CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Breathing Room Martine Bellen

Breathing Room Instruments of music and surgery, Statues of birds and kings, Chapters illuminated by gaslight:                       Visual features differentiated in space, not time. I’m reading a book about monkeys and their languages. Did you know With their innumerable dialects, most comprehend Each other no better than you and I? When a tongue functions as a contour seen as boundary. The difference between centrality and infinity. Because of internal contradictions of love I believe in a host of unlikely divinities.                       A scene shifts from dream-room to living Room. Living room to cubist painting.                                                                In simple isometric Rectangles.                       The balance of immutable force. A surface is a translation of a three-dimensional image. Some parts must be excluded. Distance                                                                Between a window and its view                                                                On the vertical axis. This is where we enter the room—living, breathing.                                                                                    The room we inhabit Has the appearance of being trustworthy. We believe Its space will not dissolve                                       Like the hotel lobby in which we’re waiting.                       Familiar landscape                       Mother’s womb—forgotten, then remembered viscerally                                      As though we had been there only last Sunday. Reading From the Book of Genesis.                                       Unlike the moon seen through reflection,    The moon in the womb is an umbilical connection            To a web, network of our past lives,                                       And deflected moonlight stretches across the lake.            Putty nosed monkeys string together utterances. The principal locus of repulsion and attraction. One’s death                                                                                                  Firmly anchored                                                                             In the present.                                         To step on a isolate shadow,                                                     A shadow pierced by a knife,                                                                                              Or buried with a corpse. One does not sleep at night / delusory state / One does not enter a village that’s near a road. The devil is a kidnapper with a flair for the dramatic. The devil will snuff out she who reveals her heart-line. My revolver was removed from a drawer By a corporal spirit with no interior perception. Airy construction or Paper as material on which music moves.            Cellophane thunder, lightning bolt.            Cello broke dawn. April 1920, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein met:            Compression of heat core increases luminosity            When two shapes of varying densities collide. In medieval cosmology, idols are the rupture between mind and nature, Thinking and being, a mirror eclipsed by variation in space, How one experiences separation from the body When he is in the process of leaving it, No longer recognizing the out-of-date monkey suit. As though the body is a jug filled to the brim with water When the sky cries Raining cats and dogs The whole comprised of oscillating parts In varying states of coming and going. 1931 Einstein asked Freud if peace is possible. Considering:  Attraction and repulsion                       Love and its opposite                       The 32 winds that motivate man                       And an inwardly-turned death instinct. This Sunday, 27 lights were extinguished in Iraq While I was reading a book on Diana monkeys. Freud concluded that the impulse toward cultural development Is compelled to elevate us into pacifists. As though time were linear and entropy didn’t accelerate At the speed of evolution. Look up! No clouds— Bodies floating among us, toward us,                                                            Never the same moment twice                                               & each new lake                                                            Occupies non-Euclidean space. I will take my book and go for a boat ride In an ever-expanding, multidirectional body of water. □