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Shape of the Bulb,
Bloom of the Flower
The peonie root is a gnarled piece of work
As big as the hand that buries it.
The flower is not even curled inside,
Waiting,
The flower is a dried, over-built, gnarled piece of work.
When it dies, after it has lived, and the petals drift down the street
unconnected,
it will never look as old as this
Or as complicated.
I think, the night before I was,
They chose silence over clearing words.
Corners were retreated to.
Separate pieces took peace.
Crickets spoke instead.
Deep in a moonless night
I took root and formed,
Like a pearl around a piece of sand,
As small as the kiss that made room for me.
Returning Home
When the doctor put up the xray and the clinical
light box illuminated the plastic image
I understood why I had been feeling so peculiar.
We both, doctor and I, drew closer
but that wasn't necessary because the fish
that was caught just under its head
between the bones of my rib cage was not at all
small.
Now, knowing where to feel for it,
I could feel it
press into the soft cavity below my ribs and touch, vaguely
the tail, the points and bones of the tail,
feel it jerking now and again with a frantic force.
I had sensed it before.
The head for my heart. A need. A fitful, muted pull.
I couldn't name it.
Or I did name it.
But incorectly.
The doctor said there wasn't much he could do.
That it would die soon.
That time heals all wounds.
That less and less these days, in fact,
do these beauties actually make it home.
With dams and blocks. Well, it's harder than before.
He tells me I must carry this thing for awhile more.
That it is a good idea not to give it a name
or talk to it, even a little.
The doctor's office is near the river
so I go to the river.
Sit on the river rocks.
I feel the points and the bones of the tail
above my gut and to the right poking just slightly out.
A deep twitch. A weary tug backwards in my chest.
I lie down and take the rain on my face.
Make myself, as best as I can, like a still
familiar from long ago pool
- far from the teaming sea.
a place to rest
a place to lose one's color
to let go, in time,
one's gift for miraculous leaping.
The Problem with Waking Up
The problem with waking up is not
That you have widened, unimaginably in the night
That under the warm press of comfort
your body is now the size of a inland sea,
[- a new species swims at the bottom, eluding the photograph].
The problem with waking up is not that as each car passes your window
things vanish in its wake
the man in your dream who pushed you who pushed your car from the outside so you almost, almost hit those women, their tea, the glasses breaking. you were in the backseat and could do nothing why did he push you to it what did he look like that man a car passes and the water you poured then cut with scissors in a bag that stayed there like water would never do you cut it and it stayed, - it doesnt spill but vanishes into the beginning of the question
when
The leather belt that she held onto with her teeth.
The stairwell in which she was sick.
Going
The question: when.
The answer: now.
The question: when is that.
The problem with waking is not that you quickly become
so much smaller
(- one or no fish swim inside)
The problem is that you know where you are.
You know what came before.
It comes to you
And this you cannot help
It comes to you.
That.
Oh.
Yes.
That
The Invention of the Eye
I.
It was dark for so long
one year in the sea that was everything, everywhere
that maybe was like the sky
(no - there was not yet a sky) or like the space outside
of whatever was outside if there was an outside
a year in the sea
times a million, times a million, times and times
It wasn't even dark
There was no darkness to see
no sea to see though we were there
Blind, soft-bodied
dividing to reproduce
the blind, soft-bodied
not even invisible
nor visible
as there was no such thing as either
and it happened
it had never been before
an eye grew
it opened
and an eye - the first - saw
first to blink
first to see the sea
first to make the world visible
one supposes color,
water, the dumb, blind soft-bodied
creatures swallowed and swallowed
and so we died over and over
becoming part of a creature
a creature with an eye
or
we learned to hide
to look like exactly sand or look exactly like rock
now that sand and rock looked like they did
we learned to agress
see me, see this
i see you too
i am electric
i am blue, now that there is blue
and the tips of my undulating sides are brilliant orange
and spike with poisonous yellow
now that there is orange
now that there is brilliance
and yellow
there must be poison
and seduction
both
i move through the water with filagreed parts
with whirring motors
translucent spines and dicing scales
shells hardening
i will breathe
I will go to the edge and find at the edge
another space to move through - differently
new world
i will move two eyes across its form
find form, find more
i will change before your very eyes.
i'll grow fingers and, someday, touch your face
that i see
and see is so beautiful
II.
and now then what if insight
gains sight
the blind, soft-bodied fears
the gentle, self-dividing loves
the strange formless ways of intuition
we might grow a sense to sense it
the medium we have always been swimming in.
you know what i mean.
we just passed each other in our minds, in it.
