A Treatise on Stars Read online

  A TREATISE ON STARS

  .

  Also by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

  The Lit Cloud (with Kiki Smith)

  Hello, the Roses

  I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems

  Concordance (with Kiki Smith)

  Nest

  Four Year Old Girl

  Endocrinology (with Kiki Smith)

  Sphericity (with Richard Tuttle)

  Hiddenness (with Richard Tuttle)

  Empathy

  The Heat Bird

  Random Possession

  Summits Move with the Tide

  Copyright © 2020 by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1469) in 2020

  Design by Eileen Bellamy

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei, author.

  Title: A Treatise on Stars / Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.

  Description: First edition. | New York: New Directions Books, 2020. | “A New Directions book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019047008 | ISBN 9780811229388 (paperback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780811229395 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.E77 T74 2020 | DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047008

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  ndbooks.com

  .

  to Richard and Martha

  Contents

  I

  Star Beings

  Consciousness Self-Learns

  Scalar

  The Loom

  Jaguar

  The Pleiades

  Pegasus

  You Are Here

  II

  Listening

  Lux

  Darkness

  Wonder

  Heart

  Singing

  New Boys 2

  Chaco and Olivia

  Acknowledgments

  Landmarks

  Cover

  I

  star beings

  1

  In late afternoon, stars are not visible.

  Everything arrives energetically, at first.

  I wait to see what I’ll recognize, as diffuse sky resolves into points of light and glitter.

  When Venus appears, objects are just visible; silhouettes seem larger, nearer; voices are audible at a distance, though words don’t make precise sense.

  Glancing to the right of Antares in medium blue, I intuit cosmic allurement.

  Stars arrive non-visually, first.

  I practice to see light in this process of evanescence, like an aroma.

  The field of heaven, which operates outside space-time, is formed by acts of other entities, other stars, and by people who rise in the dark to look for them and place them.

  When mind extends toward sky, it may take the form of a perceived star, because respect is a portal.

  When your experience ardently links to an object or person where you live—husband, tree, stone—you try to hold onto the visibility of this object and its location.

  Connecting with a geography of sky gives this sense of security, inspiration.

  I ally with a crater on the plain, also the comet’s light.

  2

  Venus arrives in cerulean; Antares, second star is just visible, then Pico in indigo.

  Full dark: light streaks from one star to another like communication, travel.

  Planets line up and turn with their DNA, energy around them, like a web struck by light.

  Stars are holes in the dark; when I look at one, I go there; entity contact eases emotion.

  I ask heaven that we be left with some essence of what has disappeared, that one day we again experience physical beauties no longer seen.

  Remembering concentrates something at work in the present; visibility is like memory, dimensions also; invisible, organizing substrates unify past and present.

  They provide a framework that keeps stars in place, cohering the dynamic quanta of infinity, so travel is easy.

  This frame does not emit light, nor other waves, nor show itself by absorbing light from hot dust or star death, as with a concentrating black hole, nor show how far we extend into its ecology.

  Watching is like living on the mesa, while deepening my reception to it.

  Richness I concentrate is not contained; I radiate desert fragrance spontaneously from a wild rose in my dream.

  May we go to that time; I mean, we’ll all see the beginning.

  3

  She passed on her observations of Venus and spring dawn.

  We did not ask the personal details of her study.

  We thought, naturally, object and subject processes connect, that night sky and knowing are undivided.

  Perhaps creativity is the unfoldment of relations between objective and emotion in space.

  The beingness of stars onto which my consciousness projects awe is also consciousness as light.

  When we expand into any unknown, we use the term origin, i.e., one time.

  Waiting for stars I know is the fullness of time, contingent time.

  I go out before dawn to check Venus on my birthday.

  I feel extension, pre-space through which dawn will arrive.

  There’s an ambience of bird song, cicadas.

  I aspire for transparent space to diffuse dissonance inside me to its quantum complement; sky lightens.

  4

  I see a white tree against black ground.

  Its shape is a person reaching up with wide arms, but fuzzy in outline from leaves and blossoms.

  I study how gravity, allure, origin create the shape.

  Natural law is represented by the dark from which my tree grows.

