albionspeak: a draught of language (8.3)
Possible Islands
Scribe's postcard poem to me, Possible Islands, was composed between September 24 and October 12, 2002, where each of the 18 cantos was written on one of eighteen pre-selected postcards on eighteen near-consecutive days. Only one day, full of activity, was excepted from the routine. Each postcard was then mailed the day it was written. [Scribe] even went so far as to excuse himself from gathered friends to a corner of T. Bar & Restaurant (where he reigned as poet-in-residence) to compose and return.
The content of Possible Islands comes as a direct response to my question posed to Scribe upon his becoming a flyer, Who are you now? And the autumn occasion for this poem follows my own family trip over the summer of 2002 to Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. Before any trip, as I’ve written elsewhere, I plan in incredible detail, and then I send out my itineraries to family & friends. After visiting Crete & Santorini, my itinerary entry for July 11, 2002 was unusually open-ended: "Possible Islands," and I listed probably five with all the essential details for each. (We wound up hitting Amorgos, Paros, & Antiparos.) Along the trip I mailed eight postcards to Scribe, who followed our itinerary, and I finished off the series with a ninth mailed from my “Pacific Sound location,” which Scribe knows well from his many visits. Prior to beginning, Scribe had the exact form conveyed to him in an intended dream:
18 cantos, 10-13 lines per postcard canto
(Mostly) dodekasyllabics (with odd lines dropped on purpose)
1-, 2-, & 3-line stanzas reflected chiasmatically after 9 cantos,
as are the garden vegetable postcards. Thus, each canto form is
inverted (x-axis reflection) while the 18 canto sequence reflects over
the y-axis. For example, Postcard 1, a picture of a rutabaga, turnips,
and a tiger beetle, has stanzas of the following length: 2, 1, 2, 2, 3, 2,
while Postcard 18 displays the same picture and inverts that order:
2, 3, 2, 2, 1, 2. Postcards 2 & 17 are inverted forms, as are 3 & 16,
and so on. Postcards 9 & 10 both show pumpkins. While I am more a
math-guy than Scribe, this grid perceived as x & y reflections is entirely
Scribe’s and is embedded in the content. Scribe’s location in the poem,
for instance, he calls Exit Y.
Below I have arranged all 18 of Butterfield’s beautiful postcards in Scribe’s assigned sequence, following vertically from the upper left to lower right. Consider this photo then as a table of contents, though I’d be surprised if Scribe viewed his poem in this manner.
The postcard pictures are all by Helen Butterfield, copyrighted 2000. Each shows garden vegetables, along with both a “helpful” animal or plant species (as a stamp) and friendly vegetables that should be planted nearby. While the postcards are exquisite, Scribe never told me why he picked them for this poem, and I can’t easily reconcile their garden content with that of the poem, except that these postcards nicely set up a “garden mentality,” a quieter place of contemplation, especially when juxtaposed with the constant motion (or many-mindedness) of my family’s trip.
Below I offer both sides of Postcard/Canto 1 in part to show off Scribe’s exquisite calligraphy, one of several he employed for different occasions. A different calligraphy, I believe, adorned the lengthy menu boards at T. Bar & Restaurant, where he wrote most of his poetry in solitude and silence, despite (I’ll attest) its being a loud & busy venue. Waiters knew to ply him with staggered lattes & lagers without disturbing his work, without a word or bill. Not until he’d finished his work would he then order his first meal of the day (late afternoon). This disciplined routine continued for many years, including, I assume, after my departure in 2005.
Within albionspeak I offer few photos of our original raw transcripts. While they lack my much-needed comments for documentation, they are generally far more beautiful to look at & read than any typed transcripts, so elegant is Scribe’s practiced script. So, too, are Scribe’s handwritten cantos more beautiful than typed words. But this is not a “picture book” per se, and I’m sure Scribe understood that his Platonic words would outlast his calligraphy. Similarly, I don’t know how Scribe expected his postcard poems might someday appear in print, although he certainly understood that reproducing each postcard would carry high costs and would probably not be publishable in that form.
I’ll add here—because it may be relevant to the lesson, if not the poem—that this particular family trip is the one I regard as my “biggest ever,” though I’ve traveled rougher and far longer than its 70 days on the road. My daughters were 9 & 11, and we hopped ferries in the Aegean, buses across Anatolia, and feluccas along the Nile. This was the summer after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, which is why we went, because all the tours cancelled, and everyone was scared to go abroad. Thus, as I conceived months in advance, everything was cheap & safe, and we had the entire three-continent trip to ourselves, no tourists—including, just imagine, the Pyramids of Giza—just us alone, & about fifteen guys with camels & machine guns to protect us. I regard it as my best trip because it’s the greatest gift I ever gave my family. My children were changed forever.
