the human sensorium

some residue of April lingers,
in the taste of its oblivion,
a haunting reminder of its thick milk sky
in the tick of its timeless time
spilling like salt or pride,
its slide back up into one dark drop,
across dense surfaces that echo in the key of E,
and even now, in this disappearing May,
with lilacs almost in full bloom,
the ring of fateful destinies,
that one lost diamond earing
compared to those irreplacable stories
woven from well-travelled words

until I remember Vico,

my Vico-in-the-never-failing-light,

18th Century Italian philosopher

who notes how people translate human nature

into art and technology,

how he regards culture as a second nature

manifested in the artifacts people invent,

by the way technological invention extends

the (first) Nature of the human body,

the prosthesis of technology.

And consequently, how technoculture becomes the text

of his re-search, just as he abandons

Renaissance scientificity, with its all-consuming focus

on natural laws.

Just as he notes in Scienza Nuova (1725)

that the study of cycles in human history

rests upon a foundation and a methodology

different from the totalizing theories of the natural sciences,

that instead of searching for all-encompassing concepts,

he declares the genius of each age must be understood

within its own context and on its own terms.

"But in the night of thick darkness enveloping
the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves,
there shines the eternal and neverfailing light
of a truth beyond all question: that the world
of civil society has certainly been made by men
and that its principles are therefore to be found
within the modifications of our own human mind."
(Giambatista Vico)

How I love that quote.

A language discovered in

"man's social artifacts and their correspondence
to the consequent modifications of his sensibilities." (GV)

By examining the sensorial effects of human artifacts

with formal scrutiny,

he retrieves an ancient poetic wisdom that predates Plato

and relies upon sensorial experience

rather than scientific fact

to expose the common language of human perception.



Imagine finding a poetic science in

"the grammatico-rhetorico-poetic xegesis of nature"



And in the thick milk remainder of this disappearing May
you will find me searching for it
on my own terms.