EXCERPT FROM GHOST ROOM/REFRACTOR

by Rooney Pam Dick

     3     Unfinished if the line goes dead

     4     Your songs, your roof slates

     5     The lines hand-drawn, as in Agnems, ergo fragile

     6     The lines wideset like a saint’s eyes in some icon

     7     The letters dark red like your roof, not flame red like your dead songs

     8     Or bright red of your Triads

     9     Or your red garment in the postcard of the Jesusc painting I might never gaze at live again

   10     You are, of course, various

   11     I see you when you glow in them—in God—or when the inverse

   18     Flat, graphic, gestural

   19     Not able to keep up with the rêve?

   20     Prierre, we’re Petey Rev—when blurring edges

   21     I will not name the others yet

   22     To repeat your name

   23     To lodge in my dark red core

   24     To push my mind down into my chest

   25     I said chest organ, now this doesn’t say it

   26     A core, an orb, a particular sphere—bending plane—an inner region?

   27     To be your locus

   28     To exist in (your) name only

   29     I said hart—as like gazelle

   30     There is a deer in my chest’s clearing

   33     Gregoryp, I am Rooney Pete

   34     I could not slow myself down, adjust my verbal intake

   35     Divinity as rhythm

   36     But that alters, goes arrhythmic, intervallic

   37     Energies that are around you

   38     But it is the light that

   39     It is the glory—

   40     Is the glories

   41     Refractor, thus am not

   42     Red of rules for mind—qua angles of the spirit

   43     To explain the spirit, ghost—

   44     But can I always trust this?

____

45     Red of glow, not cut

   46     The light no human liquid

   50     Red of Cyt, Loubise, Marrk

   51     Of Kellsworth, Joseaf, Aanni

   52     Of as a way of life that is philosophy, but lower case, loose, vibrant, cursive

   53     The world is All as lower case

   54     Today began with quietude

   55     I could not pray last night

   56     I told you writing is praying for me

   57     I told you drawing, scrawling are

   58     Therefore cannot rewrite later

   59     Unholy, to revise a prayer

   60     If flawed, still must be vision

   61     Yearning as believing

   64     Lines that shape the emptiness

   65     Lines of thought

   66     Taut beauty in absentia

   78     Light flows—the uncreated energy

   79     Creating energies

   80     What clusters near God’s essence

   81     I wear my red deerskin jacket against possible chills

   82     I fear the onset of our fevers

   83     I wear red hair of flaming thought

   83     I will tell you now my slate of new ideas

   84     The I is a refractor

   85     To bend or to disperse

   86     To alter ray’s direction

87     The bending of a ray when it passes obliquely from one or One’s medium to another with a different speed

   88     What is my speed now?—Younger, it was rapid

   89     This medium

   90     Red pen, fawn-tan recycled paper

   91     Metahuman, deiglow

   92     If to spectrum or bent ray

   93     But what if just absorb it?

   94     Or bend it back, send back to God?

   95     Is prayer or lit or thought or artwork

   96     Brighter grey of sky that is self-isolate

   97     Now nothing touches

   98     Is this room

   99     How to explain it?

  100    When writing is a spectrograph

  101    Code red of radiation

  102    How the god would radiate

  103    To appear or look

  104    To see with transformed eyes

  105    The person is transfigured

  106    I will tell you of my vision

  107    It came to me, was freely given

  108    Prierre, Gregoryp, Rened: these writing ghosts

  109    Did I say this is a ghost room?

  110    Say this is a Holy Ghost room?

  111    Did I speak of guests, peregrines, aliens?

  113    Of truth, world, flow, of particles, of godhead?

  114    No more the flame of pyrocosm—

  115    I am One’s glow: the hesychasm

  116    I was Johnny Star, the Human Match

  117    My former testament prefigured

  123    Now demo new transfiguration theory

  128    Hew the sharp new style, the dark red clarity, translucid logic

____

  129    The red that spilled on me

  130    It was his concept of anxiety

  131    It was the stranger’s dread

  132    It was the fragile novel’s process

  133    But other red is what might save this

  134    Save listing for much later

