On the Boulder
Begin with the proposition that the boulder is not a mountain. That you are not so relatively small. The proposition that the boulder is not a mountain locates itself in space where the body is: arms reaching, fingers outstretched, toes secured in familiar footholds; familiarity through the matter of scale. The proposition cannot be conceived as an abstraction. The matter of scale is living, lichen-covered, crevices are spider-threaded. If you were here long enough you could learn to tell time by the shadows, but in that case there would be no point to telling time.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein tells us that the world is all that is the case. He presents a voice as solid as the boulder, but he does not tell us what then can stand against the world; if the world is all that is the case, whatever could stand against it is enfolded into it, a cosmic dough that is the case. The aged oak tree that stands against the boulder presents its own aphorism for reality: is the tree partly uprooted because it has grown into the boulder, or by an accident of lightning has the boulder been chosen for its support? Love loss.
The lichen spots seem like stains, only if viewed in a certain light—can we resist any and all attempts to pattern, to configure, to hypothesize, to humanize, to animalize? (The proposition is a kind of experiment). Perhaps each lichen mark is a window opened out onto the surface of the boulder; a solid window. “In the atomic fact the objects are combined in a definite way.” Metal bolts could and have been pounded in in sequence until the boulder cleaves (a technique of old). It would fracture into two, unlike the lichen that are already two, in harmony with their nature: algae and fungus, starburst and flange. At which point does any given bifurcation begin?
The boulder is a cornerstone that once belonged to a temple that once belonged to a culture that lived long ago, say. Couldn’t we just say the boulder once belonged? The forgotten facts of when and where serve as distractions to belonging. There is only: belonging, or not belonging. Yet what is belonging, be-longing, apart from what belongs? I didn’t mention that the ancient culture belonged to the world, which belongs to the earth, which belongs to the solar system and universe—why were these additions extraneous—why did they not appear instead as immediately relevant? Because they are distant and I happen to be sitting on the boulder, my legs slightly stiff, the birds chirping, small flies drawing near my mouth? The boulder can be an uncomfortable place to play or write. Hymnals I overheard them singing as I to myself wrote in the voice of my own consciousness without writing anything down, above, in the apartment, at the holidays which every year are a reminder of everything missing in my life that could not be more precise, family singing I could never sing.
Because although I am part of the universe it can never seem to me near at hand—must it, despite imagination’s capaciousness, be always grasped in terms of some other thing, clothed in a metaphor, or bemused as the spider threads between the cracks in the boulder which seem to hold everything together for whomever weaves the web. Perhaps some thoughts (e.g. of time) can only be expressed through metaphor? Or: “The world is independent of my will”; “The contemplation of the world sub species aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole”; “The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.” Trace each aphorism as if it’s a grave rubbing and uncover some metaphor otherwise invisible. Brownstone angels.
In the Upanishads you find the metaphor of a spider weaving a web as a metaphor for all being, it is Brahman self-contained but expressed in terms of phenomenal reality, Saguna Brahman. Physically, a song from a throat is simply a sonic vibration articulated by the thyroarytenoid folds in the larynx; socially a song is a binding together, a belonging, a carrel or a choral overheard by this something that defies it, is/was not part of it. Angels in a hierarchy of their dominion, golden braided singing ever upwards, each aware of the exact place of the other. Define a person then who doesn’t belong as disharmonious.
Wittgenstein thought that propositions picture the world—there was an isomorphism (how vague!) between the constituents of a proposition and real items in the world. But if you wanted to be exact, wouldn’t that “picture” be a metaphor for identity? Experiencing was a way of seeing, yet foundations were “atomic facts,” “atomic” meaning “cannot be cut”—why should an atomic fact be thought to be so small it cannot be cut, rather than so large, so immense, infinite and absorptive, that it cannot be encompassed, as in a dark wood one can easily be lost within it? Is it true that to be eternally lost is to be forgotten, as I have often intuited? Can the question be expressed if the answer cannot be?
