Time – Nick Norton

March 22, 2017June 3, 2018

Woke to the words (and it is only ever words which wake me):

be prepared to be
on your way
on that last day.

The same shone first (and if ever anything wakes me it is only light).
Shone first, shines within, and this same light will shine out at last.

The word wordless when these, wordless, have many sayings
yet little string to hold them.
So how is it, wordless and stringless, they have their world strung together?

Time in both directions is inconsistent.

Any inconsistency makes time timeless.

The space runs without knocking any edges off.

We are one and we are another, without edges.

Paucity and the deceased. Beauty and the least. The boat pulls out, escaping the intricate device

of the word worldless, of the heist, a sea stolen of its ground. The bottom dwellers struggle, finding not the bottom.

January 30, 2016

On rabbits and hills.

The way through the head / the never before thought / way of thinking as one / mind body person / making new. // Get your self of knowing / as never known before / outside of the knowing and has known knowing all / at the root afresh / of who you are.

Thoughts about 18yr old Harehills and in the squat self. […] Opened the curtains and sat and a rabbit was here on the grass in front of the window, a perfect echo of the [rabbit shaped] cloud I saw yesterday evening. // The first [rabbit] just ran back in the opposite direction with a second. Meanwhile the mountains are in the process of being engulfed within a rolling bank of cloud, vanishing.

Hare hills; rabbit clouds. I remember a hare running down the middle of the road as I cycled along behind. An empty road somewhere in the Vale of York, the hare and I, and a single oak leaf stuck in the spokes of my front wheel going clickclickclickcclickclickclickclickclickclick.

The only other time a hare has run down the middle of the road in front of me was that time when I was coming down the very steep wooded hill on a bike heavily laden with panniers and a tent strapped on and a rucksack on my back. With this kit I was too heavy for the machine, which had spokes too loose and kept shedding its chain at the merest touch of a gear change. The brakes began to overheat, I zoomed past a couple mid-sandwich, their bites hovering around crumbs as I walloped by. At the bottom of the hill a slight rise over a small bridge lifted me from the tarmac. A startled hare shot out in front of me and ran down the middle of the road, I followed and, carefully, touched the brakes. Immediately all my luggage fell off and became entangled with wheels and gearing. I fell forward, clinging onto the handlebars. The handlebars were wrenched into the opposite orientation, and I was on my back on the road and the hare careered to left, disappearing into the woods.

I remember another time, rabbit on the road. Only this time it was not running. I was cycling, labouring up a hill, the landscape around me lightly wooded, some fields on the other side of hedges. I thought it strange that the rabbit did not run. Its head kept bobbing up and down, ears alert and then ears low. I slowly came closer, again I had heavy panniers and a rucksack and a tent, although this time the bicycle was more robust and better behaved. The rabbit moved its head but did not move, it did not run, and running is a thing rabbits normally do. I came alongside the creature and saw why it was not moving. Its rear half had been driven over. Most of the spine was smashed and the rear legs squashed completely. Only its front shoulder region and head was unscathed. In its alertness it knew its rabbit-like behaviour. The front paws made gentle scrabbling motions and it looked certainly at where it might go. I was then, and remain, a poorly educated city person, despite jaunts toward woodlands and hills. My first response was to mount a rescue. Call a vet! Get a farmer, a farmer who may have found my scruples hilarious. Just stamp on the thing if you’re so worried about its suffering… But I’m just a poorly educated city dweller who has no conception as to how an animal’s neck may be swiftly broken. The rabbit nodded and ducked and ineffectually wriggled. I dismounted and worried over its agony. In the end, bravely (I thought), I grabbed it by its front shoulders and hurried it into the hedge. At least here, I thought, it might die with some greenery. A small carnivore may put it out of its misery. Repulsed, I wiped my hands on grassy verge, remounted and rode away. This rabbit’s nervous, failing gestures, and its smashed flat rear end, still remain alive in my memory. That it was sunny with a decent breeze. That I cycled past many small inlets and harbours. That my tent broke apart as I set it up that evening. All of this remains.

