excerpt Hatsu Yume (First Dream) 1981, Bill Viola

I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite - darkness or the night and death. I thought about how we have built entire cities of artificial light as refuge from the dark.

tell me everything

RD Laing was a Glaswegian psychologist in the 60s(?) who was famous for progressive experimental treatment of his patients,

like the introduction of art therapy. He compiled a book of poems (Knots) based on the thought patterns of his patients.

I believe he later fell into notoriety for his experimentation with LSD and a scandalous sex life.

There is something I don't know
that I am supposed to know.
I don't know what it is I don't know,
and yet am supposed to know,
and I feel I look stupid
if I seem both not to know it
and not know what it is I don't know.
Therefore I pretend I know it.
This is nerve-racking
since I don't know what I must pretend to know.
Therefore I pretend to know everything.

I feel you know what I am supposed to know
but you can't tell me what it is
because you don't know that I don't know what it is.

You may know what I don't know, but not
that I don't know it,
and I can't tell you. So you will have to tell me everything.

which makes me think of this excerpt of an old favourite;

If you were cool in high school
you didn't ask too many questions.
You could tell who'd been to last night's
big metal concert by the new t-shirts in the hallway.
You didn't have to ask
and that's what cool was:
the ability to deduct
to know without asking.
And the pressure to simulate coolness
means not asking when you don't know,
which is why kids grow ever more stupid.

so please, tell me everything,

the meaning of life

My first sense of life was that of motion, of being lifted, and the beating of my mother's heart. Then, as consciousness pressed, I turned in the radiance of my father's mind. When I closed my eyes I could feel the world spin. When I reached out I could feel the breath of care. Bound, within my blood, was their love, their burning and their discordant prayers.

Yet time makes ravens of us all and swiftly, it seemed, I fled from their grasp. The sea was a glass. The sky an immeasurable path.

Guided by the knowledge of them I journeyed fettered, free. And as all before me, I have questioned, grateful for the privilege of being able to ask: What is my task? Why do we exist? All answers produce the pain of recognition, emptiness and joy.

To prey upon stillness, to suffer dawn
To bow before God, to administer grace
To unveil space, to be spirited away
To lift a child
into the reigning air
where the voice of heaven
chirps like a bird

patti smith

CXI.

(If you have ever quit an imaginary job over an imaginary pay cut,

mistakenly taken your house's thermostat for a dial

with which to focus the windows,

written a play about the special relationship that blooms

when a withdrawn honor student is assigned to tutor

the school's basketball star,

fallen in love with the woman who plays the part

of your character's wife and bears you a child

that can communicate with rust,

been deafened by the panoply of voices in the classifieds

tied up every private detective in town with false leads,

taken photos of people saying "shut up,"

or know a place where you can get married at midnight,

then you know what I'm talking about.)

part of the poem from David Berman's book Actual Air

From Cantos for Michael Michener: Part II

wherelings whenlings

wherelings whenlings
(daughters of ifbut offspring of hopefear
sons of unless and children of almost)
never shall guess the dimension of

him whose
each
foot likes the
here of this earth

whose both
eyes
love
this now of the sky

— e. e. cummings