ENVISION
For Paul David Hojda
Something flows. Knowledge has movement. The movement of knowledge is to flow towards acknowledging that there is another kind of knowing than the Socratic one. The Greek’s proposition that "I know that I know nothing" is not very useful. Socrates is not thinking about knowledge in relation. But any androcentric maneuver should consider containers, counter-factuals, and contradictions. As such. And in as much. One desires to have one’s knowledge (of nothing) be contained by another’s knowledge (of something). As it were. Has Socrates ever read David’s song: “I am my beloved’s, his desire is for me?” Seeing as becoming. We contain knowledge and the other. There are only passages. Such as the one I quote from Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination: “whoever desires to be seen before his master should not enter except by means of this stone." The pronoun “this” takes the feminine form (zo’t). It is through the Shekhinah, the gateway to dwelling, that one gets to know about dwelling. "Communion can ensue only from envisioning, and envisioning only from communion." Envision the secret of the rainbow. The telephone rings. My nephew plays a Satie piece on the piano for me, and then whispers: “You know, I adore you.” I know.
Comments
"..., he has continually pushed on toward a kind of poetry that is more truly experimental. He is the alchemist of modern poets, and his work is an endless series of experiments, each changing the nature of the last (he has written that each poem is a revision of what has gone before). Alchemy exists beyound a universal doubt that it can realize its object, just as Duncan's quest can never be fulfilled precisely because it is an ideal one. Yet in the course of it he enlarges his preoccupations so that their original goal is lost in revelations. Reading him, we feel we are living into the body, down toward the soul which is below rather than above, until one day we emerge on the heights, like Capricorn, without realizing that was where we were heading all along".
From John Ashbery, "Introduction to a Reading by Robert Duncan" (1967)
Paul, what a wonderful comment – a thorough translation is on its way. But then you already got it. As with such things, and since you’ve always been in my sight, and furthermore, as special things run in the family, you get a special hug too, also here, though it is one that not will surprise you, as you will know it right away, as you already know it.