Soon we will know where we have been
all this time
all this long, long time of trying.
Painter/Hunter
Our job was to separate the cuttlefish
from the sharp rocks they clung to.
They were visible just in front of us, but they clung fiercely.
If you could just get your fingernails under their edges,
it was told, you could detach them
and, if you survived the wave
and for a month said nothing
there would be food, somehow, then for everyone.
The water was only two feet deep and more than perfectly clear:
it magnified the fins, the veins, the insides of the fish,
the fish inside that fish, and another, still, for later.
When we came to the bay to work we stepped right on them.
We cut our feet on their fins, on their veins,
on the sharp toothed stones and we bled into the water for awhile.
We settled into the water and floated above them, paddling our feet
for balance in the current.
The salt water healed our wounds and stopped our bleeding
and the current cleared our vision.
Our eyes were sharp, our nails long, our reflexes - quick.
As the water drew back, if we could just get our fingernails underneath,then pull back, the sea could give us leverage - the cuttlefish would release in our hand an
and if we were not greedy but humble in our hunting
there would be food, somehow, then for everyone
and love and life and fish
and love
and fish inside of fish.
The day I died I was punished.
I had my fingernails - of both hands -
well under the sharp, razor edge of a one.
It held on tightly to the black and shiny rock.
The regular current pulled back and me with it.
The fish lifted half away and I heard
one chord of 40,000 years of singing.
I let go and stood and shouted out to anyone
who could hear me
"It's music! The fish! They hold on - with music!"
and the sea sent a wave horizontally - right at me.
faster than I've ever dreamt or seen or known of
and it obliterated me and so I died - learning then
my work was just to hunt, just to paint of the hunt,
to never stand and proudly shout,
to never holler out the names and secrets
of sacred things.
The Unicorn Tapestries: Three Youths Stamp Fawn to Death
The perspective is a bit wrong
on the fence that circles the unicorn.
The slant light from the cloisters
catches the warp and weave of the final panel
and reveals the beast contented in captivity
returned, iconic
mystical and good for us
after we'd slaughtered him
a spear through the throat
the dog licking there
preceding panels show the hunt
the men and dogs waiting as the unicorn
dips its horn
purifies the water
of poison
there
carry on
beautiful
mystical
beast
and then the dogs
the men and dogs
chase to kill
but cannot
all arrows sharp, long,
directed, pointing at
what eludes
the kill
leap
away
next
the woman,
gracious,
who - irresistible - charms
so the dog takes a bite
and the animal then kicked in the muzzle
stepped on with tunes blaring
the eyes gone wild
little sounds, little,
dampened with an untied shoe on the throat
parts going limp
soft dots of fur
naming innocence
reddening and youth
embolded snapping new bones with a two-heeled hit
their power visible from the side of the road
fuck you, mom. fuck you, teacher
and you. and you.
and whoever
and whatever
and whatever.
and the magic eyes look up to one boy
and go black.
and in this way the fawn finds himself
in a circular pen in heaven
more perfectly beautiful
this way
than that
how it would have been
his white tail
disappearing into
the broken
light of the forest.
New
At first it is like gauze over my eyes
then a sheet, something, over my face
growing thicker, stickier
Heavy, heavy the white light comes through
more and more yellow
shapes rounded, made indistinct.
wrapped close my ears now
wrapped and my name
if that is what was said
comes to me muffled
impossible to respond to
surely
i cannot push forward.
i'm enveloped, bound close.
did i make this thing?
my patience twitches
and now, worse,
with me here
pressing against me like love
with an urgency flickering like
love i have these small
and bent-back
velvet-edged
wings.
Old House Kitchen
each word is like a steel ball
dropped in a steel bucket
rolling
empty echoes
they have nothing to do with you.
i could begin by seeing, describing
the kitchen
how that drawer pulled out
and dropped off its tracks
and it would have nothing to do
with you
or the banana peel i put now
fraudulently in the trash
that doesn't exist
that i make up thinking
i could make you up too
or at least your shoes
blue summer shoes
kicked off on the old brick floor
steel ball in a bucket
nothing but circling echoes.
the walls blasted out
the staircase
folded like an accordian
the four wooden steps where we'd sit
in our long warm sleeping shirts
with coffee
and look at Callie, the tree,
misted in the Long Island autumn damp
a little girl by our side
a little bird hopping
the pantry one step down where you kept
everything you needed
to feed us and make us happy.
rich and blessed life.
east wall
west wall
first ceiling
second ceiling
rubble fallen on a handwritten song
brick floor, copper pot, double stove
dripping water, dish drainer, cereal box, cup
full of spoons, hurricane lamps, door latch that lifted
rhododendrons and wet pavers outside
and I would go to the car to get the bag
with flour and yeast and cheeses and i
would bring them back
hurry hurry
(fog in my hair) back just to
stand next to you
to stir
the sound of your laughter
into the mix
to move the spoon
as best as I could
in steady,
even
circles.