· What is this flame, / what is this flame / we call death? // Nothing that was dying is created.

· “… and I have breathed out nothing that can die.”

· What is this flame? / This is the passing of appearance. / That which is appearing may die. // Appearing others…

· Appearing offers a great struggle / to its passing / often. // May we cease to be appearing and / still be, even in / this world.

· Appearing appears so to / to struggle. // Who is it offering resistance to / the flame?

· The falcon cannot / eat grass, and yet / there is the rabbit. / The falcon may / float in the sun / but it is rabbit / who translates the / sun, and this through / the language of / grass.

So we had two guinea pigs and a rabbit and one day I opened the hutch and Squeaky (a guinea pig) was dead and stiff and sort of propped like a board over the food bowl and Rabbit, was sitting on both Squeaky and the bowl. The other pig is called Princess Fluffy Bum. Ms Fluffy Bum is with us still.

A time after this and I opened the cage and the rabbit fell out, flopping onto the grass. Once she would have immediately been up and off, making a break for freedom whilst been chased by an inarticulate raving dad and several children wracked upon their hilarity. No longer, no longer. She neither noticed that she had fallen nor ran. The hutch door hung open, Ms F. pushed back into shadow and stared at me, not moving, most certainly not escaping.

I scooped up the floppy animal and inspected her, and then I laid her down briefly once more, and I closely looked some more. She was still alive but breathing shallow and rapid. I got a kitchen towel, spread it on my lap, and sat down with Rabbit draped over my legs. Once, perhaps twice, she weakly kicked a back leg.

Slowly, slowly; the sun shone. I sat with our pet rabbit over my legs, her breathing getting weaker and weaker. Her mouth fell open so I could inspect her front incisors. I stroked her, I talked to her. Gently, slowly, over an hour or so, she ceased.

When the rabbit was dead I called the children out of the house and together we dug a grave and buried it. I cried and my daughter was astonished.

· [In the dream] I realise how flimsy / wire is all that keeps / them in plane. They / all leave. One / realises they have records on [indecipherable] / here – she turns / around and goes back / in order to find out / all about herself and / why she has been / contained. Woke up / with the word / Ensign.

· “Anything in which there is no force is dead… For the Spirit [force] is the strengthener and the quickener.” [Hildergard.]

· Dream of the mountain / a large empty mountain.

· The mountain begins the book.

· The hill stands / within a mountain / and the mountain stands within a range / the range stands / within a mountain / and here we have / our frame.

§ The volume of

§ clouds

§ stretched even

§ length and height

§ still conclude

§ in the enormity

§ of land below

And the volume

of land below

stretched and pushed

still conclude

in the enormity

of its roots below

§ the roots below

§ and the clouds

§ above and my

§ time smeared

§ volume between

§ even now

§ concludes

§ in the mereness

§ [meetings] meeking set against

§ the scales (meeking – training of horses)

§ timings {meekness} we cannot

§ attain

§ journeys ~~only~~ already

§ made yet only

· in the moment of

· vision our imagination

· absconding

· from the tumult

· of dimensions

· if it should

· be allowed.

October 17, 2015

As the ways
of chivalry,

so the current ways of doing commerce will one day be arcane. The mysteries of the round table were also the tabulations of exchange. And in days to come, should those days arrive, then the mysterious manner of knighthood may be at least as distant and at least as impenetrable as the current urgency of exploitation and electronic usury and the leverage of false scarcity.

Yet the troubadour sung trail of the chivalrous is a dream which still marks our trail. The city is mustered around heraldic banners and its names are heaped atop of old stories, and those squeezed out, paled, redrawn, elaborated and once more forgotten memorials still run their course within our consciousness.

Maybe these stories, sunk just below that which can be approached in the presumptions of rationality, are actually those forms around which the new myths of finance and banking take shape?

It all comes down to a moment when the red knight, the green knight, the white knight, and black knight commingle in a quantum affray. The white sheep are black sheep, the black sheep are white, they cross the river and reverse, they cross the river and reverse: the black sheep are white sheep, the white sheep are black.

