Thomas Lowe Taylor -- THE WORLD IN ITS OPPOSITES

***************

The Processes of Beauty

I

Beginning always in the same place, the dialog proceeds by fits and starts into an impressive though brief array of contact and resonance, and reactive space reduces the field of vision within the specific confluence of acts. Any gesture speaks, and within the forms of speech, specific personalities in motion are also drawn between the polls of form and sign.
Simpler however are the arts of practice, patience and sign. No maintenance is necessary to the practices of recall, for instance, as distinctions arise before the moments of decision to arouse what is curious within sensibility and discourse toward what is also new. The dream inhabits not figures or designs, but structures of energy wherein acts resolve.
So it is in release and pressure toward completion that beauty is drawn outward in the moment of pursuit or pleasure, and where we find the body sleeping in its disguise of facts, proper registration prefers to see in what is there the boundaries of chance resolved by simpler resolutions: ease. Of course, singular meditation refers to what is there, and the assumptions proper to beginnings are always present, though the familiar tokens resist the foolish claim of possession: song pertains to choice, perhaps, though the assurances of style are also described in the circumstances of the line.
Naming, then, improves what is difficult. The personal realm is still described in style; or the elegant pursuit of alterations of the perform betray, almost, the secrets of motion relevant to the final arrangements of passage. Surely one is drawn aside, and the light of events pursues thought.
Declamation recalls vocabulary within voice, and the centers of consciousness fill the diagram without conflict, just as the eye is always alert before the mind’s own sensations alert the organism to defensive array. The speed of events permits some error along the way: perhaps the door is always open, but surely the distinctions we make arise from somewhere; language and the forms of speech differ, as acultural visions organize in directions unsought, perfect trails resisting the names of strangers, just as the hyperbolic stance pertains. In no decoration, then, but ling distances between words when even speech is rushed through the formalities of choice.
Abstract conclusions precede thought: the eye is that quick. Speech recreates the one moment of release inherent in relationship. It is not the other way around.
Ecstasy, then: the dance of light is both pursuit and motive, where a future resides first in flat design, in comparison and diction, in the body’s quick charms for power. Or does the rule prefer to sleep where challenge pretends to rest alert beyond the open scores of others. There is the dialog reversed in motive first to other sharper scenes. There is “image,” the mind’s imitation of the eye, in conceptual strategies reversed or positioned within the framework of what is done. Or the theoretical. There are designs, or one would make them in his meditations in order to survive. The thin edge of perception allows adjustment: we pursue our own mysteries exclusive even of our knowing, though simpler assumptions are more manageable. We might begin again tomorrow, but space persists, the sameness of the signs is disruptive.
So tension and contact relate the procedural to its claims for completion. The more spaces there are to fill in a conceptual design, then, the more perfect it is, filled out, perhaps, with the diagrammatic eloquence which constitutes a release of pressure: tactics.
The conceptual act is also a physical exertion. Our distinctions lapse too easily toward the contradictory other. Could we arouse these signs pretentiously, there would comfort becalm the sensory array in eases left unknown. But the body’s life is perfect, we insist, it is our own, and no defenses arrive as needed. The critical realm is neither a response nor an arousal of the other in our movements: the same leap into the same water. Even drama is sincere.
No, they sing together, even separately. Complaints arrive on cue, the organism pretends reaction, and solitary states review unwilling declarations of opposition with ease.
Or is the moment of the grounding of the idea itself too separate to allow rendition? Pervasive and obscure, a language comes along between the assumptions, resonant and precise. Where style belongs to time, the spacious dogma resists. Intense, but joined again to proper dialogs, swimming down the line and never dropping off to sleep. At last the day arrives, and what was there before is there again, the work.
Of course correction is participation.
Passage and invitation. The invisible but distinct reminders that we have changed. Without persistence we might collapse, and in the world become ourselves, clothed as it were in the disguises we have avoided so skillfully and in perpetual conjunction, encircled, withdrawn or closed, the signs are made and disallowed, the closed center of speech and silence, newer and profound. How is one to respond?
We might recall our own voices, left to speak in another darkened room, where smaller airs recall our other moods with frightening rushes of other faces cast between our lesser worlds. But then the calm flow of movement contains an image in its restless flux of acts. Could they be better? Or are there times to move and times to rest even in the absolute voids of space. A goal would resist all but formulation, a singular release of doubt which permits functioning to continue its flat and even heartbeat, breath upon breath, unperformed and dreamed, signals where we might begin, succinct and unfamiliar, this vocabulary of light returns and holds to the organization of ideas and goes between the referent s and into color. A speech is described more simply where collective argument ceases to be heard, the drum of trance and sign, continuing to be the same voice drawn outer without these rhythms of abstraction.
But the rest is allowed, encouraged, practiced. And is there sincerity in not belonging there or there, but hoisted out, the voice begins and goes along to hold the beautiful before the eye as if some perfect charge were laid between the eyes, diagram and sign, even before vocabularies resist their formulation. And there’s the question: are these organized gestures more than that evolutionary commonplace we accept too easily, or is there another higher dogma even as restrictive and into which we cast prejudice, encouraged by the energies of a simpler and more critical description of processes. In the static realm there is neither peace nor silence, this “cessation of thought.” There is the language practiced by decorum or ease, but left along the way6 like some simpler engine, whre the children remind us of the mysteries inherent or latent, specific signing of the invisible, we all know that.
But pronouns differ. Beauty holds alone, and perhaps that is its failure to become the norm, a mundane and exclusive property left along the way, an afterthought. Left between designs, an imperfect though unimpeachable conclusion, like the meanderings of conversation which are so specific to storytellers, nothing is wasted, and hardly are we moved than left alone within the same.
Calling out along some simpler rushing-out, these days resemble a destiny where one is sought, focal, shined out, given image and form and boundary. The functional lapse of description and easing in to doubt, a resistance or pursuit of the formular in disguise. The views we learn are too solitary to become perfect; one would come to no resemblance or recall but describe his acts with words which are already known, and then begin again to fall apart, the future comes again and rests to outer signs collapsed. Structures of discursive judgment are always simpler than their origins, you we must speak before the audience, left to share our leanings privately or called to dreaming in the center of our intensities, no game but following these specific confidences, alert and told, into another definition. It is too simple to become abstract, and yet the work is there, roof, floor, window, the house, its lesson and learning, anf finally, filling in the space completely, held to account for what is new by signing a name and drawing aside to recognize the claims that have been made for what they are, the boundaries of the choice we made, a foolish conjunction of head and tail, the straight lines of thought interrupted by arrogance and pushed along between our moments of conviction. Love resists the claim and pushes outer into year and sign. We move again.

