2 - Cutting and Pasting: Language Writing and Molecular Biology

Summary

Exploration takes extra words

Words qua sentience and thinking

These are spread over a position – being long and pointed over

They anticipate an immoderate time and place

Reality moves around making objects appear as if they belong where they are

Then it shifts, say, up and down, with the sunlight's yellow interstitial coloring matter

The sun here is an exceeding stricture

I've yet … I keep thinking … all open daylit areas carry to peripheries their yellow floating ovoid motes

Eggs go out of optical range, but only ellipsing

This particular attraction empties in

Blown convincing field, it rattles with brown grass turning

I'm looking, prematurely, for a particular point of view – that of one who has already achieved objectivity

Objectivities and metonymies

But one can't die

Sex sexes scale and flies faithful to the ground

October 11, 1986

This is the third section of Lyn Hejinian's poem sequence The Cell (1992), a series of meditations on the embodied self, partly inspired by the pragmatism of William James and the philosophical observations of everyday landscapes in Henry David Thoreau's writings, partly by a commitment to avant-garde proceduralism, and partly by interest in the principles of scientific research. Tacit allusions to science are everywhere: in references to methodology (exploration, objectivity); in technical vocabulary (sentience, interstitial, ovoid, optical); and in the style, which emulates the self-correcting precision based on repeated observation typical of reports of scientific research.