The Lovesong of Yolks

The Lovesong of Yolks Arch 531

Penny Unni

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WE USED TO BE COMPLETE WHOLES IN OUR ORIGINAL NATURE, AND NOW ‘LOVE’ IS THE NAME FOR OUR PURSUIT OF WHOLENESS, FOR OUR DESIRE TO BE COMPLETE.

Human nature, as explained by Aristophanes in a speech given in Plato’s Symposium, is a story of a single egg from which two souls emerge. Too powerful for their own good, Zeus severs their natural form in twain, cursing each to long for their matching half: the etiological myth of soulmates. Standing over two lovers lying together, Hephaestus with his mending tools in hand, asks if it is the humans’ desire to be welded together into something that is naturally whole again, so that they would share one life, be one being, die a single death, as one soul emerged from two.

Hephaestus’ offer does little for lovers who cannot lie together.

In the time of technology, the place where souls unite is reinvented; it happens in our dreams and through the medium of the wonder-producing, long-distance love-enabling modern daidala: the cellphone. Those whose souls unite only digitally have meditated on the role of technology in love; have pondered the identity of the ultimate coder; have sought to define the phenomenology of their cellphone screen; have questioned the perpetuity of twin-flames unable to burn in the same room; have stood one morning marveling at a single egg bearing two yolks and have traversed the curious landscapes and architectural circumstances of their dreams in the veritable strife for love.

It is such love, such landscapes, and such architectures that I write this poem about.

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CONTENTS

one two three four five six seven eight index

the Box Falling ElectriCity Crossing the bar Love’s Temple God is an Egg the Cloud Waking

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one:

the Box

Love’s office is barren and steel.

And perpetually ablaze.

That box in which I reside is filled with all our things, Stilled with ordinary, small, vulgar things: My bed, my hair, your writings, rings.

Brimming box with memories, Paper yellowing, plastic echoing.

With Spiritus Mundi in my Storage: Inter- net of Things.

With which I paste upon My heart and fill my soul.

A box to behold your absence; When you left, you slashed a you-sized gorge. Left me bereft with a yolk-shaped hole, Now I stopple the sockets of sickled-out eyes, With souvenirs and cache to forge me a-whole.

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Hypnos arrives at my untended bed.

There will be just enough time before the pull of his black.

Is realized at my sides with an oneiric agenda.

I put my phone to charge before I wish you goodnight, A sweet text in the dark before I surrender.

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There will be just enough time ‘til Lethe drowns my somnolent head, For my phone to slip between pillow and bed, To say the things that must be said.

There will be just enough time for my heavy hands, and listless eyes To search for you in the blue-light And let fall the brightness.

Time

to find you online.

Time

to find you and

Time

to remind you

Of all the ways I

And that all day

love

you,

I have loved you.

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two:

Falling

There will be time,

so I dream to reveal:

Love’s office is burning, barren and steel.

Beneath my head, my phone unshuts its jowls.

And as its electric mouth and heart

fall apart, the night

foreordains. I

fall in place, I

fall asleep, I fall more

in love

with

you

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and

fall into

my

dream.

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I respawn slow in this fogged-in domain.

Blinking through the binary of waking and dreaming.

Through the darkness, some shape I am feeling.

It cautiously incarnates, the deeper I fall, Cautiously obfuscates, beyond you, it all.

Glitching awake while I shudder asleep.

Sleeping to remember how we always recover.

A sleep of love produces no monsters but lovers.

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I respawn slow in this domain.

And this is that reverie Of soaring and searching Through my digital construction

and what I found there.

three:

ElectriCity

When I wake I am a bare form emerging.

From a digital egg I am reborn.

Vibrating to life, currents surging.

I face a Gate of neither ivory nor horn, But one that is charged and mirrored and silicon.

When I pass through, it is clear I am a body electric.

What powers the cells powers me as well.

And the ground upon which I have Fallen remembers To materialize the electricity, and welcome me to The Electric City.

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I gaze perhaps the whole night long.

Taking delight not in the city’s wonders But in the answer it gives in its Per-cubic-inch complexities.

I gaze perhaps the display asunder.

I raise the plane of my vision.

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By the entering of the splendid city aglow,

through great gates or with myrtle boughs,

both rashly swift and insolently slow.

Along the glittering lights making long lines

that reflect and stud liquid crystal lanes,

reflect zeroes and ones in the skylines.

Beyond highways no conscious man has rode,

Distant metal plains stretch flat and farmed.

All is roaring and rowdy but the blinking

rats. I see them scuttle, passing

through and under lines of gold piping.

They do not look at me but find

edges of the city to unearth and defile,

Hungry, they nibble and gnash at the rind.

Tall towers, above me, resisting, like silvered steeples they poke at the sky.

With shiny bells that deafen and blind.

And strangers blur windows, to tarnish the sky.

