John High
Translations of the Unsayable--
Conversations with Murat Nemet-Nejat
“In an integrated life, there are no coincidences as the mind/heart embraces them, and they feel like fate.”
-- Murat Nemet-Nejat
I. A Poetics of Longing
Dear Murat,
As I reflect on your poems, essays, and translations, I think of our long correspondence over the years, discussing Eda, Tarkovsky, quantum physics, Sufism and Zen, films, and a curious life of pilgrimage through language itself. I often think of these dialogues as floating states of being and prisms of time, or what visually has felt like an image of a monk and fellow traveler walking through various histories, places, and gateways of different worlds through our letters and conversations. It has been a tremendous pleasure, and great mystery, as to how these epistolary meetings from places as distant as China, Cambodia, Turkey, Singapore—in locations as removed from our frantic worlds of commerce as Bodhidharma’s Cave in present day Loyang, to Rumi’s grave in Konya. It is in the hope that these selected fragments and epistles from our correspondence will offer a portal, or wormhole, into your poetics, and it is why I have woven in our e-mails and collaged together these documents as a montage of your own process and thinking. Yet through all the words, poems, and letters exchanged, I have felt and indeed, experienced in your own writing a profound performance of silence, or as you write in Io’s Song: “The poem became experienceable in silence through the eye, but un-performable—or a performance involving silence.”[1]
There is an intimacy in all of your writings, expressed as you say as: “That re-joining perhaps only possible in accepting death…a part of the longing for unity (with the divine) in Sufism--implicitly in Eda.”[2] The inanimate is revealed for what it is: living, as in breathless breaths of syntax, and your poems bring this melancholic presence into these languages we embody, or as you write about your own “…attempts to arrive at that place of ‘extreme vacancy’ beyond the geometry of ordinary space,” and you, indeed, take us to that timeless place.
Io’s Song, as with all of your earlier books, in its own inexplicable directions moves through extraordinary flashes of quiet and explosion. Your verse dissolves into some kind of parasyntactic invention: the sounds before sound become audible, if ‘unperformable’; where through the prisms of disjuncture and fragmentation, the eye sees with the ear; the ear hears with the eye. This is akin to what you write about Eda: “…Eda is the alien other. What is this alien ghost?” A way of perceiving, as you write? Does this not also connect to what you wrote in your essay on my work in “The Journey into the Wilderness, an Elegy: Thoughts on John High's Tetralogy?”:
“There are poets who say things, and there are poets
who unsay them. Every language contains miraculous
puns, having to do with etymological coincidences,
accidental convergences of sounds. English has two:
“eye & I” and “no & know,” either of which if pursued
may lead to explosive results…” [3]
In Io’s Song, Animals of Dawn, and The Spiritual Life of Replicants, your poetry both says and unsays. I still remember our standing on the porch of Ed Foster’s house one morning many years back, our conversation beginning with an exploration of how fragments and root sounds of language are like film clips, the way Tarkovsky discusses this in Sculping in Time. This, in part, is what you were pursuing while then writing toward The Spiritual Life of Replicants….
II. Arrival and Escape
Conversations with Murat Nemet-Nejat
“In an integrated life, there are no coincidences as the mind/heart embraces them, and they feel like fate.”
-- Murat Nemet-Nejat
I. A Poetics of Longing
Dear Murat,
As I reflect on your poems, essays, and translations, I think of our long correspondence over the years, discussing Eda, Tarkovsky, quantum physics, Sufism and Zen, films, and a curious life of pilgrimage through language itself. I often think of these dialogues as floating states of being and prisms of time, or what visually has felt like an image of a monk and fellow traveler walking through various histories, places, and gateways of different worlds through our letters and conversations. It has been a tremendous pleasure, and great mystery, as to how these epistolary meetings from places as distant as China, Cambodia, Turkey, Singapore—in locations as removed from our frantic worlds of commerce as Bodhidharma’s Cave in present day Loyang, to Rumi’s grave in Konya. It is in the hope that these selected fragments and epistles from our correspondence will offer a portal, or wormhole, into your poetics, and it is why I have woven in our e-mails and collaged together these documents as a montage of your own process and thinking. Yet through all the words, poems, and letters exchanged, I have felt and indeed, experienced in your own writing a profound performance of silence, or as you write in Io’s Song: “The poem became experienceable in silence through the eye, but un-performable—or a performance involving silence.”[1]
There is an intimacy in all of your writings, expressed as you say as: “That re-joining perhaps only possible in accepting death…a part of the longing for unity (with the divine) in Sufism--implicitly in Eda.”[2] The inanimate is revealed for what it is: living, as in breathless breaths of syntax, and your poems bring this melancholic presence into these languages we embody, or as you write about your own “…attempts to arrive at that place of ‘extreme vacancy’ beyond the geometry of ordinary space,” and you, indeed, take us to that timeless place.
