Notes For the State of a Vanishing  (Human) Geometry

Alfred Watkins’ The Old Straight Track details his re-discovery of ley-lines, tracks marked by stones and trees and pools as to leave some part visible from any of its points–: more interesting to me this afternoon is their nature as perception-possible markers forming a human-geometry as pathway, trade-posts, and places of stellar correspondence. The discovery is as remarkable as the forgetting of the track. Ley-lines form a geometry disappearing as soon as one leaves the path, even to penetrate into the shape itself. Why didn’t we design Manhattan that way I thought on my way to Mandala Tibetan Store walking south-west of Union Square.

Vide: Duncan’s poem about a man becoming a room, a man seeped into the walls, so she feels what’s there of him in the beauty of the place. And true to itself I can’t find the poem again, wherever it is in Roots & Branches, seeped back into the book, refusing to be taken apart, like I might the figure in a Vermeer but could never dismantle those walls, that light. Vermeer too knew such such human settings.

Dante (the only research of use is what’s already done, D being the first to hand)’s lost until brought into the rigorous geometry lessons of  Inferno and Purgatorio. Not until Paradiso does he learn to be lost again (supposedly anyway, he still can’t stop talking about the schema).

I am on the road, by the road

hitch-hiking. And how, from one side,

how glad I am no one has come along.

For I am at a station. I am at home

in the sun. Not waiting, but standing here.

from Come, Let Me Free Myself; R.D.

One wonders at the stairs leading up to temples, that of Aphrodite Urania coming most vividly to mind. With over a story of stairway one is bound to come level with the floor, carried by servants, on stilts or on horse. One enters the proportionality by perceiving it, and then physically enters, moving beyond the complexity of the momentarily visible whole as it vanishes into its fragments. The temple makes a home, breaking like the concept of a world into the tangibilities present: the sun, the gum tugging down your shoe.

***

The real value of a vanishing geometry is in suggestions made by the physical metric itself. The way a house has more to tell than how we use it. The secret passageway is always behind the dustiest painting. Behind the fridge. 

I used to dream of finding a door at the landing where the stairs turned back and over themselves in a sort of pyramidal twist. The stairs turned left, to the right was a wall, where the dream door was. This new room (which I could never find again, and which, once inside, I could never seem to leave) contained a mail-carrier’s bag full of letters. I would read them, though I knew it was against the law. These letters told vaguely of some war, while always yielding instruction in the ways of love. 

Between flights of stairs I found a door vectored against all rational (ratio; ration) going: all the news, the real news angel news sloughed off into this “lost” place. This sun in which the prophecies huddle.

***

There are secret cities that rise, with one foot in the gutter. Who’s to say Manhattan wasn’t designed this way? I just designed it! All is there to be remembered. Re-membered.