he counts the curves on a cloud near the sun, the only one in a close-to-clear sky; then he curtains that window of clarity closed, finds and follows the flight of a fly against the gloom of his shuttered room. he fumbles at first, and the relight’s the worst, but soon enough he learns how to look through the burns, to keep a coolheaded control on his eye.
noise and novena, racket and reveille, wa[ssa]iling and whistleshrill from the unwanted; whisperlessness, mutension in heart-holding hush, and the hum of an empty house haunted–he’s sampled many sorts of sound and its reverse, and the most jarring change, he’s found, is not cacophony to quiet but from symphony to silence. it seems the shift is more arresting when what’s missed could carry meaning, just as correction is more cutting than a curse.
he visits parfumerie and pisshole, landfill, lover’s lane, abbatoir and orange grove and oil well. he holds [a] fast; the hunger helps him hone his sense of smell, and he discovers how a craving-qua-compulsion can replace remote revulsion when the nether need grow[l]s to a greed, outweighing the proscription against feeding where flesh failed or offal fell.
the skinsense has its hunger, too: heat and hurt and pressure are its measures. he takes his ‘tention to the training which teaches him to treasure those transitions: singe to soothe, feather-[f]lick to fold-or-force-to-move, and of course, from pain to pleasure. here more than else, the difference is of scale, the slide from end to end as smooth as scar[le]tissue polished pale.
where scent and touch are joined, the tongue can take its turn at testing temperature and tingle, moisture and mouthfeel, the way a morsel’s airy-light or water-weighted. he experiments with bitter and spicy and sweet, with starving and glutted and gorged and simply sated. he goes two days without a drink, dries to a chitinous husk, then plunges into a fountainhead pool, deep to where it’s dark as dusk. the opposites in food may be composed and imprecise, but water is an absolute; no other could suffice.
some stop there, but he surenough knows he’s seven-sensed: beyond vision and audition, past olfaction and tactition and their gather in gustation, comes the first of the last two: temptation. (that temp‘s the one in tempora[i]re, the fugitive tempus of proverb’s premonition.) he masters the mereversals known as memory and prediction, struggles with the subtler sort–eternities of endurance, instants of enjoyment, the solstice as condition of conviction–the diversity of differences held due to time’s dilation. tenaciously temperate, he heeds his whole and finds the heart of the matter’s in his relative, [ro]mantic motion–which means, as much, the slippingrip of gravitation.
hence he comes to the last moment: making motives over movement, implicating ground’s attraction in his improvised improvements. because a skill in body’s bone is made a metaphor in mind, he knows his sudden sprints and stops translate the transitiveritas of all dimensions he’s so far divined: countering constriction by control, ma[r]king meaning as a measure of what’s more, overwhelming valuations with a will which swallows whole, scouting out the scope of scapes assessed by scalar score, describing the difference between doubtful divisions and those rifts resistant to any revision, and the grasping at grace that comes in giving chase to gravity with racing relativity, the rush through space that d[r]ives towards divinity.
proprioception prepares his first precept: nosce te corpus :: nosce te ipsum.
balance is the basis of his second: poise is a perfection when perception’s pushes t[r]ip some.