May 14
But then that, too, a kind of sounding, an architectonics all its own. A sort of script. A preface. & there’s the thing of it—how we surrender ourselves to experience but cannot let go the thought of the thing, the conscious presentiment, that dim intimation of structure. & so a moment in which we feel ourselves perfectly conjoined with phenomena holds its rusted anchor yet, & the wave washes it over, & still are we tethered, bank-chained, rooted in that grey-blue alluvion that we allow ourselves to consider at rest & ample for the root-room. Bed down, then, silt & shifting pebble. Bed down & begin a constellation.
Which is to say that there are no daemons but in our faiths, no rubric of order but we would draft its design in the first. No news here.
& this, too, an echo. There is in Keats’s odes a gradual unclenching of the fists, a slow & ponderous relinquishment that seems to me always somehow relevant. It is how thought works on the world, I think (or the obverse). The first odes are presentations, & then they begin an erosion & fall swiftly into deeper & deeper chasms. & the fingers clutch the cusp of reason, bend its compass, hang upon its sickled needle. We read the dissipation of that nameless faith, see that clamoring after efficacy reduce itself to the mournful dirge of the gnats over the river sallows. We see proclamation shift into question & fall into interrogation before finally reason seems to despair of itself & withdraws completely in the autumn ode. & then it is a silence ringing a try at a truth, or a human silence anyway, absent the hemming & hawing, absent completely those companionable daemons that concepts provided Keats early along. Nothing is insinuation of an alterity. Or everything is, entire. It is a stubble field, or a swallow, or the haunting smell of the cider press. & the hand withdraws, lets it be, posits a space empty of human utterance. & oddly, it is Keats at his most perfect.
Which is not to say that our utterance does not matter. It does, I think. It merely does not matter beyond ourselves, not really, not enduringly. Or if it does, it means like a ghost means, like a small flame throws heat, like a constellation can conjure a wolf, or an archer, or a bear. An imagined taste that cannot touch the tongue but sits restive in the thinking. & so we gather our faiths like tools & build worlds that we can fathom, & all the while the unfathomable, just there, just where we let our faithing cease.
Which is to say that there are no daemons but in our faiths, no rubric of order but we would draft its design in the first. No news here.
& this, too, an echo. There is in Keats’s odes a gradual unclenching of the fists, a slow & ponderous relinquishment that seems to me always somehow relevant. It is how thought works on the world, I think (or the obverse). The first odes are presentations, & then they begin an erosion & fall swiftly into deeper & deeper chasms. & the fingers clutch the cusp of reason, bend its compass, hang upon its sickled needle. We read the dissipation of that nameless faith, see that clamoring after efficacy reduce itself to the mournful dirge of the gnats over the river sallows. We see proclamation shift into question & fall into interrogation before finally reason seems to despair of itself & withdraws completely in the autumn ode. & then it is a silence ringing a try at a truth, or a human silence anyway, absent the hemming & hawing, absent completely those companionable daemons that concepts provided Keats early along. Nothing is insinuation of an alterity. Or everything is, entire. It is a stubble field, or a swallow, or the haunting smell of the cider press. & the hand withdraws, lets it be, posits a space empty of human utterance. & oddly, it is Keats at his most perfect.
Which is not to say that our utterance does not matter. It does, I think. It merely does not matter beyond ourselves, not really, not enduringly. Or if it does, it means like a ghost means, like a small flame throws heat, like a constellation can conjure a wolf, or an archer, or a bear. An imagined taste that cannot touch the tongue but sits restive in the thinking. & so we gather our faiths like tools & build worlds that we can fathom, & all the while the unfathomable, just there, just where we let our faithing cease.
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