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The front cover of Selected Poems has a
collage of the inner workings of clocks,
because the superposition of second hand
spinning quickly at the point of the
minute hand spinning more slowly, attached
to the hour hand turning still more
slowly, is an image of time as a
fractal.
On the cover, there is the image of a
human form in figurative abstraction
dissolving in a fluid, almost like cells
in dish.
Pulling away the veil of this fluid we
see the elegant Smith Chart, which is a
convention in electrical engineering for
presenting the behavior of a system in a
more natural coordinate system, for
purposes of tuning, and resonance
discovery. For a more lengthy discussion
of Time as a Fractal Vortex see below.
The back cover shows four photos of
Michael Lyons going way back These images
are montaged on top of a moving,
phase-shifting rectangular play suggesting
the idea of zeroing in on the
quintessence, started on the front cover.
The play of golden sections in harmonic
rations, showcase incandescent flowers and
are what my kid called "bling." Some play
also occurs in the place of the barcode.
This is an illustration of Desargues
famous theorem extending and demonstrating
the invariance of the harmonic ration
into projective geometry.
Since there is so little interest in
paper poetry books and since this is my
first effort at a poetry e-book I have
replaced the inventory bar code with this
diagram of the projective. Similarly in
the Hitmotel Press root ISBN number, I
have substituted the X and Y for the
significant digits.
Time as a Fractal Vortex
What does it mean: the poem as vortex.
The time internal to the poem of rhythms
coming back to relate to other parts of
the poem.
The vortex is a chaos attractor or a
freshness attractor in many dimensions.
The vortex is a model of all life evolving
on this orbiting, spinning, precessing
planet who took this ancient diurnal
dimension of time into our hearts so that
we experience time as a projection, an
average, over these cardioid constrictions
and expansions and neuronal pulsations
ebbing and flowing.
A classic clock with hands for hours
minutes and seconds shows the end of a
cycle coming back to the beginning. Some
watches show phases of the moon, and other
sidereal circadian movements. Time as
embodied in the clock is a representation
of the classical cyclic group, a finite
arithmetic of mod 12. Time is a vortex.
Time can be seen as a fractal vortex, if
you convolve the second hand onto the end
of the minute hand onto the end of the
hour hand. We could express each of these
circulating hands with the rotating phaser
e^Ii simply by putting the h, m, s into
the argument: e^ih , e^im , e^is . Time
becomes a vortex, a spiral of spirals
moving on the path of a helix.* Time is
the projection of rhythm. These orbital
rhythms become vortical time. We can start
to understand the projections onto our
weeks, days hours minutes seconds. Time as
a vortex can be see as zooming in on these
time scales.
Poetry, in particular the movements of
structuralism and vorticism, moving toward
Actualism starts with WCW - The poet
thinks with the poem. Olson thinks about
the projections of higher dimensions into
ours. The Parmedian world of the ultimate
source leaves traces in our world at every
moment, along the unfolding path curve of
time's vortex. One studies Forms to be
able to take them out into the world and
"see." Forms are opening up. The modern
poet at the end of the 60s human potential
movement was part shaman, part physicist,
part monk. He was a poet in the sense of
autopoeisis, self-making emergence of
chaos out of randomness and order out of
chaos. The oroborous, the self-referential
is its symbol, and it seeks harmonic
validation on many levels. Openness and
coherence are not easy to make
commensurate. Just as to essay is to try
and bring things together, by projecting
them out of a field of potential, so the
poem was the making through an open form
that emerged into being on the
potentialities and reflections of the
ideal forms. For me the moment of being
actual was a great mixing of eros and
logos; it goes back to childhood, of
feelings and ideas being like transparent
forces pushing across the membranes of my
self. (The Greeks thought of it this way
too, in the childhood of humanity.)
Children know this. Poem is the first
making, the essay, the trying to catch the
emergence of being in the moment.
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