I, too, was changed deeply by that trip, though it’s not clear how, as it marked but 1/81 of my stairway to flight. Today, 3/15/18, as I near the end of Step 78, perhaps I should start to ask myself the same question, because I’m not sure I know, Who are you now? I am sure, however, that Scribe imagined this very moment as he composed. (He’s waited a long time, too.) Possible Islands was intended always as a dialogue in time.
§D.L.C. - Albion
Possible Islands*
1.
For example, the postcard you send from Luxor
In the summer of Egypt arrives here in the Fall.
(September: acorns everywhere, tree lawns, sidewalks.)
Your summer days as dense with itinerary
As the pictured ruin is with picture-writing —
All beneath the eye of the watchful blue ibis
Or jackal, intense and impersonal as sky.
Compare that all-but-timeless, tiered writing with this:
A postcard sent back, not back to Egypt of course
But to where you are now, and will be all through Fall —
Written in real time, one changing leaf per diem,
Fallen, or woken, from the sleep of the whole tree.
2.
Autumn already! Writes the symbolist poet
Near poem’s end. And lets something turn: turn, and detach —
Here are gaps appearing in the page, yet the text
Appears larger, as if we were nearing the sea,
As daylight’s wavelength lengthens like a wave, reaching –
A shore abstract, mottled with touching found objects.
Two maple leaves, changed, but still veined with springlike green,
Tiger beetle, rutabaga — I could go on,
But, like the symbolist, feel the need to depart.
Let today’s cube cradle a seashell white as ash.
3.
Exit to one of many possible islands —
Rainy afternoon, cat dozing on the sunporch.
By the end of afternoon, may the Aegean
(I mean, my unseen imagined bright Aegean)
Resolve itself out of the known keys and Caribs,
With their tiny scrub forests bristling, ringed with reefs
And the rare drab sand escaping leeward… Pause, breathe.
Boats, temples, sweet air, white seashell church, blue crater —
Water taxi to coasts ragged as papyrus,
Stairs from the dock reaching up, up to cloudlessness.
I do not hope to touch the sky with my two arms,
Wrote Sappho. But here there is not much else to do.
I’ll raise a glass to you of what’s local, come dusk.
4.
Goatherd/rose/speak/yearning/sweat, wrote Sappho elsewhere
She should know. On the floor of islands live the clouds.
Take your postcard from July. A dry gorge in Crete
Whose broken riverless floor you follow (10 k
To the tide) on the archaic road of water.
One day laid down in the rugged topography
Of memory, like a verse or a vein of copper?
— So I’d like to think. Today, rainfall continues,
Green-chevronned leaves like unreadable words appear
On the concrete, on the tree lawn: I choose a few
To take home as if these things could teach me beauty.
Máomai, says my cat, disconsolate near dawn.
5.
Let “Pacific Sound” stand for where you are this Fall.
— Yes, postcards are meant to describe the sender’s place
But some days are spent picturing destinations.
So: turning over a small smooth floe of driftwood,
Let me see, off the local point, that span studded
With rocky unvisited kingfisher islands.
Rinsed along shore, the wreckage of overhanging
Endangered forest, and, under barnacled wood.
Hermit crabs — in dense, clustered, separate city-states,
Each one as busy as the inwards of a watch.
6.
Call the place where I live Exit Y: an option
Among many in a splayed, many-level game,
Almost hiding the option. Pick a vehicle —
And you can enter “as” somebody, with powers and lacks
To be discovered at intervals as you go,
Real time streaming round you like Fall’s airs and breezes,
Full of beginnings, phrases, excitements, decays,
And also unplanned pauses. Pause, I like to say.
Place some kind of token at this particular
X, Y and time: waning moon, picnic table, wine —
Prizes the game defers or conceals. Takes away.
Still, any blue postcard could be today’s token —
Syzygy, katydids still say, on warmer nights.
7.
Flashback to August. Postcard from Asia Minor.
Caves that are cities, stacked like so many micmac
Birch-bark boxes, some adorned with porcupine quills.
