21 December 2005

'Reality' on the Tree of Life

i once heard tell
of a toddler, overheard
after being put to bed
repeating to himself
a word he'd learned that day

and that's become for me
the prototype of our relationship
with 'reality'
(Nabokov agrees
it should normally be written
in quotes)




sometimes, too,
in the small-font comment-line
under a blog headline
i'll channel Zippy
and repeat a weird phrase three times

just to help it sink in

and this 'sinking in'
feels to me like it involves
the solar plexus

feel it in your belly

which makes the best sense to me
in the light of Kleist's observation
that graceful action
must flow from our centers of gravity




so in our flattened neural maps

the point(s) that represent the solar plexus

may have a special status

addressed by the toddler-Zippy within us

when a pattern is considered 'real'

so that it will in future

shape our grace

at the deepest level




acetylene and hydrogen cyanide

acetylene and hydrogen cyanide

acetylene and hydrogen cyanide