Long Island Thrift
i am inside the drawer
the left one at the top of the dresser
the wooden dresser where the girls kept their scissors and loose tiddly winks and crayons
all the games done being played
dried playdo face and messy mixing cup
and so here a spare church key, a spare car key
- essential tools for getting out
flutter-covered in construction paper with a pumpkin shape cut out
through which i see the living room ceiling
no one peeking in
i am crumpled near the back of the drawer
with back of the drawer fallen out
or taken out and it is like an elevator shaft from here down and down behind drawer and drawer
behind addresses, stamps, and addresses changed, invitations, checkers
stuck together and capless pens
behind place settings and plastic fruit,
behind writing, serious and clear
down in blackness
to the bottom where the tucked bottles rattle again
as the dresser is finally disturbed from its place
(a necklace sparkles there underneath - oh there!)
the dresser lifted (by who?) and emptied (where am I now?) and driven
somewhere else
to contain and organize
a brand new story.
cleaned.
scent of old wood.
antique.
Lifeguard
We climbed up the life guard stand
She, ahead of me, fast and barefoot.
Me, looking down, judging the distance of the fall
as ever
The wood was cold and slick
the night - just night, moonless
nothing to it
nothing to remember really
We giggled (at what, always,
what?) and stretched to reach the
wet, scaffolded possible footholds.
We did seem high up, now
on the lifeguard's bench
settling in next to eachother,
facing the ink black Atlantic.
Cars that came down to the beach parking lot behind us
illuminated the waves for a second in their climb
then lights out
ocean out - black
crash and crash extending down the long,
long vanishing beach
We told eachother
as we had for decades, decades
because we couldn't not say it
again and again
couldn't not notice and be grateful still
as if it could change
how it was always easy to talk
no matter what or what about
what a miracle to just be understood
in everything what luck
to be sisters
Tell me again the story of the star-thrower.
I have forgotten.
sometimes a shy hand-holding
always she reaching out for me
when she was ready
and letting go
when that was done.
We did not look down
but out to the dark black sea
as if either of us was ready
at any moment
to dive into blackness
or to jump straight down
to save a life
-to save a life, or die trying.
The Cryptic Placement of Things
Poems by Laura Hohlwein
© 1997
for Vati
Inheritance
Romance perhaps was not yet conceived of, let alone myself,
when my parents in hats and serious postures,
afternooned on the cliffs of Santander, Spain,
held fast in an independent light
I equate, for some reason, with the fifties.
My father was painting, my mother, holding her hat
against a breeze,
studying the separation of sky and sea.
Years later and often I was told how the wave, already huge,
seemed to mount over the horizon as over the edge
of the earth
and before they had a name for the size of it, it was on them
and they were dragged under,
skin and nails on rocks,
dense water forcing over and over them
until their bodies, each, apart, seemed to lose all form
and distinction
but that of the breaths
held against the end.
It happens again and again and again. I am on a beach.
My dream's hand holds a shell, opalescent, cold.
I study it carefully. I note its sweet size, its tender weight,
each grain of sand lining its bumpy, lunar rim,
each gradation of wet, pearl pink.
It lets go a drop and I mention to myself how it looks, how it feels
this cold tear tracing down my wrist
as the beach below begins to rush
sucked out from under me.
I don't need to look up. I think,
It will hit me before I turn the shell,
before I can be sure there is nothing
hiding inside.
Look, these seven purple petals,
thin-veined, fallen to the black cobblestone.
One half of one flutters under a pebble.
Another cradles water.
I swear, I don't want to be a child again,
but I sympathize, for a rhythm
has been lost in this translation of form,
a correspondence to order - abandoned.
The petals have forgotten the laws that arranged them
and cannot know where the flower has gone.
It is Sunday and the city is empty.
It is good to be alone, to sort through what's left.
Pattern or chaos I do not know. Evidence only of wind
and gravity, still this slash, this curve, this violet M
read as hieroglyphic directions to some construction
of myself, referents to my dim tangle
of roots.
