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Narcissus,
Carravaggio, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
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THERE IS AN ART TO FOLLOWING A POETIC EXPERIENCE
There is an art to following
a poetic experience. Consider
Carravaggio’s pool.
If you dream,
dream such an encounter
nine shades deep; what
saturates the air
of a waterless syllable
watery in nonbeing
slumbering where a roof leaks in;
a tapper, M___ in living darkness
pools darkness shading each drop
inward with watery syllables. M___
seems ghostly but she’s not. As
medium she inspires the first word.
The first word, the medial word
not only inspires kings
and poets
before you, it inspires a god to make
love with M___ from the other
side. And now, from that side
where there is no other side
and, if
you are
blessed,
some waterless syllable
dream-gathers the muse
a dream dreams in you
nine shades deep. M___
where the roof leaks
watery in nonbeing
inwardly dreams
thing-less things
alive with being―
B(e) comes being―
out of it (e)M-Bodied (experienced)
the dream, always speechless
doesn’t say squat; it
shows you something
you wouldn’t otherwise see (or know.)
Mnemosyne’s watery atlas of images
(in likeness) initiates you into a
metaphysics of pure presence
Yet, of the tapping toneless tone
neither first nor lasting echo, being
of image talking with image
remember,
the medium
is the message.
©2016 Mneme's Pool (What Carravaggio’s
Narccissus Encounters)
stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
notes
1. “The medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan’s line, reminds me that the
form of the medium embeds itself in the message. This creates a symbiotic relationship
by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. Not only does
content influence reality, the characteristics of the medium do. McLuhan says
the content of the medium is another medium. The contents of our psyches
express another medium, a spiritual one— the one in which I can’t even say “ours”.
2. Abraham Maslow in working out his psychology of being, (TPB) thinks very few people
developed themselves spiritually. He also plays with the image soul of this
language, medium/message: mess age/massage/mass age
3. He refers to our spiritual need as self-actualization as did Jung but
perhaps one can reimagine the contents of spirituality (archetypal images)
actually as a present absence, a specific lack or lag in spiritual development
across the human species itself.
4. M____ the medium for spiritual self-actualization didn’t start out that way
but developed as the poem developed over time.
M___ began as a mytheme, that story about a longing in the soul for the
impossible return from that side where there is no other side, long absent and
beloved.
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