Io’s Song, as with all of your earlier books, in its own inexplicable directions moves through extraordinary flashes of quiet and explosion. Your verse dissolves into some kind of parasyntactic invention: the sounds before sound become audible, if ‘unperformable’; where through the prisms of disjuncture and fragmentation, the eye sees with the ear; the ear hears with the eye. This is akin to what you write about Eda: “…Eda is the alien other. What is this alien ghost?” A way of perceiving, as you write? Does this not also connect to what you wrote in your essay on my work in “The Journey into the Wilderness, an Elegy: Thoughts on John High's Tetralogy?”:
“There are poets who say things, and there are poets
who unsay them. Every language contains miraculous
puns, having to do with etymological coincidences,
accidental convergences of sounds. English has two:
“eye & I” and “no & know,” either of which if pursued
may lead to explosive results…” [3]
In Io’s Song, Animals of Dawn, and The Spiritual Life of Replicants, your poetry both says and unsays. I still remember our standing on the porch of Ed Foster’s house one morning many years back, our conversation beginning with an exploration of how fragments and root sounds of language are like film clips, the way Tarkovsky discusses this in Sculping in Time. This, in part, is what you were pursuing while then writing toward The Spiritual Life of Replicants….
II. Arrival and Escape
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“[….] Myth is not a narrative applied, but dis-covered. The narrative that emanates against our will revealing ITSELF, A VIOLENT LIGHT that descends and leaves. Every myth is an arrival and escape, departure which in truth is death. This is due to the nature of words, their will to metamorphose themselves from meaning to meaning….”
—Io’s Song |
On January 10, 2010, you wrote this e-mail:
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"A burning that matters," you wrote, John….What unites us as friends, it seems to me, is an absolute determination to find an underlying, bedrock reality in the inconsistencies, tribulations, clap-trap of our daily lives—even seeing this reality in the seemingly chaotic fragments themselves. You see it in "the one-eyed boy passing," "a far-fetched word," "a Blue Cliff record," "a straw bag," etc.; I see it in the collection of linguistic gestures, fragments which, for instance, constitute, the form of The Spiritual Life of Replicants —only tangentially (in "the unusual perspective of her eyes") rubbing against each other, the fragments becoming reflectors (maybe only partial, "the unsaid said") of the river/light running through them, in Jack Spicer's words, functioning as the emitter of "clicks" logs make floating in the river.
Are we not both after a language for death/dying, you in Here, I in "The Spiritual Life of Replicants"? These are a few of my immediate reactions to your wonderful e-mail. I hope this can start a dialogue between us….” |
*****
A year later your book, The Spiritual Life of Replicants,[4] arrives and with the verse emerges a cinematography of countless universes seen and heard, even if briefly. Toward its beginning you quote Roy from Blade Runner: “If you could see what I see with your eyes!” when addressing J.F Sebastian, the engineer who designed his eyes. What do we really see or hear with the evanescence of our humanness, or even as replicants as we glimpse these Blakean worlds all about and within us? You write: “Imagining death is before all image (-ining) the eye’s absence/the absent soul tracing these transformations.” You go on to quote the filmmaker Stan Brakhage: “What cinematography means, writer of movement.” You, a cinematographer with the poet’s eye, write:
ergo, death is the death of the cinematographer,
a writing of the eyes’ movement of disappearing,
its calligraphy
And on the adjoining page, just this one, singular line:
Burial of What Isseen in Silen c
Looking back at your response, it occurs you were already also talking about your forthcoming Animals of Dawn, (though it was still several years away).