  Night elicits, then highlights the tree, as if brightness (day, experience) were a flexible substance being thought into coherence, a mold.

  Night is of day, as day is transparent, as dark energy is of light attraction.

  The tree attains its most intimate relation with black ground in the context of my viewing.

  I perceive the beingness of stars as a kind of visually emotive flow-through.

  A woman watching is like a mirror surface on the outermost layer of appearance or her experience of the tree.

  Each of us when we look at stars is the localized reflection.

  I went out with him to see the Spiral branching away.

  It viscerally enmeshes us in subtle fields of other beings thinking through space in lines of light.

  Distance between viewer and star resolves into one experience, point or singularity.

  As you continually generate the transparency of flowing space, it must continually unfold matter that shines.

  consciousness self-learns

  1

  Plants and rocks lay under night sky; ground is a subject of sky; the relation’s a force.

  I combine descriptions with
ideas of forces; my photograph of night sky’s like a text of symbols.

  Look inside when you are struggling; every cell in your body emits light.

  Cilia beat rhythms into space, signaling cells of wildflowers in a field, signaling sky.

  I connect to it, holding the hand of our friend, who’s sleeping.

  When I look at a constellation, I construct lines from indivisible points, bind seeing to an infinity of points and single brights, at the same time.

  I may not recall these thoughts tomorrow, and I’m anxious, as if stars had extinguished.

  Then, talking to you about his illness provokes tension, disagreement that stirs in my memory lost thoughts.

  Our difference became a permeable membrane between each person and the whole.

  Even though my mind focused within bounds, it’s indivisible from sky I see, because seeing is as a field.

  Looking is an innate impulse toward wholeness.

  2

  Particles flash in and out of being; the border between life and death may not continue in other dimensions; gravity and time flex.

  Struggle and freedom elide.

  When you arrive at my house ill, I throw my arms around you and lead you to a chair, “What happened?”

  “I’m glad your mind is clear, even with such pain;” I place my hand on your chest and pray.

  And I pray when I read the paper, for lost people.

  Any transformation is an expressive aspect of this intent.

  World is undivided, observer and observed, as particle from its wave nature, as prayer from a compassionate outcome, when prayer is multiplied.

  Next week, you find me crying over a fawn whose mother was killed; I drove to town for milk, but when I returned the fawn had died.

  “It was very hungry, now it’s dead,” I tell you; “Its mind flows into my mind.”

  “I’m weeping because I want milk.”

  3

  The dead fawn is a delicate, cosmic holding-position, like the invisible spiral around a crane circling the marsh to land.

  Its pattern of being maintains without a fixed structure, whose virtual particles and fields may include my prayers, my compassion for it.

  The way some waves continue into space when light and matter are removed, using a latent mentality outside space-time, my fervent plea may evolve physically.

  From possibility, feeling for a faun generates photons like rain on matted fur; words, visions, images of milk engage with the baby for a better outcome.

  When I recognize this, effects become intentional, hopeful, because love is a measurement.

  4

  I think waves that condense into particles retain their original information and that coherence among these waves is lost when an organism dies, like a person swept into the chaos of a party.

  He can no longer hear himself or speak.

  When no one observes us, not even ourselves, our particles regain their wave aspect.

  Our attention that collapses quanta contains a kind of meaning intrinsic to feeling connected.

  I sit on the patio and watch small birds calling, fluttering in the rain.

  Our friend asks if I saw an oriole on the stones outside his window, but I did not.

  Describing a bird you see, which I did not see, is part of collective consciousness self-learning.

  Ghosts, angels, phantom birds, crop circles, even hoaxes incarnate some of this wholeness.

  Connecting to it is being, wherein through prayer my consciousness binds with subtle energy of a bird I did not see?

  Coda

  I love a person leaving who sees birds in other worlds, nearby.

  All the good in nature I imagine in birds, their images like quantum leaps.

  Goodness is part of my awareness that sensing a bird intends.

  We feel love shape a situation in which our friend’s inseparable on a constitutive level from the immediate.

  Worlds emerge and transform, so metaphor uses birds to extend disrupted thought.

