how deep does it go —
any of it? — a fine thing,
to come in the end
fully to terms with my own
superficiality
What kind of trap are we caught in, where self-knowledge always seems to consist in knowing less and less? Try telling that to my infinitely curious baby nephew, whom I met for the first time yesterday. He’s aged six months, which says something about how distant I am from his mother (my half-sister): although, I discovered yesterday that babies have a way of absorbing you into their sphere. They are pure intimacy. My poem has a lot to do with a lecture by Chogyam Trungpa, which I used to have on tape, where he explains how, in a state of meditation, the emptiness at the centre of consciousness makes the periphery extremely vivid. Baby consciousness seems to be a bit like that. From what anyone can tell. Depth and superficiality are imaginary categories of course, transcended by the fact of reality. In my dream last night, I was contemplating jumping off the side of a ship. The depth of the water wasn’t on my mind so much as the danger of getting entangled in the propellor. But the main thrust of the dream consisted in a realisation that the ship needed me to stay alive. It needed me to remain within its hierarchical structures, under the command of the captain, and somehow this was my destiny, although only an instant earlier it had seemed to me that my destiny needed me to jump overboard. If my sense of destiny is at the beck and call of a hierarchical structure, doesn’t that make it (the sense of destiny), and therefore me, in the end paper-thin and superficial? That sounds derogatory, and limited is a word that can easily be used in a derogatory sense. But that’s strange considering how limited on all sides we are, in so many ways. Some idea of a tension between infinite (sea) and limited (ship), gets to the heart of what I took away from meeting Thomas yesterday and from my dream.
sciencegoodmagicbetter 