Friday, December 5, 2008

Primordial Soup, Only The Driver Hears

There is a back story, no? There is truth even where there are not facts. If I can turn into pig iron it is certainly no difficult feat to remember the

Primordial Soup

Primordial soup,
Essential goo, slippery
Fluid smearing me.

I've been squeezed hard. I recall.
I've been whacked. I gasp, I breathe.

I give such a squall.
It breaks bonds of memory
And I lose my home.
***
But as I wrote, the memories from before the soup are another matter entirely.
************************************

In Zen there are these conundrums called koans. So I thought one up and realized something.

Only The Driver Hears

The horse is not me.
The cart is also not me.
Driver in thin air.

Or the horse is really me.
And the cart is really me.

Unknown, forgotten -
I am the smaller third lost
In dreams of wholeness.
***

If I recall correctly this image came from reading about Gurdjieff on the day I wrote the poem, and the horse and driver are his images.

6 comments:

  1. I'm slowly catching up and picked a good time to come visit the oasis. Primordial soup, goes down easy, then turns you outside in. Familiar.

    I had one of those 'me not me' episodes this week (thanks to the fever), in which that smaller third is the key to string theory. ;-) That is, it made brilliant sense at the time...

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  2. Welcome Master Starfire, I know the fish thing is incognito. I am happy to find you here with energy and snap.

    In music of course a small third is the minor key, where lots more dissonance ("wrong notes not wrong") is allowed and so me n the other not so well trained musicians hang out without sounding unmusical. That's why we all play "sad" music. Happy music is MUCH more difficult. The smaller third is indeed the key to string theory. Pythagoras agrees. So does my cat who has to listen to me and remarks that at least I sort of sound musical.

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  3. Walt, Your old post looked as fresh as the day you posted it. As I am sure you do. Since the Starfish is puny (but coming back), and I am puny (but also coming back), it is good that one of us Northwest curmudgeons is still manning up to things. The fact that you are the tea master is an added bonus. Tea master, team aster. Wow. Star of the team.

    That reminds my of Holy Blood, Holy Grail where Sang Real/San Graal is the driving theme of the book.

    All hail the Merovingian kings of France.

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  4. My acupuncturist assures me that, practiced regularly, qigong prevents critters like virusii and bacteria from invading the "soft organs" -- which would include the lungs. The idea is that open and free-flowing meridians create a kind of "shield" around the body that wards off the more common attacks.

    Is this believable?

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  5. Of course qigong is believable, and then bring in the larger contexts where it works for some but not for all, most usually self inflicted, but not necessarily.

    In allopathic medicine, they have to accept "paradoxical drug reactions" which merely demonstrate that knowledge of humans in ALL areas is statistical knowledge. What works for the mainstream will not work for the edge groups (much much smaller populations). That is why you have to know yourself, and also why you have to doubt your own specialness. Chances are you fit somewhere in the mainstream, but then again, perhaps you do stick out. Because certainly some do.

    It's a bitch. It's also a piece of the answer to "Well, HE can do it, why can't I?"

    But then, I routinely find something that works in my life but doesn't fit the flow of my sloth. One of my routine complaints is "why did I stop doing what is good for me??" In this I am in the self-afflicted mainstream.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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