June 16, 2008
Monday Poem
//
Blue under Blue
Jim Culleny
We were sitting on a bench under blue
under the bush of a willow admiring her garden when
I saw an Indigo Bunting but didn't know it when I did.
Look, I said,
a bluebird on the wall!
No, the fabulous near-turquoise of it,
its deep and tiny beyond-blueness makes it
an Indigo Bunting, she said, if it's
anything at all.
It hopped, mysterious as one of the angels some say exist
and took off fluttering more beautifully than
the idea of fluttering
fluttering for real
took off into wisteria
like the idea of flying
(cubed at least).
Who thought that up, the flying?
-not to mention the wisteria,
I said. Truth is
that's what we were both feeling
just then, seeing an Indigo Bunting
so blue under blue under willow
from our bench.
//
Posted by Jim Culleny at 12:26 AM | Permalink
Comments
"and took off fluttering more beautifully than
the idea of fluttering
fluttering for real"
Jim, you hit the nail exactly on the head here. Fluttering is more wonderful and beautiful than the "idea" of fluttering or a computer "upload" of fluttering. An imitation of reality is not reality. A picture of a pipe is not the same as a pipe. The world is not a computer program. Nice poem.
Posted by: Jared | Jun 16, 2008 11:21:52 AM
Jared-
There's a line from a Dylan song that I think of often. It speaks to a direct and simple perception of what is. Speaks to its perfection, in the sense of transcendance (though not mystical); just to an immediate grasp of something more real than our idea of it. It's not perfection in the sense of goodness, just of isness.
The line's from Stuck Inside of Mobile:
Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb.
They all fall there so perfectly,
It all seems so well timed.
Every once in a while, if we're lucky, we get a glimpse of what is so perfectly well-timed.
That bench moment was one of those glimpses. It came and went as quickly as the Indigo Bunting.
Glad you like the poem.
Posted by: Jim | Jun 16, 2008 11:54:28 AM
I guess this relates to the most basic mind/body questions in philosophy. The phrase "The Tao that can be named is not the real Tao" comes to mind. The human mind seems very prone to abstraction - to prefer its models of reality to actual physical reality. There are even those who would attempt to become immortal by downloading their mental experiences into a computer. But I think it is the physical reality of living things together with their mortality that gives them integrity, that save them from being fake. The Indigo Bunting exists in its own right, quite idependently of whether or not someone is there to observe it. Even a stone has existence, something no computer program can emulate.
Posted by: Jared | Jun 16, 2008 4:31:31 PM
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