Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Meditation on the Seed

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


Love’s final equation is permanent. What we see always in the precedences of our development is the attribute of our energies compounded by our other. And where we come to the balancing of our fantasies and our actions, a morality leads us from the dream to our completion. Hardly are we death-in-life, and yet the initiation of the mask is not its removal but its adhesion. And what is this turning but the quickening of my blood, where this avatar of poet is a bringing-to of the drama of the period. Surely the extremities of diction to which we are driven are a clear signification of the eminence of a vocabulary without images, for no abstraction will suffice us that it be driven toward an actual ceremony, where we see, finally, that the images we came to in the dream-sleep we inhabit are perceptual instructions from these layers of being we are visiting that the cultural framework has burst us out into the open, and that an entire “scientific framework” which bases the pleasures of its subjects on the objects of its succession must also presume that some failure of the spirit might accompany even the habits of loneliness and the diagrams of mutual functioning wherein “machine” for instance is a validation rather than a song. Where I have come through my information, then, is in those tactics of attention by which a man is made into his style and time, but driven before himself like the enemy he becomes. I mean, it is in some seeing that I begin to move, and if there is a vocabulary here it is borrowed for the sake of this being-in-my-time that I would have, where the liberties a writer might take with the graces of his period are also the very formalisms which give those graces their energy and substance. No, we are not here returned into the closeness of some earlier and more innocent time. Here there is no time. We would simply pass on through those historicities and formalisms and pleasant abstractions (the plays of the masters of the period) and come to the mundane with which one began: that where there was discipline there was no imitation and that where I have come to my predecessors it is as a beast is driven, by a pointed stick. And so the well-;known advantages of discourse and community are as imperfect as they are ultimately impersonal. My final step was an ingenious and absolute rejection of the forms of even my own behavior and it was only something like faith which returned me to this mundane interplay of event and light which is the world. My own hesitation at revealing the secrets of behavioral development is the irony that there are none, and that what passes commonly for advice is simply the adversion of the struggle to limit which is the name of the shadow’s eloquent law, and that the abandon of one law for another is no literal enterprise it is simply the reading of the perceptual event with increasing accuracy, it is simply paying attention to the constancy and gentleness of the fantasies. Where a man comes to his words, so is he left among them, and those depressions and anxieties of the way are simply the measure of one’s ignorance. Surely it is no brave matter to be stupid, nor should one boast of his grossness with the pornographic indelicacy of the well-known neighbor who shows his nakedness before dawn and then only to himself. There is also a sort of vain boasting of survival to which the glorious giant is given, where he hakes these marks of style upon the age, it is as his borrowings of other languages from other times, his intensities of “information” have given him his false song. But surely, too, we would read ourselves in something, and would find voice measured in these presentiments of recollection. I know that objections are raised to this view I seem to be describing that it will be ahistorical, or heretical, or primitive, or modern, but surely it is just there where the matter rests, exactly, in equilibrium or abandonment, temporarily, and for the sake of one’s initiations, of all the discipline one has made. It is here that the content of the discipline comes through to us: one makes hiself powerful in order to become the master of time in which to pass attention, this hermetic jumping-the-ring, for the ring is her circle of muscle where I would make my pleasuring clear and perfect, it is not simply Sophia’s wisdom I would become, for I am still a man and would let Sophia show herself and be plain, and I would have no wife to make these claims of inattention. My children are my own business, and I have not made them out of any union but this gradual description of my energies. There are no poems in this contradiction of names, and yet the beauties of their making is not some drunken dance but the revolution of my life, it is where I have been beautiful to myself, to know who I am. It is not some empty voice of youth’s agony of the impermanence of the genius it is filled with in the absence of the seed, for the seed is also this dying-to-time where we are made into the artifacts of our living among our people, for they are brutish and shallow and that is the meaning of the host, that there is some absolute joy in their massing together, and where the bourgeois household, for instance, is a prison to the imaginations of the children—there is such a shy and accidental deprivation of love in these white rooms—but there is a presence here in this primitive pseudo-world we are constantly making “new,” as if there were any making to depend on from the one brief moment of our seeing together. I have been taught by these friends to abandon my genius, and so I have done so, for it is a terrible and lonely isolation and it has no cure. Nor is this a particularly easy saying, nor is this any renunciation or denial, one is, simply at the center and name of his being, and what we would advise is this essaying forth of words into the context of our conscience; we would have something intelligent and graceful come into our language, there’s the summary and charge: for surely one is all things to all people, he sets his revolutions into play and wins the world, and as he wins the world he no longer plays. There’s the laughter. We aspire to everything and let it fall too easily. Some gentleness fills these empty spaces: we permit ourselves these substitute languages: certainly the material and elementary placing of category and thing is a sufficiency to itself. If we die without any knowing, what of it, it is our matter and our death to experience, and these exhortations of holiness are just that. I would be left to my singing and walking in the woods.
The woods are where I learned my name—I would know these trees personally, and I remember my loneliness too well to leave it undisturbed. Any masterpiece subsides into its vocabulary, but a song is permanent, it is the life of the body to be the perfection of its material substance, and it is love which brings us round, and our woman is made of these images and victories. A provisional disturbance lessens; we have driven the eagle out into the open where he is finally seen. And to be sure, there was no ease to this, only a passive yet determined will which shares these exercises of patience into some symbolism where the healing lies-to in some openings of the earth where her name is driven into the song of this becoming. A circle is made then drawn, there is no other way, and should this absolute seem to be “another,” well, then, you might try it some other way. There is no way when there is “another” darkness to overwhelm. Children are made so simply, and yet they, too, come to the brittleness of these decisions, triangle and line. These openings are fertile: the drama and wide-eyed evocations of the eloquent revelations only obscure the gratitudes of the body’s simplicity. For a privacy to remain constant, of course, it need only become cultivated. The becoming is the perfect quickening of stance & song, that I have come to my eyes in their longing after image. But the final resolution is too much to accept: perhaps we would live with a constant immanence of “becoming” and keep “being” always at the briefest possible distance, where the alert and designable simplicities of preparation and study maintain us always with a constancy of expectation. There is, however, some distancing in this reception we might occur. I am the event, it says, and we follow, and where we come out upon the end, there is a hard and transparent openness which at first seems not to be the “real thing.” This too can be transmuted as another of the stations of attention, for here the exclusiveness of detail and center cohabit at event and tangent. Not to be a perpetual borrower, nor parasitize these others who have given of themselves so willingly.
There are some meetings to prefer, and out of the willingness of the calculable realm, we would achieve a sponsorship and similitude wherein a truer resonance outlasts the lassitude of principle. Ah, then, to become this thing at last, mask and drum, and to move through the permanence of the dance, to arrive, at the center of gratitude where one might return to his community and rest, at last, the long, clear jumping-out of life’s true breath having been completed. Here in this middle distance where the powers of daylight have not yet begun to wane, there is still some stillness, and even in this remembering, there is the woods and the trail winding up into the mountains where it has no end.

Tom Eagle, Missoula, mid-70s