Ben Mazer
Closed Space

Any positing of existence-any positing of anything, true or false, real or supposed-any positive assertion-any assertion-concludes an inhering whole posited by contiguity of underlying supposition not alien to itself. To conclude an alien entity would only in fact be to extend the underlying supposition to its positive limit. Yet to speak of a limit in this sense is only to refer to the inhering contiguity and continuity of all supposition-outside of which only not a thing at all can be subscribed. If its notness can be asserted or supposed it is then inherent in its ascribation to be contiguous with any selection of order whatever-supposed or not supposed. Supposition itself is a key to the inherence of all that is not supposed; there is no not supposing that which is not supposed in the act of supposition. The posited inclusion then-if any thing at all is posited-must inhere to a unity of form. Only one form is possible to enclose all that is positive within a background that is nonexistent: a perfect sphere which is continuous with itself; for otherwise to inhere in unity would be to continually radiate outwards from any point of inherence in every direction without cessation or end. By definition to continually progress in such a manner would contradict the inherent unity that would have to be essential even to any pattern amplified to an infinite progression. To posit infinity is contradictory to any positive inherence whatsoever. Being and existence by necessity inhere even in the most variegated and complex of possible patterns to an inherent unity which on any terms must be ultimately finite. The so called expanding universe is itself the most finite and unified of patterns or propositions. The only form which represents not shapelessness or non-ultimately unbounded extension is that which closes itself in a perfect bound or continuum: and that is by any extension of principles inhering in the finiteness of unity incapable of being expressed or formulated without bias except as a sphere. There is nothing outside of this sphere. Unity is a self contained proposition. The sphere merely represents the totality of all that is in any sense positive or possible.

That is to say that all curves towards its infinite progression towards itself.

ii

In fact this sphere must be oblong in order to account/compensate for the variability implied by the division of things into their retrograde actions towards themselves-as a hermetic sphere could or could not take into account all changes reduced along a single curve. Roundness is all. The oblong spherical accounts for differentiation.

iii

Although the star we are closest to is the sun, has no one ever noticed that there are vastly many more million light years on the one side of us than on the other side of us? If we travelled long enough in a straight line we would return to our starting-point, true, but the fact is that we are already at our starting point, and that we are closer to it on one side than on the other. That is to say that the time travelled is less than the time it takes to start to return.

iv

Conventions of Measurement

To plot any grid is to impose squares on any consecutive series of degrees projected throughout the spherical. Each square encompasses and engenders an infinite series of mimic perspective spheres within the finite spherical. Each gradation in each series in turn generates an infinite series of mimic perspective squares within the finite (oblong) spherical (in a sense oblongated squares), such that every accountable square moves by the static guidance of its own mimic square.

f = f2 - f2 / {Vf = x - x16H}

v

In fact the earth is continually rolling like a somersaulting acrobat (or a set of chinese wheels) past a series of suns-night day night day night day night day-in a long progression-all seen from a bedroom window-back towards the original sun.

(You notice when you go out for a walk that you are returning.)

vi

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a piano I might play a Beethoven sonata.

But even a Beethoven sonata is always returning to its source.

In fact every time I idly run my fingers over a keyboard I am playing a Beethoven sonata. In fact I am playing the entire set of Beethoven sonatas. And they are all returning to their source.

vii

In this Corner

The world is on fire. But we can see it.

Increasing organization beautifully turning.

viii

How many flights since the inception of aviation? How many miles flown? Over what arc returning. An arced line relative to the earth's rotation. Relative to universal expansion. Now once again see-Paul Henreid and Ingrid Bergman taxiing out of Casablanca. The stars glitter. Conrad Veidt is removed to displace Humphrey Bogart to Claude Rains. [A five pointed star continuous as it is drawn.]

