Notes Toward Amateur perspectives pt.4
For mercurial north nodes as Uranus moves with Gemini
Will Alexander relates how Nathaniel Mackey holds expertise, not as an endemic idiom, but as a state superimposed by others. Language is just as alive as we are, a psychic reality, just as real… According to Alexander, for a poet, reading exists both as creative procurement and organic stimulus, engendering life in this perpetual stage of openness, or what he refers to elsewhere, in mind of the articulation of the Mother through Sri Audobindo, as a different kind of endemic, one of psychic rising, set in contrast to a hardened education of delimitation, cutting, segregating, keeping at a distance, framed as expertise.
One way to practise an amateur perspective is to try and work with such nuanced schema as laid out by Alexander, held in and out of place by so much pluralising and necessary specificity, through roots, strands, and wefts of spirit (a word I think with in terms of reciprocal relation), dirt work as lingual inter-subjectivity, stepping back and listening to how words appear to our imaginations as images, as lives in unto themselves.
If we can feel both centrality of imagination and omni-individuality, then all schisms, all taught and taut categories who split, begin to fall away, even if only temporarily. We no longer ask, myth or history, physics of psychology, religion or philosophy… Perceiving poethically places an emphasis on likeness. Myths are alive in the ways we live, and to paraphrase Etel Adnan, we have to reconnect who we have separated. The hell with Aristotle, I’d rather give back leaves to tree, waves to sea.
This feels like a good time speak about pink, not only in mind of their association with Inanna, Aphrodite, Venus, Eros, Erotes and the golden ass, manifestations of pink as entangled waves, reciprocal and opposing aspects, admixtures of red and purple light, pink as co-existence of visible and invisible spectra.
Thinking in this way (because of thinking this way?), many have claimed that pink does not exist, that they are not a colour, but a phantom (a spurious dualism regardless), lending pink an overly mercurial reputation of being ‘hard to understand’, akin to behaving like a liquid and looking like a solid and vice versa (this often reminds me of news articles agog that an animal has been observed exhibiting what we so myopically define as human behaviour).
Pink light is both colour and substance, colour and calor (inclusus of alchemists, innate heat urging participation) passing through with image magic. Pink is freedom of erotic imagination, core of desire and metaphor, made up of triangulation of lover, beloved, and space who comes between them, however realised, both one to one correspondences and unique configurations of holistic precarity.
They are believed to be world’s oldest colour, with pigments having been found in 1.1 billion year old rocks beneath Saharan deserts in Taoudeni basin of Mauritania in West Africa. Such creatures are believed to have been produced by ancient organisms, molecular fossils of chlorophyll stemming from photosynthetic organisms inhabiting oceans long since transformed.
Cyanobacterial oceans, ancient imaginative powers of pink pleasure, began changing around 650 million years ago, which is when algae began rapidly spreading, providing a new kind of green energy who became a vital part of complex evolutions of ecosystems. Pink is colour of earth, green is colour of wood, suffused pink madness in which colours and psychic seeds are alive and ever corresponding as cloacina, our lady of sewers.
Silver as seed of Moon
Gold as seed of Sun
Mercury as seed of Mercury
Tin as seed of Jupiter
Iron as seed of Mars
Copper as seed of Venus
Lead as seed of Saturn
Seeds are psychic moisture, coagulating with earth, moist vapours as psychic fantasies within deeper ultrastructures of humusanimal. Seeds here connote living archetypal natures, fluidity of intention in all capacities moving and forming, having a history, making effects, influencing leaf and flower in maturation. Planets are metallic seeds in earth, gods within world, buried within our depths.
I often imagine pink, entangled as they are, in relation to such ways of knowing and living, in relation with the phrase, why bother doing science if they’re not erotic? This often guides me to an essay by Dorothea Lasky, called what is colour in poetry or is it the wild wind in the space of the word... Lasky refers to Indigo as a problem in terms of the, what I would call commodification of visible spectra. Lasky asks, is the possibility of indigo the possibility of the wild wind? Is indigo the possibility of the wild wind in the space of the word? Is indigo a wild animal, a being beyond? If colours show us what is possible to do with a poem, then indigo is the problem of poetry. Because if indigo, a seeming child of blue and violet, is included in the spectrum, then why isn’t teal, or turquoise (the children of green and blue). Why isn’t fire-orange part of the spectrum? Or marigold? Where are these colours?
Pink is a paradox, a kind of thinking who reaches out but never arrives at the Gestalt of their feeling, each time they reach out, there becomes a shift of distance, of perspective, because pink is a Venusian place within and without spirit of this time and spirit of our depths, close to who Federico Campagna calls magic’s world, wherein a person can find sufficient room and refuge to cultivate their own, autonomous re-setting of reality, whom some call temenos.
Pink is a place who at once escapes contemporary maps of reality, while remaining subjected to the limitations imposed by them. An outside within who doesn’t merely break totalising shapes of who Campagna calls Technic’s world, but exceeds them by vanishing. The, quote, ‘classical’ electromagnetic spectrum resides in wavelengths of edges. Pink is both their vanishing and their reappearance, however realised. It reminds me of how Rainer Maria Rilke considered a togetherness between two people an impossibility, and instead of an easy fusion, so called, he suggested we stand guard over each other’s solitude, in between there is pink.
Gods are within world, buried within depths of shaking stars. Pink gold is an alloy of roughly 75% gold, 20% copper, and 5% silver – so pink gold is Sun, Venus, Moon and their many permutations... Gods are within gods, each excitation has in them spark of midline, pink glint, spinal madness, attraction and tensegrity. A complex imagination is released, not an explanation, but a story, an imagination who actually exists. Each mythical story involves another story, never does one god appear alone, pink noise leaps from one to another in similar otherworldly attractions, inside and outside us as third position.
According to William James, human soul recognises themselves in world, and, in his pluriverse, he goes on to write that analogy reaches in all directions and thus finds subtle strands of implications, erotic connections. Soul listens through walls and overhears reverberations. James goes on to describe unus mundus (all being on which we externally depend for life: air, water, plant and animal foods, being included in earth, self-sufficing in a million respects) as a shining ball, sky blue, sunlit starry night. Every quality of landscape visible at once, deep ecologies of Gaia as more than hypothesis.
Sun rises out of the darkness of earth ( black sun of phantom fact, air as attenuated water), living interactions of inner and outer natures in chromatic mutuality (matter in love with form as form speaks through edges in love with matter), erotic and Aphroditic in between images from whom little Hermetic faces undulate in rest, listen to forget.