite of Anything

No one dead will ever
read these words,
and those alive now
will sweep them from the streets.
The writing of our time most
likely to survive is graffiti.
It survives war.

                            —Chase Twichell

Then a question arose in me:
What language does the mind
speak before thinking, before
thinking gives birth to words?
I tried to write without embellishment,
to tell no lies while keeping death in mind.
                        —Chase Twichell

NOTES
—“No is not the opposite of anything” stated by Melissa Myōzen Blacker, Rōshi, a Sōtō Zen priest with the Boundless Way Zen Temple, discussing the Mu koan.
—Top: Chase Twichell from her poem Skeleton in Dog Language (2005)
—Above: Chase Twichell from her poem How Zen Ruins Poets in Horses Where Answers Should Have Been
—Below: Julia Hartwig-Międzyrzecka (1921-2017), In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems (trans from Polish, 2008)

CODA
It Is Also This

Art casts a spell summoning life
so it can continue
but its space extends to the invisible
It is also an intelligence reconciling
discordant elements and similarities
It is brave
because it seeks immortality
by being—just like everything else—mortal
                    —Julia Hartwig-Międzyrzecka

Outrageous Grace

There is a kind of out-of-sight dreaming

that never stops. Light for other eyes.

A zone where creeping thoughts learn to walk.

Faces and forms regrouped.

We're moving on a street, among people

in blazing sun.

But just as many—maybe more—

we don't see

are in dark buildings,

high on both sides.

Sometimes one of them comes to the window

and glances down on us.

—Tomas Tranströmer, from the poem Dream Seminar (trans Swedish)

 

Downtown, the people scene, the seen and the unseen.

FREE FLUX

The eye you see is not
an eye because you see it;
It is an eye because it sees you. 
—Antonio Machado.

Both sides of a 8'x8' freestanding wall in continual unpredictable flux.  
All the news that fits and starts  — made real. With appreciation of to the artists, truthful in the telling, elusive in the being.
Arriving as Washington Street north of First Street terminates near the Willamette River.  

Past posts of FREE WALL:

Sep 2025 FREE & EQUAL
https://tobecomevisible.blogspot.com/2025/09/free.html
NOV 2024. FREE XPRESSION
https://tobecomevisible.blogspot.com/2024/11/free-xpression.html
May 2024 CONSPIRACY OF VISIBILITIES
https://tobecomevisible.blogspot.com/2024/05/conspiracy-of-visbilities.html