Cities: many-niched as corals, or hives, seething
With emptiness, encyclopedic with entries:
Each cell as clean as the eremite’s, each busy
As the termite’s interface of caste, fate and task —
You and your family now a “travelling machine”,
You tell me. The postcard remains as a fragment;
So much more to tell but no room (good-bye!), no time.
8.
As if the cubes had exits to one another,
October begins by mimicking summer’s end.
Onward — or back — to my private Oxyrhyncus
Scarcely a funerary cache; rather, word-hoard,
Trash of lyric papyrus, flayed to weightlessness —
Archive of widgets, some spanning only the stamp
Affixed to this postcard like a waning moon’s moth,
One wing saying: lovers/never/till I arrive.
Where? With October underway? —And the wingbeat
Itself the fuel for some further Oxyrhyncus.
9.
A traveller in Egypt beleaguered all day
By sellers, beggars, and forced to haggle even
For the postcard that records that very datum,
Along with sickness, heat, whatnot, a timetable
So filled with deliberate pops, skips and jags
As to defy the efforts of a noon cricket
Below the crescent of an ibis, blue as sky,
(Too busy planning, even during his trip,
He says, to relax into mere experience —)
Addresses the postcard always inexactly,
As if to prefer the sheer, curved surf of delay
To arrival itself, at the atoll or eye.
10.
Exit to here. Or do I mean exile? Today
Exit Y is dreary, smeared with October heat.
(Pause: play a loop-sample of luxuriant noise.)
I wish I could say the dead leaves whirl, but they don’t;
Scraps, flat as graffiti, tattoo the slab concrete.
And yet: why should this particular x-and-y
Be thought any poorer, meaner, than another,
Possessing as it does its spray-paint hieroglyph —
Its own drab, spangled wreckage out of which to form,
I don’t know — impressions? Or a traveller’s log,
Including, as it must, ozone and ennui,
Inventory, and the scraps that yield a poem.
11.
Signal to noise. Hiss, pop! corruption, pumice
On vellum, gaps that riddle the scroll of autumn.
Some far pointillist storm attacks tonight’s program:
“Girl with the Flaxen Hair” proceeds like a cutter
Drawing its wake along the aqua-grey crater
Of the Pacific Sound, but now headed into
Sheets of lightest rain that almost hide it, then do.
But when we come back, the islands have reappeared,
Green as emu eggs, changed by a sense of distance,
Time, the tuner groping along the frequencies.
12.
I indulge myself, write too much of loneliness.
Watch my friends exit into unseen cubes (good-bye!),
Some as large as summer. Rare messages emerge.
Yours are things-to-do: catch blue bus, bring flashlight
To quarries, see butterflies on Paros. Picnic.
What counts as an impression? You ask, flashlight’s
Tilted cone widening toward the hieroglyph.
Back here, almost too much picture-writing pours in
Momently, at every port and inlet. (Stop, breathe.)
Afternoons, let ibis wade the sky’s wet-and-dry.
13.
Chiasmus? Eventually we trade places.
Crossing, in the grand bazaar at Artaxata
Or the quincunx of a pomegranate grove,
Though perhaps never crossing paths, on finding
Whole days lived along the other’s hypothesis —
October’s plaid grass quilts the baseball diamond.
So I become the traveller, rapt in his urging grid,
The airport curled like a nautilus on the bay.
And always those machines à voyager as sleek
As crabs poised high on their landing-gear. —And yourself?
So caught in the cube of now, motion vanishes,
Sound reduces to the katydids’ radio,
Signalling: near new moon above the Equator.
14.
The map of Northeast Foliage is updated
Daily, oranges of Peak and Near Peak advance
Like stages of the tide against a green inland.
Exit Y hovers in the shallows of Still Green.
The town itself a mere speck of a waking bird
Seen from the imaginary sky-high orbit
Of some calm, Atlantic, geosynchronous eye.
Down here, you can find the map enacted daily
On the palm of one maple leaf: With peak colors
Spilling down like the fan of a river delta.
15.
Since almost too much imagery comes streaming through,
Follow with me (or the palm-reader) the course of
An archetypal river, upriver: due South —
Past the stagnant brickbats, where diving boys spangled
With sores are fetching up some wreckage from the muck,
Lies the place where the proscriptions formed, hardened in sun
(“I have not snared birds in the marshlands of the gods”),
Then miles of lazy papyrus, as if adrift,
And banks where, at evening, the jackals whine and snap,
And the scribe fashions a pen from a pen-like reed.
Quickly now, we are surmounting the cataracts;
Uplands, “far from folk who die with the seasons —“
16.