III. Seeing Inside the Names of Things
ergo, death is the death of the cinematographer,
a writing of the eyes’ movement of disappearing,
its calligraphy
And on the adjoining page, just this one, singular line:
Burial of What Isseen in Silen c
Looking back at your response, it occurs you were already also talking about your forthcoming Animals of Dawn, (though it was still several years away).
III. Seeing Inside the Names of Things
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How does it feel to inhabit Chaos, to write in this inhabitation. This question never died out in me, the subject losing its independence, trading places with things, even only for an instant.
I am starting such a long trip... approaching the subject from left from right, but never capturing it: only whirling around. At the nearest approach to start from the beginning again. As if lovers in each others' arm, as if love made of pebbles. -Ilhan Berk, The Book of Things (quoted in Animals of Dawn[i])
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In my commentary to Animals of Dawn I wrote:
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In this sweep of imagination of Ghostscript of Ghosts no longer Who can remain as ghosts an opus in time transforms into the timelessness of being tumbling out of words (mouths/ideograms/silence & mirrors) that are the animals of the Kind-Dom of worlds, known & unknown, being itself translating itself into Nothingness ‘from things real or unreal, objects living or un-living’ and bringing us inside the great waves of compassion and of their no separation of their no death or birth of their end of language as anything more than becoming who we are and were and will be. All these animals of dawn traipsing the palm of a hand.
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Naturally, you already had revealed in your own translations, essays, and poems, what Heisenberg realized, and you quote as well in Animals of Dawn:
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"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
(Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science.) |
And had you not told us this yourself, through your own commentary and meditation:
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"A commentary on a word or a phrase in a holy text can only be an ideogram. An illumination. Fragments in things, real or unreal, objects, living or un-living are instant ideograms. Each a clear image made of recalcitrant parts, a mosaic of discrete moments of light—as stars in the night sky—that light the place in visible darkness, and disappear."
("Poems as Commentary,” Animals of Dawn) |
Your response to my first invitation, one of others that would follow for the MFA students, was a generous one, and as I glance out at the sea while writing this, it appears as the seamlessness of time & being. You wrote me:
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January 12, 2010
Dear John: …Nevertheless, I think, a selection will work, I will first choose a sequence from it which will include the poem entitled "Eda" and the Sufi lyric ("water mill why are you moaning") and the three visual pieces ("err go," "Immense pool O" and "ro!") around it. The lines in the poem “Eda,”: "Not the individual, but objects, colors, things are at the center of this endless transformation, the ego attached to it only tangentially, a detail, suffering and ecstatic," are at the heart of The Spiritual Life of Replicants, how the tangential approach to reality—where the ego disappears and "colors, objects, things, natural processes are in dialogue with each other, weaving their endless patterns"- lead to a Sufi idea of poetic space that the visual poems embody. To this sequence I would add also the opening first ten to fifteen "fragments" of the "The Spiritual Life" where the importance of the eye and its link to the sense of language in the poem are established. I would also add, if it is not too much, the sequence at the end of the poem, "Letters and Other Notes from Ari." That would be enough I think to open the poem to the audience for reading and discussion. What do you think? Is it too much or the right amount? |
Your visit to the class lit a fire in the students and helped propel their own writings into ones of exploration, daring, and entering into places and a new syntax of their feelings about what poetry can do. And your continued visits to our program broadened the scope and range of our meditations on the nature and possibilities of language itself.
*****
IV. Ghosts, Death, and Deathlessness
I want to make Hamlet, to dis appear.
The lightning that didn't strike made me disappear completely.
"Horatio: I'll cross it, though it blast me. Stay, illusion!
Speak to me..."
Existence is a very rare event,
out of the infinities that don't happen.
These lines're about the left out.
And their liberation.
