Heiko Recktenwald wrote:
>
> > stop being a poet? Its impossible. Theres a trick to not losing
> > poetry, its called writing it down. Scratch it into wood.
>
> But this "writing it down" makes it very different. Live and art, maybe
> this was much different before t6he invention of letters.
>
> H.
I've got some bits out of a series re the Norse invention-of-letters story,
viz:
AK
In the Car #8: Unnatural Writing
These beings are not us, we see them from outside their skin, rooted,
green, breathing what we exhale.
In an old story, the first letters fell from trees. Twigs lay on the duff
in signifying angles, but no one could see it. When the one-eyed man hung
himself on the ash tree, his terrible pain made him see meaning in the
scribble of fallen wood below him.
For so long people could only build those forms that they could remember,
or that the land or their need told them to make. To be able to throw
thoughts, to store them--it was amazing what the sticks could do. Steadily,
present perception grew weaker as the past swelled, bound up in those nets
of lines, hoarded for a bleak day.
The sticks in the woods still signify, talking to themselves.
In the Car #9: One Damn Thing After Another
In the land of the goddess
there are no clocks. It's the
same thing today as it was tomorrow
at this time.
Yesterday doesn't call,
plaintive and lost,
because it's still here.
But when the sky burns the earth, the failure of the grass
is the beginning of need.
When the sky then inquires inhabitants
and they begin to whisper insults, finally
finality unravels, finally
there is a beginning,
and then a middle, and another beginning,
and an end, and
a beginning.
Soon, it's all beginnings
and nothing is ever enough.
And nothing never happens
again.
In the Car #10: Another Damn Thing After the One
Odin makes stories about himself, but
doesn't seem to want to hear them aloud. And
in them, he's never himself. He's
a one-eyed stranger whose name means Poison,
a lank-haired man in a dark cloak, no one
you'd trust, no
heroic figure.
He's made sacrifices, sure, but
on his own terms.
When he gave himself to himself, hanging on the tree like
a sacrificed stallion, seeing the first written words on the ground figured
with pain,
when he tore out his eye for foresight,
he knows what he's doing.
Something must be torn.
This is a man who brings, as a gift
to the goddess before him,
loss, poison, pain, defeat, and the means to record
the struggle against them.
It's everything the world holds,
but it's a paltry gift,
all the same.
Eventually it'll be worn out and thrown away.