  135    The noise, the chatter

  136    The mundane light

  137    How mundane truth is sign, is symbol

  138    That the truth is still first-personal

  139    First-person singular

  140    The higher, lower

141    Thus the letter I, with vertical that links two horizontals, planes, its line depicting restless motion

  142    Or some form of modernist grid and mystical ladder

  143    Possibility

  144    E.g. back when I was Jacob

  145    Gregoryp says the personal—it is transfigured

  146    I’s eyes new through granted energy

  147    The gift of vision

  148    Is unnatural (not Rened)

  149    When Skøren said truth is subjective

  150    Skateboard sound returns to me

  151    Joy, that this exists still

  152    Not to distinguish spiritual from mundane truths—in their faith, their structure?

  153    To be is to refract—or does this go past being?

  154    Like as known by like

  155    Coby, how we know each other

  156    Fidelity, reality, veracity: triad’s verity

  157    How refraction into spectrum is a new mode of analysis

  158    Is to break up, bend

  159    How meaning, truth become expansive

  160    This could be text or image

  161    But to go the other way—

  162    Not to disperse

  163    To focus, hold, or bend back toward the godhead

164    The question of the One and the many is the question of semantics, metaphysics, of the godhead and refractor

  165    Jesusc smeared by light or as light

  166    It spills across the planes, the tiles

  167    I said the truth was incarnation

  168   Was my teenage vision

  169    Metaphysical vision, not spiritual vision

  170    But that opposition is misguided

  171    It’s religion that might free philosophy for the leap, the vision?

  172    Or it’s art that

  173    Not philosophy to rationalize the spirit, intuition

  174    I must tell you of the breaking

  175    I must tell you of the fracture theory of meaning, refractor theory of truth

  176    Of being and non-being

  177    But right now, low light’s blinding me

  178    I need the gift of clearer eyes, right now they’re eluding me

  179    I will stop, will wait—be patient, ration paper

  180    For our chest apocalypse

  181    For our fever eschaton

  188    Next time, I’ll describe that—

____

  189    A sentence is a ray

  190    It has direction

  191    The space it strikes refracts it

  192    To switch directions (one) or break up into aspects (many)

  193    The space between sentences—or clauses, phrases

  194    Each linguistic unit a ray—a word as ray?

  195    The language is what’s shining

  196    When I was Lou, I said the coil, its energy

  197    Now I am Rooney, say the ray, its motion

  198    Both have force

  199    The ray of truth—the ray of meaning

  200    Ray of the pilgrim

  201    My hair is made of dark red rays–of arrows

  202    Not snakes, nor cloud, nor burning bush

  203    Does it point in one direction?

  204    Each singular ray

  205    But the refractor breaks it into many—this is thinking

  206    This is language, this is world

  207    The building is brick red, close to the color of Prierre’s roof slates

  208    Dusty rose cornice, pediment

  209    To the left in my vision, a darker crimson building

  210    Mars black cornice

  211    To the right, fawn-toned building

  212    Spring green cornice, fire escape

  214    All modes, particulars are the refractors

215    The ontology, semantics, metaphysics of refraction—I have just begun to think this

  216    And what the sounds do?

  217    The silences that let them change direction

218    It is the rays and how they break from the straight path, they angle or they splinter

  219    In your Eastern Renaissance painting, to hold a prism, not a mirror

  220    Since my long red wavy hair, like Aldbrecht’s

  221    His St. Jerome engraving shows some rays

  222    He could be played by Stewve, who’s playing

  223    To be like Emmahnuel’s Viviane?

  224    Or how the rays are vivid

  225    The bright, bold arrow of Kellsworth

  226    The names of God—the n + 1th is coming

  227    The names are all his name, refracted into spectrum

  228    Spectral nominalism, spectral formalism

  229    And the gender-spectral

230    E.g. how you yourself are on the sweet new spectrum—or else how there can be hauntings

  231    All books ghost-, guest-written?