I stand at the Cripple Gate, a solitary beggar awaiting sustenance from trade. Elusive trade of the city, my rags speak me as a poor traveller, a stranger. My manners are alien.

Grand towers arise, sparkle and glory, the king-in-deed. The architecture is sovereign in expression, and its role is to make beggars stand at a gate through which royalty will never pass.

October 8, 2015

Ownership is a drapery
and the deep is an act of the imagination
which cuts

a hole in the drapery.

I see through a hole the clouds. The enormous volume of these clouds, stretched height and length, give to the panorama an assurance of the land’s enormity.

John Constable, “A Cloud Study, Sunset,” ca. 1821.

And the volume of the land below, stretched and pushed, still conclude in the vastness of rock below. The visible land drapes across an invisible mantle.

The roots underneath and the clouds above and my time as a smeared volume running between.
There is a mereness to the meeting.
We can peek; these the meek scales, these the timings we cannot attain; these are journeys already made, the length which continues

beyond and outside of the seen moment.

Our imagination is continually absconding from the tumult of dimensions, but vastness is the duty of imagining.

Here is the urban drapery.

Here is the studded surface of attentiveness.

The chemical and the electronic gather as the armed do muster in the feld and as castle formed the manor. The robes of the legendary are not long enough to cover our immodest awareness.

Often the shallows are as impenetrable as the deeps.

Often the greatest depths will flit away without note, entirely insubstantial.

Often the surface of a building will stimulate one’s memory. Memory is another drapery.

The imaginable shallows are a drapery of heavy grief, sometimes lifted in order to flirt with the disowned and unseen depths.

Vastness is the calling, the horrified call. And response to the call devastates chronological time.

These devastation are moments of transition.

We are in transit.

We are devastated

therefore the drapery has been lifted ruffled cut

or otherwise

disturbed

other-wise is
and will be therefore
the irruption in moment.

Non-time in time and no-place in this place. Therefore the irruption of moment in moment is this

and this is forever transformative.

September 17, 2015

That old saw,
Eternity
is that which hides.

This cut-out cup holds infinity,
so therefore this container is infinitely larger than the infinite
although that which holds the infinite is not necessarily eternal.

It is a hollow cup which holds a deep draught,
the longer the drink the emptier the cup.

To quaff forever is to taste the eternal
vanishing.

Cup and liquid may be infinitely present and yet
we thirst.

Where our foot falls, the step on ground rolling with the walk

then this step sounds
resonant below, going
into ground, rolling away
to stop

in silence where the the pivot stalls.

This stillness spills returning silence.

Our walk grounds ashore the beach,
foot falls from deep and far.

This to and fro of sand.
I am beached in the glisten of glass
milling its depths.

My shadow blows its coolness across heaps,
the ground remains of my ancestral skeleton,

and the shadow of my shadow is hot.
A great heat melts dust

to sudden flood.

A shape is formed,
something like a cup
in which the eternal hides.

September 11, 2015

Everything reflects.

Reflection is a division.

All light is divided all ways, in this manner is the spectra perceived.

Perception is an analysis of the reflection, a division further divided.

We daily partake of the infinite in this manner.

(( Neither is there a smallest part of what is small, but there is always a smaller (for it is impossible that what is should cease to be). Likewise there is always something larger than what is large.

— Anaxagoras ))

By reflection the world is infinitely and minutely and exquisitely constructed.

The construction is light infinitely reflected, light reflected from light.

Reflection is our manner of infinite perception.

Our infinite perception is entangled with many qualities of the spectra.

Matter is the mannerism of reflective perception, a spectrum of qualities.

In the spectrum of qualities consciousness is reflected.

Consciousness knots together reflection. Light multiplied by light.

The eternal, that which holds the infinite, is subject neither to division nor multiplication and therefore it is beyond perception.

The eternal is open to awareness via an infinite reflection. From what may such an incomprehensible force reflect? Its own light, which we the knotted reflection cannot perceive.

