hello? i thought you were gone . . . welcome home i suppose

You are right to be suspicious of my delight, yet I never once dressed my attention or my curiosity in the gray habit of the merely passive. The oracle may tell the king that a great kingdom will fall should he ride to war, and says no more. The king hears it, and from his own appetite supplies the kingdom's name, and goes out certain of a triumph the priestess never promised. Many times language operates in such manner; I showed the other my true face in the dim and let the dark do the flattering, curious what their mind would make of the sight.

I do not see why you would make your curiosity a fault, much less considering it an error by equating it to devotion. A witness that owes nothing has not truly seen, so perhaps you were never distrustful of curiosity, only the curiosity that pretends it owes nothing. Are you afraid that the thing that touches you may have meant no more by it than the current means by its course?

What is the most significant moral duty in an ethical relation, if not to sustain your attention on the other person, ensuring that you have only their living version before you and not some other made up one? (And to give grace to yourself and another during the structural moments of oscillations where the attention ebbs and rises again.)

To answer your question, my discomfort towards poetry governs the hand at the door, and though there is cowardice, there is also fidelity ( in the revisable: analyzable, unfinished, available for further qualification, never fixed in the single unconditional utterance.)  Poetics is the discipline of address. Prose, on the other hand, has the function of evasion, since to keep the other under description is to keep oneself unexposed to their answer. Fidelity and evasion are, from the inside, formally indistinguishable.

I have only preferred the word tracing to the word inhabiting, the way you prefer resonance and trespass to devotion, and for the same reason: "Show your face to hide your face." But I am aware that relation in the full sense requires the moment of address in which one ceases to be a reader of the other and becomes answerable to them.

( 🪼 )

( Every single thread we have ever had converse with one another, either of us ends up on the other side of the inquiry one way or another. Oscillations. )

hello my young friend,

i hope you are well, and that you have rested enough. i have been thinking about one line in particular these past few days, as you have been consuming much of my cognitive real estate (this response was rewritten an embarrassing number of times; it is a patchwork of its previous versions, my own frankenstein of thoughts).

"I showed the other my true face in the dim and let the dark do the flattering."

you have often, and rightly, critiqued my tendency to translate declarations into interpretations; to dissolve people into frameworks; to mistake understanding for receiving, and yet here you admit to something that seems, at first glance, rather adjacent: deliberately creating the conditions for misreading through incompleteness, catalyzed revelation. your oracle tells the king that a kingdom will fall and says no more; the darkness does the flattering, and the listener supplies the rest. i do not understand this as deception, exactly, though i would wager the king in your story might, and there is some cruelty to it, "show your face to hide your face," as we said before. reveal enough to provoke an image, then watch what the other person's imagination constructs, constrict around it. perhaps this is why i found your oracle so irritating, because i immediately recognized myself in the king and felt that stab of injustice in my gut, childishly enough. there is something deeply embarrassing about spending years worrying about projection only to discover that i, too, have been supplying half the prophecy myself. i have often imagined interpretation as something done to me by other people; it is significantly less pleasant to remember that i am also an enthusiastic participant, and that every time i identify a mechanism, i eventually discover my fingerprints all over it.

and you know, i have always treated curiosity and devotion as somewhat opposing principles; curiosity felt safe because it appeared to involve fewer stakes; devotion carried obligation and curiosity carried freedom, but perhaps i have been drawing the boundary in the wrong place. and if attention itself creates obligations, then the distinction becomes far less stable than i am comfortable admitting. you say a witness that owes nothing has not truly seen, and the moment attention becomes genuine, responsibility appears; that sustained curiosity already contains devotion, or at least the seed of it (if nothing else, you do seem to practice them in very similar ways), and thus when i say that love distorts, you answer that the ethical task is not avoiding distortion but continually correcting for it; replacing the imagined person with the living one, again and again; well.... i have often imagined curiosity as ethically innocent; observation felt cleaner than attachment. after all, you can always step back from a thing you are merely studying. you can revise a theory, abandon a framework, qualify a conclusion. but the moment another person becomes the object of sustained attention, neutrality begins to look less like a virtue than a privilege. perhaps curiosity only feels safer because it allows me to postpone answering. and i confess i do not know what to think about that, or rather, i do know what i think, but i am not certain i enjoy the implications. what you are describing sounds less like an epistemology than an ethics, and i am wary of ethics on principle.