  232    All thoughts spectral—glowing

  233     Living thoughts—the dead ones do not glow from

  234    Thus Thomads’s gospel says to be a place, not body

  235    Or body as light’s place, the light moves through it, body bends or breaks it?

  236    The light breaks onto you, and you break it, breaking with it

  237    Either a place of royal domain or a dull corpse

  238    The light, glow, energy—as signified by halo

  239    Your hair a halo or it’s giving off a halo

  241    Either a place of ray’s domain or a walled corpse

  242    The world is all that is the ray

  243    The refraction of lux, not of things 

  244    Emmahnuel and I, intersecting in obsessions

  245    Intersecting lines, not planes nor sets?

  246    My vision—it keeps changing

247    Before, I said set theory, intersecting idiolects, idiocosms—

  248    Later, I said cluster, ion, dash—after I said coil, circuit, energy

  249    Now I say ray, vector, spectrum, refractor

  250    The vector theory of truth, refractor theory of meaning? Or the inverse?

251    When you cannot keep up with the revelation—it strikes you, but you are a different medium, must slow its speed—but isn’t something lost then?

  252    It is the speed of light, but you are a subluminary—but sometimes almost, almost

  253    To refract, not to deflect—because it has to enter you

  254    You let it penetrate, pass through you, you’re semi-sheer medium—like Hilmaak

255    All the visionaries know it is light—they see, feel it (they are artists, writers)

  256    You change its color or direction, you modify its wavelength

  257    You absorb, relay its energy—this is very beautiful

  258     If you have not experienced it, you cannot understand what I am saying

  259    No words can fully model it

  260    The receptiveness is all

  261    You must refine your openness, your sensitivity

  262    Aldbrecht is a noble brightness that’s enduring

  263    He’s the one I must explore now?

  264    To wash the germs off of your hands so the light can still pass through them

  269    So you can become prism—

272    The holy-spectral (contrast Fhriedrich)

____

  273    A ray as in a vector—with propulsive direction

  274    Not compositional semantics but implicational semantics—meaning’s maximalism

  275    Spectral—not analytic—division

  276    Neither cognitive nor conceptual role—not rational inference but notional transference

  277    Irrational, exponential, intensional transference

  278    The unruliness of meaning

  279    The idiolects and their intersections

  280    A spreading tree, truth tree, yes, but free-associative, not rule-based: an otherlogic

  281    A thicket—thick semantics: cluster, bramble

  282    Path conditions—breadth conditions—breath conditions

  283    Thickness of meanings—inflationism

  284    The intersubjective is not intersection of sets—not clean, modernist, translucent—as I once wrote

  285    It is entwining of branches—trees grow together—tangle, thicket

  286    Not rhizome, not below—but branches, shoots ascending

  287    Still, can detach one ray—arrow—vector, to examine it

  288    See what it follows, where it leads, how it splinters

  289    To bend or break, to fraction, shoot

  290    This is not errancy, then is it truancy?

  291    It is glow’s flow—it is fluency

  292    Is this hearing things?

  293    The city holds its breath

  294    The way of truth—the route, the path

  295    Fidelity

  296    To mark the parallel

  297    To work from or against—thus with—Parmenidees

  298    Parmenidees and Gregoryp

  299    Last night, my ardor for Prierre abruptly faded

  300    Will it recur?

  301    But Aldbrecht—

  302    If the room—the rain

  303    The texture of the birds

  304    It is raining and I don’t believe it is raining is an implicit contradiction

  306    It’s the key to the first-person account of truth

  307    Why, today, it rains, is bright, is quiet

Rooney Pam Dick (aka Moyna/Lou/Mina Pam Dick et al.) is the author of five books, including I am writing you from afar (BSL, 2021), Moira of Edges, Moira the Tart (OPR, 2019) and Metaphysical Licks (Book*hug, 2014). Her work explores vagabond formal structures and rebellious spirituality, the tender urban sublime and the necessity of beauty, fluidly intimate comradeship and sly gender spectrality. Also an artist and philosopher, she lives in New York City.