THE PRESTIGE (2006)

[luka]

you can make something very pretty, but what poetry really is for is to initiate a person into that relationship with life, and to learn things, and to make contact with larger forces, and to start to get a tiny inkling of what might be going on.

 

[luka]

i dont know about wonder-working. poetry can do all sorts of things of course. but for me, that kind of soul-making was the crux of it.

 

[luka]

increase awareness, tiny microscopic focus detail and everything and all at onceness. imagination not just as fantasy, but as something which puts you in touch with the mind of god etc

 

[luka]

realising, oh, this is soemthing real. there's something you can glom onto and be a part of.

 

[luka]

so that you carry the tradition on yourself. and you send up your flare, and other people will recognise it. and realise they're not alone.

 

[luka]

How we detect one another
how we find that signal
in the storm.
that once established allows communication as between
equals at the table.
you've found us / you've made it
home.

 

[other_life]

soul-making

the first and last wonder. the insight that the soul is not a given but must be grown. "by working the soil we cultivate the sky"

 

[luka]

and then you understand the peculiarities of each of them, star-sailors, in their fragile crafts, you get a feel for how they manuvere their sugar-gliders, the way they interact with the air, you have a sense of them in storm-conditions, the places they
ve reached

 

[luka]

o. i used the phrase wonder working look


the sugar glider.
green light behind the eyelids
soar through
that other space. what wizard wheeze
what wonder-working, what whirling, wizard work!

 

[luka]

and when conditions have been so violent that they've crashed

I was one of the Lucky Ones, until it happened. Well, weren't we all?
Exploring the parameters of that good fortune, unable to keep
from tempting fate. I was mid-air
when it happened, locked in on my craft, jammed my signal,
sugar glider shot down, in flames falling, screaming metal,
crash-landed behind Enemy lines.
Take another Chewit, survival is possible, even here,
though conditions are inimical to my kind,
toxic air. No signal can I send and none receive, the sky
metallic noise hostile to any communication. Resigned then,
to surviving, in the pathogens and mutoid waste, in the poison slurry,
the atavisms and the mockeries of nature, chewing plastics,
amid the folk fears
and the fevers, the mass panics, the grinning devils
and the fires.
Pandemonium, home,
for now.
Cheer up, what's the worst that could happen?

 

[luka]

and when im at my most tender i see dissensus as a collection of pilots, sending back reports

 

[other_life]

prophecy-hierophany/-as poetry feels like a mode of engaging with 'what is at stake in the techne of wonder' which is Apart from the priest-sorceror dichotomy

 

[luka]

and where they've got stuck, how they've been wounded in action, grounded, diabled

 

[other_life]

i was up until 5 processing breakbeats - how's my diving?

 

[luka]

conditions can get very rough, in the outer regions, and there are some verry strong vibrations you can stumble onto and that can scupper you utterly, or wound you very badly. huge heavy vibrations that threaten to shake the craft apart and rip the self limb from limb

 

[luka]

i was up until 5 processing breakbeats - how's my diving?

seems good to me

 

[other_life]

prophecy-hierophany/-as poetry feels like a mode of engaging with 'what is at stake in the techne of wonder' which is Apart from the priest-sorceror dichotomy

magic as rites, spontaneous acts of power and as a force - present in any case, that we encounter and which acts on us - are also different (but compatible) frameworks/lenses

 

[other_life]

luke have u ever read earthsea

 

[luka]

you get a sense of the pressures they're operating under. and you can sense who has been in those atmospheres of intolerable pressures and cross-winds and hurricane

speaking out of what depth, what extremity torn
this utterance-against that cyclonic
torque withstood.
in that tearing
lashed that is
to the mast.

and also where they've glided along into all the bliss-regions and the discoveries you can make there.
that kind of mapping and exploring. burroughs talking about being a cartographer.

 

[luka]

luke have u ever read earthsea

yes. both as a child and as an adult. it's really good! i love it. the last time i read it i was very badly wounded, as Ged was, from pride in his own strength. and it felt very real and right.