The non-existent, you have nothing to lose
but your walls!
—Animals of Dawn
This all brings me back into your “The Journey into the Wilderness, an Elegy” in which you write:
I want to make Hamlet, to dis appear.
The lightning that didn't strike made me disappear completely.
"Horatio: I'll cross it, though it blast me. Stay, illusion!
Speak to me..."
Existence is a very rare event,
out of the infinities that don't happen.
These lines're about the left out.
And their liberation.
The non-existent, you have nothing to lose
but your walls!
—Animals of Dawn
This all brings me back into your “The Journey into the Wilderness, an Elegy” in which you write:
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“…The poem is about silence, the speech of silence: images occupying mental spaces in between that are thresholds both of arrivals and departures. One enters a reflection: a reflected field of ecstatic suffering that ‘sees a small wave in the middle of waves, hears.’ ‘a cadence of hair,’ ‘coaxes silence out of noiseless weeds.’ The human and unhuman synthesize—'stones also are deaf mute... rivers, bees’—and, as if in a mirror, one becomes what one is also not. In this projection of the soul, in suffering, the prison of language turns into a prism: does not say what it says, but moves, says in motion—thought in motion.”
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But which one of us are writing? Are we writing one another? Or, like these conversations, are we writing into each other?
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“…Looking into a mirror, one sees oneself speak without a sound, as if in a dream. Language, message detached from sound. The poem describes this dislocation as ‘[hearing] the shape of letters.’ Time disappears. Past and present, the absent dead and the living consciousness extending into the mirror, the ‘it’ and the observing ‘I’, a wall removed between them, connect and join the same field: ... In a story there is never a beginning & end—whose voice traces itself in air.... -- “The Journey Into the Wilderness, an Elegy”
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V. No Coincidences: Zen & Sufi Sages Meeting in Hillsides
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October 27, 2010
John, yes, in an integrated life there are no coincidences since the mind/heart embraces them and they feel like fate. The idea of spending 10 days in China, in a magical place the way you are describing it, is amazing. I will mention it to Karen and think about it. From what you are saying, this is becoming a very special trip for all of you. The China I know is crowded, huge and obsessed with shopping. This seems to be another universe. Don't miss Angkor Wat if you can help it. Give my love to Andrea. Is she writing also? Affectionately, Murat |
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Oct. 8, 2010
John, I am very sorry about your mother. At least she (and you) seem to have been surrounded by loving people. From my own experience also I can tell, this means a lot. Obviously, you are already deep into your experiences in China. It is perhaps why your mother's death corresponded with your visit to Juihuashan Mountain. In an integrated life, events cohere. The cease to be coincidences. I am sure the poetry will follow if it has not already. I was in Mainland China thirteen years ago and visited Hong Kong several times afterwards to see our son Rafael. That world is so different from my own. Assuming that this is your first visit to China, I can imagine your sense of disorientation, especially in the Urban centers, despite your spiritual attachment to certain locations there. Will you go to other places besides China during your stay there? If you will, I will suggest two unforgettable places. One is Angkor Wat -to me, strangely, it is a place like Death Valley in California. The way Death Valley gives one a visual picture of the history of rocks, the formation of mountains with their vegetative skins stripped off one can see the slow march of time as opposing layers of rocks pressing against each other -due to tectonic motions- to create peaks, the same way in Angkor Wat, in the whole area, one can see the history of the struggle between Hinduism and Buddhism in the very formation of the sculptures or carvings in the temples. Did you know the profound philosophical shift from Hinduism to Buddhism is expressed visually in a subtle shift from the frown in Shiva's face to Buddha's smile? There is both a continuity and a quantum leap. In Angkor Wat particularly Hindu temples are ecstatic. Even the Buddha centered ones have not arrived at their minimalist state as they do in Zen. I divert, but communicating with you has this beneficial aspect. It opens mental doors.... Give my love to Andrea. Again, my condolences for your mother. Affectionately, Murat |
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December 19, 2010
