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Heliopause

At the edge of the solar system a spacecraft named New Horizons just woke up. It slept for nearly three billion miles and now it’s opening its eyes to take photos of Pluto. Astronomers are hopeful to find craters, mountains. Any features clearly seen would please, as the best photos we now have show only a blurry rock.

Maybe they’ll find rings, my favorite planetary feature.

Πλοῦτος means wealth. Rings are a form of wealth, and I like to think of Pluto circled by the very thing that typifies the god for which the planet is named. I like to think the rings might ring and that New Horizons has ears and not just eyes and will send us music back from the very edge, the outermost circle, of our sun’s influence.

One way to consider a poem’s relationship to itself: it tries to discover its own limit so that it can fill the shape with song. There are other ways, but I know them less well.

George Oppen: “If there is another horizon, I haven’t seen it.” Maybe I’m misquoting.

How likely is it, that in seeking out some utmost edge, the very limit of sound, and using sounds to arrive there, that I will not deceive myself just to feel I’ve arrived. And how would I even know.

Prufrock twice being told:

That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.

I remember being an undergraduate, writing my honors thesis. As in high school when, I wrote a term paper on existentialism for which I received a failing grade for having misspelled the word “consciousness” throughout, I was reaching past my grasp. The topic: Czeslaw Milosz and Eschatology. I was curious about the end of time, I suppose, not because it offered some glimpse into heaven, but, heathen that I was, because it promised return to the world before time began, moment of origin, when the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Existence before existence occurred. I read an essay by Paul Ricoeur about language and limits, and in it I came upon a sentence that so filled me with the sense of truth that I quickly memorized it. When I saw Kristy on campus I hurried to her to recite it, but I couldn’t find the exact order of the words, just some semblance of what they meant, enough to convey a sense, but I wanted it exactly, and grew angry, depressed, felt some rage at my own failure, that a sentence memorized just two hours before had already loosed itself from my hold, and I felt stupid, filled with some drift of loathing that only now I realize was shame. It was an odd reaction to have; it should have taught me something about myself; it didn’t. Now I don’t remember even the gist of the sentence that meant so much to me I hated myself for failing it. Not even a syllable remains. Just some shame as faint now as a scent remembered years later from an earlier day.

I do recall that Ricoeur suggested that certain figures of speech in the Bible, notably paradox and metaphor, functioned to riddle the rational mind and take a reader to that most uncomfortable of horizons in which one feels the thing that cannot be said.

Then you sort of say it anyway.

It’s hard to put your ear against a horizon and listen to what speaks from the other side. The horizon likes to retreat. And there’s no barrier, no membrane, no page, no film, no pane, no nothing, to mark as other the other side.

Then you sort of wonder if the horizon is the farthest line or the nearest, the edge of what can be seen, or the edge of the eye that does the seeing. Or is it the separation between.

Simone Weil: “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with God. Every separation is a link.”

I think I agree.

But you have to go knocking everywhere, just knocking your hand against the air, if the sky is the prison though we cannot see the wall; and then we do not know how to listen because we do not know where to knock, or if we’re knocking.

Seen from afar it looks like a ritual gesture of the ancient world, a kind of simple dance: a step, the hand knocks in four directions, a step, the hand knocks in four directions.

It doesn’t feel like faith, but it’s a method.

A poem considers the situation and tries to offer a wall.

Wittgenstein writes:

To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he has given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.

Prufrock twice being told:

That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.

How childish it is to see it as I do, a spacecraft like a child opening its eyes. Solar panels rubbing the sand out of the sensors.

It’s very lonely out there. That’s why the baby in her crib reaches up at night for the rings spinning on the mobile.

Properly seen, every word of these sentences has been used without having given meaning to certain signs.

This past summer Voyager 1 left the solar system. It is beyond the reach of the sun’s gravity, and what light it now gives is no brighter than any other star Voyager can see. Like a mystic who has wandered away from his wealth, it has entered into desert places to feel nothing so deeply a new influence might be found. This space is called the heliopause. Voyager is the only made-thing that has crossed the limit. It can send no word back about its experience. Such a strange, sad poem.

Existing wherein it cannot speak.

Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

It doesn’t feel like poetry, but it is the only strictly correct method.