Leaf Meditation Good Friday Rising Early

Traveling the Inself Border

We cannot deny the inself image in three dimensions. The truest representation is sculpted. A scientist claims to the artist, "you made the leaf, but I discovered it," but the sculptor replies, "you made it too, described it, plucked it, preserved it in glue. It is a construct of your mind and mine." Of course neither one them did, so neither travel to that country.

We must know the leaf inself  live. The botanist who presses a leaf  must know the leaf live, but image and word are incompatible.

Can  word be both text and the image,  graffiti over-top? The image cries out to the Branch to be spoken. Word longs to be seen. Fraktur text and image twine. Concrete poems, vispo pretend  paper and type. Blake illustrates. 

The Speech of Corn.

Twine a poem about a branch, it will not leaf. Tendrils do not speak. The Inself  gives speech to the plant. What is the speech of corn? What says aloe? Every thing has breath. Plants breathe light. I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, a cloud of dew in the midst of harvest.

 At Altamira many millennia  of horses and bull on  had no words, but spoke in rhythm and color. They had no language, nothing written the stones cry in).  Breuil says art was an extension of hunt, the worship of life, a celebration. To take a quilt as a word, draw over you a cover.

Quote

 Whisperings in the head

a quilt knit in the ear,

square hand-painted, stitched

every night you stretch

or wake in sun.

The eye catches letters,

 silver, rose, embroidered

 dawns, but one,

though it be flower, rhymes,

 now you hear, make out the line.

to quote as if in store

quick light lives

but don't quote it here

 the paint is dry

when we meet.

It is not shaped as a quilt in the text but in the mind. The images are figurative not visual. Words become the thing.

 These matter when the content is greater than itself, the words' image something more than mundane. Why else make the effort? A loaf is a profound but has not many attempts made. Charles Williams designs the figure of a woman and stretches it over the kingdom of Logres, over all of Europe (see the endpapers of Taliessin Through Logres, Oxford, 1938), like the Cave at Altamira and its bison, except Williams' Europe Logres, Arthur's kingdom, millennial grail, did not exist as the bison, or it did and now only remains express the cave wall, as the bison, Williams' Taliesin.

 The Cover

So the Inself concedes the out manifests as leaf, or in human terms, mask, a covering for what exists but cannot be seen. It can't be seen because it is, thought which does not exist in language, but in image. QED? Walking one side of this border, up against it, cross immediately the other side. 

Notes

Inself sounds much like Inscape. A true statement about Hopkins is that "seen from one point of view Hopkins' work is some dozen nearly perfect lyrics. Seen from another perspective it is a heterogeneous collection of documents...but within this seemingly chaotic mass we can detect a certain persistent structure." J. Hillis Miller This describes life on the borders. 

Take the border between image and word.

The verbal is the interior leaf,  

images the internal sense,

the leaf inself of the seen,

the leaf inseen of the self.

The Plant

I live

among you

though you know

 me not, but knowledge

came to me found out

 of doubt, hear,

see me

on

   my

        stem,

    I

            have

              come

            out

         for

       now

I

rise

                                                                         and

                                                                     bloom

                                                                  while

                                                                you’re

                                                                 about.

I could

but now receive

you for I grow nearer

 to where my Lord his veins

 let flow, He has me

and he will not

let me go.

I

      Am

       un

           done

        yet

    he

 shall

                                                                            be

                                                                       my

                                                                      Lord,

                                                                       He

                                                                        has

                                                                           into

         my life

                   his water

                          poured

                      that

                  I

                          bleed

                    with

                  him,

                                               for he loves the world.

He loves

 the world

 with his own shed

 blood, he has given me

the way that I should go,

 he has taken away

all of my will

and

 he

 would

 that

 I

   scatter these

 seeds he

would

  sow.