[RCL]

O Balls of Being O

The “all” in “ball” suggests “be all/is all,” a cosmic duality where two-are-one: the cyclic beginnings and ends of life and death and, possibly, every game that’s played with balls. Many people instinctively, some fanatically, play and follow ballgames, experiencing the pulses of ahead-and-behind, winning-and-losing, gracefulness-and-awkwardness:

American and European football; ping pong, tennis, racquetball, softball, baseball, pinball, soccer ball, golf ball, volleyball, pickleball, basketball, bocce ball, bowling ball, croquet ball; also, pocket pool and billiard balls, handballs, clay pigeons, hockey pucks and dart boards, echoing the balls of sun, moon and earth, as well as planet orbits tracking our calendar.

Our bodies too echo O: eyeballs, ears, nostrils, breasts, nipples, testicles, balls of feet; as do our emotional cycles (sad/glad, love/hate et al) and myriad other expressions of cyclic wholeness, including formal tracks for foot, horse, auto races and sites for wrestling and cage matches, each round and repeated within cages wild with sharp contrasts, bipolar forces.

For centuries, the world’s children shot marbles, hard small stones (primal weapons) smoothed by streaming water, later manufactured as plain and ornate glass balls, ammunition for this ancient war game, like so many games. A player shot his “shooter” marble (thumb flicking it off the crooked forefinger) at other marbles within a circle drawn in dust, winning or losing some “mibs.”


S3L1: too for also?

This final English 101 thesis sentence, below, omitted. Thanks, Cameron!

In manifest ways, the archetypal ball permeates human culture’s facts and thoughts—instinctively and intentionally mimed for weapons, arts, games and narratives.

[W T Clark]

This is wonderfully unhinged: the more I read it, the more unhingedly convinced I am. The final paragraph feels rather like a boring conclusion to a treatise; you would do better without it.

Hope this helps.

[RCL]

Cameron,

Big thanks for reading and swinging with its unhinged pulse. You're right about the last paragraph, now gone.

Cheers,

[John Riley]

I don't know anything to say but I like this, Ralph. I admire the wildness and force and how it seduces me back for just one more reading. It's the type of poem that is what it is and I wouldn't think of trying to improve it.

You seem to have broken out of a cage lately. I like it.

[Jim Ramsey]

Hi Ralph,

I remember that little baby Ray was burbling and gurgling to the bubbles in his bath before he grew up acquainting with the music of the spheres in one of your poems posted not that long ago.. You are on a roll with roundness. I suddenly have a craving for donut holes. One of my favorite songs is Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game," so of course I'm glad you are adding greater sphericity to the sphere.

All the best,
Jim

[RCL]

Thanks, John. Guess I’m getting more and more restless as my Wheel of Fortune seems to be increasing speed and predictability. Plus, it’s fun to push at the edges.

Thanks for noticing my greatest obsession, Jim. I seem to have a mass of bubbles on the brain as round and round I go, livin’ that spin I’m in. Which is to say, I’ve been mugged by the monomyth as dramatized by James Joyce and described by Joseph Campbell (i.e., by being a born a prisoner of natural cycles, from Ingress to Egress!). Yes, and good old wonderful Joni who circled back recently to sing a little!

It’s time to start thinking more about the Yo-Yo! Another round toy that has also been a weapon (its circulating cousin is the unstrung boomerang?).

[Jim Moonan]

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Hi Ralph, I know I'm late in responding to this. I hope I'm not crossing the time-line of bumping something up when it's been going down for awhile... I had begun preparing a comment when you first posted this but don't know where it went. It's a buried bone.

But I circled back to it today and read it and at the very least wanted to say that I, too, liked the unleashed quality to the thought process on display and how it is a sample of the creative mind in free thought mode. It happily follows its nose, goes down rabbit holes, ping pongs from revelation to revelation without pretense and with no clear motive other than to make your thoughts known. It's refreshing to see.

Although I haven't actually tested it out to see if it would work, it seems to me it would easily slip into Joycean-like language (somewhere between the style of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) if you removed all the punctuation. Hmm.

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