Thomas Lowe Taylor -- ON COSMIC POETICS

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“The flame started first by amazement over subject matter… not the emotional pleasure of the laymen but the intuitive understanding and recognition relating obvious reality to the esoteric, must then be confined to a form within which it can burn with a focused intensity: otherwise it flares, smokes and is lost like in an open bonfire.” (Edward Weston, Daybooks II)
“To the unsophisticated mind, the characteristic thing about phenomena is their dynamism. It is only abstract thinging that takes them out of their dynamic continuity and isolates them as static units.” (Helmut Wilhelm, Eight Lectures on the I Ching)
Prospectus for a work. Submitted, &c. The sequence of events is proscriptive, alternatives dismiss doubt. If change is constant, pressures coagulate toward acts. In the open field of events, what one does has consequence, in himself alone. He meets himself in choice, at that crossword.
First, then, one would adopt discourse “as speech.” Presocratic is the mode. Syntax as a rhythm of the cosmos: one would voice his thoughts, as rhetorically clear. One would write it down, as thought beheld, as witnessing and observation. As one wrote, there would be a learning, a “taking place.” The particles of change submitted to a void, and coming back, a voice.
Personal voice yields infinitely, just as vox populae, the law holds, of reflection. But self-as-event yields newer parameters of selection in process by virtue of that reflection. In the cultural inrush of new information, that is as alien information from other cultures invades allmedia, one can view the flooding of all reservoirs of information, their welling and ultimate bursts and showers of imagery. That is the visual circumstance. One need only look but how and at what and to what distinction and with which one eye or two? Hence, “the evaluative normative concepts” are derived out of language. What it says is “listen”; what it sees is light and form. Therein, “response” mechanism for feedback, hence control, emotive eloquence of style and eros. Out of that lesson, straight-line out to the actual, to touch what one sees. A psychological drama in which choice reveals the nature of the game to the won who chooses, the self which accepts action as a result of intelligence, not as a symptom. “Emotive eloquence” being the first of the necessary criteria. The standards at each level of achievement are commensurate with what one has achieved. By discourse with what one allows: factors of the ultimate. Time’s memory a rhythm, a cycle of behaviors. The topic “intelligence” is seen as a partial occurrence. It is useful to consider certain relations of the specific. Prior consideration defeats the enigmas, resolves disregard into disparate units, even engenders time into its constituency. The plastic, however, is not so discrete and in its entirety unmanifest. Solid space, as contradictory as it appears (how nul!) is nonetheless the definition we give to “the real.” The fact that a camera mechanism seems capable of invading a superior externality and returns with a facsimile-event doesn’t seem to trouble us. The photograph itself is a “particle in the space-time continuum (cf. Wynn Bullock, even Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet) “…The concept of change is not an external, normative principle that imprints itself upon phenomena; it is an inner tendency according to which development takes place naturally and spontaneously. Development is not a fate dictated from without to which one must silently submit, but rather a sign showing the direction that decisions take. Again, development is not a moral law that one is constrained to obey; it is rather the guideline from which one can read off events. To stand in the stream of this development is a datum of nature; to recognize it and follow it is responsibility and free choice.” (Wilhelm)
No, I have no satisfactory reports at hand. Some psychological events and manifestations of print. And surgical prints of photography.
And the sequence of events, which has as components all that one expects from events “as information.” The evaluative concept “breakthrough” is a judgment of behavior. The matter of the shadow figure (who he is) and the locus of observer-as-fixed-by-relation need clarification. They are related problems inherent in the notion of the location of the light. From which location (“here” or “there”) does the light “come from” when one is “looking” Self-as-event collects light, self-as-object says, “the light, there,” and points excitedly. Gesture as act. But photograph as possession-of-image.
To possess a portion of the actual and to participate in a psychological event are two different matters, each with its own aesthetic. Set against this, the continuity of events, with image as an intersectant with the actual. I mean something visual as well as mechanical, and all those thousands of cameras going off all over the world, pinpricks of participation, the camera is an instrument of participation in the image, that’s how it goes Completion however declares sensation’s domain as locus, there where touch is.
So voice, the image, and the sequence, all located in speech-active psycho-functional man, muscular and vi rant, a pulsation in the whole pulsation of light: instant, event.
The willingness to sequentialize has no specialty, it is the norm of the behavior, in no place known but in the individual’s perception as “I am that.”
Accurate calculations resound outward, light to the touch, but even here it is more than rhythm, syntax and movement. The concrete, the “thing itself,” is borne out everywhere. When he live it out as here, it bears examination, experiencing--the artist-as-hero is antithetical to all good sense. Or our new “the person as hero,” what of hero? What consciousness inheres there, “our heroes of information,” etc. What touch yields to its view? Toward morning, the cream becomes palpable, remembered, startling by being close. At least this morning, this afternoon. “The language of form cannot be read except by those with the key; to others it is no more than meaningless hieroglyphs.” (Weston)
Mainly, then, in such acts of cleverness as this, in which a territory is mapped out in advance, one would purposefully initiate a sequence with a goal of repetition or re-experiencing a style of responding, or a mode of feeling appropriate to a particular state of consciousness, one would perform Krishnamurti’s or Gurdjieff’s “watching” with something in mind, but what? One would want to be most clear about the transitions or transformations of personality which take place between events or sequences of them, chains of the whole in its connectedness with what surrounds the gaseousness of one’s continuum. In that to identify the sources and actions of one’s love.
Isolations of purpose or function are meaningful inasmuch as they persist (duration). Art is what I do, or is what I do is art? The sequence of definitions is what follows, the computer knows that, of curse. The bog of familiarity—I would burst through that fallacy of repetition, the sooner the better. What could be gloomier or more familiar. Better to celebrate those repetitions of information as pleasure, better to redirect one’s energy at creation, at a reassembly of one’s senses.
The final location in the sequence would be “begin,” which (conclusion) has permission to enlarge the vertical “arising of thought” in all cases its description and contant. Original impulse to redirection as a behavior. Fine! “In a magical world view, however, such as the one which has left its impress on the oldest strata of (the I Ching), a thing and its image are identical.” (Wilhelm)