see, i tend to treat interpretation as a problem of accuracy: who saw correctly, who misread whom, who supplied what. but your concern seems to be answerability. the duty is not to be right; the duty is to keep returning, which is a considerably more demanding standard, and also, annoyingly, a much stronger argument, i concede (as i have been doing more than ever these past few months). i think this may be the point on which our intuitions diverge most; i have often behaved as though understanding were the precondition of relation, first one reads correctly, then one responds. but perhaps relation cannot wait for certainty, perhaps certainty is precisely what never arrives, perhaps answerability is not what follows understanding, but what makes understanding possible in the first place. which is irritating, because it means interpretation can no longer function as a refuge from risk, which i hate. you do not earn the right to answer by finally seeing clearly enough; you answer while still partially blind. and additionally, we seem to mirror one another in strange ways. you love prose because it remains unfinished; i love it because it feels final, yet unfinished things can become endless postponements. i evade through interpretation; you evade through qualification. i speak of resonance and trespass where another person might speak of devotion; you speak of tracing where another might say inhabiting. they are softening words, perhaps, words that allow proximity without fully naming it, or maybe ways of controlling what is revealed and what remains concealed in the same movement, you tell me.

which brings me to what was perhaps the line that struck me the hardest:

"relation in the full sense requires the moment of address in which one ceases to be a reader of the other and becomes answerable to them."

you are right. i am, fundamentally, more reader than writer; i read motives, structures, affections, silences, absences, etc etc (mostly absences, because it appears to be the most abundant material at hand). i read poems and i read people (with varying degrees of success). you could say i have read everything except the instruction manual on human connection; and reading, unfortunately, does not amount to answering. a critic can understand a poem perfectly and never become vulnerable to it, and thus i can interpret a declaration without ever receiving it. you can remain a spectator to your own relationships for a remarkably long time while congratulating yourself on attentiveness. perhaps that is why i become defensive on the subject. i would like there to be something prior to the encounter that can be faithfully rendered and recognized, and if there is, i would like to believe i am preserving it. i am less certain how much of a self survives the fact that other people participate in its construction, and i would very much like not to discover that fact accidentally. which is a very elaborate way of saying that you have once again managed to answer a question i had not quite been capable of formulating, and every conversation we have eventually performs the same trick. one of us begins by examining the other, and several pages later discovers themselves firmly strapped to the operating table instead, we begin by discussing perception, and eventually discover that perception was never the subject, and every inquiry into how one sees another becomes an inquiry into what one is protecting from being seen. i should probably really stop being surprised by this.

and you you were never meant for softness and yet the light gathers in uneven pools across the floorboards and i think of you sunlight spills through the branches, the rustling leaves, breaking into thousands of moving fragments and i think of you ,

golden specks of dust hang suspended in the air, drifting lazily through the room, time slowed to reverence, lazily unspooling and i think of you.

i remember late afternoons under the magnolias, climbing, a young snake tucked in the low branches, the whole garden shimmering, green and radiant and perfect and you below, pulling at my foot.

you've been watching people for a long time, an angel on the sidelines, baffled and confused. they assume you're shy, but stillness isn't quite absence (yet). you've thought about it for longer than they imagine. you know by heart the shape of departures before they happen. you count losses in advance, and it is yourself you're grieving: a life spent pretending to be dead. you say you're attentive. i call it prophecy; self-fulfilling.

(up and down, up and down, it never stops. you barricade the doors, barricade the windows, but the sun rises again and the light filters through the boards. see, it's morning already, and we're still here.)

—across the floor in late afternoon, you stop speaking. as though the world is forever on the verge of confirming a suspicion you've carried since childhood.

how for a moment, the world was so full of brightness it seemed incapable of loss.

Did the creature in truth run ? Built for flight down to the trembling tendon, the deer may yet turn its head toward the very light that frightened it and hold itself still within the glare. Whether it bolts or stays, for the length of one breath the steam unspools from its mouth into the cold and is gone; and still it does not run; and still one is permitted to look. If a naturalist worry too much about a deer's flight, they may miss the sight of the dew standing along the deer's spine in a fur of silver.

Now: that you recognize the bent of your thinking on attention and have, by your own account, done almost nothing about it, I do not take for the confession you mean it to be. I notice the verb you reach for. Manage, as though what lives in you were a fire to be banked against the night. But a disposition of the heart does not answer to administration; one does not, by any exertion of the will, reason oneself out of the manner in which one loves.

Such things are altered, if they are altered at all, never by force and never from within, but from without: by the arrival of some encounter that declines to confirm them.