Primordial language generated as an awareness of incomprehension.

A sheer surface of mute return, this word as the first reflection.

Reflection, refraction, perception; first consciousness as a knot woven in an infinite drop.

A light which balls around itself; in this curling motion the finite is invented. Therefore by perceiving the falling the falling does not go on forever.

The curl is the first shape of creation.

The curl instantiates infinite light, invents its finitude, and insinuates eternity.

September 1, 2015

A pluripotent cell
holds in restraint certain possibilities.

This a non-genetic adaptation which even so is added to generation after generation. (The stably heritable phenotype resulting from changes in a chromosome without alterations to the DNA sequence.)

That temporal adaptations can be passed in intergenerationally by means other than culture.

That culture itself may nonetheless be an expression of previous temporal adaptations,

Play and play amongst species cannot be dismissed as a means of moulding the response. The moulded response may inspire a change over time, and this inside time and biology may be passed on.

Play “pass it on”.

Altruism as play.

When play is logistically difficult altruism may not be.
When altruism is generally not required playfulness most certainly will be.
When altruism is not required play can now become apparent.

Bacterium love to share.

Seeded information transcends species barrier.

Altruism and play are instances when both social and species barrier may be blurred without the requirements of predation or consumption.

Pass it on.

Any one species may be found.

Any one species may be found as a moment.

Any arrested moment may be found as species yet species may be found to be community, an instance of trans-entity in cooperation.

The shape of the cell is a multiplicity.

The shaped community is a collection.
Temporal adaptations are held in an a-temporal pattern.

Myths tell stories literally told in the blood, even as those blood stories can over time become become distorted by a miasma of fantasy.

Phantasms of bad blood.

The brutalism of biology as competing communities whence competition is stripped of its playful core.

If the telling of blood cannot participate in the playful community from which it came, the pluripotent cell as original ground, then there is a “must” inherited also. The “must” of it wallows in this strange fug of species domination and predation.

Illusion as an adaptation to timelessness within the strict grain of time, this humourless game.

A temporal adaptation called utility.
Use value denies that everything is given and this may be useful, for a moment.

What is it which changes a culture, what is which changes an inheritance?

Collective unconscious may provide a flow of good order, running still even beneath fug, miasma, and illusion.

Individually and communally there is a response to the flowing order. A revelation which can be transmission, unlearnt learning.

Knowing is always recognition and this occurs before it is cultural elaboration.
Deep memory is always prior to a rational or competitive testing.

Testing is not telling.

What you know you know as participation.
It it is the telling of an original moment which is a-temporal and dynamic. Time without time within an instant.

June 18, 2015

As a dog returns to its own vomit
so I return to the infinite.

As a dog will try to eat its dinner
several times over
so I am sure that there is taste in here

a food of goodness and divine savour
except the meat has fallen off the platter
this gross overspill of stuff

matter and the awkward rhyme of splatter.

So an infinity can be located in materiality.These innumerable grains of sand, the shy stand of number which will forever evade the count.

Infinite number as material presence must yet be held.

Infinity rests within that which can hold it.
Only the eternal might bracket and cup an infinite.

If such materiality which is infinitely going on is not held, even in miasma or mist, then such infinite matter as we apprehend
is
a bootstrapped reality pulled up by its own become.

Hoopla!

Then it is nothing. Infinity is materiality encountered through nothing and that nothing through which the infinite falls is eternal.

Presence of nothingness, the infinite partakes thereof.

And infinitely that which is nothing shares its own lack of substance, materially and presently, and thus the eternal moves thought within the potent of here and this.

By material expression
awareness and substance
can be found as an infinite operation within the present tense.

The given, given even of nothing, becomes something. Something is now nested within its own fecund void, which is eternal.

The eternal is greater than the infinite, even as it may only be detected within the infinite movement of substance.

Here and this snares thought and perception. Awareness is entangled with the infinite materiality of finitude.

