Butterfly In A Bathysphere Poem by Denis Mair

I think a sacred purpose is embodied in the way water and sunlight interweave with dust to make the living world.

A telos inheres in us, lifting us out of the dust, but it is a mystery where it is drawing us. If it is drawing us toward catastrophe, maybe the sacred telos is also suffering---on a vaster scale than any individual being could suffer.

The brain is like a flower bract, and where the whorl is tightest with growing petals of thought, that is where we have transcendent experiences. We are led onward to taste the flux of world-forming energies which is inside us as much as outside.

In every simple reflection there is a gradient in the riverbed of thought, tugging us toward the rapids of radiance and joy, if only we can feel our way to that current. But there are also dark undercurrents and eddies that churn our emotions.

Why are our brains set up this way? Why is there such intricacy underlying our intelligence? Why are we encouraged to sample the fountain of pure energy that coalesces into matter? This is not the plane on which we exist, so why are we vouchsafed a peek at it? Why are we endowed with a sense of beauty? Is it to guide our aspiration, a signpost of the telos implanted within us?

It seems we were born to seek something, and in seeking just to live. Yet we also have to resign ourselves to being ephemeral, like leaves in fall, to make room for more life. Why does a death-wish sometimes gain the upper hand in our psychic economy? Can beauty help us strike a balance, to live in a blaze of color as long as we can? Or could beauty sometimes be mixed in, even when destructive impulses get the upper hand? (Perhaps Edgar Allen Poe could tell us something about that.)

I want to build a staircase of well-thought-out, questions, make myself ready to receive revelations. On each tier of the stairway I stop and give thanks for how the laws on that level mesh with those beyond it. If the laws didn't mesh with each other, I wouldn't be alive. If I cannot mesh with the laws, I will get stuck.

Is the mesh of laws a sacred fabric? In the orbits around an atom, even the ratio of energy levels between one electron shell and the next is equal to pi (π) . So there is a trellis of ETERNAL geometrical truths, upon which the flux of energy entwines like vines. Where is it taking us? Where am I taking myself on its stairway?

Although I can think about these things and articulate them, I have fallen out of communication with many people I knew. I have become almost aphasic in connecting with others. Luckily, I still have a few loved ones that I can still talk to about simple wants and needs. I am sorry that I lost my wide circles of acquaintance and friendship.

What an absurd pass I have come to, spinning out these reveries while my emotional connections fall away, like a butterfly in a bathysphere. To those who invest their deepest feelings in words, then tie them in pretty parcels and send them floating down the river, please accept my thanks.

When I stumble onto such a parcel and bend down to reach it, I feel as if a nurse were simultaneously bending down, to wipe my brow with a cloth. To the bedside nurse leaning next to me, this locked-in patient thanks you.