The Preverb - like its predecessor the "Proverb of Hell" in Blake's invention - is the site of a certain focus, a moving "point" within a radial field, and despite its single-line declarative force, attracts reading by field. The "full meaning" (a quality rather than a quantity) is never fully sourced at the spot of its occurrence. However no account of the "meaning" is richly relevant without reference to the site of exposure to the specific language. The site attracts the meaning. Yet the meaning is not a thing but an occurrence in this time and in this place that makes it possible to think a certain thing in a certain way. A site/situation specific assemblage, a local performance.

But where is the locus of the local? The AXIAL as a pure force field creates a liminality at the surface - between on and under, conscious and (un)(sub)conscious, above and below. The torsional force (like a twister) joins the contents of above and below, indifferently. No hierarchy of important contents; also no exclusions. Torque busts attitudes.

So a Preverb occupies the space of wisdom-mouthing, twisting the tongue of truth to include its field of variants, even those not yet considered, yet inevitable. AXIAL wisdom includes its contraries as true friends, baptizes its devils in their own blood. It drives out sanctimonious closure, such as the priestly voice on Sunday that encloses divine words in pretended pre-human tonality, the lure of ultimate comfort. Such closure cannot reach into the heart of present being. We need a crack to crawl out through, a flawed bell to sing its cracked peace, to remind us we are here. The AXIAL self itself cracks, listens in on itself through the new aperture, hears itself by tracking what it lacks, knowing itself as never more than a sound away. A given AXIAL line can lead us out, and pushes a surface toward its outer.

An AXIAL utterance may seize attention below the threshold of syntax, in the moment before a reading knows it is in a sentence, and carry it over the abyss of unintelligibility by sheer synaptics. When the mind lands, so to speak, it may flood with multiple syntactics as a condition of realizing that real meaning is never without (perhaps unexperienced) choice. An AXIAL moment tends to be self-instructive in the valences of elective likeness. And thinking or speaking about it itself tends to slip into AXIALITY, which can feel a little like dreaming awake. Meaning showing up at once as absolute, vanishing and at variance with itself. A syntactic act can have the structure of sensing that one is being followed, a sudden turning, and catching one's own mind bearing down upon one.

Of course we can't catch the present moment; the thought that we should be able to is a lure of the Limiter. Non-limitation is a ride of another kind along a vanishing edge. AXIAL poetics is the practice of talking ourself [sic] through. This is a journey in conjunction, and we join our multiplicity to take it at all. Poetic engagement in non-limited/non-linear field dynamics - a participation afield - draws on the energy of possible reading as something like a virtual fact of interconnectedness, the sense and sensing of how we are already "cross-wired" as it were "by nature." The AXIAL keeps these doors swinging.

The simulations of being thrown into free space may even be training for the great cutting loose at the end of our efforts. At least it does no harm to allow art that kind of force of destiny. One must consider that the mind may be incapable of divesting itself of the wisdom impulse, with all its opportunity for addictive self-delusion, chateau-like constructs where the ego glowers in secret luxury. So faced with an impulse toward wise saying, one can choose among the paths, including, perhaps:
  • to give in to a known thought, a wise way tested on enough minds to assure a certain restfulness;
  • to think better, according to a philosophical or theological method, to accept the challenge of wise saying;
  • to resist with, say, a blank stare, or otherwise (meditatively) allow space to show, to sidestep the habitual, to seek a shift below the threshold of experienced wisdom;
  • to ride it wild till its root (or branched) knowing twists free.
The Preverbs test-drive the latter. One tries to develop a certain touch - perhaps to stimulate, even if necessary to provoke, the thinking impulse to further awareness in saying itself. It's a kind of persistence in folly, to paraphrase Blake, giving the fool his realized moment. Perhaps if not to see the full face of one's private angel, at least to read its lips.