Dear Murat, …. Anyway, what I talk about when I'm with these good monks and teachers is what you and I started learning in our travels years ago—hearing the inanimate speaking, that’s why even in the poems I (maybe you too) write now you can't really distinguish the voices of trees from humans and stones from buddhas or fallings off from alphabets, and all of that. The end of suffering includes suffering, that's why Huike had to cut off his arm, why Bodhidharma had to go up to the cave, how Sengshan saw the end of sin and Taoshan could find the truth that this very heart is luminous, why Huineng had to go into hiding after receiving the teachings from Hongren and be a monk in the marketplace too...all makes good sense, all vast heart interconnecting, all continuous practice. Broke our hearts to leave China, and yet this is the way, going to Istanbul, for now anyway. I hope we can continue our pilgrimage with the Sufis in Middle East, and that you may be able to help me in this? I'd like to meet with as many true practitioners as possible, especially the women Sufis, and ready for rugged travel if that is what is required. The Sufis are so close to our Zen practice, Murat. I think of you and walk in the silence with you, even though we are, often, thousands of miles apart. Your pal, John Relevant T.S. Eliot quote: "At the beginning is our end" |
*****
May 30, 2011
Murat, dear friend--
Sitting across now from these Lycian & Karian tombs, on a balcony--the owners of pension making us fish. A toast shortly to you, and Andrea and our 10 years together!
This leg of pilgrimage no less gratifying than China. Making peace with our ancestors’ glorification of war in Troy. Meeting Heraclitus & logos in Ephesus, Aristotle, Paul and St Mark in Assos, and all the others along these roads of invisible hands.
Thinking of you,
john
Murat, dear friend--
Sitting across now from these Lycian & Karian tombs, on a balcony--the owners of pension making us fish. A toast shortly to you, and Andrea and our 10 years together!
This leg of pilgrimage no less gratifying than China. Making peace with our ancestors’ glorification of war in Troy. Meeting Heraclitus & logos in Ephesus, Aristotle, Paul and St Mark in Assos, and all the others along these roads of invisible hands.
Thinking of you,
john
*****
VI. Sculpting and Meeting in Time: Mirrors & Frames
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“Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.” Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
12/16/12 John, P.S. By the way, this afternoon I I watched Tarkovsky's The Mirror again. He is also inhabiting our world, the world of your poem. This is my first viewing of the film after reading his book Sculpting in Time. Reading it is very helpful understanding the film. Watching the film is part of my process writing this new part, to be called Things, as Blade Runner was essential in the writing of The Spiritual Life and Bresson's A Prisoner Escaped in the writing of the totality of Disappearances. —Ciao, Murat |
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12/19/12
John, There is a sequence in Mirror which starts with the young boy reading a passage from Pushkin (about the peripheral but crucial relationship of Russia in relation to Europe), followed by a ring at the door (which the boy does not physically hear but still answers) and the appearance of an older woman there, followed by a telephone ring which is physically audible and which the boy answers and someone asks him if somebody had come to the house referring to that woman who appeared at the door, followed by a shot of a table on which a trace of condensed humidity slowly disappears—that sequence too contains for me everything Tarkovsky believes about time and the importance of memory in organizing our existence. Affectionately, Murat |
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8/20/12
John, you are everything you are not feels finished to me. It has a totality[….] Reading the poem, I sensed strong similarities between the world view contained in your poem and The Structure of Escape, both of us pursuing a music of silence, seeing the animate and inanimate as a continuum and looking for meanings trapped among words. That's why you were convinced the two short passage from The Structure I sent you about a week ago were written by you. Am I correct. I did at times also similarities between your word choices and mine and the way we both morph from one word to another --e,g., in your case from prison to prism-- but I assumed they were coincidental, the result of similarity in our sensibilities, rather than the result of a direct influence. Of course, I also remember very clearly our conversation at Greenfield. I am sorry we won't be able to repeat it this year. —Murat ***** 6/3/13 Murat, In the meantime, something you wrote, and all of our conversations reminded me of this, so sending in case it is of interest: "Language [is] a system of infinitely complex spatial