Imagining Starry
The place of language is the place between me
and the world of presences I have lost
-- complex country, not flat. Its elements free-
float, coherent for luck to come across;
its lines cure as in a mental orrery
implicit with stars in active orbit,
only their slowness or swiftness lost to sense.
The will dissolves here. It becomes the infinite
air of imagination that stirs immense
among losses and leaves me less desolate.
Breathing it I spot a sentence or a name,
a rescuer, charted for recovery,
to speak against the daily sinking flame
& the shrinking waters of the mortal sea.
—Marie Ponsot
Easy: Poems (2009)
COMMENTARY
“. . . [P]articipation in the nonexistent reality of the ground is participation in the timeless; the consciousness of the ground is the area of reality where the timeless reaches into time. Where, then, does the existential tension belong? To time with its ‘post-,’ or to the timeless where presumably there is no ‘post-‘?
"The experience of a reality intermediate between the two poles is excellently symbolized by two passages from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: ‘History is a pattern of timeless moments’; and ‘the point of intersection of the timeless with time.’ To express the same experience of reality, Plato has developed the symbol of the metaxy, of the In-Between, in the sense of a reality that partakes of both time and eternity, and therefore, does not wholly belong to the one or the other.
"There appears to be a flow of existence that is not existence in time. Since modern philosophy has not developed a vocabulary for describing the metaxy, I shall use the term presence to denote the point of intersection in man’s existence; and the term flow of presence to denote the dimension of existence that is, and is not, time. The question will then arise, what sense the symbol ‘post-‘ does make if history is a flow of presence; and inversely, what sense the symbol ‘presence’ does make if the presence of intersection is a time-like flow.” Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 ( CW Vol. 12), 77.