Breaking it Apart to Prove it’s Whole

I’ve been thinking a lot about measurement and proving, and just spent a few days receiving a great deal of data. I am working with an incredible, capable team to develop ways to measure the benefits of our creative writing workshops, but I also feel really, really, really certain that breaking it apart and looking at it will not give me a more glorious view of the whole gleaming thing than I have now. I just hope that I don’t forget the magic of that as I embark on the process of proving. I’m putting this here to remind me.

I’m re-reading The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (I’d listened to it, but then needed to hold it in my hands and read it). It’s a dense read–at least for me. I’m reading and re-reading passages and trying to understand them fully. It’s about perception, and human beings’ relationship to the earth and the animals and even the inanimate objects that we surround ourselves with. In a really simple, striking passage, Abram writes about the limitations of perception in this striking passage about a clay bowl on his side table, his inability to see the whole thing at once (hey Cubism):

Moreover, while examining its outer surface I have caught only a glimpse of the smooth and finely glazed inside of the bowl. When I stand up and look down into that interior, which gleams with curved reflections from the skylight overhead, I can no longer see the unglazed outer surface…There can be no question of ever totally exhausting the presence of the bowl with my perception; its very existence as a bowl ensures that there are dimensions wholly inaccessible to me–most obviously the patterns hidden between its glazed and unglazed surfaces, the interior density of its clay body. If I break it into pieces, in hopes of discovering these interior patterns or the delicate structure of its molecular dimensions, I will have destroyed its integrity as a bowl; far from coming to know it completely, I will have simply wrecked any possibility of coming to know it further, having traded the relation between myself and the bowl for a relation to a collection of fragments

from: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

I came home from a trip to a wonderful care package from my dear friend Ashley who is so thoughtful it stuns. The package contained a stack of new journals, with a beautiful leather jacket to hold them and some delightful travel-sized treats for my suitcase living days, and the gorgeous, gorgeous, book When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. Our poem today ties both the excerpt from the Abram book and the subject of the Williams book together.

I love how it sort of approximates a spinal column in its presentation on the page. Really simple prompt here: read it through twice and then write: “The body is…” and whatever comes next. Lots of love to you dear dear hearts (and send me some poems, damnit).

Composition by Rebecca Hazelton
        

The body is a mass of hair and teeth
                                                        that walks and talks. Three hundred and five bones then
two-o-six. Two parts oxygen, one part fire. A child
                                                        has all his life’s teeth in his head, waiting to descend.
Impermanence is pushed out. Everything after
                                                        is a commitment. Vast rooms of empty space between
atoms. Vast rooms in a suburban mansion
                                                        which is a metaphor for late stage capitalism
and also the body. Blood is a connective tissue
                                                        made of cells and cell fragments and liquid. A gallon
of milk is a body’s blood. It’s something
                                                        to cry over. You are made from clay or carbon or one cell
ate another cell and the second cell
                                                        didn’t notice. This happened billions of cells ago.
So it was your mother’s cells met your father’s
                                                        at a church picnic and no one noticed how the wind picked
up and scattered the paper plates.
                                                    You might be fo rgiven for thinking there’s an order to
things. This applies to childbirth and this applies to love.
                                                    Two parts gin, one part Luxardo. The connective tissue
is a cord and our bodies are breath and fire
                                                    yoked together. We are never easy with what ties us.
A mother’s body is one part then two
                                                    parts ever after; departure is the slowest part
in part because it’s already over.