((Keats))

To ******: to the unnamable Essence, but why six asterisks? Perhaps to draw together completeness and in-completeness, thereby dispelling the dichotomy. Six signifies Earthliness, a totally bound system, as one divides into two, two couples with one to make three, and three interacts with two to make six, and ad infinitum; Seven is the crown, somehow set off from six, yet the asymptotic goal beyond that system, constantly drawing it near (these ideas come from Philo).

So let’s imagine an aquarium. Fish swim about in the water, eating food and each other, copulating, moving about amongst the coral and anemone. Objects interact, but water holds them. Water is the ethereal Essence, and its waves and vibrations control all action, paradoxically, by receiving all action. Water captures the interactions that are ungraspable, since they unfold in time and space, yet water is eternal and cannot be captured. As the crown of Seven receives all asymptotic strivings of the six-systems, yet they never reach Seven. Moreover, objects interact only because Seven exists beyond the boundary.

The sonnet, then, is the water of the fishbowl: ungraspable yet unified, lucid, clear, and tasteless. Concepts hang suspended like water, unable to reach out, only able to receive and react to movements as a pure matrix.

“Had I a man’s fair form,” the sonnet says, “then might my sighs/ Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell/ Thine ear, and find they gentle heart.” Had water some source of will, it would move fish, yet fish move themselves only by pushing against water. Thus the sighs of the sonnet cannot echo but may only receive the thoughts of the reader, out there in the Ether, as he throws a stone into its pond, making ripples. Some irony surfaces: men are but shells, as are their ears.

To place Essence in passionate communication-out-there—speaking, stabbing (“I am no knight whose foeman dies”), wearing armor—because it reaches the frail, temporary heart is to miss the point.

“Essence” is the inability of matter to fuse essentially, no matter how hard the atoms fuse. Real fusion occurs through metaphor, in the literary space of the poetic matrix, separated off into the Crown of Seven through differance. Thus, the shepherds lips may only tremble with maiden’s eyes, and not into them.

The shepherd offers the maiden the poem (“Yet must I [the sonnet] dote on thee”) as if he could offer her water in an envelope, or a pond in his hand. It can only give to her what she throws into the deep, and each rippling never occurs the same way twice. The poem can call her “Sweeter by far than Hybla’s honied roses/ When steep’d in dew rich to intoxication.” Only the poem captures metaphor; only the poem can fuse matter in the set-off space of Essential Concept. Yet the Essence falls away without isolated objects. Objects give meaning to the Essence by reaching wildly into its infinitely receptive waters. When the interior Earth-world reaches for the isolated, eternal, unified space of metaphor and difference, the differance reaches back with incantations and the ‘face of the moon.’