In her book Once Upon a Time in the West, Jan Zwicky makes the distinction between lineal logic and oneiric logic. Lineal logic strings thoughts together in the same way that Newtonian physics strings events together --- one thing follows from another. In oneiric syntax, Zwicky writes, “rather than lining themselves up like railway schedules,” “events are understood to cluster, to form ecologies.”
Cause and effect are understood as interrelated
aspects of some organic state of affairs.
In oneiric syntax things hang together like families, or like water droplets in a cloud.
To understand a narrative whose syntax is lineal is to grasp that certain events are triggered by others. To understand a narrative with oneiric syntax is, by contrast, to grasp that certain types of events form families; they ‘hang with’ one another.
“Hang with” is another way to say “resonate.” Effects don’t come from causes, they cluster together through the forming of internal and external resonances. This is not to suggest the kinds of post-modern narratives that defy analysis because they present “everything everywhere all at once.” Resonance discloses wholeness.
Lyric thought has less to say and much less to tell. It doesn’t thread together events into a one dimensional rope, nor does it weave events together into a two-dimensional tapestry. Lyric thought is both polyphonic --- there are multiple lines of rhymes happening at the same time, and diachronic--- events that are separated in time resonate with earlier and later events, composing a recognizable “beat” in the same way that a sophisticated poem rhymes, and through those phonic and semantic rhythms, discloses more than it says, often, by leaving the most telling words out.
Lyric resonance means paying attention to the natural world\ and learning how to resonate with the on-goings there.
A single robin visits me down at the barn almost every day. She was there when my horse died, and the day after, and the day after that. She sings a few notes in the bittersweet that has strangled the old dead birch at the edge of the duck pond. Her song, too, is bitter-sweet--- I hear sadjoynessfullsomeness. I ask her “Have you been left behind from last autumn, or are you foraging ahead of the flock, already thinking of the coming spring?” But, because the seasons are all awack, she doesn’t know the answer either. The snow this morning is wet, and the weather is rather balmy. A new resonance is being orchestrated. The grass, happy under the warm, wet snow, probably won’t die back this winter. That’s good for the grass, but bad for hay cropping. Last year the grass in the paddock was too “rich” all year, never hardened off, so I had to fence if off from the horses. Lyric thought listens and finds the harmonies beneath the disharmonies. Like a jazz improv gone wrong for a bit, when everyone is trying to find their way home, even as home continues to move.
A single coyote has been circumventing our property all winter. I see her down in the big field when I drive into town. She makes her way through the meandering streams that etch out the wetlands in the state woodlands--- and their pathways lead directly to behind my barn. She passes by, on her way to the high open field just above. The moon follows her there, and listens to her stories. My big white dog Eiger, knows she is here, knows she has been here, and a few times he has had enough motivation to run right through the electric fence. He knows he must get up to speed, knows when to jump and shake his head, in order to minimize the shock. When he comes back, he whimpers like a baby, asking us to help him come back home. So we take his collar off, and greet him with love. He is the Great Protector. He loves his job.
When we talk about Lyric culture as “ontological design for back-loop realities” , I recommend we look carefully at the natural world, and the new kinds of resonances that are being created. Resonance is not the same as resilience, because the creatures are not interested in something as abstract as “resilience.” But, looking back at it, from the further regions of the conceptual mind, we might see in the creation of new resonance relations, the patterns we would call “resilience.” There is something about the singularity of Robin, and the singularity of the Coyote, the occassion of Robin, the occassion of Coyote, that seems significant to me, although right now I cannot make words for that right now. Except for serious and sincere, come to mind. Yes, that’s it. They are disclosing something to us. They come out into the open, by themselves to disclose something to us.
There is something about resonance and Lyric Culture that highlights this singular, the one who stands among the others. This is not collective cohesion, nor, do I think, even collective coherence (which requires a job, a task, a shared goal.) Rather it has to do with a expansive opening, in which we can gather as singulars, and disclose how really different and strange we know ourselves to be. The oboe and the lyre, sitar and the kazoo. I have come to believe that what humanity needs, is not a path toward unification, but a means for being with difference. Imagine being in a room with 20 other people, and feeling absolutely no coercion to adopt some norm. You could just stare at other people with curiosity and surprise, the way we used to stare at people in the airport, before airport life became so codified.
The Universal Chord
If we step out of our personal conventions,
and resonate with the natural, living world,
we would begin to understand the
numinous intelligence of reality.The more we trust this intelligence
the more we become nature; the more we
can dance in the causal field of creation.Nature is the universal chord.
Your self , my self, & the self of the universe
Alfred Staraat 1979 p. 12-14
In the year 1925 my family lived on a small farm in Danvers, Massachusetts. My father was chief engineer at the Salem Electric Light Company. He had neither the time nor the inclination to work the land, but the farm was a pleasant place for the children in the family---two older sisters and a younger brother besides myself. I was ten years old that summer and thoroughly enjoying my love affair with the world.
One pleasant moonlit night I responded to the call of some inner urge for adventure by climbing out of my bedroom window to the roof of the porch just below. From there, as I knew from many past excursions, it was easy to cross over the top of a couple of intervening sheds and reach the edge of the roof of the big barn. Soon I was up on the ridgepole of that tall building, and I sat down feeling that I was at the highest point in all creation. The old farmhouse and the outbuildings were at my back and before me stretched low rolling fields toward a distant stand of trees and then rising hills. The air was clear and still. Moonlight washed out most of the stars and illuminated the scene. Below me Grunt, our pet pig, was making snuffling noises in his pen.
As I sat quietly there on the roof of the barn I began to notice a strange transformation coming over everything I could see. Things were becoming luminous before my eyes. They shone from within, glowing with light in a riot of colors that continuously increased in intensity. It was as if the grass of the fields, the brown fences, the red barn that belonged to our neighbor, the white walls and green roof of our own house when I turned to look back---as if they all were made of stained glass with sunlight shining through them.
As this inner light grew brighter I noticed that it pulsed with a steady rhythm that appeared to me to be the beating of some gigantic heart, as if it were the life-throb of the Self of the World. The scene became a living, scintillating dance of glory---everything beautiful and everything just right in relation to everything else. The very darkness of the distant trees and hills became shining purple and blue.
Then something more strange happened. While still retaining awareness as an individual, the sense of “me” at a fixed location in space and time expanded into less limited conscious perception. I can try to suggest what happened by saying that there was a shift of identity from the self of an observer to all that was there to be observed. It was seeing without any specific person doing the seeing from any particular perspective. The whole circle of the horizon was before my eyes simultaneously.
My personal life became universal life. The rhythm of the luminous pulse beat was the surging rhythm of my own vital processes which had become identical with inner shaping and sustaining power of all creation. I could feel directly the varian urges, strivings and relationships of the different forms of the one limitless life. I felt in a tree its love for the earth and air; the holding-on of fence posts; the grass reaching toward the light; all things gathered and help in supporting embrace of the earth. I was also sensitive to conflict among the various forms, where life struggled with life and one kind of existence was absorbed into another kind. But the opposing tensions was experienced as one hears dissonant chords in great music which add to the beauty as they are resolved into harmony.
How long the experience lasted I cannot say, but eventually the process reversed itself. My conscious awareness took up again the perspective of a particular location on the roof of the barn. The light of glory faded. My seeing became natural human vision again and I had returned to the sensory limitations of a little boy with an aching bottom from sitting for some unknow length of time on the ridgepole of the barn roof.
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