relations of which neither ordinary geometric space nor the space of everyday life allow us to seize the originality. One creates or speaks in a creative way only by the preconditioned approach of a place of extreme vacancy where, before being determined and expressed words, language is the silent movement of relations, that is to say, 'the rhythmic scanning of being' [Mallarmé]. The words are ever only there to designate the expanse of their relations." —Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come p.s. love to Karen too, john ***** 6/4/13 John, "[...] before being determined and expressed words, language is the silent movement of relations, that is to say, 'the rhythmic scanning of being' [Mallarmé]. The words are ever only there to designate the expanse of their relations." John, yes. This is exactly what I am talking about. For example, Mallarme’s "the rhythmic scanning of being" is very close to what agglutination in Turkish syntax is all about. Through that syntax Eda expresses "thought in the process of emerging." (I am quoting myself, perhaps not quite precisely). My visual poems and in places my syntax (and very much Baydar's poetry) are attempts to arrive at that place of "extreme vacancy" beyond the geometry of ordinary space. I do not think what is going on should prevent you from visiting Turkey this summer, unless things start to get really violent, which I don't think will. But who knows? Affectionately, Murat ***** 6/6/13 John, When one starts to listen, waiting for a future speech is inevitable and even normal: in this hour, not certainly of refusal, but of withdrawal, this detour is what permits the speech to be in suspension, communication to be restrained; or even more so, it's because communication is thus only possible, and the gift reserved, even not recognized, that one is able to wait for, only to wait for, a speech so in the future that its coming is not at all promised. Not against the grain of this situation, but in its logic, it's at the moment where waiting becomes completely without an object that it arrives at its rightness: not that it denies this future speech, or that by distraction it is negligent of it, but that waiting no longer thinks of it, or more so waiting isn't yet worried about it. There is a moment where I am not able to say that I am waiting nor that I am not waiting, because I am then with the future in a neutral relation, one of a pure vigilance which preserves the unexpected. [...] That of which I want to speak can neither be the object of an affirmation, nor of a negation, and I can at the most ask myself an instant, but without looking for an answer, if I am not in relation with a neutral language, but a first one, anterior to the distinction between speech and silence. How designate this relation? Is it listening, but in this case, what is listening to what is neither speech or silence? It's to be silently listening. ***** 3/2/14 Yes, John, we are traveling in the same universe. There are so many connections between your poem and "things, real and unreal" that I am writing now. Earlier, discussing Tarkovsky's Mirror we talked about his and our conceptions of time. The idea of cause and effect presents us with a similar dilemma/contradiction. "things, real and unreal" most possibly will contain a fragment contemplating etymological dictionaries. If one follows the transformations in the meaning and usages of a given word through time (in terms of your poem, following the reincarnations of the word), one sees that the new meaning can never be predicted or anticipated from the existing one. The word can change in infinite directions. But, once the new meaning or usage emerges, one can see how that new meaning came about, often through a metaphorical or imaginative jump (an imaginative/spiritual jump that belongs to the psyche of total humanity). In other words, though not predictable (infinitely open), once the new word "happens," one can see the earlier meaning as its cause. Therefore, in language (in human imagination and spirit), in time, effect precedes cause. A reversal occurs, perhaps implying the subjective, illusionary nature of time. Isn't each new meaning a replicant of the old word, a reincarnation of it? Doesn't human spirit flourish through this process? "& no mistake, there are no mistakes, ice cones & movie stars..." "One day I noticed objects don't make mistakes." Affectionately to you and Andrea, Murat ***** 3/ 3/14 Dear John, I am certainly keeping my discussions with you, this one and the ones around Tarkovsky. They are relevant both to your work and mine. What I noticed reading the passage in your last e-mail is that in your fourth book the theme of the trilogy has been transformed. The earlier three were focused on a boy and a girl, their unlearning (disintegration of consciousness) and reintegration. The third book was about an arrival. This new poem is about reincarnation, in other words, about what is beyond death, searching a language of death. That is exactly what I am doing in The Spiritual Life of Replicants and the new poem things, real and unreal. That is why, I think, the idea of replicants resonates for you also. To be continued...—Murat |
