‘Blue Pendulum Marking Time’ – Google Images
Ken’s poem about going ‘blue-pendulum’, marking time with each micro-instant swing of attention… I get glimpses myself doing that too, in my own mostly clipped and disjointed way. I’m reminded of what Rinpoche writes about ‘marking time’…
“[We may] see clearly that the unfolding of linear time, and the sense of progress on a path—aspects of reality that seemed so fundamental, so vital—are in fact only ‘marks’, points imposed on the rhythms of time. The marks do not mark out anything solid… Marks are conditions imposed on every instant. A mark that is noticed becomes a point, but a mark that opens becomes a rhythm. Yet rhythms too can turn toward the solid. They can take their part in a causal sequence, always heading toward the ‘next’, always participating in the structure of before and after, of beginning, middle, and end. Through such structures, we ‘mark out’ and establish lines, which we name as moments in time…â€
“The mark means that something has formed… We look for the cause, or for the process of arising, or the originating force, or for something that lies beyond… It is through this process that the mark manifests… compiled into a focal setting, perhaps through a combination of the sensory faculties.â€
“We can speak of this as the field, the producer of the waves and rhythms and ripples we identify. It looks like action comes from the center of the field, but in the field, the field is centerless. Still, form manifests and creation takes form. With labels comes completion: now we can mark out the appearance that has been formed and founded.â€
…’Keys of Knowledge’, by Tarthang Tulku, p. 182-6
And as I mark time tinged with blue, I think of this month, October, a transition point between that time to this, for an instant at mid-point of the pendulum’s swing… poised… not swinging in either direction, time stops in the sense it feels unconditioned… and I know-not my fabricating…
OCTOBER DOWN
by Ken McKeon
Sky cleft fall through
Of the wind blown light,
That and a crow squawk
Wake up my day,
I’m thinking blue now,
And here it is,
Little time left, light sways
Further away
From us each day,
And I start going pendulum
With the hours,
My arc shortens,
The ducks I set up
So carefully
Fall away,
All of them now
Shot down quickly,
It’s unnerving,
Just how does one mark place?
I know,
Note a field of places,
Each one says,
Mark me, mark me, mark me,
We are all strangers
Being spoken to
In sober tones
As we walk by.
