Planetary Motions

This post is a draft of the introductory essay to Planetary Motions, a collection of new poems whose publication (from Giant Steps) is scheduled for June.



The planets were so-called because the name signified in Greek “wanderers,” and Mars and Venus, unlike the fixed stars, seemed to ramble about aimless in the heavens. From a later heliocentric perspective, however, the movements of these heavenly bodies appear elegant and predictable. I can conceive a day that scientists might announce that Venus and the rest were vagabonding after all and the regularities the astronomers had reported were simply mirror images reflecting their own minds in their more rational, if operatically grand, moments.

My own course pretends to little design. The chaos theorists have shown, however, that systems lurk even in what is apparently arbitrary, and, of course, all patterns break up when viewed from a different angle or a slightly altered consciousness. How do I happen to dwell in this town? I simply find myself here. Why do I believe as I do? Because of everything that has come before. Course of study, course of life make little difference in the great tidal movements of mind which are likely in the end to resemble the slow unfolding of a tree’s shape over decades, the distribution of stars in the sky, or the histories of slugs and snails told in silvery mucus.

The boldest claim I would make for the driftings of the consciousness I know best is similar to that made by Marcus Aurelius for what he saw before him on the table: “some splits appear in the crust of baking bread, and these have nothing to do with the baker’s plan, yet these have always a certain rightness.” A rightness like that of the shore-marks of the sea’s waves, or the undulations wrought in the Sahara’s sands by wind, or the swirls and stripes on my tabby’s back.

These things, though, are untouched by intention, so a work of art represents always its object, not only transformed by the conventions of human senses and brains, but then further shaped by desire, fear, and vision. Poetic events, like those observed on the quantum level, come into existence only when observed.

Everything is a matter of aesthetics in the end. Ethics requires defining what sort of a person one would find it becoming to be. Viciousness is quite simply ugly. My ideologies resemble my home’s interior decoration though the former are more easily portable. Each person constructs a nest of what seems right and judges others for their taste rather than their ratiocination, and this procedure is quite in order for we know what we like and must settle for that as a human sort of Truth. Poems and other forms of art are naked about this. As Sidney said, the “Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” A few hundred years later, Keats called a similar willingness to suspend “any irritable reaching after fact and reason” Negative Capability. A millennium and a half earlier another writer with medical training, Sextus Empiricus, had recommended ἐποχή, withholding judgement on all issues, as the likeliest path to serenity.

Lacking a destination might seem to some to entail lacking a purpose, yet, though miles behind, I would like to think that I follow the footsteps of Fa Yen who, when he declared that he was on a pilgrimage without a destination, wandering without goal, was assured by master Kuei Ch'in that such undirected movement was exactly right whereupon Fa Yen attained enlightenment. I can promise no such reward, only a few snapshots of consciousness reflecting glints of shattered truth which I wave in the dark like a blessedly naïve child with a sparkler the bright lights of which provide a sort of promise in spite of their evanescence. Looking then down, a crystal ball is surely available in the reflections and refractions of every puddle in the gutter!






This story I paraphrase is case 20 of the Cóngróng lù, or Book of Equanimity by Wansong Xingxiu, in Japanese called the Shōyōroku.