Movement, internal consistency, and the authoritative increments of data from what we acknowledge culturally as sources or inputs of energy. Movement in relation to image is hre used to implement formal pressures. The assumption is that response’s function to the act-event but wholly for the sake of fixing the various loci or postures which are associated with each image. This particular mode of associative behavior (analogy) can be isolated within the sanctuaries of the image yet removed by sequential shifts of attention. The parallel as a category of the aesthetic consists solely in the relation constituted by one abstraction existing in relation to another, those two in their time (as relation) generating a succession or theory of events on their own behalf. All that is unfamiliar is a moment ago, but of such directness that a final drive toward internal consistency figures in the act-event beyond the scope of this project. This synchronicity of balance predicates the drift of the single event in its polarization of lightedness. It seems to be what it is: the devices stand as numbers in a poetic of behavior, that syntax of visual and abstract encounters which bring event to being, which cause cause, a momentary isolation of fragments into conjunction or contact. Transformation out of what warps the state toward its future, or movement, follows from the dynamics of the flow or continuity of thought as it realizes its inertia in the image and then, drawing from the energies of its recognition, daws on, again, toward pattern and complexity. The object draws closer as detail, figure, and then finally blocks the whole field of vision. Such collisions release energies of data, scrambled and unsorted; continual pressure upward, however, reconstitutes the distance to the observer, and the solid falls back into its temporarily unmanageable distance. The specific sequence of events has no further allowances beyond encounter and reflection. The image persists in its own domain. “…modern artists who go back to the primitive, try to recall the past, the feeling and technique of simple, artless people, fail absolutely. The way is ahead, not back, no matter how great the past may be.” (Weston)
Any poetic is meant to describe the origins of thought. What is more important than origin, however, or cause, or authority, is the specific sequence of events which leads one to his specific origins, as though in the continuum of events one would ask for a psychically specific muscular aesthetic of movement related to visual sequences and the modes of behavior associated with the self’s successive affirmations and progresses toward the actual, the assumption here being that such a progress is chosen, via imageries of selection, for certainly, one cannot choose to exist, but only resist its dominion in the senses.
The chief issue at state here is energy in its relation to objects and to visual experiencing. Prior to the aesthetic of movement, certain assumptions have been made and certain hesitancies experienced and questions asked. On the whole, this preparatory series of excursions has been lived through thoroughly. Form as an emergence of causality need only have authority here as it resembles what other teachers have had to say about the present and of mind’s relation through body to the presence of the world, as an image full of light comes to inhabit the body. Hence, “Sun at the center.”
Internal geography is what remains. This initial statement is meant to disclose the possible in its relation to what is solidly, now, “image.” A style is a behavior, and a behavior carries with it psychological imagery and visual experiencing. What is ultimately beyond control, that is unregulated, is the energy itself. That one is and knows one is and that it is good and that one is present in the act-event of his being, and consequent to his arousals of thought and action, resolute, perserverant and continuant.
What is achieved out of the poetic, then, is directness and immediacy of one’s sensations of the world. Being presents one to the world, world is present in the act-event of being. Here, image is a celebration of the visual act-event becoming as it is experienced. What is written out through the variations of any present is the rhythm and focus of energy via a personal syuntax of responsiveness to one’s information.
The experience precedes the modes.


