Reordering: Crossing Open Ground

I once copied out and added line endings to a passage from Crossing Open Ground — Barry Lopez writes in "Landscape and Narrative"

Inherent in story is the power to
reorder a state of psychological
confusion through contact with
the pervasive truth of those
relationships we call "the land."

From these newly disposed lines, I went on to ponder the mechanism of story.

Story as a means of sorting. What strikes me here in this discourse of balance and harmony is the equivalent role of story as disturbing — confusing perception to arrive at greater psychological order; l'épreuve. I think of this especially since Lopez invokes the song/ritual ways of the Navaho which I've encountered textually in Rothenberg's anthology. What I recall from that reading, is the great mass or repetition with very careful and minute repetition that plays upon symmetry — remembering longer patterns esp. The Enemy Way.

19/02/98

Not only the power to reorder but also the reordering of power.

And so for day 1329
03.08.2010

Found Pieces

fagus

pleated gears and acceleration sequences


images combine when reading quickly readily recombine that is


Phyllis Webb in Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti Ghazals invites the reader to

Hear the atoms ambling, the genes a-tick
in grandfather's clock, in the old bones of beach.

driftweed is perhaps what the beach washes up but wave upon rushing wave yields the homophony of beech, the tree, the grandfatherly tree, an appropriate chronometer planted for generations to ponder and could perhaps as felled timber be lost at sea, driftweed indeed.

Robert Priest: Sky Sea Night and Skin provokes an urge to reverse some of the sequence: Sea Sky Night Skin.

Lorna Crozier: transposing as transplanting for The Garden Going On Without Us: a flight plan rearranged "like direction and distance" from "Wild Geese"

[...] sadness
passed through generations
like distance and direction
and the longing
for a nesting ground.

Gathered together the refound lines give

like direction and distance
sea sky night skin
in the old bones of beech

A drift in pilfering, rearranging continues in some gnawing sea sky direction.


And so for day 556
21.06.2008

Broken Circles, Scattered Pearls

A passage from Edmund Gosse on Swinburne's compositional technique offers some alternative vocabulary to the nodes and webs of hypertext. From Aspects and Impressions

It may be observed that Dolores is a rosary of stanza-beads on an invisible string; in other words, that the string might be broken, the beads shaken together, and the stanzas arranged in an entirely new sequence, without any injury to the effect of the poem [...] It is now clear that Swinburne forged his brilliant Dryden-like couplets as though each one were a stanza, and practically treated them as bits of mosaic to be fitted, in cooler blood, into a scheme not present to his mind when his inspiration seized him.

Ironically I transcribed this passage while listening to recordings of Indian music that include ghazals — a form if I recall correctly where couplets can tumble their order.


And so for day 199
01.07.2007