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some tastes also have the taste of past tastings.
this hot mulled cider is like that. it tastes of juicy
autumn apples – ones upstate new york
i picked once. it tastes of their grit, their skin,
their way of shining in the slightly dulled autumn
air breezing between stalls around fourteenth street.
i can taste the spices, cinnamon chief among them,
flirting with each other, and me. it is so hot i almost
put it back down, wait for it to cool off, but it smells
so delicious; familiar. i take one more taste, somehow
a sad taste. it tastes just as it's tasted before
only now something else— it tastes now
also of that past tasting. i can taste not only that i have
known this taste before: i can also taste that when.
i relive her look in this taste, the way she watched me
before things were clear, uncloaking myself
with the smell of the cider between us, no space
and uncomfortable stools. i can taste my desire
just to entwine a bit, perhaps our bodies hinting
toward intercourse, to the meaning of our dancing.
it tastes so strongly of that hiddenness she left for me
to move me more slowly into her, to make my own
sharing lush with attention, the weight of the thing,
the thing shared silently between us, the poem;
i taste now her refusal to recite that poem aloud
as she quietly muttered it to herself, knowing a poem
must be spoken. i'm tasting the icy chill of approaching
wintertime through the opened and reopened door,
the taste of a scarf and a cute hat, and especially
above all else, i taste in this familiar taste, her look
shyly out from behind whatever it was there between us
birthing love out of lust, birthing intimacy out of distance,
giving birth out from herself to a kind of me— the way
she looked at me when she let me look at her
and when she let her look mirror my need to see,
the intimation of some me-to-be, that hint, that taste.
yet i also taste a different tasting. her look was absent,
that i may never see her eyes again. waiting, drinking
hot mulled cider that i wished to be drinking with her,
and though i can taste that earlier taste now, and her look
and all that subtle starving presence, never almost,
i can taste, almost came. and now perhaps that never
has arrived. and yet, unfortunately, i can taste it
the never-againness of this taste i taste in this very mug.
COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET
For some interesting reason, James’ `The Taste of Past Tastings’ reminded me of a poem I wrote a few years back, called `The Closet.’ Perhaps the places we go from within recalled for me the closet mind from which memories become imprinted. Or perhaps because of these lines:
Dark spaces of mind, much like my closet
That I, at times, keep closed from the world
Of many closets, where other minds
Like and unlike mine, hold onto things
They think they need but don't
Things they need to let go of, but can't
Because those things are memories
That, at times, beg to be released
But won't because loss like a mirror
Is harder to look into than held onto
And I’m also thinking about Emily’s, at best, ambivalent relationship with theory and wanting to help her see the power of a theoretical mode that fits so exquisitely into her way of being in the world with her mind, a mode that is actually the method I use to unstick myself from the stickiness and rigidity of conventional presentations of reality. It is a method of suspicion of all presentations that moves within consciousness with a critical eye. Whereas both ordinary thinking and conventional theory tend to build upon pre-given systems (Emily’s greatest critique), this new theoretical method takes the given rules of meaning (and rules of meaning) and interrogates them as an incessant critique (hence, my annoying nature and interminable questioning, Who is the authority? :). For example, when a proposition is stated, rather than helping to make matters comprehensible according to public (or professional) criteria, this method interrogates experiences and understandings in an effort to achieve awareness of an ultimate ground or horizon of meaningfulness, even though it ascribes to the presupposition that there is no ultimate truth to be found (in the conceptual sense). In this way, one finds a kind of “curative shifting” towards misunderstandings. We have used the term “sublation” on this blog of which this method seems to be describing.
Though making use of a method of negation, this is not a script for a nihilism that rejects truth in any form. As the analyst and theorist, Charles Spezzano, put it, "truth emerges out of our conversations and confrontations, remains the truth for a time because no one can talk about the matter at hand in a more useful and compelling way, and then becomes not true or an irrelevant truth because someone does find another way to talk about the same matter that now seems more useful and more compelling." (italics mine)
But, before we can even think about approaching thought, ideas, beliefs, thinking, etc. in this kind of way, we first have to acknowledge our closet minds, that is, that we are interior beings of meaning, understanding, interpretation and communication who, because of the malleability of mind, have theunalienable tendency to mistake representation as reality. These are the structures of consciousness that partly comprise the closet mind.
The Closet
I thought of writing about a closet; a poem
I will write then keep on the outside
Of my thoughts to share with others
And me, who I might express
Inner things from the small, sometimes
Dark spaces of mind, much like my closet
That I, at times, keep closed from the world
Of many closets, where other minds
Like and unlike mine, hold onto things
They think they need but don't
Things they need to let go of, but can't
Because those things are memories
That, at times, beg to be released
But won't because loss like a mirror
Is harder to look into than held onto
And, in some mysterious way, like a crystal
Or stone, if held onto long enough will bring
Back what was lost like all things packed
Away in the closet. My mind holds onto
Closet things, things that close the mind
Off even from itself, like compartments
That preserve the concealed desires
And dreams that perhaps remain inside
And never like snow get off the ground
Or outside and onto the ground of experience
Nor the one desire that craves to unconceal
The closet things and open itself to the light
That brings with it like steps a view of all there
Is to offer to make this life a bit easier-- to reach
The cupboard or change a bulb, clean a window
Hang a rack, roll out the vacuum to vacuum the rug
Take out the basket to load the wash--
Or lift out the photo album, with presence
And care, and slowly look through a history
Of snapshots--of an old garden an old house
An old relationship where two people deeply
In love grow the garden, hang the racks, change
The light bulbs, vacuum the rug, and make
Love while cleaning out the closet.
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