Provided by Tess Kincaid as a writing prompt for Mag 180
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Surface Illusions
When I was three years
on the planet a fellow
decided to draw
hands drawing themselves
to show the strangeness two dee
adds when you try to
chase three dimensions
within two dimensional
space.
But I think more
to the point, we draw
ourselves precisely like this,
surface illusions
above deeper ground,
the spiritual savannah
of inner spaces.
August 4, 2013 10:12 AM
The spiritual savannah of inner spaces...oh I love that...clever, intelligent write, as always Chris...
ReplyDelete*smooch*
DeleteFascinating, how we all draw ourselves...
ReplyDeleteI have never been able to convince myself that my task on the planet is to smash all my illusions. I suspect that they are in place for good reasons, both deep and long term. They belong to the realms of my destiny. However, I am quite sure I do not need to pile the load, the burden of my illusions higher and deeper. I have undertaken disciplines to prevent that, I hope.
DeleteI agree... love the second stanza.
ReplyDeleteis it all an illusion?....really enjoyed your piece..x
ReplyDeleteIt really matters what you mean by illusion. Yes, if you mean the technical term from the varieties of spiritual science, but not completely if you mean our daily experience.
DeleteI too love
ReplyDelete'The spiritual savannah
of inner spaces.'
So sorry about the matter of the last post, but there is still so much music and poetry to find. Loss of outer vision never meant losing the inner one.
I have never thought otherwise, Lucy. What happens though, my poetry is deeply "visual field" in its form for me. I am not confident that I can use my "musical" memory in its creation, not at all confident. I have never been able to compose lyrics. I don't even know how to begin in terms of connecting with that sense of composing as I have it in poetry. It is another part of the brain. Composing melody happens effortlessly and endlessly but it is wordless. I need my eyes for words. The memorized word string is not in me, not longer than a single line, and would have to be constructed from the ground up.
DeleteOr at least something like that is how it appears to me. Even my composition of replies here requires of me dipping back into the visual space of "the already composed" and diddling with things as I just did in this sentence, finding and placing a necessary "the" after the fact. This kind of word revision cannot happen in blindness, at least not well. I am decidedly not stream of consciousness.
In music, on the other hand, I am easily and nearly completely stream of consciousness.
surface illusions
ReplyDeleteabove deeper ground
Hmm...all of human life is there displayed...
I am likely to smack my nose on the bottom long before reaching the depth of "all of human life" :D
DeleteLoved the wordings. Illusions yet spiritual in some ways...
ReplyDeleteYou really uplift writing.....:D
existentialism
Wow. Thannk you for that.
DeleteHa ! Good on you mate, seems its not lost anymore.....great to hear you visited our vast and tragic land, peopled as it is by genocidal maniacs like me and my clan... 250 billion years old but whose counting!
ReplyDeleteMy favorite t-shirt of all time was solid black with small white letters across my chest which read, "Just visiting this planet"
DeleteI have not visited the sandstones in life but in imagination. I paraphrased a tourist brochure. Google returned the links when I searched for images of "savannah".
Some very deep thoughts, my friend.
ReplyDeletethank you for thinking so.
DeletePerceptive comment on what art is. Like it.
ReplyDeleteTrell, I have run into the strangeness caused by this sort of artistic compression in several fields. If for example you are in the business of theory building there are cul de sacs caused by the illusion you are forced to use to model reality. That is another example of the same quality of illusion and it may cause a failure unforseen.
DeleteI love the description of Drawing Hands in the first verse and then the spiritual savannah of inner spaces. It's a wonderful phrase and poem, thank you.
ReplyDelete...spiritual savannah. (very nice). The lost city is quite amazing as well.
ReplyDeleteI hope you went out and searched for it on the web. What I have said here about "the lost city" is the nutshell version.
DeleteStunning capturing of our own capturing of self....lovely writing Christopher! :-)
ReplyDeleteI do feel that part of the perrenial problem we have is that we live deeper than we can think. I mean we cannot train to go deeper in this exact way. That I believe is why we are invited in spiritual disciplines to stop. Only in the stillness or the serenity of motion can the deep come up to us. My understanding, we cannot really even invite it. Instead the deeps have a natural buoyancy and will rise in time if we are out of the way. Getting out of the way is not easy.
Delete