One wants to say—well, if there were just one atomic fact—the undifferentiated universe, then it could not serve as a constituent at all, except perhaps of itself. To be collected in oneself—is this to be a constituent? I remember being lost once in a forest in Pennsylvania (really!), the feeling of the world spinning –the trees, the shrub, the horizon darted in ever-widening circles as I tried to catch the sound, however faint, of the familiar voice of my stepfather calling me. I felt so lost that at first I was silent, in tears—Weltspinnerei. I shook and thought of approaching night, but not of how—not of any thing like direction. I was a microcosm. “The world is independent of my will.” The small world in the woods focused itself to a point, and the boy in the small world in the woods collected into myself. Instinctively I stayed put. When eventually I was reunited through a convergence of voices belonging meant having a way home.
Or at least: a path.
I think of the time before my mother and stepfather met, the time before the commutes every other weekend from Michigan to Pennsylvania, before that time when neither had a sense of belonging but each sought each other’s belonging, if I think back far enough the woods are pristine, the gunshots absent, the creeks flow with leaves and beavers look up at the sunlight as it obeys an eternal path, brown eyes searching for nothing in specific, occupying their own point on this evolutionary timeline, everything being necessary, everything seemingly inconsequential, love in the musk scent as dusk falls, not love but desire’s consuming wheel.
*
I am here again. At the boulder which belongs to Sleeping Giant and which probably had a Quinnipiac name once. Like the exit off the highway before reaching Sleeping Giant, Montowese, a chief’s name meaning “little god.” All I know is that I am here again. A plane drones on overhead. In the distance, cheers and shouting from a baseball game. If the silence I had wanted of the boulder today were more pure, perhaps it would be oppressive. Wittgenstein admits at one point that the two youths and their two horses and the lilies in the field are “in a certain sense one.” Are they one by being objects of the same story? Belonging to the atomic fact of their fictional world? “The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common.” I have too often wanted to forget that corresponding to this logical structure there is an actual worldly structure, a groove. Falling out now and again reminds me.
It was at a bowling alley when my now stepfather asked if my mother was ready to begin to date again; I tenuously said yes. I didn’t really know. We were winning and the lanes were streaked with grease. The hot/cold, dim/bright, good/bad, weird/normal, fun/boring contrasts dominating my mind as an adolescent must have somehow subtly shifted when he asked the question, my mother with her doe eyes and hair in braids who had paraded me around, her courage as she finally decided to divorce my father whose situation is a story for another time … So much stuff can happen—and I’m not going to give you the voice to seek it—you find yourself as this sort of thing that can be manipulated in various ways.
So manipulated you think of yourself as “this sort of thing that can be manipulated,” forgetting that you determine yourself. Are you a thing? Are you a propositional constituent? Are you a process? Given your mood, now, are you really what you take yourself to be? Is it any comfort knowing what you are or are not? I do take some joy in my mother and stepfather falling in love. Not that it was easy: my stepdads fists which used to box, to work a steel plant, my fathers elbows by the screen door which seemed to have its own perspective on things, as a thing might be expected to, the swinging and blockading as some unnatural hindrance to its duty … to be a door.
God I love doors for the reason they can be open or shut, that they serve just one function, that they reveal boundaries between outside and inside, that they tantalize, that when decrepit it is a sign of a growing field, that they provide a mirror of our own bodies before us, an enclosure we long for, a necessary condition of belonging, not to fall to disparate pieces in the face of the wind, doors as reminders of integrity. I think often on the screen door that did not cooperate as my father chased her out of the house and into the driveway, a function obfuscated, bloodied, caught on the forearm of man. A straight line cut. A yes or no. An answer.
The notion of longing, of belonging, one which at a distance does not seem unlike language—a sequence of thoughts held close to the heart, not “learned” in the sense of requiring repetition of the foreign, but absorbed as part of a natural process. When I dreamt this morning of philosophical essences, of the aspiration to describe anything in complete generality, I was not on the boulder—but I was being asked whether it was possible to say anything at all that was both true and general; and the only generalization that emerged was that I could say nothing. A kind of urgency comes in/with the language of a dream, not subject to the overlay of human voices, the patrol of one seemingly undivided consciousness. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
There were times I brought my violin out on the boulder to play, play or practice as they have intermingled over the years, perhaps a stagnation of certain technique (aren’t we each our own worst critic?), as the loose leaf pages of Tractatus, held with a clip and a rock on top, invite whatever I’ve become to explore new analogies, to pursue some loose threads between solace and solidarity. Aren’t they such different kinds of things, violins and pages and ink, and boulders that give and gave themselves to a human finding a place to rest, literally or literarily to “contemplate” on a rock? “Contemplate” from the Latin “contemplari,” meaning to mark out a space for omens or auguries. Go out and do that.