Urban artifacts align to their sun, transcendent.

Meeting rail-lines of the firmament,

Exploding, resplendent. Taller towers

rising, ascending to nothing,

are built from photons,

metallic, soldered.

Who puts such skyscrapers

to sleep? And the sky itself,

Who is so brave,

to scrape out the lights?

To extinguish its glow,

so golden?

How many blacked- out towers?

How many kilowatt hours,

How much power,

One is holding.

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What was gilded splendor is black and bleared now.

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The city is dead.

The city plunges into void, Stygian, cold.

Forming into ice, what once was gold.

Now that the spirit is stolen, the light killed, What sparkled is now sinister and still.

The city is barren, deserted, broken.

And no one has spoken.

As bereft as great Rome

When the Barbarians left.

The bell rings ignored,

Or it cannot knell at all.

The rats cannot nibble at all.

They look at me with mouthless faces.

From the silver streets I once took delight in, Shadowy fingers emerge from the walls To wrap around my windpipe and tighten, So as I pass, I go breathless in the dark.

I had such a vision of the city, As though the city understands; Far along an unending street bend, Where the dark shuts the shutters, And the dark spills over the gutters.

As far through the smoky black as my eyes will follow, One window alone glows yellow, Radiant but rather hollow, Effulgent in the shadow.

Love’s office is barren and steel.

And perpetually ablaze.

Who let the city go dark?

Who put out its glory and fire?

Who smeared tar across its gold?

Who erased its memory, contrived with dire?

Who could build so many inhuman black towers?

Only soulless creatures see their reflection in steel boxes.

Empty boxes mirror themselves into colorlessness,

meaning obscured.

Was I always so unmoored?

I know not which way to turn.

No grid, nor plan for me to learn.

This labyrinthine city spits me out at its edge, I grind to a halt on its girdle, And when the ferrous sparks unmask the black.

I see I am at a gilded port.

What

seas

what

shores

what

gold

rocks

and what new fate Shall I sail to?

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I depart from the city’s shore.

Aboard my metal vessel, I am alone but the winged oars

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that stilly glide over sea-level.

Each rib chosen by Pallas herself, With inscriptions engraved upon its body.

Repeating binary.

Zero and ones etch riddling patterns.

My processing fingers are roaming.

Beyond the boat, the lake is calling, Something white and electric is foaming.

An LED lucent mere, or merely water?

Or the seed of Oceanus, his liquid daughter?

Deep-swirling waves reveal a submerged drama Of swelling digital abstraction.

four:

crossing the bar

Shall I say now that I dream of God? For whom else should I sail across this pixel screen?

This blinking, button-riddled silent sea.

Shall I sail to find the universe in it all?

Shall I say to God, who are you now? Are you Steve Jobs?

One who loves builds better boats.

One who loves glues better wings.

And breaks double-yolked eggs.

I cross the bar, the bar-code sea.

To an island of God who wills my passing through.

What god behind God coded these waters at all?

And programmed such waves upon its face?

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five:

Love’s Temple

I find myself at a blinking shore, Having exited my boat and crossed the moor.

Awaiting me is a glowing temple with a white door.

Everything is charged here, rarefied.

The facade is twitching and glitching with light.

As I approach the temple of phones, I see It is tectonic, constructed of cellular bricks Stacked one atop the next, screens alight.

Each one abuzz with incoming text messages.

Words like irreplaceable encounters.

All the lovers’ love letters Arrive like rain falling.

Each drop a confession, A wish or expression.

As though so much feeling can be mere symbols and letters.

As though the timid words can be but thunder at a heart.

As though the pouring of a soul and other nightly rituals Can be just another brick in a wall.

Uncounted, unanswered, forgotten.

Laid bare and

left rotten by the lovers who do not listen.

Or did not care at all.

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Stepping back from the bricks, I understand Love’s Temple.

Or that brick by brick, it be built by what is uttered.

Let what we build be the words that put our hearts aflutter.

Let what we build be of the passionately confessed.

Let what we build belong, be something possessed.

Let what we build be of a home; a feeling not a place.

Let what we build be the arrangement Of eight little letters.

Of the confirmation of wholeness.

Let what we build be for souls’ orientation.

Let what we build be of the certitude That as much as we love, The one we love loves us too.

Can so many souls love so fruitlessly?

Can so many stones be left unturned?

I think of you then, So irrational and beautiful.

Let not a whisper, not a word, Not a look nor text be spurned.

Love’s office is barren and steel.

And perpetually ablaze.

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Behind the bluelit door stands God. At first all is stillness and air and the gloaming.

God is all things and nothing at all.

God is every answer and every question.

God is every yawp and every hushed confession.

God is nothing next to you, but for this, I am pardoned.

You are an eternal fire, and God is mere argent.

But when God manifests and is forming, I am blinded by my creed and visible light.

