The Wisdom Of Rivers

Meander comes from Greek Maiandros, the name of a river in Caria, Turkey, which today bears the name Büyük Menderes, and flows west to the Aegean Sea in the proximity of the ancient Ionian city Miletus. There’s nothing much there now. It’s good to know that this level of meandering concludes so quietly. There’s no climactic seaport, just arid hills, the mild soughing of a breeze. My dad liked taking back roads and stopping a lot. It was generally to take photographs. This drove me nuts, whenever I tagged along. I’m usually in a hurry to serve my addictions, one of which is inertia. But I applaud people who take their time to take in the undiscovered, the back roads, the detours, the places hidden from view, the places lost to the frantic hustle of commerce. This is what I like about meander, and what rivers are always so good at. “how much / of the ‘way to’ / is loss,” writes Heller Levinson in a poem titled “the road to seep road” included in Seep, his recent collection of poetry from Black Widow Press, lamenting the loss of serendipity, the treasures of the aberrant, thanks to the prevalence of technologies such as GPS. Navigational systems are great if you’re in a hurry or trying to get to a meeting in an unfamiliar city, but they’re a disaster for the human psyche, which is enlarged by accident, by kismet and coincidence, chance discovery and the uncanny flukes that awaken the senses and get us dizzy with the unyoked power of intuitive occasion. It’s stunning to make yourself available to things by dropping all purpose and predetermined trajectory. It takes discipline – a certain willingness coaxed out of the easeful milieu of our internal programming - to be a little unhinged. The French have a word for it: dépaysement. Finding yourself elsewhere. Beyond the borders of habit and routine. The grids and structures that are useful for productivity but poison for the mind. Dépaysement is a state of disorientation. That can be unpleasant. But it’s stunning when you surrender to its limitless circulations and the tumble of its psychedelic dice. Everyone has a sense of losing this world but really what’s going on is a secret rebellion in the souls of the alert. Poets like Levinson denuding language of its syntactical chains and setting the words free.