Listen before the administrative stampede happens; attempts to define silence #= why try to define silence, to characterize it at all? The pauseless ceaseless lightning going down over the trees, energies playing like two people at a game of lost souls. Intermission comes and everything you imagine could happen does happen, and I want to put down the porcelain white blot of everything that has come; ideologies resisting nature (what with-over is); intelligibility or unintelligibility of the limited whole.
Doesn’t a sense of sameness come to afflict everything, if “everything” is, in effect, each experience? Then if sameness is a root of evil, learning is its chief sin: then one of the attractions of silence, its purity, is its innocence. We can attempt to think elevated thoughts, but the reason “elevated” is trivial in that every instance of such a thought finds and analogue in a lower form of speech. What holds for forms of speech holds for forms of life. It is the distraction, being there and not being there-it is the conception existing between thinking and action, the that which must be said and needn’t and is said but only if shouting, condemnations, praises, swearing, goodbyes, regrets, willful condemnations, frights, ejaculations, hopes, pauses and songs as the new agora stands open, blunt and blunted, ready to be described “smack,” “you’re gonna feel a big prick,” “honestly, I respect the bro” … We have to rely on being still; a notion we invent perhaps to console ourselves, but that endures; “crass” or “I told you” to it is incomprehensible, “fuck me” or “it fucked me up” or “I can’t disagree” are also incomprehensible. We must imagine that at the premier of Oedipus someone in the audience shouted, “that was a great fucking line!” The simple fact: she lacks a vocabulary to describe worth without loss of dignity. “And I didn’t, and shouldn’t, but it gets me free rides.”
So goes writing at the bar.
*
When Wittgenstein had some free time, he used his engineering skills to design a radiator. Its simplicity of design, its elegance and utility, its thingness made one think that the possibility of salvation found in cave-fire (ur-warmth) did not restrict itself to a natural setting—a heap of clay that constitutes a bread oven—an open pit covered with banana leaves, a potluck laid with ash remnant. How was it possible—for the metallic coils of a radiator to create a space of appreciation around it, not to merely be a taken-for-granted thing, to have the same polish as a pianist perfecting a piece, to be set apart, aristocrated, demarcating within the living space, and functional? Those who know fire know a rock stays hot, transmits heat despite the solidity of its surface—the heat longs to stay close to the coals, to belong there.
The radiator I imagine hissing and sputtering in winter in the corner of a room also longs for this more abstract thing, to fulfill its function according to its design, as any artifact. All else then is extraneous: the world, its propositions, its endless stream of speech acts. What besides winter is there when Wittgenstein conceived this, the window slightly open, the slope of the Alps receding in memory, snow falling like quickening glass fingertips in soft white flurries advancing and advancing against this one point of protection, of comfort. The crisscrossing chalkmarks on the board where he posed for his famous photo, lashing into meaningless squiggles that had had for a moment when he “composed” the bluebooks, a meaning. “The world and life are one.” Of course, one thing so broad as the other are the same. Yet neither retains its silence. This statement is not to be reckoned to divine abandonment.
The silence at the poem’s end, a lover’s face in memory beyond which an indescribable sea extends chaos comes thus far to fall, eerie in the strangulation of waves, blind in their mindless circumference. Say then, at this point, with the sun risen in the sky, you wanted to destroy yourself, sinking with still the strength to swim—alteration’s eye, impregnate with stone—Some silences have the force of a demonstrative “here” encloses one in a space indicated by the expression, the lines create their own kind of interior space the entrance to which is the final line, so that the impression of silence is a kind of door opening into a living room.
