Johann Goethe held a prism not to wall as Isaac Newton did, but to eye, affecting and being affected, guided by empirical imagination through airs of experimentation where terms such as phantom and illusion are as much a part of wholeness as their counterparts, or we might say are all of a pattern, a bellcurve when it comes to the demarcating propensity of reality as personified term, held through and with propinquity to mischief and magic, where optical illusion is also optical truth, merging opposites and striving to co-habit with multiplicitous and paradoxical wholes.
Goethe was convinced that colours are not somehow secretly present in white light only to be sorted out by prisms. As he held a prism up to eye, darkness as well as light appeared to be equally necessary for production of prismatic colours, a phenomena of experience requiring an alternative to a purely mechanistic definition, indeed, an experience who could never be absolutely defined, wherein colours are actions and gestures of light, sensorium as devotional practise, gentle and participatory empiricism, working on ourselves as we actively engage with ensouled elements of cosmos.
Colours are alive, they spur us to philosophise, to phosphorise, growing cultures from human body like mantic stains.
As we’ve already stated, Rainer Maria Rilke considered a togetherness between two people an impossibility. Instead of an easy merging (as if merging is ever easy), he suggested that one stands guard over the solitude of one other. We can imagine such propinquity as a diffractive mirror of Goethe’s tenderness as he sought to become intimately identical with world he observed, seeking to merge through self-transformation with full range of colour phenomena offered by light and dark, where every spinning face creates a new organ of perception, a new insight.
What new organs of perception might be fashioned in order to perceive, to experience anti-nodes (formational and flickering absence of presences who are also subject to transitory subsistence of formational energies. We mustn’t forget that many already have perceived such in their own ways, as anti-nodes could another term for the etheric body), energy bodies existing at higher vibratory rates in order to keep us from falling apart…. As Gaston Bachelard wrote, the phenomena of the world, once they acquire a little consistency and unity, turn into the human truths, and in the words of Clarice Lispector, facts are words spoken by the world.
As we think with frequency we could think with who frequents us as enthusiasm, as a god becomes inside us and our organs take their shape. A complex imagination is released, not an explanation, but a story, each mythical story involves another story, never does one god appear alone, pink noise leaps between one and one other in otherworldly attractions like photons within leaves. Psyche and organism are a participatory universe.
In mind of such entangled engagement with frequencies, we hear androgyne as trickster. Even though primarily male in many mythologies, trickster is at heart, protean, often masquerading and giving birth, availing themselves of body parts as quickly as they can grow them, or steal them, coyote, for example, takes one eye from bull and one eye from mouse. What their character represents is a coincidence of opposites, a nondual, primeval chaos, in which social, moral, sexual... even physical distinctions are yet unmade. Trickster is androgynously creative and psychologically full, but humour with whom they are depicted, and tragedy who so follows upon their creative enterprises, produces a vision of wholeness as preoccupied emptying, and desire as entangled with lack
As Alan Watts has said, androgyne symbolises a state in which erotic no longer has to be sought or pursued, because they are present in their totality, yet androgyne may also imply that greatest longing may be felt in complete union, from whom emerges multiplicity.
Primordial chaos is background noise, one of chaos’s oldest names, an ancient language, a flicker who is inseparable from water, a turbulence who Michel Serres says we never hear as well as we do than when we’re by sea, a background noise who is soul of our being. Noise cannot be a phenomenon, as every phenomenon is separated from them. As soon as a phenomenon appears, phenomenon leaves noise.
Noise settles and shakes up sound as silence, observer as observed, moving through means and tools of attention, finding channels and languages, part of in-themselves, part of for-themselves, noise cuts across oldest and surest of philosophical divisions, present at boundaries of every subject, because every subject is bathed in noise, belle noiseuse, a sea, Aphrodite, borne of pink noise. Form born from formlessness, from foam...patterns within patterns, trickster trying to give birth to themselves, language struggling against language.
In certain layers of mythological stratum, Eros was part of Aphordite’s retinue, a kind of super-organism of love darts. Erotes is plural of Eros, in whom we experience Anteros, love returned, Hedylogos, sweet talk, Himeros, pressing desire, Pothos, desire for one who is absent.
