morethanenoughtruth

The Monday Morning Writers Group might appreciate knowing what is going on in my strange essay, “Gnarly Knowing”.  (Please see January 15, 2012 posting.)  That’s reasonable and understandable.  When I first presented this piece to the group, my last resounding words were met with a silence so dense I could have sliced it and served it on a plate.  I hadn’t intended for us to actually enter the Cave of Silence.  The group sat in shocked stillness, surreptitiously glancing around the table to share the question on their faces: Is this woman nuts?  Fair question.

Writers are familiar with the concept of “point of view”.  The writing flows from a defined vantage point: If “I” am telling the story it becomes much more intimate than if “He” is telling it.  An “Omniscient” viewpoint knows all and can tell all.  “Gnarly Knowing” postulates and demonstrates a new viewpoint wherein metaphor tells the story.

Inside the Cave of Silence, the metaphors assemble.  They wait for inevitable visits from the writer who in unguarded moments of dream or meditation or bouts of solitude come to visit and explore.  They exist for a single noble purpose: they express raw truth.

I can only describe my cave since it is impossible for me to enter any other, but it is reasonable to assume that what I experience is available to others.  My many years of asking “why” and “why not” have taught me that no feeling or idea is self proprietary.  Any insights I ever achieved had already been expressed by others quicker and smarter.  But what I am speaking of here is a personal cave, personal to me and what the flow of my conscious thought has carved out of the rock of my own reality.  See?  We have already entered the cave.  Every concept is quickened by metaphors that hang around waiting for some nascent thought to pass by and press them into service.

My cave itself is a homey place.  How could it be other, carved as it was in my own dark subterranean mystery, growing from ooze, to seep, to stream, to mighty river of expression.  As roiling torrent breaks out into light and air, both reader and writer take a shared breath.  We have come through this adventure together, buoyed by a joined trust, moved by a poet’s vision, affirmed by the resonance of reader and writer, embodied by the many metaphors lurking like bats hanging from the dripping arches of my cave.  Such a moist place breeds life.  Where there is life there is the capacity for thought, however rudimentary.  Even the lowly snail carries in its unique nerve cell array a microcosm of the mechanism that produced the Harvard Classics.

In my cave, I am caught between microcosm and macrocosm, in my own personal chasm.  I can vision infinity in either direction, but I rail at being stuck in my spot in this hierarchy of fractal branching.  The universe isn’t fair; why must I be so imprisoned?  Why me?  I am put in my place by the limitations of my being.  Who am I?  A being called human crouched before a computer screen, on a planet circling a minor star, in a galaxy that spirals about a black hole somewhere in a roiling universe of suns; conversely and reflectively, I am a conglomeration of systems and organs and cells and molecules and the atoms, electrons, neutrons, quarks and bosons they comprise, in an ever-diminishing expression of the incipient reality we call energy.  I will be imprisoned here until some form of life discovers the answer to the ultimate questions: who, what, when, where, why are we?  Are there other dimensions, out of time, out of mind, or in a Twilight Zone inhabited only by metaphor?  Until that is clarified, perhaps poetry dreamed in the Silent Cave is the only consolation.

“Gnarly Knowing” was conceived in my cave out of raw passion impregnated by seeds of raw truth.  My description of what happens in that cave carries the use of metaphor to absurdity.  I’m hoping that exercise will clarify what I was trying to do.  If it still doesn’t make sense, it might be useful to switch viewpoints, to wit:

Dorothy J. Martin, aspiring writer, had a dream.  When her alarm went off, she pressed snooze, lay abed and thought it through.  It was fascinating and deserved to be recorded.  She rose, washed teeth, and showered.  Then she sat at the computer and realized she had forgotten the dream entire.  It was gone.

Then she decided that the wisdom carried by the symbolism of the dream must have already become part of her integrated matrix of understanding during REM processing.  This self-serving rationalization made her feel better, so she decided to write a poem about it, to have faith in her basic thought process, and to spend the rest of her life enjoying the craft of writing.

But hedging her bets, she resolved on future awakenings to write first and wash later.

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As wishes turn into kisses

And longings turn softly to sighs,

The lust in me stirs and remembers

How tender, how sweet were our cries.

* * *

As our lips touch gently and linger,

While our eyes meet and shimmer and shine,

The earth stops and waits in its turning

                                         As our hands and our hearts intertwine.

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This represents a dream entire, set down honestly and without augmentation or interpretation.  It amazes me to learn what passes through a nighttime brain quietly at peace in sleep.

* * *

The dream began as a large convocation of women.  There were seats enough for all, even one left for me.  I approached its hard emptiness with trepidation, not sure it could really be mine.  Several women beckoned, assuring me that it was for me and I was for it.  I felt much better.  A man urged me forward, pressing a round object into my hand.  I opened my fingers and gaped at a gold coin gleaming with a newly-minted shine.  It too was really for me, and I grasped it as if it meant absolutely everything.

No sooner had I taken my seat but the mass of women began to murmur among themselves.  The whispering assumed a life of its own, moving in waves throughout the assemblage.  It lulled and soothed me as I assumed it did everyone in the quiet crowd.  I breathed deeply, relaxed, and waited.  This must have been somewhere in Asia, for the women  were wrapped in loose flowing garments but they didn’t cover their faces and hair.  Interspersed among the nondescript patterned wraps, was an entire spectrum of pastel satins.  These were each decorated with complex patterns formed by stitched areas that enclosed subtle puffed strands of down, slightly elevated from the base surface of satin.  I appreciated the beauty and nuance of the designs.  They were non-representational though conceptual in the abstract, and they spoke to me, as they must have to any with eyes to see and admire them.  One by one, the satin attired women rose and progressed toward the exit doors.  One by one they passed through and out of sight.  They moved slowly, not looking back.  I watched and wondered what this meant to me, to each and to all of us.

The last woman moved toward the portal.  Unlike her sisters she sat, a graceful form riding a long square beam.  It appeared to be approximately 2” x 2” x 20 feet in length.  It was made of wood but responded to the woman’s weight as if demonstrating the rigidity of steel.  There was no bending, no sagging.  Two young males dressed only in loin wraps carried the beam bearing its load at each end.  The woman sat gracefully, one hip hitched over the beam, her ankles crossed modestly.  I tried to assess her age, but she had none, her bearing appearing ageless.  She sat, head up, shoulders back, each arm a graceful cascade flowing down to grasp the beam.  Her dress was a shimmer of white lace, the skirt drawn toward the ends of the beam so as to display the exquisite handiwork in unabashed splendor.  I looked at her face.  It was merely skull and translucent skin; a parchment overlay depicting all the expressions impressed on the face of a life completely lived.  This woman had fully inhabited the trail of her years.  She had lived each step in totality.  Even her raiment, once the same as her sisters, exquisite satin hieroglyphically textured, had been transformed into the living energy that moving relative to time universally creates.  Only essential structure remained, as lovely bones and the bare skeletal substrate of fabric, once satin, now preserved structurally as swaths of sentient lace.  The woman rode, proud and serene, and slowly passed from view to a place woven of her own desire and imagining.

I lifted my hand, a gesture of farewell and longing.

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