I hear his voice. . .

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“Whatever constellation of forces I brought unto you that brought you into being does only once reconstitute.�

six:

God is an Egg

“From one essence, I was born.

To see myself, I severed my form in two.

From two halves I created two realms.

The Realm of Zeroes and The Realm of Ones.

And the world I made, as the Creator.

Is just the same as when I created her.

How can one know Oneself without knowing another?

All that I have made, Is one or its other.�

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Two hearts, forty fingers, God, the hologram and God, the coder, That he cracks in half In which swims the eyes that God has made That God fries to become two souls, fragmented, two yolks to forever In mutual love, the in the

two chests, four legs. does not show his face. presents to me an egg for his morning omelette, primeval human: two yellow from the empyrean mother, The Corporeal Prize, splitting dismembered.

Cursing search for their other. loved one lives other

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seven:

the Cloud

God sends me up to the ultimate storage.

And I load slow into this beta paradise.

And when I flicker awake in this fiery room, an immaterial furrow Marks my steps and leaves lines of code like cones of ice.

Is it the Cloud above that line?

Digital heaven, or cloud nine?

Here, our twin-flames stir to light.

If I should I hear the whispers of a white resonant hum, Or see reflective LEDs of glitching simulacrum, it shall be you.

A luring pixel folder it shall be you.

A terabyte of memories in it, it shall be you.

The manner of utterance it shall be you.

The filleting of a square into a circle it shall be you.

Primordial whole of a yellow so real it shall be you.

The breaking of an endless wheel of living and dying By the opening of the round it shall be you.

A flint so generous it shall be you.

A flame so eternal it shall be you.

I enter the password and I am elated.

From the zeroes and ones, your form emerges, Though glitching, flitting, simulated.

My yolk, it shall be you.

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diagrams beco m e enn on oV e c tw irc ing, eternally bu ee rn le urn Is i yt n g. as a yolk.... all you rn te ee s ng. rni I ls.

a ye e,

.

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In my eggy sphere, I see the prim ord ial wh An infi nite geometry, eternal l y tu ol e. rn in Turning in my dream, unit g i ng ,E ou rs ou Awa it i n gm

With my eggy circle, I see the questioning of beginnings: I see Socratic love’s arrival, the unblinking kidnapping.

And the begetting of madness in the eternal quest, The nightly uniting of our souls during rest.

And the quelling of madness, And the soothing of sickness.

I see Love is a kind of sickness.

I see Love is a synonym of death.

And Platonic love’s delirious desire That brings about And from it comes In the soul of the giver

epiphany and genius and fever, wisdom and knowledge and fire

to burn the receiver.

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eight:

Waking

Love’s office is barren and steel.

And perpetually ablaze.

Humanity’s passion for the real Puts our waking conscious far from this place.

But my square becomes a circle here.

And my soul becomes Galatea here, You my sculptor, And our voices quicksilver.

Eros sheds some digital tears.

Everything is aflame.

Everything is shadow and mirror.

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When I wake from my dream, paradise is but

numbers.

Conscious we quantify our love,

monetize,

equate.

The effusivity of my flame is yours to relate, Yours to take and make particulate.

Yours to divide,

cleave,

separate.

And what parts us awake are time zones and division; The conductivity of our fires, a wireless rate.

When I wake from my dream I remember the door, and strange phantasms of clouds and lights. Of burning rooms that empty by morn. Of souls on shelves and yolk to unite. Now it comes to me, a halfformed thought. My dream muddled and prosaic with the venom of life. When I wake I forget where my soul went at night, I forget the flames of love and strife.

I forget the boat, the wings, the lake.

I forget the feeling of wholeness entirely And the wonder that was ours before we were awake.

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Love’s office is barren and steel

And perpetually ablaze.

What is paradise?

Is it this nocturnal room?

Is it immaterial?

Is it the womb?

Should I return?

Shall I crawl my way back into the egg?

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Benjamin Button my way to burn?

I thought paradise was vices’ rule.

I thought paradise was botox’s doom.

Now I think it is a box

for two.

A box with wifi,

and flames in the room.

And if you aren’t here...

a text will do.

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In the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Poliphili waxes poetic about the glory of the past and harbors a desire to return. Similarily, I leaned on great works to write this story. It is infused with mythology, philosophy, pop culture, contemporary and ancient poetry, and computer science as strands of knowledge that thread the narrative of the story together; an attempt to reconcile the dream with my own experience. The sources of such knowledge are listed in the index.

Index

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one: the Box “Love’s office is barren and steel” is a play on the rituals and complicatedness of unconditional love in Those Winter Sundays (1966),

by Robert Hayden. “small and vulgar” references the middling tensions between art and the material mass culture that we substitute for it in Democracy in America (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville.