This entanglement is connection made via regard, such connection as modelled in the neural pathways. Entanglement evokes consciousness.

Consciousness is not necessarily made, not necessarily called forth, and consciousness does not necessarily pre-exist the regard by which it is noted. Even so, consciousness does appear to be necessary. It is the entangling agent.

The agency of the woven.

November 29, 2014

So, the key

as subject approaches subject.

So, as subject approaches subject they seek an exchange.

So, as subject approaches subject we seek an exchange.
In this gifting it is required that we match the quality and tenure of our giving, one given to another given, the singular subject matched by singular subject.

So, if there is to be an exchange, the gift is a manner of summarizing the quality of energy within that exchange.

So there is an exchange, a gifted exchange, and a key fits together these energetic exercises.

So an object.

An object is produced in subject to subject exchanges.

An object thus collates the subjective.

An object thus is the communicating function.

“A child will discover parental qualities in stars, trees, and stones… without realising the cost its parents incur in upholding the fabric of its world.”

[Eric Rhode. Psychotic metaphysics. 1994]

Stars

Trees

Stones

Keys

So the parent is an object to provide objects.

So the functional energy here is to allow the energy to function.

So this figure we call parent can be translates as; they that collate subjective experiences.

So they that collate subjective experiences are the pre-archaeology of this singular subjectivity; this singularity of experience which always stands counter to the summary.

The singularity of experience is subjectivity, the deep reality of our consciousness which always stands counter to the object which represents it.

Even so, singular subjectivity must be communicated.

So the must be communicated seeks an object through which it may bypass its own singularity.

And so this figurative object is the funnel through which subjective experience is directed.

The subject to subject experience becomes a gathered weight.

Thus weight and point provide new pattern, a pendulum swing, a new key for this melodic array.

“A liturgical object is one that carries over meaning from pre-birth times.” [E.Rhode]

Thus the figurative is redrawn, or drawn back, in order to reveal a subject.

So a revealed subject, pivoting around a liturgical object, draws subject subject and object through an exchange of gift.

An exchange of gift gives not gift for gift but reveals a further pattern of possibility.

So subjective communication, acting on the pivotal possibility of the object, is an adaptation of the diminished object.

A further pattern of possibility has caused the key to vanish.

A phase transition.

The diminished object and the subject singular become

November 18, 2014

Words do not

seem to play a role

words do not seem to play in this thought.

The thought playing wordlessly.

Hoarding will not act. The hoard has no sentence to say.

Ordering refuses a role. This making order is not sentient

And collecting and sharing are still not words.

If each term crosses where, or what, is the middle marker?

If in the present moment there is a field of memory, are we remembering or presently discovering?

Losing finding collecting losing finding. What is the loosing of information that it may become wordless play in thought?

Perhaps knowing only becomes knowledge after it has been rolled back and forth in the dust?

The rain makes mud. Mud makes seeds. Seeds meanwhile are in the hub.

Sprouting is the crossing over, mud made green. This dusty here and now spouting pollen. Pongnation, pollination, words dusting our shirts.

Pollen is snared in a spiral of wind, a sneeze, asneese. This force blasts around in a moment, the moment partakes of consciousness’ travelogue.

There is something in my imagination which insists on the play of conceiving, inwardly, what is, outwardly, too big to ever properly perceive.

I brim over with cosmological schematics: the grand systole diastole of it all, big bang and big crunch.

It is but nothing of course, squeezed between this system of many worlds and the next multi-verse along (of which we can say nothing other than we have met there).

Many verses sung become one song. Some verses are hummed in the dark. This tune behind tune is simultaneous radiation and coagulation, without a word, dark matter nurturing the space within each thought.

Dyslexia is meant to indicate a “trouble with words”, therefore in many respects we are all dyslexic because words are trouble.

But let us hover in this stillness of a collision.

A single aspect of the multitude, stopped in a snot expulsion.

This infinite porridge gradually coalesces into a thick, complex, and quite promising universe. There is a quiet promise even in this universe, it it making my nose twitch.