Dipper Falls, whisper veil, Cliff Creek . . . Eagle Cap Wilderness
On the road in the American Northwest.
Dipper Falls, whisper veil, Cliff Creek . . . Eagle Cap Wilderness
On the road in the American Northwest.
Epiphany is one of those beautiful words that comes to
us from the ancient Greek. It means to reveal, in the
sense of sudden insight or inspiration.
In a way, insight, which for me is an actual movement
of energy, or intelligence, is everything. For me, insight
is not something personal, but rather moves, or is in
resonance with, but not of, the individual. Insight is
what I look for in works of Art. I find it, for example,
in Bach's Goldberg Variations, as well as in Glenn Gould's
performance. I find it in certain seminal addresses of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Or the ideas and style of
thinking of Buckminster R. Fuller. Or the brilliance of
Benoit Mandelbrot's fractal geometry. And, of course,
I find it everywhere in Nature, especially the forms as
revealed to the human eye in the not-too-big and not-too-small
dimension of what I think of as the magical middle realm.
It seems to me that present-day Western culture has
for the most part turned its back on this energy of insisght,
and already two or three generations ago has filled the
empty space with entertainment. That is why wildness is,
and has always been, so important. Because it turns off
the entertainment, and turns off this incessant chatter
of voices telling us what to believe and think.
Three legendary moments of insight I think every child should
learn by heart, and which are especially dear to me, are
brought together here in a little set of three 37-step poems.
The Greek philosopher, Pythagorus, who used and explored the
world of sound for much of his model of creation, appears
in the poem at the moment he hears a musical octave ringing
out on the heavy anvils of a blacksmith's shop and on the
spot figures out why. The teacher / student duo——one
of the greatest of all time——of Anne Sulivan and Helen Keller
appears in the second at the moment Helen——both deaf and blind——
suddenly sees that every thing in the world has a name. This
moment has always seemed to me to manifest the very
essence of what learning is, and like a lightning bolt out
of nowhere, calls into question mechanistic theories of the
mind. And lastly, there's our humble earth-bound reptile
as it for the very first time takes to the air on newly
discovered feathered wings. I've always felt that this
hypothetical evolutionary moment is directly linked to
humankind's own great leap, an ephiphany or bold leap of
spirit if there ever was one, many eons later all the way
to the Moon and back.
* * *
In order for a variation form like this to work, one needs
to do them in sets or sequences. Try reading them out-loud
to get a sense of how the rhythms and accents change in
surprising ways while still keeping to the basic 37-step
pattern:
Epiphanies
(I)
Lover of wisdom,
Pythagorus hears two anvils
sound octaves at a blacksmith's shop.
Suddenly,
half of weight is half
the length of a string—lightly touched.
(II)
"Wa-ter. Wa-ter. Wa-
ter." Thrice the fingers of the teacher
write in the palm of a girl's hand.
Suddenly,
all things have names, and
the girl sees more than those who see.
(III)
Strangest of creations,
a serpent with arms and feathers
slithers to the edge of its cliff.
Suddenly,
take-off, thin air! O
tracks left in the dust of the moon.
Thompson Meadow,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
Oregon, X.23.2008
