so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow.
if i can tell you one thing, it is this: your story will begin with a knucklebone.
dear little voice,
if i can tell you one thing, it is this: your story will begin with a knucklebone.
Jochen Lempert, Birkenzeisig (Redpoll Bird) from Vogel in der Hand, 1998
in his Symposium, Plato writes of an unremembered time when the entire world was good and gold and bright and thrilling. in this world, we each walked not as one creature, but as two joined together as one, knit together, knuckle-to-knuckle. one day, lightning came down and struck us all in the temples and tore us apart. the consequence of this disaster is all we now know: a stasis of wandering; an eternal hunting, a hungering for our other half.
in English, the word symbol grows from the Greek word symbolon— meaning, in the ancient world, the half of a knucklebone we each carry as a token of identification with the distant someone who, somewhere, holds its other half. these two halves, away from one another, compose one meaning: a wholeness. completion. as Plato writes: we are like a flat fish sliced in two. like two instead of one.
each one of us is the symbolon of another something. we belong somehow to what we do not have. and what we do have in its place is a hunger.
nowadays, in secret, whenever i come across the kind of person i’d like to fall hard for — which is often— i always, in my next snatched private moment, close my eyes and try to will back to my mind the shape of their knucklebones— the delicate creases in the skin; the rise and fall of a forefinger; the lily of a wrist—and, looking down at my own hand, try to work out whether maybe Plato was right.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe; Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
each of us pursues a never ending search for the symbolon of himself or herself. this is why a metaphor is a species of symbol. this is why a lover is. or a friend.
but this is also why art is. or the words on paper that part some secret centre inside of you.
or that walk, early morning, when there was air, and long grass, and you turned the corner where life evaporated into the fading call of a finch, a few scattered stones, young willows and hawthorns in muddy bloom. the way the world was suddenly so far away: only distant squares of yellow light glowing and twitching in the dark.
or that street one night in june. you remember it: the small groups laughing and glowing in the early evening light; they steamed of summer in small silk dresses and rolled up shirtsleeves, and like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light; to accumulate and reflect it like long-stemmed glasses.
or any minute there was the same gentle animation to all things, all beating to your own pulse.
why do we talk to ourselves about these things?
we remember them when they are gone as though they were some part of us, severed at the source by lightning.
Hand of a Kore holding a fruit, Attic Workshop, 6th century BC, marble, Acropolis Museum, Athens.
the knucklebone— or symbolon— is a point. and much like any point, a point gestures to a reference of importance. it is an arrow toward an absence. and like any hunger, it is unyielding.
we feel our absences every day; a sort of blunt ache in the dark, gesturing to something that is both familiar and unknown; essential to us, yet totally absent.
as the wonderful Anne Carson writes in Plainwater: every hunting and every hungering is half of a knuckle bone— a wooer of a meaning that is inseparable from its absence.
Hands of the Old Straw Weaver, St. Croix, Virgin Islands. 1970, Fritz Henle
it is not nothing that absence hands over to you—that would be too simple. what absence hands over to you is yourself: yourself unknown, and therefore full of immaculate possibility, in every part.
longing is a beautiful thing because it is an arrow. this arrow provides a path toward what is absent from you, but belongs to you. in this way, it is something to act in accordance with. it is a path. and all paths are a clearing of things; empty space creating a cleft through noise and colour— creations of absence to be followed, to be inhabited.
to follow a path is to inhabit absence.
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses Of Beauty, Jonas Mekas, 2000
for the presence of anything to be arrived at, its absence has to be noticed and followed. in this way, absence can often be a much more powerful and generative guiding principle than the presence of anything.
to be in possession of a knucklebone is to inhabit an absence; to take notice of a path.
every contact that we make with the world is a gesture towards this separation from what we desire— but it is also an invitation toward the search.
at any moment, lack can become hunger.
carry this with you like a fist.
— AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972) dir. Werner Herzog
in Plato’s story, the simplicity of the human hand becomes a sublime personal cosmology vibrating with an energy that derives from surprising mediocrities: fingers and palms; thumbs and a knuckle’s cleft now gesture toward an absence: toward hunger; toward the early spark of a search; the adrenaline of pursuit, hot lightning, a cry in the dark.
perhaps that's why it is poetry that feels to be the only tool apt to wrestle with our hungers— poetry which is, after all, play. or maybe it’s play that is poetry— after all, it is from poieîn— in ancient Greek: to make— that we get the word.
we cannot help our being makers and remakers, it seems, in a world in which we are haunted by what is absent from us.
Joe Penney & Abdou Ouologuem / Incarnation
i believe that if we are reunited with our absent symbolons, snatched in the throttle of a lightning bolt, by love, it is only because love is a tremendous incarnation of play. and as grown ups, when we write or read poetry, we are playing.
and we know that a poem can be made without a pencil or a word or even a notion of one. it has been known to take only a gaze, a silence, that early morning with the willow and burble of birdsong, or the evening with the women so beautiful and the silk dresses and the pale hands like Moons moving with laughter in the dark.
and if these poems— or any poem— will save the world at all, it’s because Beauty will.
William Carlos William writes just this in what may be my favourite poem at the moment— and i am not sorry to say little voice, that it changes all of the time:
if we want to make a poem, it follows that, under these conditions, there is no poem.
if we make a poem, it is because we are hunting where something is absent— hungering for something that was torn from us by a thrill of lightning in the dark.
Donald Bartheleme writes in his essay Not-Knowing that the writer is the one who, embarking on their task, does not know what they are doing.
and this is the poet’s essential task: to dwell in the space of forever-unknowing, to wallow in absences, to delight in an empty space— to search in it for a path: not with the intention to finding an answer— or even an other half— but to allow themselves to become better acquainted with mystery and wonder. the poet delights in absence— clings to a dream, is carried by only the memory of a knucklebone.
we do not read poetry in order to find answers. but we do read it in order to find new ways of living and seeing and loving and crying and dreaming and searching and sleeping and growing without answers.
Bons mezzes du Levant. Photographed by Jack Davison for M le Monde, December 18, 2019.
i have taken two months away but now i reach out to touch your hand again. i know you don't mind. the world has been very full for me: bright and good and thrilling, just like in Plato's Original World. how now do our knuckles breathe together like this, side by side?
what else is new? i’m still falling hard for everything i see, and even harder for what i can't. i broke my heart reading every single F. Scott Fitzgerald novel in a row, and i had to lie in bed for a whole days eating apples because i simply couldn't bear it. i'm writing a book. my eyelashes are still longer than anyone's. i wrote some pieces for some magazines. you can read one here.
i have been thinking very deep and long on that line: the writer is that person who embarking upon her task does not know what to do. it makes me excited to be in that territory— wherever or whatever it is i don't know, but i do know that i am as inside of it as i have been in anything. i'm just excited to not know it. and i think that one reason i feel so lucky to do all of this word-searching is that writing puts you in very close proximity to this territory. it makes you need to become comfortable with the unknowability of things. and so you learn to give yourself this space to go a little mad with not-knowing: to work not from the head, but from the interior. and if i am learning one thing, it is that that is just a beautiful way to learn how to live a life as well.
i suppose i took a little break because I wanted to talk to you as only friends talk, but i wasn’t sure how. for example: this morning, i ate plums. i am often embarrassed that i cannot spell the word recommendation. lately, i have been dreaming about whales.
and you?
i think i will leave you with something a friend once told me: if your choices are beautiful, so you will be too.
i hope you feel an absence today.
i hope you have the love in it to follow it, too.
love,
ars poetica
little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. it is for this reason that my work will always be completely free, but it takes considerable Time and Love to give to you each week. if it has brought you something, please consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket:
Ingeborg Bachmann, tr. by Mark Anderson, from In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems; “Songs from an Island”
fist bumps are crazy when you remember that we used to be joined at the knuckles
So lovely to have you back! This is so beautiful. It feels like stilled waters, deep and reflective💙