  I want to learn from what generated the metaphor, the need.

  scalar

  1

  You can rise to a level of not knowing that’s untouched by entropy.

  Out of uncertainty, openness: order is maintained.

  You rise to a realization beyond decay.

  There’s a deeper intelligence than that.

  It radiates like light across a border between quanta and matter, unifying them.

  Your physical body and your quantum body of probabilities are like two candles on a table.

  Space between them evenly fills with photons of light, no separation at the particle level.

  You carry one candle outside and hold it up against a background of stars.

  Space between candle and a star fills with waves that bind them; each star’s as connected to it as the one inside.

  Look at your candle, then look at Sirius; photons from each hitting your retina electrochemically flash.

  You’re another flame or star in the surrounding interconnected field.

  Yet, what is the structure of this connectedness?

  The field is your light and not knowing simultaneously, local light.

  You observe sky’s dimensions according to our consensus on entropy.

  You don’t see the unifying factor in all things; you can’t perceive the enfoldment of chance and fatigue.

  2

  Time also enfolds.

  Your present state may not relate to what’s past, but to a more fundamental structure, like a pool of widening rings from a stone.

  This moment cuts through the physical universe now and seems to hold all of space in itself.

  What happens today may be altered by an event in the future, since space consists of ambiguous, foggy regions, where a particle may pass on your last day.

  Awareness creates the duration you experience.

  If you try to divide duration, it’s like suddenly passing a gold blade through the flame.

  You divide space you think time occupies, not motion itself.

  Imagine duration as non-referential time, change, and freedom from the decay inevitably implied.

  You observe creative emergence.

  Growth indicates intelligence of the universe as a whole in space you measure between heartbeats: new content, new time.

  3

  I can’t distinguish duration that separates two instants from my memory that connects them.

  Duration continues what has passed with now; it implies consciousness, for which time flows.

  Brain steps down energy radiating from stars through optic nerve to pineal gland arranging these myriad photons into a neurological, space-time grid.

  It conveys the influx of light as a field, mentality.

  So thought is a form of organized light.

  Non-physical variables, my wish, intent, expectance also create and transcribe energy.

  Even if mind never operates as slowly as the speed of starlight, your future dwells gracefully in the space of your imagining.

  4

  A body or galaxy requires continuous energy to maintain, like a whirlpool in a fast stream.

  Its spiral persists, though water constantly moves in and out of it.

  A standing wave of photons comprises the immanent grid of starlight that permeates space; and vice versa, emanations from earth, sun, your nervousness and emotion radiate out.

  You observe this enigmatic dark energy, where every point in space contains intersecting photons from every star, past and present.

  Zero-sum, immense creativity streams through you, gyre of light as intelligence or your intent to observe.

  The observation is grainy; people, dogs, trees are mosaics, a crystalline lattice of interacting bits; each “decides” countless tim
es per second whether to leap to the next moment.

  Light, information, so activated composes a body in the process of coalescence, outcrop of growing, infinite fields.

  Nurture belief that your body’s infused with the deep intelligence of this information, whose sole purpose is to sustain you.

  5

  Add to four dimensions inner space, mind, the virtual.

  All objects connect, for example, through meaning in hyperspace.

  Our plans for the future exist as images, and these cognitive structures are also in hyperspace, since mind is more like a spatial concept.

  What we call star lines, like songs, ley lines are the interconnectivity.

  There’s no need to decide what’s true; reality’s a learning curve.

  Then, he tells me about his pictures of stars and galaxies; he projects himself into space, taking with him a 35mm camera.

  He puts the lens to his forehead and photographs the sun, moon, Milky Way, Andromeda.

  He has many boxes of these images.

  To commune, deepest process of space, evolves toward more connection, complexity.

  When I look at night sky, I touch inner space with heaven; plasma streams across borders.

  Time is not blankness through which light travels, more like plasma.

  Consciousness embodies it by acting self-referentially, not dualistically as in seeing, not seeing.

  Through emotional attraction, mass affinity, tachyonic speed, we know bodies and radiance are interwoven; what we call originary is instant.

  the loom

  1

  I would show her the night sky and point out certain stars.

  A person, being of cosmic origin, can become one with a star.