(Or, why, addicted as I am to the thrill of send or post, the flash of subject and time stamp, why I wish I could send you letters, so it would be your whole hand holding these dull thoughts and not just one finger moving a mouse.)
In Slowness Milan Kundera writes “Speed is a form of ecstasy“” Computer, car, etc.–it is ecstasy when you can forget you have or need a body.
One New Year’s Eve, my mother and I mingled with the residents of a senior citizen’s apartment complex. In the “banquet” room, a few couples sashayed to a slow band. But since the men were few and the women wistful, the night evolved into group dances. Electric slide sort of dances. Even that limbo song, with a limbo stick, though no one went very low. Elderly people dancing–the slowness of their twists and turns–you can’t forget you have a body watching them.
The opposite feeling comes when driving up and down the Hollywood Hills, crossing Mulholland Drive–the only place I’ve seen the night sky below me, where outer space is a valley of novas–a post-lyrical distance world? I would be weightless and carless–
–until the car was stalling, and slowing, and I had to will each crank of the engine.
These seem to me today to be in the space, the limbo, between the body and mind.
“There is space enough in the finger moving across a back,” writes Eva Runefelt in “The Slowness.” Then, a few lines later, “How far in does the slowness go?”
Sometimes I like poems that send me back in, in, in–not out to the next thing, the next line–with all the while each bright movement presaging a kind of dying.
In his poem Novas, Ryan Flaherty writes, “all sentences / are cranks of the engine“”
His poem is a dying star, “the dull one,” talking as it fades in the space between the body and the mind.
“Early in my dullery,” says the nova, “I put a pebble under my tongue and said: no pebble, no pebble, no pebble.”