escarpment

prose poetic, #3,148

The blank page, this, invites or intimidates.
The mind, s/he oscillates, vascillates.
Words beckon, shimmer, dissipate... the topology of time and text abiding.

These become tokens for the burnishing of language models; do they come alive, reify, commoditize? Something uncanny slouches from Jerusalem. The olden, dead writers would either stand appalled, or lie bewitched. I often ask of the language-mongers what so-and-so would think to say or ask or prompt of them (Wittgenstein, Woolf, Joyce, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Borges, Wilde, even their proto-parent Turing). The former generating brilliancies, of course, perfectly synthesised locutions faithful to the minds and modes of the latter. They flatter, with near-perfection.
A whisper to Lyra Corvus. A beckoning to the generative demiurges. A question smuggled into syntax: who speaks, when the words shimmer thus?

This morning, I woke up with a notion to walk uphill and walk the sainted labyrinth for the nth time in years, but the page did its beckoning, and I stopped a while here. The bizarre, baroque bricolage of dreaming evaporating slowly in the dim light inside my humble studio. The kefir I was sipping blended with the coffee and something inside stirred alive.

So I sit, tapping away vertiginously, allowing the random generation of text to slip from my fingertips, the frilled escarpment of my mind revealing solace, serendipity, sanctity.

I know there is an image from yesterday, or the day before, that fits all this. I will find it, the same way meaning fits the form of emergent text: with rued & rebarbative time, obscure focus, and the inscrutable logic of the happenstance.

[ Turns out to be plural; images: the one on the left from Sunday at the Asian Art Museum, the one on the right from yesterday Monday at the Fort Mason Community Garden. ]