4th day's happy hour rainbow, in the same high window! (It's the one I couldn't get the bird-poop off).

I'm going to send my paid subscribers a thank-you excerpt from my coming book. Starts with a passage from a genius writer, lost his vision at age 55. Just one kind of vision. (All the rest expanded.)

㊙️

FROM A LONG WAY OFF

Who would not delight in Borges’s “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written:

animals are divided into:  

a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.

With this one mock-taxonomy, Borges confounds the very categories by which we make semblances of order. Not only he, but many underminers of the rules and categories of an intellectual procedure (critics such as Foucault, who was also known to quote this passage) anticipated, wittingly or not, the instrumental revolutions looming in the searchlights of the Internet—now as then—the Googling eye: what fundamentally regrounds our old attempts to organize experience.

Our disposition to the tree was partly biblical; but so too then inevitably our own attempts to think a search engine omniscient. (An omni-comprehensiveness requires a pure impossibility: that we exceed our best fact-checkers' comprehending.) So welcome now to 2020-plus, its futures as myopic as its pasts, its engines unexpectedly wide-ranging, in comparison with prior instruments for inquiry. It's also differently unfree. It’s inquiry with outsourced memory, an exquiry. It isn't just the volume of the misimpression but the speed, that makes it potent. Where media were once accompanied by time for meditation, now no more. It's yes or no, and fast. The instrument is ever implicated in the grasp.

What make a Borges churchlessly transcendent isn’t just his sense of the preposterous, which cuts through lots of categoricals and commonplaces tied to time.  He gets us closer to an understanding of poetic languages, which don't gain depth by mere accumulation or in piling packets up under a rubric such as “content”—till it's genuinely countless.  No, his insights are informed by an imagination's meta-visuals, proportions hatched of sensory experience, morphologies of unfamiliar forms. During his lifetime, physics gave us ways to “feel for” waves not just “composed of” particles but inrelations among motions in particularities, and from our ways of seeing anything at all.

The venerated reasons of the heart, the loves of mind (which sometimes seem distinct, sometimes alike) will change. Community is less in locability, or tenability, than colloquy. But we would have to speak across the boundaries.

Work past the seizure to relinquishment, past the ossifying, into oscillation; past the parts at odds, toward alls-at-once. We’re granted no security but our unsettlement.

So love is not for claiming: It's for falling.

And poetry's own raison d'etre is no high or fancy naming.

It's a calling.