Raymond FARR
The "Text" As It Is Scanned
I. Number after Blind Number
Under the reign of math's inviolable "text"
the cure is irreducible—a distinctive blindness,
the equations, indicative, offer a voluptuous sight.
To solve one is to suspend one's belief in oneself
To believe that numbers are a blindness themselves
is to accept the infinite in respect to one's existence
at the "text's" periphery. Its one quickly expanding,
sightless dimension rolls over us like a whale
smashes a whale boat in hot pursuit. The blind beggar
covets the "text's" personality, stumbles drunkenly
up the stairs to his boarding-house room,
his cane tapping the ridiculous mathematics
of the unbeliever: tap-tap tap-tap (one two, one two)
& cadence, withdrawing into blindness, leers
at itself in the black mirror of the blind man's eyes.
The blind beggar strips, alone in the dark, deluded
to the point of actually seeing for the first time:
two plus two the "text" screams at him—tap-tap, tap-tap.
On the toilet before going to blindly to sleep he welcomes
the sight-giving elders to his crucible-room,
their names synonymous with invariable darkness—
bridges over nothing designed to scale. And the scale
reduced to a paucity's dimensions, distorts the "text,"
decrees that it must be brought up to date.
The measurements, taken again and again, prove
the blind man's existence here in his darkness.
And so one is trapped; one counts or begins to count
the unpronounceable integers of sightedness
until nothing comes of this exercise but a kind of momentum,
the forward-progressing illusion of the "text" attained.
II. Lunar-Blindness
We slept nude beneath our protectoress-moon,
safe in the silken embodiment of her blindness.
Her blindness required a sighted congregation.
So our current image of her becomes the question:
does our sight empower our protectoress-moon?
If we continue to stare up & pray in consolation,
will she open the "text" to a pre-arranged page
and read: Nothing occurring is unwilled; the "text"
is our witness even while blindness eclipses the moon.
One shall surpass one's voyeuristic self
by one's audacious desire to decipher the "text?"
III. Vertical Sight
A rule was created and handed down via the "text":
In the blind man 's eyes we seek out enlightenment.
And thus the miners adorn themselves with the lamps
of descent strapped on their foreheads.
Their descent is a minor, purely and simply.
The "text" of descent is a mist on the glass, a metaphor.
(There are few more potent than this descent,
blindly, into the underearth—endless, unnegotiable
descent and ascension, the cramped elevator
a synecdoche for the "matter at hand," the "text.")
And witnessing life's arch-Faustian temptation:
to descend and experience an inexhaustible life,
they sometimes sing or speak in low voices,
confiding in the shadows that envelope them,
oblivious to the mineshaft's contortionist's embrace,
the dark contracted walls stony as a tomb.
And wonder if something has changed (the "text"?),
if finally they'll see what was meant to be seen.