Monday, August 17, 2015

Negative Narrative Space

don't mean 'negative'
As in pessimistic
Or bad
Or gloomy.

I'm talking about the voids
between the elements that usually command our attention
as the center of illustrative or musical or written creation.

This negative space
is what gives us the two ways 
or more
of viewing this optical illusion:



source here

It is what makes the chalice in The Davinci Code movie 
(as well as the book,
presumably,
I imagine in the void of my
own literary ignorance):

Source here.


It is the silence
of a Buddhist meditation.

It is what makes Miles Davis cooler
than what Billy Madison thinks 
because he knows where to

pause

(unlike my own
empty reasoning).



This in-between state is
perhaps one of the only things
that could travel
faster than light



and also hold
the intriguing capacity
of conveying
infinitely more
and infinitely more diverse
messages
than can be confined
in one finite communicative transmission
of any substance.

It's the untold portions of the stories,
the windows positioned within the created architecture,
where we find both
egress from our own minds
and entrance into another world
of multifarious variety.

For example,
I imagine
what Obi-Wan Kenobi ate
all those long years on Tatooine
and how he knew
he would turn a ghostly blue
upon Darth Vader's final hew. 

And I try to feel
the wind through the dry grass,
the accumulating perspective of identity
and its accompanying sense of forboding
that isn't included
in Luke 5:16.


And perhaps if I pause long enough

2 comments:

  1. I love that the labels for this are life, religious, and star wars :) Also, I like that you're doing a mixed media poem, complete with images and videos

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  2. Thanks! I haven't done a mixed media in a while, so I thought it would be fun. It is rather crazy how often Star Wars shows up in my poems.

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