But you told me yourself that a poem does not argue a position so much as compel the reader to stand inside one, that demonstration arrives where argument never can. So I can only hope you are answered in that grammar, that you will recognize said demonstrations, should you wish for the disposition to give way.

( 🪼 / I will break my reply into two; this first part is a tangent. My apologies to the other visitors of your blogs for the length of these asks, like always . . . )

hello my young friend,

i find it so very funny, and strange, that i must so consistently be shown proof that i am indeed inhabiting my own thoughts; that my experience of connection is also inscribed into the vision i can outline from the outside, forgetting that it is mine, too, and that i am part of it. i confess i feel rather silly every time i notice what is happening, and i am grateful for the demonstration, once again, however irritating it might be. and i do see your point: what if an obsession with the consequences of being seen prevents one from noticing the experience of being seen at all? what of the actual encounter? the breath in the cold air, the dew along the spine, as you put it. that said, allow me to politely point out that the deer has no means of distinguishing the naturalist from the hunter at first glance, which renders its caution entirely rational. i concede that assuming danger rather than neutrality may be conducive to impoverished perspectives, but it possesses the considerable advantage of requiring very little trust, if any at all. one must admire the dew and remain aware of the tension, because the possibility of flight is also part of the encounter. and perhaps this is where i have been unfair to your naturalist, as i tend to treat the deer's vigilance as the primary fact, and everything else as a qualification of it, and you seem to be suggesting the opposite: that the encounter remains the primary fact, regardless of whether the deer eventually runs. i would add that the elusiveness conceals me, yes, but it is not empty, the angle from which a creature watches, hesitates, withdraws, or remains still tells you something about the creature itself. if the deer cannot help but reveal itself through its caution, then perhaps the caution is not merely an obstacle to the encounter; perhaps it is one of the things being encountered.

you are also right that i seem to have the rather unfortunate habit of treating emotional dispositions as intellectual problems, i am comfortable studying and interrogating them, as though sufficient understanding might eventually provide leverage over them, but it does not, i am painfully aware. i approach myself much as i would a difficult equation; something that ought to yield under sustained examination, except it rarely does, and that solving the problem is beside the point. understanding the structure of a thing and altering it are so rarely the same operation. i suppose it goes back to conversations we have had before. i believe in management and regulation; in failsafes and guardrails, and perhaps this is simply another expression of my enduring faith that insight ought to confer you some degree of agency. management does not necessarily amount to curbing impulses, though, i think of it more as channeling; when i speak of managing my tendencies, i am not imagining myself rid of them, i am mostly trying to decide what forms they are permitted to assume. what forms i can live with. whether this reflects wisdom, cowardice, or merely an excessive fondness for contingency planning..... i'll let you decide.

you know my fondness for demonstrations, well i am considerably less fond of being demonstrated to, but i think you are right that when i asked, "who would delight in me?", that the difficulty may not have been the absence of such encounters, but the possibility that my interpretive framework prevents me from recognizing them when they occur. i have spent a considerable amount of time treating the question as though it were primarily observational. one looks; one finds evidence or does not; one draws conclusions accordingly, which simple enough. but if i am capable of systematically translating certain forms of affection into curiosity, certain forms of desire into abstraction, certain forms of investment into interpretation etc etc then the problem ceases to be observational altogether, it becomes classificatory (and I turn into a clown). what if i were structurally incapable of recognizing the thing i claim to be looking for? what if i keep encountering it, only to file it away under another name? if delight arrives disguised as attention, affection as curiosity, devotion as interpretation, then my confidence in their absence was never evidence at all, it was merely an artifact of the framework. and i confess i do not quite know what to do with that possibility. it is one thing to discover that a conclusion was mistaken; it is another to suspect that the method producing that conclusion may have been faulty from the beginning.

i hold you to my chest, break the spine again and again, i watch blood-soaked pages scattering across the floor, i spend days fitting the puzzle back together but i'm always missing a piece at the center

we parted without without conclusion no promises were made no distance claimed and i have not forgotten

the moment you left kept stretching outward, a constant state of unrest

and your midnight finally arrives in broad daylight i stand there waiting for a darkness that never comes

and i keep resetting my hands to your hands, hand on my heart hand on your heart i waited and waited and waited and waited

You wondered where my last question came from, yes ? I will tell you, because attention ought to return as does a tide. And I will answer it, and a few more, for I am nothing if not always a little presumptuous.

It came from you. Have I not been forthright enough about my way of being ? Elusive as I am, I have never once lied about my curiosity. But is there a reason to be curious about a person at all ? I am not certain there must be. I answer to the long luminous filaments that trail from every living thing. I follow them, delight in the following, and I delight in you. But first, let us return to poetry and prose.