But that's not how I'd have it.
I don't want to go over it again.
I need this cold sun, this indifferent afternoon.
I shift, take the sharp wind to my face.
The sun strokes my back, my hair.
It wants me
but it's late and I can't help it.
I'm tucked in,
tiny,
lavender in the damp soil of dreaming.
Two Men with the Same Name
The man comes towards me down the alley. I am almost three and think he is riding
in a carriage pulled by a pony. Or he is standing next to me, touching my hair.
I'm gone for hours. There are flies around the party cake.
All the other children are home.
Therapist says, trust me.
As I sleep I clean my house for him.
In my glass apartment, in the clouds, far from everyone, I vacuum.
I pin a note on the front door with his name on it. And ask him to just come in.
In the back room where I arrange my toys, I sense an intruder.
He has no business here, I say. And the front door opens without a sound.
The door slides open and thin air, cloud air, follows his presence
comes in my glass room, comes towards me.
This is the therapist - no one I know. But I know he's come to kill me
so I hand him my rifle.
The rapist aims the double tip at my neck and shoots.
Liquid squirts up to my mouth.
Cold air rushes in. And
I wake up next to no man.
Now the therapist listens like he loves me when I say I was stolen once.
I tell him I was alone. The stranger was not bad to me. Whatever happened was simple.
I remember the man's linoleum table. There was no sex. No violence. No entrance.
It was intimate. He was strange. We were alone in his blank house.
He wanted me to say little, to hold still and accept attention.
He brushed his loneliness into my hair and fed me something good.
The Unfigurable Thing
With bodies I'm careful. I render
curved shadows and like flesh in graphite.
My figures love in parts, and behind their backs,
or straight through their union
the river or the evening or the crows intrude.
That we coincide with the world is obvious.
What is less obvious is the point
at which the specific becomes too specific for names:
the more a hand moves a long the body
the more the room reverts to space
Once, in the wild garden of childhood,
I knocked out a hole in my heart
and in that way left
and in that way
could never be lost
A door, in the end, is no barrier at all.
Things come and go.
Still what's loved and recollected
is framed and loosely kept.
Inside any equation
is an unfigurable thing
the not-named that matters most.
The shading on wrists,
the white space between hands or
the dark at the base of the neck,
changes
but never into anything less perfect.
Between kisses
there is often shared
the air of gardens we've loved,
of places we've walked
together or alone
Mexico: Double Exposure
There at eight I found my niche, my quiet, too early. Playing
music for myself, half-hidden under silver leaves, adoring donkeys,
avoiding strangers, stock-piling stones. Evenings I ate my first clams
with the yet-to-be dead drunk and spit them up when he turned his head.
Some appreciations come later.
But I understood early the preference for black and white
when wanting to see the world as is later again. And so, his upside
down lens squared on the Aztec sun dial and the donkey he took for me
and the goats stilled in the market, the live next to the dead -
both blurred by the steam of the flipped tortillas.
Was there a picture of the cocoon? I saw it first. Worried
for it, there by the laundry sink the size of my hand in the thin film
of transition, fluttering inverted. I rattled it once. Thought
I killed it. But it came out regardless. It must have. It left a shell,
left without waiting for me, my eyes, my young sense of import. One night,
almost dreaming, I felt the chrysalis detach and go, colored, light,
but I turned back wanting to remember what I was, had been
wrapped up, protected, developing in the dark.
In my own skin I died and changed too - not then,
but that was the lesson - sleep and dream he called it. Sweet dreams.
But now I dream he is paper. Not the image. Just the paper. And I wonder
at how I fight for the color, for the scent and the hair, for the sensation
of rise, vanish, going, going.
From frame to frame I lift my new eyes and still depart
from that cool tiled room, from my unchanged self.
We said goodnight.
The fire's glow was yellow. Our skin was orange, familiar but flickering.
When there wasn't trouble we all slept together -sweet dreams -
forgetting almost everything, dumb even then to the facts and footage.
In his camera on the table, by the grapes, in the dark, there waited rolled up
undeveloped shots of overexposed church gold. The photographer's shadow
staggered on the stone steps.
Others, too dark, of the procession through the flood tunnel,
mourners ankle deep. And the one I took: the young girl, my age,
preserved in the armory.
Still hair and teeth in tact.
Advice for an Imaginary Child
Hiding in a Tree in Suburbia
I admire your silhouette.