II

However much we decline attention, the abstract-theoretical is personal, and the tenses of the language describe body states more perfectly than does our insistence on detail. Even the shadow completes the double. But abstraction is too precise, denies the very arts of attention from which it is derived, we cannot travel in straight lines or circles, but only come to music where it lasts, and in that persistence allow ourselves the luxury of commitment. Our voices calling out or driving in, no distinction. The marks are hollow, the eye resists simplification, where “art” is executed by men or women or neither, to both, together. The play of types is simpler still, and the initiative we give to the whole is newer still, a beginning to be the same across lines and properties which parts the waves too simply to be seen. This avoidance of the peculiar, or its opposite, infatuation, is too extreme to be complete.
Newer positions resound, that much is clear in the rush of enthusiasm for the accidental which, really underscores the mundane pressure of the abstract into its details. The job is done. And lying through the categories, flat perhaps, the body of thought resists its claims and perpetrations. We perform the mask too willingly, or willfully, the pun allows exactness. And roles are drawn forgetting how the dream arrives or when the net was woven from some foreign strains and lapses in the act. That the beauty is illusion calls us back and lingers at the edges of the resolute description again and yet without the mood we might describe as new. Courtship or limitation is too simple to continue. And yet complexity won’t belong again to what we are. Never to know! But that’s too easy, graphed, charted, signed and marked, the day’s allowances for the good, the true and the beautiful. They are the same. And without duality, the rest resounds, spins.
The world in its opposites, too soon to begin without commitment: trusting to what is there already, some time returns and clears the air for work, at last we come to the edges drawn against the concept, thrown aside by failure or persistence where error itself defines the sign of what is seen for its value in the whole. Day declares, arrest and see, or flow these contraries through the net to determine what remains and where the accrual rests, resists, poetry allows the union of strengths to come to resist within the sign: your masks and terms align throughout the moods of what is known, and what is not is not. That much is easy: operating through what is there, or using conceptual knots as tools, the remainder is drawn like energy rather than problem, and the vocabulary rises into being on command, the specific thoughts arrive like light or knowing, there is a difference in where we go and how we stay the same.
Perhaps examples suffice to strengths or weakness itself. Any design is marked and implemented, though the rhythms of the trance suspend the air between words with smoke and noise. Perpetual disintegration and renewal; but the voices are not new, are not even voices, distance declares. In speech we come to see the distance. In act we lose the way, retreat, collapse, and sign again for help, for food, for air, and failing that, die and cool the ground with seasons or draw along the day like peculiar turtles, snapping at reflex rather than target, smoothing the distances between the lines with a strictly conceptual ease, close and polished by our habitual disregard of what is so familiar and mysterious: or works.
It is the edifice itself which is so peculiar, not its failure, for that is where we are revived. No, the edificial itself is beyond our grasp because we have made it through too much too soon and far too easily for any scars to show. Horse and rider, and in between, the act, going around the day like rest or posture, thriving on imposition or chance or calculation. And then professional. But there is no claim here, only a territory, and living in the center of the sign, another loop recalls us to our moods and elevations; in the unusual clarity of beginnings and announcements, arbitration of the absolute by referees of the human, separate and unique improvateurs of life’s own distinctness, visible concepts, clothed, as it were, by human form.
