Out of Chaos, Shapes

By Jim Martin

What is “Beyond the Edge of Being”? Is there something ‘out there’, whole and entire, yet beyond our comprehension? If I feel something out there, does that feeling put it there? Or, does what I feel bring itself to my conscious awareness? When we read what humans have thought, no matter how far back we go, those thoughts are comprehensible to today’s minds. Even thoughts about beings we have never personally known. Among our earliest constructs were thoughts about our ancestors. Those thoughts, like all thought, traveled their own paths before written words, and the thoughts they created moved us from the contemplation of ancestry to thoughts like spirits within us, who give us life, then leave when we die; and, further, to other spirits who connect us to that other world where the ancestors live, and will transport there where we die.

From ethereal mists to cadres of entities who oversee our lives, we have thought and dreamed about who we are, what we are, and why. While our visions vary, have led to wars, they have also stimulated thoughts about our similarities, our increasingly common navigation toward recognition that we are all people, just people. Quite a feat for a recently evolved Primate, living on a large rock in a solar system. We have emerged from the open Savannah, and over a long period of time, discovered that, while we are spread across the planet, we are one people. All from our experience with small shapes which, with our words and feelings, have merged to generate a concept which tells us with certainty, that yes, we are people, and we have sensed a larger world beyond us. This, I find a marvelous triumph for living beings, on a small planet in the middle of an enormous universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665543712

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© 2022 Jim Martin. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/21/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4366-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4371-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021923071

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

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Prior Babble: Beyond the Edge of Being

Words and shapes

The Edge of My Words

Words Emergent

Eye of the Storm

Shapes

The Ancient Ones

Transformation

Words

Do Words Mean?

Is Life a Peripheral Consequence?

Hopeful River

Eddy

Where is our place?

Multiplicity

Thought Genesis

Do We Move Forward?

Eye and Hand, Apart

Do Dreams About Art Generate Science?

Simple Miracle

Eye and Thumb Speak

Quorum Sensing

Air has Rhythms

Quorum Sensing as Language

Art, Antecedent

Life as Dance

Does Choreography Think

Beautiful Decay

Do Words Dance

Outside, Looking in

Inside, Looking Out

Outside Inside

Soul?

PRIOR BABBLE: BEYOND THE EDGE OF BEING

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Over the past few years, I’ve been setting my overt assumptions about life aside, and seem to be seeking my covert assumptions, those I subconsciously take for granted, but never articulate or consider. Like, there is no comparison between me and a supernova. So certain, that it doesn’t come to conscious awareness, although once brought to thought, perhaps it should. In the light, that thought, my self is not like a supernova, may not be a slam dunk. I’m navigating my poetry and commentary into that veiled place, where assertions may be no more than mere unfounded assumptions. Sailing through them, like an iceberg field we navigated south of New Zealand in 1958. Tips of the bergs, we took for the icebergs themselves. Sonar told a different story. Below the overt surface of the sea lay a world different, covert, but comprehensible. A very strong attractor.

WORDS AND SHAPES

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I get them to think about that — which is at the edge of speech — it’s a place for me, like a bay, where the land ends and the water begins. What can we not articulate in everyday language and official discourse? I get them to think about poetry as wild imagination, the edge of the imagination. What can best be explored in poetry’s precinct, with the precision, imagination, craft and reading that it demands?

— Christian Campbell, Oregon Elegy¹

THE EDGE OF MY WORDS

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what is at the edge

of my words

there    where they would babble

           within me

                   cannot yet express nor quite

                   comprehend

within

           where lie our

           collected lives

           the shared knowledge

                       understandings

that emanate from them

the edge of my words

like a shore

           edge of the land

                       land I am adapted

                       to live within

           limits my being

places an edge on

my words

the sea

beyond the land

sensed

but not experienced

a barrier

against my quest

for what is out there

the fields of my thoughts

and I

sensing them

flitting images

           of thought

                felt

but not articulated

when do I name them

move my words

beyond the edge

to where they

dance their lives

How can I say that our collected lives reside within me? I’ve felt it, and accommodated it during my life. As I grew, and seem to still be growing, I’ve collected bits and pieces of many of the people I have known. Some only briefly. They lie throughout the neurons in my brain, held in proteins and connections there, ready to spring out and surprise me when they sense the moment. So I know, components of my brain cells, they, the people I have known, do most certainly live within me. A simple miracle of the Universe.

Can it, my thought, travel beyond my words? I know that words, like nails, can fasten meaning. New meanings, words seen anew, have the capacity to allow my thoughts to move, to travel beyond my recent words; to find more juxtapositions to assist old words to comprehend new meanings. To feel them, and express them. To you and to me. When my thoughts become components of others’ neurons, those thoughts travel beyond the words which transported them. Doing so, I slowly begin to understand. At the edge; beginning to sense what is beyond.

WORDS EMERGENT

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precision

emergent

from short        chosen

lines

efficient            independent

precinct                    and strategy

of poetry

define the edge

and meaning

of human discourse

surgically remove ambivalence

   ambiguity

       dissemblance

with precise    exactly meaningful

words

My words,