a phoetics: fragment 6
The distinction - and so mental distance - between "what we are" and "what we make" lies in the fact that while in the irreversibility of time each moment (from the Latin momentum, "movement," and related to the Greek amyno, "push away") as it is lived is new, betokening a difference, in time, of arrangement - "it (this syntax) was" - including of our distinguishable actions, emotions and thoughts and the distinguishable phenomenal universe (if they may be distinguished), it only is when we attend to it. We perform that attending naturally: It is what it is to make, which falls under a poetics (poiesis, a "making" or "creating"). The term "nature" at its root relates to birth (the Latin natus "born," the pluperfect of nasci "to be born"), and while a birth denotes a "new," it possesses concreteness - a "grown together" result, or a syntax made new. A thing as they derive from "assembly" involves a location, a coincidence in time. Attention, a "stretching toward" (ad- "to" + tendere "stretch"), makes a thing, and through it we extend the bounds of the human in a momentary (moving) conscious order.
Symbols (among which are words, spoken or written) measure, as is a moment a discrete "move." Moving words make new worlds (orders) both in time moving as well as in emotion, AKA possess feeling, including heart and touch. "Emotion" derives from a "move," the Latin emovere, "to move out." This too connects to attention: In it, we feel inherency, which is new. Each move is, constituting a unique spacetime measure realized as a quantifiable difference, or change: A distinguished location. It may be rendered symbolically (in words, among other media) through that "moving out," which is a space - not time - casting ahead. As we inhabit that space what is open is touched: a future and our responsibility, or that to which we are capable of forming a response.
In the forming of a symbolic measure, attention lies beyond feeling, or sense. That attention, as a stretch, emerges out of "will," a polysemy derived from the Old English willan, meaning "to wish, desire, want." This possesses "might," both as strength ("the might with which we will") and a conditional of act ("what might happen with the might with which we will"). In will lies our responsibility, derived from the Latin spondere "to engage oneself, promise." In that sense, the will calls to our future. This root survives in "spouse," that man or woman to whom one "promises" oneself in marriage. (Its etymology further lies in the Greek sponde, "solemn libation," and the PIE base *spend-, "to make an offering, perform a rite." This root survives - or is preserved - in poetry through the spondee, a metrical foot of two long syllables, from the Greek spondeios, a meter originally used in chants accompanying libations. There is a sacred and poetic, or actual - as well as sexual - echo in a response: an acknowledgment of more than we ourselves are at any particular moment and in any circumstance. The will ties to responsibility as a promise, which entails futurity, as heterosexual intercourse may promise offspring. It is how we make a future, phylogenetically and ontogenetically, connected to the wild vines of thought woven among the polyvalent parabolas of memory. In turn, memory holds open our mindscape and connects us to Earth, even at a sub-atomic level.
The PIE base of "will" (wel-/*wol-) means "be pleasing," as preserved in "welcome." It speaks to openness: What a stretching accomplishes. This is the same derivation as "well," a word almost emptied of meaning but which nevertheless masks a complexity, which in the commonality of its use unwittingly lends to our lives depth, including mana/taboo. Namely, "to well" means "to spring, rise, gush," as associated with water - which makes up over half of what humans, among other species, are. "Well" may be used as an adjective to qualify things, endowing "what is" with a mutable (watery) essence - and complicating its associative "will" as commonly understood, as in the compound "willfulness." A "well" is also a subterranean water source, archetypically speaking a man-made hole in the ground into which one may reach to draw water. Literally humans, among other life forms, are standing, sitting and lying wells of subcutaneous water, and while such is intermingled in our content - tissues, fat, organs, etc. - it is the mass of what we "hold together." It makes up more than half of our "content," a word derived from the Latin tenere, "to hold, to keep, to maintain," but deeper the PIE base *ten- "to stretch." In that light "content" means "what is stretched together." Fundamentally we stretch to hold water, and this stretching going out from us is our will meeting "well" in all ways. The well wills well.
Put simply one may say (wish and proclaim): Will well.
In the meeting "at" the well symbols form, and in those symbols our acts, emotions and thoughts become open. We are exposed: We become things. It is in that ordering - that syntax - we reveal our natures in the ray of creation as a possibility (a future). It is, however, moment by moment (move by move): What we contain is watery. But even such a saying becomes complicated semantically in that order (even that there is none absolutely in a flux state), as commonly defined exists outside of time as an abstract of recurring patterns that may in turn be reapplied to phenomena to render a "reality": Namely, located.
But what, let alone who, is located? We can only know or discover what we make, measure, out of time - but when we try to be in that order, we are no longer there. Heraclitus himself posited this in his metaphor of the river, within which condition, to achieve order, it is almost as though "I" must disprove "I" exist. Kafka writes this: "He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hindrance, in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive." . We are in time but, being, cannot make it here: We make out of time but, making, cannot be it there.
It is an old problem. As Boccachio writes, "The kissed mouth never loses its savor but is ever renewed, like the moon." We make out between here and there, located "no father away," as the Koran phrases it, "than the pulse in your jugular vein." This is poetic measure's key.
Namely, the heart is, and two rivers reach it, going out and coming in: The diastole of "good-byes" and systole of "hellos" that bubble and burst through our lives. That, conditionally, is the space of our future, the specifics with which we have to work. The future squeeze between and betwixt, and experiment is the going out, experience the coming in, of blood to the heart. The way in which the heart may act as a key to close the gap of being and making lies in understanding a thing as fashioned out of time, as much as one might make a figure from clay. A phoem, whose essence measures, makes time space, escaping as a voice. It calls and in that calling forms an interval - a well - in which we experience time as a thing tied to will, our responsibility for each of our futures. Returning to Heraclitus, while we may not step into the same river twice, there exists where we step a well and what is well: To will well.
one: "I began working with voice recordings..."
two: "The week Robert Creeley died..."
three: "'Thing,' from the Anglo-Saxon..."
four: "While I mark the beginning of my interest..."
five: "After transcribing 'the wells at the mouth of itza...'"
six: "The distinction”and so mental distance..."
seven: "The PIE *wel- also means "to turn, roll...'"
eight: "Contrary to the fix in which Eliot lost and found..."
nine: "My relationship early on with ESB meta-intellect..."
ten: "It is absolutely important to remember..."