Your smile stood out, the corners of your mouth smoothed like the rounded edges of the radiator designed as an afterthought, or like the boulder’s slope, not designed to be so sharp and analytical. It’s important to forget about seriousness for a minute, to forget it even to the point of being pedantic, to note so little chaos in the greenery, the gardens where hardly aware of ourselves we walked and the world and life were one, and roses seemed to relate patterns of success by rose-scapulimancy, to reveal ancient library scrolls eaten away by silverfish—success and all its fine convolutions, facets jeweled textiles. The roses were illegible, the scrolls illegible and the jewels, as was our path skirting around a wedding where we were caught at the far edge, part of a photo worn away like a smile, the same creased softnesses.
A picture of what could have been.
There was warmth in the room we shared with one radiator that chimed along in the night. There was the silence I felt in the sleepy church in Pennsylvania, my stepfather’s house which though isolated stood in Clarion outside the apple orchard he’d cultivated for the granddaughter of his deceased wife Linda, “Chrystal Orchards.” The trees had just begun to bear fruit when he met my mother and there was no possibility but for him to make a choice. You must be able to love a person for making a choice. That’s what I didn’t understand then. I’m not sure I understand now. Holiday smiling.
What molecular lattice structures constitutive of solidity vibrate eternally, as if to pronounce to you some inkling of their own silence and joy (or is it indifference?), while the violin, brightly strung withholds its harmonies, its slide of harmonics like some mystery between glue and woods and pegs held in such fragile tension that the boulder lacks, and the propositions on the pages lack, the “steps” of the ladder Wittgenstein thought could be thrown away even while subject to infinitely many possible, even plausible, interpretations, such as this. Should we conclude that there is nothing but our own truth? Should each of us navigate their own truth under the illusion of meaning’s disclosing intimacies with—others?
Then even starlight comes to an end when it reaches my eye differently than yours, and the silences’ leaves fluttering along the branches of the great oak tree that forms the canopy here, as if in waiting for a promise to be understood, unspeakable as each separate destiny that elapses. And yet, when you really think-feel it, nothing is inconsequential, nothing at all, even those changeless things; especially those changeless things. Even in the memory of a smile, a laugh, a particular way of being, there is the solace of finding a return. How else to believe the inscription: amor fati?
If it is said that music is the soul, it is more accurate to say that the soul and music have the same essence, as each springs from a universal harmony. True loneliness: full consciousness of the soul in harmony with itself, its deafening vision, its outstretched octave trembling at the fingertips. Not that they sounded like that, by no means, your mother and uncle, you yourself had you not been upstairs in the room with me, berating me for being depressed, for being a creep, for not fitting in because I could not understand how being could be so seamless. All this is in the past, but let us not pretend the past exists only in the past.
No.
I make some attempt to imagine the boulder as it exists in itself; then there cannot be said to be a path leading towards it or a trail leading away. But if there is no path one could traverse to find the boulder then there is no such imagined path either. I cannot even roughly say that it is the same color as the radiator, the same sound as the violin. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. What cannot be thought clearly cannot be thought. This immensely lonely life that fails to be interrupted by the laughter of children.
Mini-interview with David Capps
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
DC: There are a few such moments. The first in recollection is when I was a young child, five or six. My parents had decided to move from a rather small but rustic homestead to a new house in the ’burbs, and when I found out about it, for reasons I can’t fully explain I took a black marker and in the middle of the night wrote all sorts of facts about myself and my family. I genuinely felt that whoever was going to buy our old house would be interested in knowing these details about who lived there before them. Suffice it to say my parents were not happy. But that moment I think did teach me that there is something special about the impulse to write, that the impulse itself has a certain feeling.
Another moment that stands out occurred during the defense for my poetry MFA, when one of the committee members called attention to the balance between the “propositional” and lyrical content of a work. On the one hand, absence of propositions I think lends itself to a lot creative writing sounding as if it’s by the same person, on the other hand the perspicuity of propositional expressiveness can make a work sound too formal, as if it by no one at all, or these days AI. I continue to try to strike a balance between the two, while also keeping in mind that a given work—especially a prose work—cannot rest on lyricism alone, that even after you might consider it “finished,” it merits the question: why did I write this, why should anyone return to this?