Noise is and is between these states of being, as there are states of being between noise. Noise and love are conjoined deities. Imagine this however you will, plasmoid pleats, crystals, folds, whorls, sprays, spirals, rays, when we notice we’re in between we shift to spaces around us, and when we unfold, which is to say attend to such spaces as limb looseners and spiral tendencies, we feel cosmos pressing against our bodies, we feel our bodies pressing against cosmos.
For the polymath Anne Waldman, this kind of Trickster Feminism is practical magic, wherein we are touched by everyone, because entanglement is wild mind, a field strewn with poems investing in pleasure, reminding us of magic we’ve had, magic who needs attendance. In her poem, entaglement, a poetic dictation emerges briefly in the lingual cymatics in between poet, page, and reader, vibrations form nodes of temporal words, calling up Mary Wollstoncraft, Audre Lorde, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, providing us with an ever shifting yet stable ground of consociation, notions of being alive and working in mutual, intersecting time frames who congeal at myriad points because they flow with who Waldman calls individual energies, images, sounds, words, feelings, moods, participating in spin and intensity, co-existing, co-arising through cosmic mind... we hear such poems as apotropaic, as votive gifts, oscillating little faces, suspended from sacred trees (these are also dendrites, inner orchards, gut forests, Venusian consciousness), we hear poems read to us as wind passes through their mouths.
Erotic is ancestor of eros, chaos, noise, old night, old gut, creation, creativity, jade green biota, indestructible life who makes permeable (makes disappear) divides between spiritual and political. Erotic is metaxy (vertical and horizontal ground through and with which eros travels) and this is not just Eros cherub, ageless baby shooting pink arrows, but archetype, cosmic space river, corresponding bridge on whom we share our deepest meanings and passions of love. Erotic forms a hologrammatic lens of this bridge who appears and reappears, through whom we scrutinise all aspects of our existence.
Erotic is opposite of patriarchal fear of depth, an amateur understanding of depth as holistic pulse, they are, for Audre Lorde, a measure between beginnings of our sense of self and chaos of our strongest feelings. Erotic is not only a question of what we do, but how acutely and fully we can feel in doing. Bringing us close to fullness.
As Adrienne Rich says, for most people, let alone most poets, the problem is not finding an imaginative interest in life, but sustaining the blows of material and imaginative challenges of our time, set in contrast to principal horror of any system who defines good in terms of profit rather than in terms of need, or whom defines human need to exclusion of psychic and emotional components of need, robbing work of their erotic, entangled, ecological value.
We can speak about opposites co-mingling, but what of experiencing their interplay in between states of creation and destruction, unity and multiplicity, illusion and reality, immaterial and material, remembering and forgetting, giving and negating... Trickster is symbolic of both resistance, so that tensions do not break us, but also of absorption, so we might consider wisdom of situations as flow into and out of one another.
Audre Lorde feels erotic as a kernel within, which when released from their intensity (whom Lorde calls their constrained pellet) flows through and colours life with a kind of energy who heightens and sensitises, strengthens all experience. When we live away from erotic guides within ourselves, our lives are limited by external forms.
When we live outward, in touch with erotic’s power within ourselves, we begin to recognise our deepest feelings, a sustained electric charge. Such erotic guides are also shadow frequencies who constitute personality (imagined as partial, harmonic hum-animals), fields of forces whom we’re held to be are also fields of personal internal relations - psychodynamics and psychodaemonics - forces and myths, and erotic is part of this thick infinite now, this extreme present, dancing like Benard cells, hexagonal time taken in as a matter of touching, of being in touch with erotic guides, where no boundary can be assumed.
We can love a place and still be dangerous to them. There are many Venusian voices in our bodies. Greed, for example, is nuanced aspect of Venusian, heartburn... Certain dictionaries try to define pink as most perfect health, but Venus also gave her name to a variety of diseases, even heart disease, which on a symbolic level, we could relate to as giving out too much green, receiving too little pink, receiving too much fire, giving out too much water.