The Whirled

The Spin and the Still

---

Listen Here- Podcast Style

---

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

---

Photo by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash

---

The Whirled

Revelry sings to the meat of undigested madness 
in the moaning moon shadow of an imputation. 
Scalpel calls from the corners.
A kestrel of ghosts have arrived 
frenzying for facts and flyting 
   to feed a clashing
      chained to a chant in the auger of time.
         It's 3 AM.
            Woken in the whirl  
               of an agitator grrr
                  gall   grr   gall
               grrr gall grr gall grrr gall
            twisting an impeller
         into the glug of a gasp
      to grasp, onto the whoosh
of a whir yin cycle on spin.
    
Rinsing and repeating,
pulling and turning,
pushing and flipping,
at the heaviness.
Sloshing and swishing
waterboarding and drowning,
thoughts soaked in stories
revving to the rhythm of hallucination.
Removing and revolving
reeling and reducing
whirring the wet weight of the gnash
into to a wort of revealing
in the wash
of a sudden motion stopping
Click.

A discovery
that silently drips
into the singing bowl of the still.
A moonshine
that burns into the guts
of understanding,
left to ferment,
more than the sum of its parts.
Distilled into meaning -
               Spirit
Beyond looking to seeing 
a resonance of Being.

What I want - is to feel
beyond the infliction of reason
to taste - 
shadow mating with the realm of light
to be - torn open
Transparent
in the pungency of presence
To see 
sound speaking to skin
as it moves through
in the silence
of revelation
Swallowed by the labyrinth
as a poem - is nothing
as nothing - is a poem
To be carried away
on the wings of a song
inside of a song
Where -as-and-is- collide
the child
of metaphor and wisdom
What I want- is to be 
         be-yond   A
word

© Jamie Millard

To have anything to say,
language must be emptied of itself.

Robert Bringhurst

The World. The Whirled! We ride into the spin as we live through the cycles in this washing machine of life. Life does not weigh us. We weigh ourselves. We wake in the whirl of thought and ride into the spin of grrr and gall. We collect stories. Some stories we tell. Other stories tell us. Life in this whirled is ultimately a quest to reduce the weight of stories. This journey washes us in the spin of storms leaving us dripping into the song of the still. Some storms teach us powerful lessons. Some storms wash us clean.

In the poetry of knowing we slowly let go some of that soaking heaviness as it is spun, and drained away to reveal the wrinkles that have always been there, patiently waiting. Canadian poet Don McKay writes that metaphors’s first act is to un-name its subject. An un-naming. An un-knowing? Wisdom often arrives in the clarity of subtraction not unlike the great brewing process itself of malting, mashing, fermenting and distilling to ultimately arrive as the maturation of spirit. A revealing of soul. A resonance of Being. We are more than the sum of our parts.

Metaphor and wisdom. Philosopher poet Jan Zwicky who writes at the intersect of ontology, phenomenology and epistemology says that the shape of metaphorical thought is also the shape of wisdom. Have we as human beings started to lose our ability to think metaphorically? Have we lost our poetic imagination to the machine of literalization? Have we lost the bridge to our spirit?

The journey will always be our home. The world invites. It does not require. We are invited to respond. We live into the discoveries, grasping at a mystery that we will never understand. As Robert Bringhurst shares in his book The Tree of Meaning, “To have anything to say, language must be emptied of itself.” Poetry is not language. Poetry enters into language. Bringhurst says, “The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language”. Everything and nothing are angels migrating to a space beyond a name. We are more than words. We are the whirled!

Resources

1. Don McKay. Vis a Vis. Field notes on Poetry and Wilderness. 2001. Gaspereau Press.

2. Jan Zwicky. Metaphor and Wisdom. 2003. Gaspereau Press.

3. Robert Bringhurst. Thirteen Talks. 2006. Gaspereau Press.

Thanks for Being-Here!
The full audio version can be found under the main title above.

Lots of Love,
Jamie