The Hand Holds the Night by a Thread

A Thousand-And-One-Nights & Twenty-Four Days by Josh Goldberg (Boulder: Albion-Andalus, 2020.)

Author’s Preface:

Night-conscious. Striking a lunar nerve. An alchemy denying any literalism or one-sidedness. Freely mining, hotly heating, quickly smelting, forging and annealing; impatiently infusing, evacuating, coloring, mixing, distilling. Not to let it cool, not yet.

A pharmakon of image-words. Poison and remedy. States of soul. Events touched and seen. Corrosive, heavy, sweating yet salvific. Dreaming the poem along, a night song stammering. Demanding a perplexed contemplation so the image won’t disappear into generality. Turning kaleidoscopic meaning-patterns. Rectifying a language that is one’s own.

The night sea journey that begins at the edges. Not in the upper world of Day. Subterranean, self-sustaining, moving downhill to the protean darkness, to the black sun of our own roasting, the fierce heat of fine ash. A lunatic nigredo, a night radix deconstructing reason and logic urging instead fluidity and downflow. The world of archetypes, psyche, imaginal fields.

One need not be deterred by the proliferation of images or paths the lines may take. Seeking inspiration in the unconstrained undulations, their disjunctive and separate geographies. Hyphenated, clipped, or complete each line is pure stream. Thoughts, observations, moods, emotions.

Here is not the place to say whether A Thousand-and-One-Nights unifies or dissociates the personality, maps any strata of the subconscious. The void has been sighted. The imaginal field of immanence as a functioning faculty where two or more distant realities are juxtaposed. The more naturally distant in time and space, the more suggestive.

Writing one or two lines each night carefully so that the automatic flux does not forfeit authenticity. Ignoring what was produced the previous night to maintain the viridity of the images. The only “negotiation”: continue the line the following night, if need be.

Single lines split and rejoined. Read together, apart from the fragments of an ancient text under a lunatic moon. Finding congruity in incongruity, intersecting overtones, unexpected changes in trajectory.

A double space disrupts the line between two or three images. Disruptions or markers of equivalence transition, pause, or contrast images allowing flexibility of meaning, a “similarity between dissimilar things” (Freud).

Each line pursues the illogical, hurls toward the ambivalence of possibility. Taut or loose, fragmented or isolated the line cut to minimalist precision. The Struggle is “to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind” (Kerouac). First thoughts, ecstatic ardor, non-discriminatory intoxication. Elude the controls of thought, logic, and propriety. “Submission to everything, open, listening” (Kerouac). Utilitarian perceptions are disoriented yet tangible. But not of an intellectual, rational order.

Pinwheels of grace-spun images rotating on their small hinges in a single line.