*

Refuel in Ireland to continue to Istanbul. Look out the window-only the stars are moving.

ix

Lights banging around over and over again-Scarlett O'Hara.

x

The Spittle Gatherer

People either look at you, or they look away from you. Caught myself wondering if the shrimp I saw tonight were from the ocean. If I myself was genetically engineered. Perhaps we've all been for decades. Secret that musn't come out, that's referred to by innuendo. Jack Parsons' parents came from Springfield, Massachusetts. My parents came from Springfield, Massachusetts. Idea of Pasadena, a genetic colony of culture. Two references in An American Chronology of Science and Technology in the Exploration of Space, 1915 - 1960. Hugh L. Dryden, that's a pseudonym. You get to a certain point they're all pseudonyms. Made up entirely by a band of shareholders in the largest secrets. Massive eruption rocks the sun. What is the sun? Is it just fire, or is it a giant rock that's on fire? I think it's just gasses. Pasadena, I can see it like it wasn't there. Who told the flowers to stay on first? Massive eruptions all of the time. Who says opposition leads to growth or discovery? True opposition. Vote me out. Don't vote for me. Gregory Bateson and Derek J. de Solla Price. I think I know what they're talking about. Tibbets. Tibbets? You'd think they wanted us to get the joke. Patterned wallpaper to teach you stories. E=MC2. What is C? Hendrix! Like light that exists long before its sources, stars flying away from us as fast as they can go. We clink and then we drink. "And he was trying to say it was organic." I like to think of myself as a dead person, although I am not dead. Who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature. Time moves backwards. It is getting earlier and earlier. Those movies of rice fields are our own idea of myth. Relatively recent. An hundred inch diameter mirror. Glass eight inches thick. Nine years to grind and polish. Gather enough light to register a burning candle 5,000 miles away. Someone willing to go as far as possible into space, and just keep going. Carried by the force of expansion to the speed of light.

xi

An Old Lady in the Natural History Museum

And should the afternoon go down
upon the echo of the brown
enumeration of our race
and leaving a residual face
exempt us from this constant place
still see incognizant the sign
levelled between the smile and frown
and cropped hedge the long anodyne
and evening parallel they drown.

For there thin lips and watered eye
are hunched upon the citadel
in deep inversions of the sky
and permutations of the town
that the old crone will never tell.

xii

The Mahatmas

Cataclysmic simultaneity, how they return to the moment inevitable, too scary to face. Huge crescendo of volume to minor subtonic, then back again, a rock's face cliff, stark, sliding, struck by lightning, continually alternating, unbearable revelation. Shrouded in darkness, yet revealed. Horrible to look at. Those notes that are what you heard are now blinding. Yes, the expedition was sent to Brazil by the British. Like Dracula or the Mummy, they didn't even know what they'd hear. Elusive revenge of the gods, shaking the world, on a cliff's edge, stark (with lightning crackling, breaking the darkness). Ancient, not to be fooled with. Signals go out, received all over the world.

A blinding moon. Violence of subtonic winds, in Principe and Sobral. (The path of the eclipse.) She stands revealed. Unbearable revelation.

Too late. The Mahatmas sign their letters charged with electrons. (A decoded letter for every cigarette.) Decode. Decade.

I go to the corner then back again. Then to the opposite corner-the short private way. All at once, everyone comes out of their house.

We must have come from the sun.

(Private utterances reach me from a far way away.)

*      *      *

When I leave, they all return to their houses.

*      *      *

One of whom is on his way to his daily quiet work, and another on his way to denounce a fellow creature at the police station. (The piu piu bird speaks backwards to move forwards. Moonlight and streetlight splay the chlorophyl's spectrum. Only Havana turns the double agent. The logical tiger streams towards its objective.)

In imitation of the sun's energy-in its capacity of a direct motor. Forces at work in hidden corners of nature. Turning the Gunga or the Brahmaputra, back to its sources. View us as simple men.

Amritsur Nov. 1 st [1880]

"not only that They existed". "given to Mr. Sinnett". "the Master K.H.".

Avalanche in the Karakorum Mts. Letters will cease at her death.

Simultaneously in Tibet and Egypt, in London in Paris, in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles. Russia and Prussia. Nearby in Peru. Principe. Breakfast is served in the Alps.

They have written, they have written. Written. Written.

_ _

Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964. His poems have been widely published in international periodicals, including Fulcrum, Verse, Harvard Review, Jacket, Agenda, Stand, Boston Review, Salt, and The Wolf. His poetry collections include Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press, 2010) and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010) and the chapbooks The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics (Cannibal Books, 2008) and Johanna Poems (Cy Gist Press, 2007). He is the editor of Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010), Landis Everson’s Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006, winner of the first Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation), and a forthcoming edition of the poems and critical prose of John Crowe Ransom. He lives in Boston, where he is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. His new collection, Tales of the Buckman Tavern, will be published in Mumbai by Poetrywala in 2012.

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