The Bed of the System

A brief note on mimetic regressions and a new poem

The act of naming has long been central to the act of creation, serving either as the final stitch of completion or a deeper reach into the self-arranging pieces to assemble the identity itself. You’ll often hear someone snark that the constellations are something we invented, while perhaps forgetting the ways in which that premise holds just as true for the person we tell each other we are. Whatever the component parts of a personality may be, it’s difficult to ignore the truth that we’re constantly arranging them into a presentable attempt at a discrete, architectural reality. A reliable heft that can handle the gravitational weight of our interpersonal and contextual metaphysics. After all, each of our interior worlds carries compelling similarities to the vastness of the night sky and to whatever degree we exist beneath it as a patient observer, it’s hard not to hope that the patterns we thread together there bear some cause for optimism about our future.

The term ekphrasis comes from the Greek ἔκφρασις (bad languages copy, good languages steal, I guess), which in simple terms means “description” and in slightly more detail “to call out.” The verb ἐκφράζειν reads as “to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name”, and its usage seems to have originated, at least to much of the modern mind, in Book 10 of Plato’s Republic during the discussion of the Forms. The basic theory of the Forms states that everything in the material world is a copy of a Form, a perfect version of it that serves as its blueprint. As an example I think Plato uses a bed, and he argues that any bed that exists as a physical entity (i.e. the bed in your room) is just an imitation of the form Bed. Some other things happen here that we don’t need to get into, but he goes on to argue that there are 3 types of creators interacting with “bedness”:

  1. God, who created the idealized Form of Bed.

  2. The carpenter, who created a physical bed as an imitation of the Form Bed.

  3. The painter, who created a representation or interpretation of the carpenter’s physical bed.

For any religious people in the room, you’ll notice a hierarchical structure here 350 years before the birth of Christ that, as fate would have it, maps to the later-outlined framework for Christianity and the nature and roles of the Trinity, complete with Christ even growing up as a carpenter, but for our purposes here we can move on.

Plato uses ἔκφρασις in his discussion of stage 3 here, and he concludes with a question: “Which is the art of painting designed to be– an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear– of appearance or of reality?”, leaving the rest of us with a piece of philosophical cud to chew in our individual pastures each night as we look up at the moon. And the truth of it, as far as we’ve been able to tell in the 2400ish years since then, seems to be that both life and the art contained within it is an infinite, mimetic regression. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy etc. Which in turn, at least under Plato’s model, means art is taking an object and saying it’s this, and it’s this, and it’s this, and it’s this. Leaving us with a possible conclusion that what we’re actually describing when we say something like “our life’s work” in this or that discipline, is another contribution to an ever-deepening narrative tome passed from one generation to the next on both the expansion of various objects’ illustrative empires and a journey into the center of their definitional earths.

Which is just to say that there is no difference between moving to Paris and learning to write poetry or how to farm tobacco or build furniture or anything else. Whatever you decide to do, you’re hitching up to a caravan that’s been wandering around those particular parts for a long time and cataloguing what they see and how things are for them there. It isn’t ever going to be about you, but it can certainly include you, and that distinction is one of the only meaningful sources for relief I’m aware of.

As I was goobering around on Rattle Magazine’s website this week I found out about their monthly writing competition Ekphrasis, which is something I, for a rich tapestry of reasons, feel very strongly I should have known about a long time ago. Every month they post a painting or a photograph with no other context, and writers submit a poem based on the image by the end of the month in hopes of getting it published by them. Below is August’s image along with my submission for it, and I hope you find something in it you’re able to enjoy.

Fabrication

Sharp in the lip of my own, sweet darkness I have tempted its animal once more with the feathered bead of my body. Allowed it to believe again in the feast of my life, and hunched against the angles of its inevitable mouth. Time, after all, takes its shape from the riverbanks. The seams which have stitched a defense of what must remain. And so much of what I have loved has already been swallowed whole.

Beautiful, then, to have tricked another creature from its current and fed the fabric of its body into the machine of my heart. My hands steady with the knowledge of its possible rapture, and my table still fragrant with light.