Confinement
by Adam Staley Groves
The naturalist is a concept. It is a human mode, a subject. This concept is a thought about thinking. By thinking, what do I mean? Simply, as revealed to me: Truth. It’s not the truth found through a concept. No concept of consciousness shall lead there.
A naturalist will transform into an idealist. An idealist will transform into a realist. This takes place over many lives and in one, for some.
It should be clarified that there are proto-concepts, small modalities, experiences, and memories. The truth threads through all of these. This is the way of the child. It is the child’s way until the concept has reached a full body. You can recognize this in a child who collects dirt on itself, shaped by the dirt and parental scrubbing.
From there on it is a body within and about the human body. A human body, brain-bound and fleshed. I remember my parents. Yet the body, which permeates the concept too, surrounds it, with space; moves through, with a water. I am remarking of the mind.
According to the mind concepts which come to form the heroic body are ever only parts. Like a blanket, the mind covers and keeps them. Heat seeps between this body and its dream shield. Sometimes, a dream shielding, other times dream wielding.
Caught between sleep and consciousness, humans are never truly heroes. Never fully a naturalist, idealist, or realist. The body concept starts in parts and ends this way, naturally speaking.
The naturalist can never be its concept. Once it has become so, it is most likely an idealist. Sentiment, backward looking, attempting to collect what a constant collision has distributed to history; the natural idealist is what it means to be living-torn-apart. Celan’s stone scree. Time would seem to run out, but time is still questionable. Torn apart—simply said—is the truth of any concept. They shall be collected, these parts, but only give rise to belief in a truth now outside of truth. If one is hard pressed, to be pleased to pieces, they transform. For looking back seems to at once be looking forward. Disillusionment—where am I going? Disoriented. Going nowhere with Benjamin.
The corpse of the imagination is the concept of any realist. They seek this achievement. The ideas of the past inform the past is no longer important, it was decided, but not for the idealist or naturalist, given. Deciding not to look forward or backward, this would-be hero looks smaller and thus becomes smaller; inward to the point of outward violence. Gods drop like sparks shower. It’s independence day, here or there, fireworks are surface to air after all.
The inward look is not the same as the outbound of an inward truth. It pushes against every truth thread of every concept. Realists may sever as many threads as possible, to unearth, so to speak, and conceptualize, to be sure, every appearance. For magnitude is taken with such ferocity that the time of death of the imagination may be declared as our precise moment of liberation. From what? From naturalist and idealist alike. Open every gate once closed.
This realist has come to sever the concepts of predecessor modalities, which means to destroy its own foundation. Yet to be sure, with the world in pieces, it was now a world of chaos. The idealist world torn apart and put back into national concepts, which makes little difference. The naturalist’s sensibility, to feel without depending on a knowledge, was ripped apart from incredible magnitudes; is discredited but politically salient.
The idealist mopes. Their righteous solution and common sense a faulty dyad for a subject. And so too does a realist face a violence of inward striking. Having embedded positivity into everything packaged into a concept, they now face the hero. A fourth hero.
Within the realistic dreaming of the day, many whisper about this hero.
Having a corpse for imagination, the proto-concepts of this novel hero are to be found in living and dead bodies; living together, as one. Tearing apart and recombining.
Yet a constant shall be set here. That is, my incomplete concept states despair and fulfillment are the vagaries of an uncolored, unsounding hue. No mode is better. No explanation or polemic suffices. Belief is a make-up. Faith is deadly.
To deal with this hero, the hero which whispers to us, and is whispered of, requires imagination. This imagination is set free but dried up into conceptual parts. These instructions are distributed throughout the world, usually in the form of letters and words, say, as the poems of Pessoa.
Image: This Way Up by LivGreen on Flickr (cc).
About the Author:
Adam Staley Groves’s research focuses on the “theory of poetry” of Wallace Stevens and other modernist poets. He is a teaching fellow at Tembusu College, National University of Singapore.
