Shadow through hours

Abstract

This manuscript of poems explores the possibility of constructing a relationship with another person via the experience of aesthetic fascination. Throughout the course of this manuscript, the initial gaze onto a beloved other necessarily rebounds on the self, deconstructing the intentional self until an aesthetic common ground opens between the manuscript's two characters. As its own depth of being opens up, one self becomes capable of more fully registering the existence of another. The manuscript progresses in four sections, beginning with a kernel of fascination that begins to starch into the comprehension of a self as it tests the boundaries and similarities between self and world. This section is followed by a second section in which the double existence of the self as the world gives rise to a psychological shadow that the idea of self casts wherever it goes on its worldly aspect. In the next section, the rings of a hunted, drowned self spread out as ripples of identity on an oceanic image of being. The manuscript concludes with two lovers half-asleep in an apartment, echoing the mythic repose of Vishnu and Lakshmi as they drift together on the unknowable water while dreaming the world.