Notes

SCHEMA OF THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS
Authority
Curiosity
Consciousness (cause)
Sequence
Locus
Breakthrough
Repetition (stasis & accumulation)
Death-fear (duration)
Indeterminacy
Focus
Consensus
Relapse
Individuation (information)
Evidence
Emptiness
Personalization (ego & other)
Energy
Origin & Completion

1. Shamanism & Acute Schizophrenia, Julian Silverman, National Institute of Mental Health, (in) American Anthropologist (69, 1967)
2. Cerebral Cortex in Conscious Man, Wilder Penfield, McGill University Press, 1968. Chief neurosurgeon, McGill Neuropsychiatric Clinic, discusses the dysfunction of memory in epileptics and the relation of memory and consciousness evidenced in electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex in epileptics under experimental conditions. Based on subject responses.
3. Oecological sections: Solar Journal, Richard Grossinger, LA: Black Sparrow Preess, 1970. Section on Iriquois torture ceremonies (male-female), song in de-maling the captured warrior. Also in Stony Brook 3-4 as an example of psycho-causal writing.

4. The Palm Wine Drinkard, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Amos Tutuola, Grove Press. Two examples of psycho-causal writing.

5. The following letter from Richard Sassoon.

Thanks for your letter and other communications. What I sent you is a work in some sense, or perhaps an outline of one, but mainly a communication. The outside limits of that are my own immediate self awareness (before memory which is itself communication) and actual contact (ditto). I expect I have too little of both of these which gives me some compulsion to work at communication. The communication suspects it is not mostly a gain but a means to cope with loss, but also to appreciate loss. we don’t know how to appreciate except by loss. we may have some guilt about this. This may lead us to over-dramatize the pain of the loss. (is this the woundedness?)
Before our friend Christian left for Chile to study in a Sufi training school, he was carrying around a piece of paper which said, more or less: a Sufi is a person who believes that by alternate identification and detachment, he is free.
I’m fairly sure the original said “will become free”, but I found it impossible to say that. At this moment I find the word free rather difficult. Like the word God.
Suppose you broke with the concept of yourself as a continuity. Then you would ascribe characteristics, or emotional habits, or whatever particularities of yourself that bug or delight you to SITUATION. You would say, not, I’m wounded, but I live in and experience a wounded situation. Not I love and enjoy but I live in and feel a loving and enjoyable situation.
Actually, however, this would give an eternal unqualified present or presence, which may be what people allude to by words like god or truth or it, which in its original form we call innocence.
The loss of innocence is the natural appetite for contrast ( heaven & hell).
i.e. there are remembered situations contrasting present situations…
The moment of actual experience is the only contact with present situation. Memory of past situation is the only thing we can “handle,” possess or reflect on or delight in or hate or however we handle it.
This is the phase of guilt. Loss of actual experience and perverse playing with memories of oneself.
This phase is endless since nothing of original experience can be remembered. This is crucial. Literally.
There is no return to innocence.
There is, however, loss of the loss. the openings into this are various according to nature, but I recognize especially despair and boredom and also ultra-manic joy and contentment. The first of each pair is dangerous, and will usually lead one to terrific effort in a creative tradition or to a teacher and a religious effort. The latter of the pairs is natural progress.
This phase is repentance/reflection.
Now issues a balance of actual contact with present situation and memory of same. The memories of way past must get cleared, which is probably a technical matter rather than one of will,b ut probably adequate will finds a technique. I’ll return to this point because it is for us crucial also. This balance allows equally communion or communication, and the choice is complete at each moment subjectively but actually reflects the social or environmental super situation. ie, the situation of all situations in the region of awareness. Simpler put, memory is opted out of compassion, which is the last remaining perversity, in order to effect another’s communicational needs; and experience without memory is opted out of nothing which is the source of compassion.
This is the attainment of holy indifference.
In all this from the point of view of the origin or end, there has been no movement and from the point of view of any other location, there has been nothing but endless karma
This as a realization is the Big Laugh.