I’m sure also that my style, sometimes prone to larger forms and syntactic complexity, has been impacted by the whole process of writing a philosophy dissertation. My advisor in philosophy grad school did once compliment me on my ability to write a sentence; that’s a start, anyway.
HFR: What are you reading?
DC: I have been reading Hawthorne on Painting (Charles Webster, not Nathaniel), A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, This Nest, Swift Passerine by Dan Beachy-Quick, Notes on My Duncecap by Jesse Ball and his Autoportrait, Clackamas Review, and Ethel Zine. I also confess a guilty pleasure in reading Artforum.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “On the Boulder”?
DC: It might not be anything in specific, but etiologically it is pandemic related. At the height of the pandemic I wrote a lyric essay entitled “Standing by the Mountain” where I attempted to understand, from a deep ecology point of view, why we feel a sense of humility when in the face of a mountain. That piece was mainly phenomenology, but it naturally lent itself to a continuation, “On the Boulder” (and later “Pebble”) most of which I wrote in situ on a particular boulder in Sleeping Giant state park in Connecticut. I found interesting its solidity and relative inaccessibility, qualities whose metaphoric relations I found nicely mirrored in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which I began to print out and bring to the boulder to contemplate. Gradually the piece became less a phenomenology of the boulder and more about leaning on certain passages of the Tractatus, recontextualizing them in a natural setting in order to explore some ideas in memoir.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
DC: Trying to publish the longer work of lyric essays I call Mountain, Boulder, Pebble. There is also an evolving chapbook of Sijo, a translation of a short book of poems by the obscure 20th century Greek Poet, Peter Magnis, a short essay on reincarnation and a series of notes about doors, especially those doors you sometimes see in travels to remote villages where they have a definite presence, distinctive knockers, rusted padlocks, etc. In the future I’d like to do more collaborative work and maybe work a bit more on professional development e.g. create a website for myself. I find myself drawn to writing about simple subjects, leaves, doors, as everything is deceptively simple. This summer I’m part of a survey group in Greece so hopefully some poems will fall out of my travels.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
DC: It’s obvious that the political situation in the US leaves much to be desired if the choices are between The Big Orange Thing and Mr. Poolside Hairy Legs. I find politics really toxic, especially in the way that a given political ideology lends itself to groupthink which in turn lends itself to the lack of independent, critical thinking. I can sketch a sort of general position that I think holds for any position, no matter how controversial, I then would invite the reader to substitute in any given political position that might be of interest. The argument originates with J.S. Mill. Suppose we entertain a given opinion O. Then we can either be confident that O is true, or we can be confident that it is false, or we can be undecided in that we fall short of confidence one way or the other. Now if we are confident that O is true, perhaps because we’ve heard it from a friend or some other reliable source of testimony, wouldn’t it even be better if we could know for sure if O were true? One currently overlooked way of doing this which Mill describes in terms of having a “thorough knowledge” of our own positions, is knowing why the opposition’s view (that is, “not O”) is false. This can take time, but if we are able to appreciate the reasons why the opposition’s position is false, then we can better understand the implications of our own views, as well as appreciate that there might actually be a grain of truth in the view of the opposing position. So that was option one. Option two is that we are confident that O is false; in that case we shouldn’t believe it, as we ought to try and apportion our beliefs to the evidence at hand—where that evidence includes rational argumentation. But again, can we be so confident that O is false without a thorough examination of the arguments in favor and against O? Mill would remind us that humans are notorious for their fallibility, so that even if the truth or falsity of “O” seems “obvious” the fact that it is obvious to us carries little weight. The third option is that, even after care examination, there is a balance between the arguments in favor of O and the arguments against, such that neither is decisive. In this case it might help to reconsider whether O has been formulated in a precise enough way, or whether it is presently feasible to support it or not. And if no headway can be made, the rationally appropriate response is to abstain from believe about whether O is true or false. In practice I’ve found this to be a useful approach to thinking about speculative matters and a quick litmus test for whether someone has actually reflected on the positions they imbibe from their peers and culture.
David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who livesin New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.
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Heavy Feather Review 