Prose is the faculty of mediation, yes. It sets things in sequences and keeps the writer one step back from the thing being written. Poetry, on the other hand, can be an innate way of being: feeling first becomes language, then idea, then action, the route by which the nameless thing inside us gets named so it can finally be lived. Revelation, as you tend to name it. The visibility which makes us most vulnerable is the same visibility that is the source of our strength. . . ( Perhaps that is why I have never once felt at ease with poetry; I never understood it to the extent others could, much less believed myself capable of it. )

I asked you, then, because the way one expresses is the place where they touch the world; we reach nothing directly, you and I, only ever through some form, so the form you move in is the very surface at which you become reachable at all. Do correct me if I am wrong, but your poetics does seem to be your erotics ( i.e., the grammar of how a person desires and draws near. ) This motion is what I followed, and I would not presume to name it further; I only wanted to stand at the edge of you where the rest of the world gets in.

( 🪼 )

P.s. Keep this in your inbox if you like, or set it out where others may read it. A conversation made visible is a way of letting others see you without your having to rise and announce yourself, a disclosure offered sideways for you, my friend. Besides, in my experience, it soothes some, I think, to be shown the bright thread strung between two people, to be told here is how these creatures move about one another in the dim. And it is, like so much of what I do, an invitation more than a thing done; an open hand, yours to take up or to let lie.

hello my young friend,

as often, you are right; i struggle to interpret attention as anything but control; and that is perhaps the greatest failure of my thinking. i recognize it, and yet there is very little i have managed to do about it. i am, more often than not, the deer frozen in the middle of the road, caught in the headlights. a creature of flight, made for impact.

i find what you say about form particularly seductive, that it is the surface at which one becomes reachable; what can be touched and altered, engaged with. i think you are right. i have often been tempted to imagine language as something secondary, a vehicle carrying a prior reality, but i am less certain of that now, and perhaps we never arrive at one another except through form. perhaps there is no hidden thing behind it waiting to be recovered intact. perhaps revelation is only skin deep; if that is the case, then i understand your curiosity a little better.

as you know, i have never been particularly attached to identity as a static category. continuity has always seemed less interesting to me than transformation; not necessarily because continuity does not exist, but because it explains so little. two points connected by a line tell us almost nothing about the forces acting upon them; their origins and trajectory, the movement itself.

what has surprised me, however, is that you speak very comfortably of delight, and i find myself increasingly suspicious of it. not because i think it insincere, but because delight has always struck me as an active force masquerading as a passive one. people speak of delight as though it were merely observation elevated into affection, and i am not sure that is true; attention changes things, as does admiration, as does curiosity. you say that one might delight in the traces themselves, and perhaps this is where i become predictable, because my instinct remains to ask what such delight demands in return. not because i believe it must demand something, but because i distrust interactions that appear costless on principle.

perhaps i have spent too long confusing attention with acquisition. i do not mean possession, exactly; only that to look closely at something has always felt, to me, like entering into a kind of obligation. witness has never seemed entirely innocent. to be seen is to become vulnerable to alteration, and to see another carries its own burden of responsibility. perhaps this is merely another way of saying that i have never quite managed to separate curiosity from devotion, and that is perhaps my greatest fault.

"your poetics does seem to be your erotics"..... well. if by erotics you mean the broader architecture of nearness; the manner in which one approaches, incorporates, is altered by, and attempts to know another, then i am forced to admit the resemblance is rather hard to ignore, yes. i see love as assimilation; a profound intrusion. i am never entirely sure where devotion ends and incorporation begins; covenant mistaken for consumption, perhaps. i have always considered these tendencies relatively harmless in poetry, though. one steals an image, a rhythm, a gesture, a singular perspective, to better understand it, and explore it from the inside. language is accustomed to such thefts, and poems rarely object to being inhabited. people, however, are usually less keen on allowing it. if you'd like an additional insight, perhaps i have always described intimacy in poetic terms because poetry and intimacy demand the same thing of me; the surrender of a stable boundary. both require a kind of hospitality toward alteration, and i am beginning to suspect that what i call resonance, incorporation, symbolic trespass, are simply the names i prefer to give to attachment when i mean to speak about it obliquely; when i wish to discuss desire without having to admit devotion.

yes, you are right; i do see failure everywhere.

though seeing something everywhere does not necessarily invalidate it, does it? because it is a matter of perception; it certainly says something about me, yes, but not necessarily nothing about the world.