Don’t Touch Me

A new chapbook from Alex. It is difficult to describe what a gift like this means, but Lewis Hyde is helpful:

As is the case with any other circulation of gifts, the commerce of art draws each of its participants into a wider self. The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world. In the realized gifts of the gifted we may taste that zoë — life which shall not perish even though each of us, and each generation, shall perish. (From The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 197-198)

Don’t touch me, the writer says, his pen poised above a notebook and his gaze on the reader. And yet, while thrusting us away, he offers us the gift of his book, drawing us into a wider self.

“Lost among the shadows some part of me still waits for a light to come & shine & make me whole.”

The attentive eye watches for the light while knowing, surely, that even if the light were to shine in the darkness, the darkness would not comprehend it. Or, at most, its comprehension would be in and through language that represents rather than being light itself.

That’s enough for me, I think.

This book is a kind of light that shines to make me more whole. One of the last lines of my Immortal for Quite Some Time (in which Alex is a constant presence) is “That we are seldom at our best doesn’t invalidate out attempts to be whole.”

noli me tangere is replete with self portraits — this one of the writer at work while staring one-eyed at his reader. What is he thinking? We can’t tell for sure, although I accumulate enough clues (as I must while piecing together what I hear with damaged ears to make sense of what I don’t hear and as the writer must with a single eye), to suggest he may be thinking “once upon an answer” (I must, of course, throw out the “m” rising from the middle of his head to make this work).

“The shadows are gone and their absence is felt and what is now left of me is transformation into ancient Sicilian creature come back to life”

The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world.

“Who am I / all over again / a pattern in / terrupted and / then replayed / the answer / questioned / and then / regained . . . / as if speech / were the morning / as if the time was now and now was never on time . Who you are is ever on my mind is ever to be saught is ever the given in any given instance.”

One eyed and that eye requiring magnification, unable to hear high frequencies, dependent on language while enabled by language, instantiations of our selves. The morning breaks and the shadows don’t flee.

“itinerary for / the travel / thru one’s own / mind drawn / upon a / shore and a / splace not / to be found / on any map / save the / one in the imagination / which will not / fade with time or  w..t dr.. s ……..

And I repeat: In the realized gifts of the gifted we may taste that zoë — life which shall not perish even though each of us, and each generation, shall perish.