—As the symbolist writes, returning
To Fall, while imagining his exit from time
And his own x, y in sad pyramidal France.
The orchard’s phalanx darkens. But there’s a qui-vive
On the air, that quickens by diminishing, till
We come to the fish spine, the leaf skeleton’s sphere.
Out on your local point, you describe the cricket’s
To-and-fro pulsing like a scow without landfall.
Those twenty-years-ago intensities, gone where?
Sea-level clouds rolling in from the Sound blindfold
The yard, the house with its bounds of rhododendron,
Data-ports filled with the wide world’s virtual noise.
Time pours away like water in a metaphor.
17.
Flashback: flights to the rainy city are delayed.
A traveller follows shining daubs of signal;
Suddenly noise supervenes. Hours of rainforest.
Sometimes, when the plan goes astray, the glade becomes
Oddly sonorous (toucans flex their solar foils);
Perhaps in the glade of Still Green, he can grow still —
Knowing the options are present, though hidden of course
In fate, changing shade, even sheer giddy freedom,
When x, y and time seem to widen, surprised, as
The gaze of a creature who knows you’re looking back.
18.
What powers, what lacks, did your trip (from the Aegean
To Egypt, or the last twenty years) discover
In you? —Entering as someone, become what?
Planning, planning your way among the peopled slums
And shrines atop the summits of experience —
You trusting somehow, in the many-level games
Things we all-but-fail to behold will find their place,
[Here: a line obscured by postal ink]
Stores for a future imagined by the ruin,
By the sky god who cast over Gaia a veil
Whose folds form the coastlines, the houses of Ocean,
And show forth the world with its particolour crowns.
—by F.E.T., Scribe
Notes to Possible Islands
Edited by Albion, much from Scribe’s marginalia (2002):
1.2 my postcard from Luxor took almost two weeks to arrive, long after I’d returned home
1.6 ibis & jackal = Thoth & Anubis, especially as in The Weighing of the Heart against the Feather from Egyptian mythology
2.1 “symbolist poet” = Arthur Rimbaud, the subject of Scribe’s dissertation
2.9 maple leaves, the flora of both my Pacific Sound & Exit Y
2.10 "cube" = hypercube, in a "many-level game," where, from a flyer's perspective, life is seen (more accurately) as discontinuities. We exit one cube to emerge directly in another.
2.10 tiger beetle & rutabaga are pictured on Postcard 1, also 18
3.1 "Possible Islands" Scribe lifted from my itinerary heading for 7/11/02
3.2 Euthyphro, whom I met when he was an adopted barn kitten (along with siblings Greater & Lesser Hippias), was nearing age 20 at this time.
4.3 Samaria Gorge, a trip highlight, pictured on my postcard to Scribe
4.12 Scribe noted that Euthyphro is speaking Greek, but I can’t represent the Greek alphabet with this keyboard. Euthyphro meows, “I yearn/I seek.”
5.1 Pacific Sound = Puget Sound
7.4 Cappadocia, Turkey: thousands of rock formations hollowed into hobbit dwellings, 10th Century churches, even massive underground networks, where populations of up to 30,000, along with their livestock, could hide out from invading armies for months; probably my favorite stop, one week.
7.10 a direct quote from my postcard: “We are now a well-oiled traveling machine.”
8.3 Oxyrhyncus = ancient city un Upper Egypt where papyrus scraps gave us most of our modern knowledge of Sappho. (We did not go there.)
9.1 Over 100 times per day (we counted) I was hassled in this manner, while my women, following properly behind & covered respectfully, were spared the onslaught. This is called baksheesh, a combination of begging, tipping, and/or paying.
9.10 Although Scribe has lived at the same house address since 1981, I always seem to block on his zip code. (I’m normally rather amazing on raw numbers, even when I don’t care at all, but here I have a single digit off, the same one every time.) Scribe has admonished me numerous times, and I’m always genuinely contrite; but then I mess up again pathologically. Obviously Albion is messing with both of us.
9.12 from The Eye Diagram (Session 45) [see photos Ch. 7.1]
10.0 Scribe notes in the margin that my fifth postcard, from Rumi’s Tomb in Konya, Turkey, dated August 8, finally reaches Exit Y on 10/3/02, the last to arrive.
10.10 “impressions”: Scribe scolded me again over my use of this word in a postcard, followed by a to-do list for a given day. (Travel is intense.) He was trying to gather poetic material from my adventures, but now wonders if I am even capable of forming an “impression.”
