Saturday, August 27, 2016

she carried the sea with her



from mosaic (4) by freda karpf

  Do not give up all metaphors.  Though Mrs. Scattergood rather liked similes herself, she would be hard pressed to give you three reasons why they are different from metaphors. Some suspect that similes lack the nuts and bolts that make metaphors a more significant construction project.  Similes are less formal comparisons and can be used as a description rather than creating a parallel universe that the metaphor is intended to do. Similes are coated with a thin layer of grease if they are elegant similes and can slide into being far more simply than metaphors which require incubation and an elaborate birth ritual. 
     Eventually, metaphors become dials on the dashboard of your consciousness or switches that click.  Eventually, you get touch button controls; then just thoughts. Probably, eventually, you can reach through with your own hand into the deep well of a hologram. Your hand becomes an archetype with robes that are dimensions in time. And you can circle through all the strings of reality the physicists have found until you reach for the contact that is the god or goddess, the holy one, or grandmother, who is really the person you’ve always known when wisdom was a tide pool and you were a new life swimming, just swimming.  And the light and the shadows.  As Shakespeare might have someone sing, with a heigh and a ho.  What we focus on produces heat. Whether fire or foul, the worst that is fear or the energy that is beauty, depends.  It depends on everything going on that particular day. It’s about levels.  Loren Eiseley saw the entire history of the universe from the formation of the earth through to the earliest life forms, in a small puddle. Or you might have someone like Rachel Carson, knees still working, kneeling down over a tide pool watching all the life going on there in that little ecosystem. The water goes in and out pulsing with sounds and miniature currents.
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     Thirty years ago scientists predicted that the depth and dimension of holograms would change the way we would store information.  Holograms will be the new sea deep and unexplored, with all possibilities, all levels.  Imagine shelves, closets, alcoves.  This new place where you reach in and pick up a starfish, just for a brief moment, to see its tubular feet searching for solid ground to move along.  But your hand is also deeper.  It also has more dimensions, more bodies, more territory unexplored.  Although you know it is your hand it is also an archetype. Archetypes are from way back and come along with their stories, gift of meanings layered and faceted, shining like the night sky, galaxy after galaxy. Suns and moons all over the place.  Many lives. All the languages.  All reaching with your hand into the tide pool.
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     Mrs. Scattergood liked to think that she carried the sea with her.  She would dive in and the waters would meet.  Sea to ocean. Like recognizing like without a brackish water intermediate.  This is how some might describe desire met in that pool where identity swims round till the whirlpool comes and everything that is you slides down, merging, becoming the whirlpool – dissipating into another realm of being.
     Different people leave different messages, cause different structures to form depending on their need.  Whether duck paddled or boat engined.  Whether full moon or runoff.  The ebb and flow of the tide isn’t as symmetrical as Mrs. Scattergood first thought.  There’s a different tide each time but the coming and going remains the same.




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