Now at twilight you black and stiffen
and look just like a branch. I miss being that well-hidden
myself. I miss believing that one really could hide,
that to perceive with green eyes from behind green leaves
was enough to grant dominion.
I am older now and must ask you to come down.
Trust me. Once I had a house with a donkey
and soft ground messed with persimmons and thorny oak leaves.
In a week the trees were plucked and the birds scattered.
The soft ground, cluttered, weedy and beloved, was flipped
and patted clean. Now, a family walks the new floor,
cemented level where the orchard once dipped
into our wet grove of vines.
The wild peacock sometimes was there.
It came out one night, near us in the dark,
dragging one hundred eyes under the moon.
I wish I could be you, simple as a silhouette.
But I cannot. Light hits at me from all angles
and I change. And so my advice to you is this:
Come down from there and stay.
Hide the tree inside you
will a fine anger
to root where you stand.
Still Life
Painting berries, crimson leaves,
catching the tints and the hues in a cluster.
Mother, the light is changing. I cannot pretend life is still.
Even as I mix black with blue, I am being drawn from the inside.
How can I pretend life is still?
It is spring again, high April, and after yet another year
the anniversary of Vati's death returns, more practiced even,
in the rhetoric of uncompromise.
See there - it's so articulate what it does to me,
this dappled vision of berries and leaves and you and I
scattered here like broken shafts of light.
And I feel the sight of the berries, the thought
of the berries grow warm in my mind. And I know
if I touched the berries they would fall loose in my hand,
over-ripe, near rotten. They would turn liquid in my mouth
and I would drink as I have been taught to drink,
as I have been apprenticed to drink,
deep and again and deep, until I could no longer remember a day
that wasn't soaked, that wasn't stained by the great spill
left in the wake of a drunkard's death.
And I would drink,
deep and again, until I could no longer remember a beginning,
could no longer recall how once I was a sketch, simple as ink,
white all around. How once I was a gesture, round as a berry,
wanting to be sweet, wanting those for my colors. How once
I had two parents, who, on a spring day,
that was nothing but a spring day,
would catch an impression
of me in the garden,
in the light, untarnished, unfooled,
just young there,
just there,
fleetingly framed
on the canvas of our lives,
of her life, of his life and mine.
The Sick Man
I cannot go see the sick man.
There is nothing one can do in a room full of that air
but look at his hands abandoned on the sheets,
skin: white-blue and loose, stranger to knuckles
and the instinct of touch or move.
I must go to the pharmacy and buy cigarettes.
I'll hide behind a counter of creams and pills and smoke.
And let it snow outside. And let them step over me
for lotions and solutions and dyes.
Five houses up the hill. Six stairs up. Three doors in.
The sick man has forgotten he is waiting.
His body is becoming sand to him, particulate, indefinite.
And the sheet licks around his neck like waves.
And his hands lie presented before him like shells,
magnificent.
Maybe he doesn't think - they're what's left after the animal goes.
Maybe he thinks they look soft as pearls.
Maybe he already sees all colors in white.
Polaris
By now my father lies stripped of all
but the basic structure, in the cast of a cross,
shoulder blades pointing north-south like the star
five measures from the side of the dipper.
That's fine.
But it's difficult in daylight to imagine no eyes -
those that (struck by certain slants of light)
filled up and overflowed
as if spring was liquid,
as if light on weeds was made of tears.
Gone, the vagabond sight,
that in sleep revolved and searched, gathered
and spilled. Going, at burial,
the pupils, stones sinking in a bottomless lake.
I feel awkward now, with sockets.
I consider them, take one for an open door, travel
through the body's architecture as if walking a nave.
Outside there could be hot gravel and bees and brightness
but inside the vertebrae arch above me, simple, cold.
At once I am abandoned and absorbed.
I float to the feet.
Once soft, once standing, they curl in now,
martyred, exhausted, touching each other
as carefully as hands.
The bones always did love death more than daughters.
Difficult white. Inviolate bones. I beg them to want me.
I beg the bones to hurt me, to settle in a gesture I remember.
From joint to knuckle I string tears like cranberries,
like quarter notes. My prayers are tied and flap to dry
on these bones I could strangle for information.
I could kick them, spin in them, cast the parts in all directions like seeds
like leaves, like I'd lost something underneath. Or -
I could be reasonable
get my knees wet on the body grass grown here,
press my mouth to the earth and kiss.
Or - should I curl my live bones into a knot and knock
bone to dirt, bone to bone?
Louder.