OK. The pain for most of comes from that parenthetical reference, trapped memories. Things that were too good or too bad to be true. Things the mind thinks the body can’t stand to experience or the body feels the mond won’t be able to handle.
This is where we get a sense of ourselves outliving or never entering situation, a something non-situational, a personified fear or desire without its practice, its behaviour, its nature.
The foci of this seem to be: terror beauty emptiness banality. Four types of orientation to not being oriented
Terror: the anticipation of the full experience of oneself existing without any situation at all, any behavior, any medium.
Beauty: the anticipation of the reverse—oneself effaced by the fullness of the world. Enrapt. Also an anticipation.
A full confrontation of either breaks all illusion. ie, the loss of terror or of beauty is the introduction to truth, god, etc.
Emptiness: absence of both “I” and “situation.”
Banality: prolonged ordinariness: “I” and “world” coexisting. No realization.

These two correspond to sudden and gradual enlightenment. Banality ultimately opens up to emptiness, the persistent attempt to face emptiness opens up to banality.
Now my more trivial point: these four approaches correspond to the types of trapped memory. About which there is nothing directly to do. It is the situation of no access to the determining past situation, which prevents a proper balancing of present situation with memory of present situation.
Therefore it seems to me one must take a clue from one’s penchant in respect of those four fictional appointments and proceed as if they were destinies. ie, heighten the prevailing perversity. Love, for instance. Is a form of beauty. To seek love is to seek the loss of one’s self in the other. To be enchanted, fascinated, held, to a total attention. Any total attention is an acceptance full of disappointment. If one persists the loss of the other will follow. ie, any destiny attained includes all possible destinies.
The gain in this mind magic I’m playing on now with you--my special perversity is to believe I’m not alone when I’m along and to believe I’m alone when I’m with you—if I push this, its natural collapse will give me the freedom I want from and therefore to love-live. Those two statements are just persona. I continue. One can use anything that one is doing or not doing to get to one’s natural appointments, whether seen as subjective experiences or accomplishments, because one shifts obsession from content, particular discipline or way, etc., toward simply style of attention. One attends to how it is doing whatever one is doing with absolute faith that this is adequate. Whatever one can’t do while attending to how it is, one naturally stops doing; whatever practices facilitate attention one naturally begins to include and one need know nothing of this. When one fails fairly consistently in attending one simply attends to how one inattends.
Eventually one finds one has begun to abandon destination for the interest in the procedure, which is rather funny. Also to abandon future is to abandon past.
Paradoxically the trapped memories then come up. There is always the tendency then to refixate.
This technique is actually paresis. It always works. It is difficult to keep to it. But it is the only answer then there is no other answer, ie., in the despair or manic excitement. The bored one is so close. The contented one is doing it.
IE if terror is my appointment and I find I’m incapable of provoking it, then I must do the opposite. I must act as if there were no terror, and terror will present itself. If at its onset, I suddenly shift and believe in it, off it goes again. I must keep to the paresis, then it will come fully on me, from behind as it were (cf Orpheus and his big fantasy following him.)
Or love. Or simply, the unremembered which haunts.