11.4 “Girl with the Flaxen Hair” is the title of a piano prelude by Debussy.
12.4 On Paros we descended into ancient marble quarries alone, deep into the darkness whence the Venus de Milo & Napoleon’s tomb were once extracted. We brought flashlights, reminded by my itinerary to carry them. That same (scorching hot) day, we followed the marble mine with a verdant butterfly valley visit (actually tiger moths). Cool ways to stay cool.
12.6 To respond to his criticism, I jokingly sent [Scribe] in my final postcard a list from our trip: “32 buses, 31 taxis, 9 plane flights…” I wrote, “I don’t know what counts as an impression,” and [Scribe] rephrases this as a question. A real-time dialogue (see 10.10).
13.2 Artaxata = ancient Mesopotamian city, which as a near-palindrome highlights the chiasmus
14.1 “Northeast Foliage” is a real-time website to show autumn’s changes (a brand-new benefit of the still-new internet).
15.3 the Nile, for one; but also an allusion to my own poem A Capellini
15.6 from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, part of the negative confession
15.9 [Scribe] has long been identified as the Scribe.
15.12 As 16.1 identifies, Rimbaud, who at age 19 left poetry & France behind for Africa.
16.7 “cricket” is our private word for the bothersome ego, that which questions the authentic actions of our truest self, our “serpent.”
16.9 I only catch the coincidence today, 4/22/18: It is exactly twenty years to the day between my Fool on the Hill acid trip & the day my trip itinerary goes off-script & unplanned into "Possible Islands."*
17.5 “solar” refers to me and my unfolded soul, a symbol unique to me in our group.
17.6 “Still Green” also refers to my nearby fern & cedar forests, which I frequent as my refuge & which Scribe knows well.
18.1 echoes of Blake's The Tyger
18.2 “twenty years” = these continuing semi-plodding years of adult responsibility (domestic & professional), as opposed to my creative explosion in Germany
18.3 “Planning” = what I do best, especially in travel; but what may be worst for my soul, the cricket’s case & cause
18.8 sic (but, I'll add, in his second postcard poem to me a couple of years later, one line was indeed so perfectly obscured, one line exactly)
18.10 a big ending to suit [Albion’s] melodramatic sensibility (not [Scribe’s]). Again, “sky god” = solar = Albion = demiurge = colour.
18.13 In the margins following the poem's ultimate line Scribe quotes a letter from me sent from Germany (3/13/82) post manic crash, still dusting off my own ashes: "Can all of life be as meaningful and intense as this?"
Lesson 8.3: Possible Islands
Images & Attributions (in order of appearance)
1. Banner: Rhiannon C. 2016
a) Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
b) Jewel Mandala close-up of Scribe's port: D.C. Albion 1994
2. Photo of 18 postcards displaying paintings by Helen Butterfield (2000); the obverse of Possible Islands
Helen Butterfield's vegetable paintings (2000). Scribe's postcard sequence runs vertically.
*Notes appear at the end.
Possible Islands Canto I
I offer a sample photo of the words, hard as they might be to read. Scribe's calligraphy here is employed consistently throughout the poem, but Scribe has several other calligraphies for other uses.
The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.
*As I was composing Lesson 8, I wondered why (WTF!) Albion insisted on inserting the date of my silly LSD trip. Now I see his vector clearly: The knots I, the Fool, gave up "on the hill" tied up a wound that also put flight on hold for me indefinitely, a choice—not so much to run away from flight in fear, even if this image reflected my facts on the ground—but rather running toward something I regard as far more profound in life than mere inspiration & superpowers, raising my family. Of course, Scribe had no inkling of the coincidental timing.
Thus Albion, the overseer, satisfies my self’s demand in time—namely, this dating clue “justifies” my writing extensively in Lesson 8 about my weird acid trip, taking up valuable learning space (normally anathema to a pedagogue). Why insert such an anomaly? Albion’s answer: Yes, I fell like Icarus, but I made the right choice. If I’d known while kite-flying in 1982 where my choice would put me exactly 20 years later, albeit as a non-flyer—traipsing about the Mediterranean with my beautiful family—then, YES!, absolutely would I embrace my choice. And, yes, I did consider all this carefully at the time, hyper-consciously ad infinitum, for even as an unattached 22-year old I knew I’d soon be a father. So Albion’s playing games-with-dates-in-time here marks his confirming reply to me and wink, which I accept with humble gratitude.