Walking with Mirrors
"Walk here on your broken ankle. And be angry
that the ankle, and that's not all, has twisted.
Your father fell the length of an empty bottle
and the last drop was enough to kill him.
Tell me how you feel."
When I was a child in my father's house
I'd lay on my back and imagine running the length
of the ceiling, hurdling exposed beams
and climbing all the way up to the doorframe
to jump down onto sky.
Now, I hold a long mirror in front of me, and support it like a sleeping child,
as I walk forward stepping- as onto glass -
over the bare bulb
even though there is none, really, underfoot
even though the world underfoot is a different one now
Still, the horizontal slide my uneasy foot makes
through vanishing beam and vanishing beam
recalls my young hand's slow touch then touch
on pew after substanceless pew that each marked
a footstep towards the last public viewing.
For me the bottle is a vase.
Fine - no accident the flower covers up
its face with petals. Thirsty though, it doesn't draw on anger.
And drinking though, it knows itself to bloom
and sees itself in water, inverted,
opening, at the same time
to a sunk and separate sun
II
The End of the World
There wasn't even a flash.
I just bit into an apple.
It was the end
but afterwards everything was just the same.
We were still us, standing
with our bright hair to the sun
as if the light would prove something,
that we were all right
and our skin was smooth, child-like,
as if we'd been happier for longer than we knew.
We went on. It was all as it had been
- except one thing.
We could only speak this much of a thought
before it all went wrong and words
- more than lost their meaning -
lost their air, lost their need of tongue and teeth
and forced up from our bellies
and clung in our throats.
We looked at the garden, the sky.
We looked at each other, our empty jaws opening,
our mouths saying nothing
and then nothing again.
So we waited and when the confusion
freed itself from the walls of our throats,
one of us would thread our fingers to hold the other's foot
and the other would be boosted
high into the green leaves of the apple tree.
Medium
What if my tongue were made of pink chalk
and to describe for you how,
just now behind your head
the blackbirds exploded off the wire
and stuck for a moment in the sky like shrapnel,
I'd have to kneel on the asphalt
and with one sweep of the neck,
in one long, raspy lick
mark out the air thrown away
on the downbeat of wings?
Wait. There are times when want goes down smooth,
times when the French horn makes me rotate my shoulders
and fire a look through this strange, buzzing air,
choking back tears that climb on impatience,
needing to know, to name
Beauty: so fine. And me: of fortune: of molecules: mute.
Mutiny
There is something torturous in the light of the valley.
It is the sister of the still pain of afternoon.
It is the thought of the sound of metal on metal.
Here, in the garden, I see edges on edges, note
particles, particulates and lines.
Every leaf in the valley is absorbed in its hour
abducted by brilliance.
Each vein gets specific.
All blossoms seduce.
Each hair on the seed, on the berry, on the vine
clings to light as to a patron
as to salvation
as to a self.
And the roses.
The roses are too much.
Below them, their shadows,
ignorant of color,
hover on the hot patio
daring the sense of touch
to touch the flower in them,
taunting the eye to catch the allusion
to the petal, to the blood orange
and the aching sun.
.I am stunned and stupid here.
My veins conspire to roll me over,
to stand out, and make shadows of their own.
The hair on my arms, on my fingers eyelids lips
forgets the host, gets drunk on white white
stands and cheers to the health of dry air, heat
and I surrender like the trees
to the business of the leaves.
oh that's it for now.... more coming soon.
The Book of Questions
Coming soon. . .
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Creative Phenomenological Inquiry:
A Return to the Poetic Language
and the Experience of the Body
in the Digital Age
A Return to Poetic Language and the Experience
of the Body in the Digital Age
By
Laura Anna Elizabeth Hohlwein
© 2007
He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise part, the perceptible blue
Grown dense, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.
Excerpt from Landscape with Boat by Wallace Stevens
hohlwein_thesis
link to pdf
full text coming soon
Table of Contents
Introduction: What Might We Lose if We Transcend the Body 7
The Phenomenology of Perception as Explored in the Work of Gary Hill and Bill Viola 16
The Phenomenology of Unspoken Language: Descriptions Without Place
in the works of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bill Viola, Gary Hill and Shimon Attie 29
The Metaphor: Thinking Beyond the Limitations of Logic in the company of Soren Kierkegaard, Jorges Luis Borges and Denis Johnson 48
Phenomenological Considerations of Time in the Contemporary Art Works of Bill Viola, Atta Kim, and Char Davis 68
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