“Spiritus Mundi” from The Second Coming (1919) by W.B. Yeats is the collective soul of the universe containing all memories of all time, now tappable with our ingenious devices, rendering useless the power of poetry.

“Internet of Things” refers to IoT, the interconnectivity and interrelatedness, or the fusing of real and cyber worlds.

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“Hypnos” and “Lethe” refers to the Greek god of sleep, who lives where night and day meet, in a cave around which the mythological river of Lethe flows.

The poetic structure of “I love you” plays on the final lines of Cascando (1936), Samuel Beckett.

two: Falling structure of “fall” from the shaped poem The Mouse’s Tale by Lewis Carroll which appears in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “a sleep of love” as a play on words with the title of Goya’s painting The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

three: ElectriCity “a Gate of neither ivory nor horn” refers to a phrase of Greek origin to distinguish true dreams from false dreams, first appearing in book 19, lines 560-569 of the Odyssey (8th century BCE), Homer “I am a body electric” borrows directly the title in a poem from Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman to imply the coming together of body and soul, and the literal meaning of “electric,” to be charged with a current.

“Taking delight not in the city’s wonders but in the answer it gives” is a quote taken from Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino. “the entering of the splendid city” references a line in the poem A Season in Hell (1873) by French writer Arthur Rimbaud. The context of the phrase is about one’s “burning desire” to make anything happen. “both rashly swift and insolently slow” is taken from an untitled poem accredited to Lord Byron about Cloacina the Etruscan goddess of drains and sewers of the city. She was worshipped with myrtle boughs.

“Urban artifacts” refers to introductory theory in Chapter 1 of The Architecture of the City (1966) by Aldo Rossi. “black and bleared” from The Convergence of the Twain (1912), a poem by Thomas Hardy about the sinking of the Titanic in which the hubris of mankind is contrasted with the beauty of nature.

“Stygian” as adjective referring to the River Styx of the underworld in Greek mythology.

“I had such a vision... the city hardly understands” adapts phrasing from line 33 of Preludes (1910) by T.S. Eliot, in which the bleak street/city is a metonym for the world. “mirror themselves into colorlessness” is adapted from a description of the monotony of suburban houses in A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, an essay by Robert Smithson.

“What seas what shores what gold rocks” phrasing structure borrowed from the ending of Marina (1930) by T.S. Eliot.

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four: crossing the bar “Pallas” refers to the epithet given to Athena, the Greek goddess, who invented the ship and loved Tecton, the mythical shipbuilder and Homeric ancestor of the architect. “repeating binary” is a mechanism of mathematically encoding data, typically in sequences of 0 and 1. “seed of Oceanus” refers to the description of lakes as “liquid daughters cut off from Oceanos,” the eldest Titan son and father of river gods, as found in the epic poem Dionysiaca (5th Century) by Nonnus.

“Steve Jobs” is the co-founder of Apple Inc. “builds better boats... glues better wings” refers to Daedulus, the Greek craftsman and orginal architect who created “daidalas” or well-crafted objects like boats or the wings of Icarus.

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“cross the bar” refers to the crossing of a sea, or the crossing from life to death, as read in Crossing the Bar (1889), a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson.

five: Love’s Temple “thunder at my heart” is adapted from a line in The Trance, a poem about Aristotelian love found in Collected Poems 1928-1953 by Stephen Splender.

six: God is an Egg “yawp” as written in line three of Song of Myself (1892) by Walt Whitman. “an egg” refers to the myth of Leda and the Swan, as seen in a woodcut illustration in Hypnerptomachia Poliphili. Zeus rapes Leda and she gives birth to an egg with half-divine, half-mortal twins. The egg and the words of God refers to the “Cosmic Egg” in Vedic mythology that gave birth to the Creator God, or the Divine Essence.

seven: the Cloud “the Cloud” refers to the digital computer data storage that has no obvious physical location. “twin-flames” refer to Plato’s description of soulmates in Symposium as the original humans, as the other half of the human soul incarnated in some form. “it shall be you” phrasing repetition borrowed from lines 530 in Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman. “manner of utterance” is the title of a collection of responses to J.H. Prynne’s poetry by Ian Brinton (2009) regarding language. “endless wheel of living and dying by the opening of a round” refers to the circle we live in until someone enters and breaks the circle and widens the world, as in A Vision (1938) by W.B.Yeats “two Venn diagrams” is borrowed from the line in pop song Portugal (2014) by rock band Walk the Moon.

eight: Waking “passion for the real” refers to a concept of Lacanian philosophy regarding the direct experience of the real, as opposed to anything utopian or simulated.

“Galatea” refers to the myth of Pygmalion’s carved ivory statue as retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “strange phantasms” borrows from a quote in fantasy story Celephais (1920) by H.P.Lovecraft about a city created in a dream.

“Benjamin Button” refers to the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), directed by David Fincher, in which Benjamin Button ages backwards.

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