Movements and miracles

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The Lacota have a unified theology of movement: stars fall, arrows fly, people walk and smoke rises all through the Great Spirit, who grants life and movement to all things, and consequently equates the two. Still, everything seems to also abide by least action, moving only when it is necessary to move.

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There is yet something divine about meteors, knowing what we know what they are — not precisely the blueness of their light, their sonic mismatch, but some strangeness of the happening invading even the ordinary things, even us, witnessing. Nature appearing unnatural, for a time.

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Space imagery, radio waves, mineral evolution, the wave function collapse — things we colloquially connect with science, though when pressed we concede they’re nature. When pressed, we concede very few things aren’t.

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Is nature, the concept, itself natural? The tautology is insistent: a definition of nature is unattainable not only outside, but even within its usage. Worldwide, the concepts range from the familiar dualisms, through the idea of self-propagation, to things uncalculable and the cosmological order — encompassing also spirits, ancestors, a shared interiority, cause and effect, and the principles of good life.

The few exceptions — mental imagery, qualia, the first person view — are arguably things, which we, being nature, do. A mind-independent morality is nature. A mind-dependant morality — is nature.

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A semantic system, by the very separateness of signs, allows for connecting or disconnecting any two instances within reach. Borders we draw are at best half-borders.

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These are unending in implications, the sort of a way of life one assumes if they take an inconsistent singleness of things like charity, geomorphology and aesthetics into a metaphysical whole. Appleton famously wondered why should a Bellini sunrise be poignant — without addressing his own overreliance on painting, of all things.

One paints the sunrise a certain way because they feel they may not lie about a sunrise. But one also has to spend some time with it first.

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There is an understandable split in modern verse that deals with natural objects — breaking the whole of it into lyrical, ontological, activist. Cross-permeable just as they are schismogenic, each comes with its own criteria of the good, though actual texts are often a mixture of modes and voices, leading one to consider the split not ultimately revealing.

Anthropomorphism as a misleading problem is on par with the definition of nature as a misleading problem. Neither clarification would have solved anything — and if it did, would not have relieved the strangeness. It’s not an error to treat the detractions seriously. It is an error to treat them as critical and foremost.

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A case has often been made of Joan Mitchell, Malevich and Rothko as landscape painters. One could consider someone like Pound, Dragomoshchenko or Paul Celan as nature poets.

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Methodology will not provide a solution. The skepticism of grand theories misreads their wholeness: how readily multitudes come into one, one into many. In a poetic context, no new invention of a new way of writing could get us any closer to a conceivable nature of things. Chance has no extraordinary access within the world over hexameter, and vice-versa.

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There is an individuation to things — a standout selfhood, through which they are so insistent on being perceived. Despite whatever hiddenness may be inherent to them, the impact of their presence is immediate and complete.

Poetic form is not unimportant, but just like the partial material properties of things, their weight, thickness or their color, it is constitutional only partly. The sole dimension attainable in a created work, comparable with the individuation of objects — is style. We learned it from things to begin with.

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Style is the only path by which a poem could become true to the being of what it traces — and, through that process, come into a being of its own, a shared becoming of water, trees, sound. A closeness, possibly, when it is — closeness. Unlike form, style could not be codified; like form, it could lead to a false vacuum.

If ever it does succeed, we do have to call it a miracle. If we call it a miracle, it has to be more than an incredibly strange fact.

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A sustained focus on things and beings could only be essentially selfless, devotional, a percipient absence. Everything everywhere is fragile. Animals would often investigate an unfamiliar call, but would rarely answer it.

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Through undiluted attention, poetry could become, could attempt to become, maybe even becomes — natural.