Sunday 9 January 2011

Squirrel in snow (2)

The colors are not out there in the world (as classical theory held) nor an automatic correlate of wavelength - Oliver Sacks

When the squirrel ran away
From the tree in the snow
With sonance of the fall

As vibration of air in her ear
Did this lessen
And then fade away?

Or was it as when
She turned to look back
And saw that the snow

Had covered her steps;
And that she, the snow
And the tree were now black?
______
gw2011

2 comments:

  1. I always find this idea that if there is noone there to see something it is not there rather hard to comprehend!
    Dominic plies me with Zen stories and books like Zen Flesh Zen Bones but maybe I am a bit too down to earth.
    We may not see the squirrel on the bird table but we can see his footmarks in the snow.
    Have you still snow there?

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  2. Hello Pat, I'm exploring the zen paradox with my (so far) 2 squirrel and the 2 robin poems in order to come to understand it more. Oliver Sacks' story of his patient the colorblind painter is where I started. It's in his book An Anthropologist on Mars. We are, not seeing 'footmarks in the snow' because we are actually not seeing anything. We are inputting dark information into the brain which is deciphering it and giving the viewer the image of the 'footmarks in the snow'. So the next logical step is to establish who the 'viewer' is. The poems point to the similar process with sound. Disturbance in the air becomes the crash of a tree falling, or the snow of a robin singing. This leads us to explore why 96% of the universe is so-called dark matter and why the universe expands. Might it not be that it must expand to accommodate the new information it continues to receive from the unknown, the dark matter, via its conscious observers? But here I may be getting ahead of myself.
    Our snow is the dregs. We are now bathed in dank mist.

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