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VII: No Inner, No Outer—No Inside, No Outside
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5/5/14
Dear John, "…that’s fine by the way it’s ok no one ever really dies & we’re all already dead"; "no inside no outside..." Your lines are so close to the universe in which my own new poem "Things, Real or Unreal" to follow The Spiritual Life of Replicants is taking place. No wonder you have the urge to send these new poems to me. Please keep doing so. Both of us are trying to break down divisions, I think, in our own radical ways towards an ecstatic oneness, a flow. If there is no death, the reverse of it is also true: one is already dead. If no inside, why is there then an outside? "God is that being whose essence is non-existing." Non-existence is a real state in both our visions, something we are both trying to visualize (is that why your references to film takes?). Here is the first piece in "Things, Real or Unreal": […] "how about no story just that mosaic on a sky" For you, I think, the mosaic is created by the ecstatic flow of your new poems. Instead of constituting a "story," they constitute "floods." They read beautifully. As I read them silently to myself, I hear their music. Keep writing them even if "in fear and trembling." My mosaic I think will be different, as prismatic reflections, tangential, accumulating tangentially, as in The Spiritual Life. There is a story there, a suicide (or a murder) that does not take place (or takes place in the unreal). We'll see how I will do that. Wish me luck. I will send you pieces as I write and connect them. Will you have access to the internet during your trips? These are just a few preliminary thoughts. Your poems are new in a striking way. They take time to absorb which is a good thing. Keep sending them…. —Murat |
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6/20/14
John, […] As your lines above indicate, we both are in pursuit of ghosts. Hamlet is pursuing his father's ghost, in a space where finally the existence of that ghost does not matter. Existence and non-existence are part of one totality. "god is that being, whose essence is non-existing." "where's all this wandering in your mind? Can you find anything that is not?" Isn't this infinite space before anything happens (or death after a thing happens)? That is why ghosts are the speakers of infinity, its preserver. Is that ghostly gesture not towards infinity in which it exists (... the stream seeing more than its ghost). In my poem a murder takes place in this space, a divine murder…. Give my love to Andrea. Have a great time in Paris. Affectionately, Murat |
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6/25/14
Murat, Did you "think" the poems I sent you, or did I? Or are the lines above of yours my only thought? There is a transmission and interconnection that goes beyond before and after our friendship. We both see this. In my mind it is profoundly rewarding. Even direct transmission. |
*****
—Lines for Murat:
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1/27/15
Whether you are or not alive, the reptile says crawling into the girl's diary--whether of open face or replicant of human life—this vast species of time when a spirit world comes inside syntax & constant movement of historical space & shapes & lines & air in sentences & breath (these fragmented film clips of now) in the grand scheme of no beginnings or endings: will you question the ordinary passage of no birth & death, stone & water, or this simple gratitude for the end of nostalgia (The camera woman’s memory of an afternoon's shooting.) ***** 1/31/15 How true, John, "fragmented clips of now" eliminate nostalgia. Nostalgia occurs in fragmented, in the sense of classified into past, present and future, time. Fragments of movie clips can only be in a continuous present. When movie clips decay (or in camera obscura photos), one experiences a nostalgia for the present. That is what mystery (or sacredness for that matter) is. An inability to entirely possess. —Murat ***** 8/3/15 Dear John, The string of quotations above gives us sense of the parallel territories we are exploring, a desire to explore what is beyond (not at) the limit (play within the play, draft inside the draft, the dream through the play within the dream, etc.). things, real or unreal, objects living or unliving is an attempt to discover a language, not for dying, mourning; but for being dead, unbeing, for the nihil. My poem is, in your terms, an extended bardo, possibly experienced by the dead (Hamlet's ghost). That is the impossible squaring of the circle. It is a feat I think Shakespeare's play achieves. That's why the play permeates my poem, phrases from it, short essays about its different aspects, meta poems around suggested but unstated/and contradictory events, animal and plant and objects poems, etc., etc.; the way Blade Runner infused The Spiritual Life of Replicants. Both Hamlet and Blade Runner are about death, loss of one's being ("Oh, this too too solid flesh would melt and resolve itself into a dew.") We will have a lot to talk about at Ed's, both about your and my poem. —Murat ***** 8/30/15 Murat, Wave your hand and you've traversed millions of universes.... |