We might resist, and do, for that seems proper, gathering waves, leaping forward over difficult shortcuts, omissions of neglect and convenience, simplifications of doubt rejecting easier trails and filling in the conceptual holes without grace or knowledge, acting the design without respect for the traces of failure inherent in the whole, for it is neither static nor complete nor whole at all, but response and claim where none was given. Mute perhaps, the wise and fortunate modification of the absolute which permits the rest to hold its marks without permission but gather in to senses moved in larger signs and finally left alone. Alive, we are the same, alive. Beyond that, the assumptions break away like attributes or impositions. Release by simpler tones or calls in other modes: the ears twitch and flicker, the eyes roll back, suspended: an attentive grace to what is new. But what is easy is also what is beautiful, but what is? Color, perhaps, or only blue and yellow, and what of it? Simply, to go on, and working that as a sharper turf, we grow these tentacles of composition under a specific glass, and gaze around before we shout, the trees and woods. Crawling about, glandular simplicities too easily explained to be true, too true to lead anywhere, a vocable chart responds to charm the eye; even what is mute recalls us to these lesser realms.
But the absolute is not without remission, and that is an animl charm, a construction, then, and drones these days are filled with work, and filling out their dreams too easily for doubt, or pressing out their claims for doubt itself, a circular and unresponsive chart, cold to some infirmity and laid before our senses like a self, and like a body, drawn along the way by will itself, another diagram of action, “loomed her hand is wove.”
You might protest the form of the dialog has driven in upon the mind, it’s hard to read again where the assumptions haven’t yet been granted their luxuries of existence. The drawings on the floor are out of place, we think. We think. And acts beyond their call are never neat nor even particularly important. But we do persist. And through these signs of particular cleverness, the flaw, come between the specific intensities of resistance, another charm allows the rest its leisure.
Or is it even healthy? Release, perhaps, is handy. That. But the presence itself is contrary, contradictory, different. What are they growing over there; hidden in the woods the houses rest on thickened poles, the ground is wet, and dreaming life aloud, we come to love or will or pleasure only to be revived, only to sustain the motions of consciousness, forever “art” and uninitiated.
Or is it even man and women left alone regenerate the races of the world. Now there is nothing left over, there is nothing left over at all, but drawn aside for lesser drawings, sustained attention retains the middle, drives the center, calls the ideal perfect and mocks the other without power at all, calls its bluff and struggles out. Assumptions have been made because the necessity was interrupted. Silences. The days are left together, month, year, the season of the year before, and quietly.
And bare sufficiency into the main and flowing channel of conscious movement, the actual relapses of form, renewed or gathered in some humility and ignorance, but hardly respectful. We ask. But being thorough, there are no holes really in what we ask or in what we say. The music comes between the signs, the ear and eye have differing times and resonances, and in what coheres, a syncopation to thought which sees events in double time. The conceptual psychology gives way to acts just as acts themselves return us to what we are and to the ground of our own resistance to what we are as growth as tropistic clutch and glimmer, a sustaining warms is fostered in these moments of allowance and pity. Whatever color the skies are, they are still there, and they still are.
And though we might recall our own designs, then again we ask, dissatisfied with answering, more pleased in finding the simplicities of ease and dance and music left within the circles of discourse. Proper to the act, we follow out and hold the causes back to back, muted by what is seen, the familiar immensity always turned around to show us who we really are, out of question, out of insistence, out of reality, clamoring indistinctly at our selves for reassurance, and left alone to make the whole resemble what it already is. And there is some challenge there, to recreate the beginning in being simple. The rest goes by, goes down, stays. And left alone, the human image unsustained, curious, reflex and sign, already beginning to be the same.