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🦋 Poetic process: Mute sound and fury

genesis: I was sitting in the theater Friday afternoon with Sylvia waiting for the matinée (the spellbinding percussion ballet presentation of Mulan by the 北京红樱束打击乐团有限公司) to start -- when something struck me about Faulkner/Shakespeare's line that life is a "tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," to wit that what if the idiot has stage fright or writer's block, what if his narrative remains untold, what can it then signify? Is its meaningless anger rendered all-consuming by its silence, its unspokenness?

I came up with a pretty striking first line on the spot and (amazingly) remembered it later on when I had the pen and paper to hand; and the rough draft and revisions and the commentary seemed to flow pretty smoothly, naturally from the pen to the pad.

(and with that by way of introduction,) this is:

posted afternoon of Saturday, December 29th, 2012
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In the beginning chaos roiled and scrambled ,but crisis draws the hero's alchemic change to name the world

posted afternoon of December 29th, 2012 by L Young

So here's the plan, 4 short chapters -- Mute, Voice, Song, Sleep

posted evening of December 29th, 2012 by Jeremy

Mute

his story still untold, it's full of silent fury
and significance and void
mute like some magnificent android, and so
the idiot recounts, he counts
he builds up poetry and mountains
crumbling pottery
shards of steel, silent fountains
distant voices
see him stuttering and pale and seeking
shelter from the storm of sorrow
shattering, resonant, freaking out
about the null tomorrow
and his idiotic legacy
comatose, potential
inside the eyelids snaky purple patterns weave all hectic and the
syllables shift and merge electric
inside the idiot's eyelids

the idiot wind-up's found his tongue, his sound, he sighs
and hesitant at first he tries to flesh out some good story
and his wound-up spring uncoils, relaxes -- listen to him now, now see how surely in the end,
this craving, craving for a narrative, an order
which we've agreed for now to call consciousness
is nothing more than slow decay
a gradual unfolding into languor, into entropy
The words tumble out of his wind-up mouth
and he pries, he tries, inquires, probes the void of inner
meditation, gleaming immaculate clockwork -- but the
automated web of narrative unravels in the telling,
thread caught on some miscalculated bearing point

posted evening of December 30th, 2012 by Jeremy

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