*****
VIII: Quantum and the Dream
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10/18/15
Dear Andrea and John, I just finished watching Interstellar twice. It is a wonderful, sad film full of longing: the kind of longing we have been talking about, present in your last four books John and in the Eda anthology, in The Spiritual Life of Replicant and in my present poems things, real or unreal. Of course, Interstellar is all about Time and our relation to it, to its passage and our longing to circumvent it. Its ending is very similar vanishing acts, isn't it? (To be at one place simultaneously at different time zones.) —Murat ***** 10/18/2015 Murat, My students somehow understood what you say in my course on Zen & Quantum Mechanics as well. It is all Love and Longing. From my notes to class; "Interstellar next week: I guess because the whole film is leading to that overwhelming realization that only Love can save the bulk/future us/light/quantum/spirit/dust. All these names for what somehow, we all know inside is only love. Cooper has to come home to it and when he does, he finds Murph and can transmit this code..." —John |
*****
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10/18/15
John, That is true, but the film Interstellar also says the other ("they") is ourselves. One thing I forgot to mention in my previous email is that the objective and subjective are not separate, but are one (or a continuum, I'm not sure). That is also an idea we discussed before. Perhaps what I call "longing" in the film is what you call "love." At least, love is expressed in the film as a melancholy yearning (for the daughter, for the father), for re-joining. That re-joining perhaps only possible in only accepting death (which occurs multiple times in the film—another idea present in your poem). It is part of the longing for unity (with the divine) in Sufism--implicitly in Eda. —Murat |
*****
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10/19/15
John, The film eliminates the idea of time as past, present and future. All three are simultaneously present (the father is younger than the daughter). To me, one of the most wrenching moments in the film is the ending when Murphy says to Cooper that she has her own family (grandchildren, children) now that she wants to see and say good-bye to before dying and sends her father to his own life (the reverse of what happens between parent and children). Murphy and Cooper must exist on different dimensions--that is the heartbreak. You long for specific beings. When you are resurrected (like the Damon character), you do not recognize or continue your previous life. Damon character and the woman on the ship were once lovers. But when Damon is resurrected and cries on Cooper's shoulder, neither he or the woman (I forgot her name) acknowledge each other in the same dimension. Then: what is that momentary reunion between Murphy and Cooper? The movie doesn't kind explain it in my opinion (at one point in the film, one of the characters says that one cannot re-enter the wormhole from the other side). Is this just a Hollywood ending? Timelessness is in Vanishing acts also, I think, multiple dimensions (in the poem dimensions are also animal/plant/human) whirling around each other. Affectionately, Murat |
*****
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1/11/16
Murat, Synthesis yes, as in your approaching work. No divisions between past, present, future.... Until we meet again. —John |
References:
[1] Io’s Song. Chax Press, 2020.[]1]
[2] EDA: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry. Ed. Murat Nemet-Nejat.
Talisman House, 2004.
[3] “The Journey into the Wilderness, an Elegy: Thoughts on John High's Tetralogy, The Journal of Poetics Research. Murat Nemet-Nejat. 2017/18.
[4] The Spiritual Life of Replicants. Talisman House, 2011.
[5] Animals of Dawn. Talisman House, 2016.
Note: Throughout, I have culled excerpts from our personal correspondence.
[1] Io’s Song. Chax Press, 2020.[]1]
[2] EDA: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry. Ed. Murat Nemet-Nejat.
Talisman House, 2004.
[3] “The Journey into the Wilderness, an Elegy: Thoughts on John High's Tetralogy, The Journal of Poetics Research. Murat Nemet-Nejat. 2017/18.
[4] The Spiritual Life of Replicants. Talisman House, 2011.
[5] Animals of Dawn. Talisman House, 2016.
Note: Throughout, I have culled excerpts from our personal correspondence.