“a person (the poet) has no irreducible, ahistorical, unmediated, singular, eternal identity.”—
Lyn Hejinian
Meditation is the action or practice of deep focus or contemplation on one thing (including “the all” or “the void”) often in silent stillness, perhaps while chanting or deep breathing to clear thoughts & worries to refresh and/or rejuvenate, or embody. Meditation can also be a written or spoken discourse expressing considered thoughts on a subject. Philosophers may write long tomes called “Meditations.” The body of the text.
There is an aporia between these two senses of the word “Meditation.” In a way they contradict each other. It is difficult to write a Meditation while practicing Meditation. One may even meditate to clear the mind of the thoughts so necessary to write a Meditation.
Mediation, on the other hand, is often used in a more social context: the intervention by a third party to settle a dispute to effect a reconciliation. This third person mediator must be impartial and balanced. This may happen in the justice system, or in the couple counsellor’s office. As a teacher, for instance, I too mediate conflicts between students, or step outside myself enough to even mediate between a student and myself.
Yet “mediate” can also mean to bring about. To illustrate this, a dictionary uses the example: The right hemisphere of the brain mediates tactile perception of direction. As an adjective, it can mean “connected indirectly through another person or thing; involving an intermediate agency.” This meaning of mediate may be said to largely characterize 21st Century life in America. Many (if not necessarily all) of our social relations are mediated, not so much in a fair & balanced way, but in indirect, mysterious, ways.
One of these agencies is what we call the media, or the medium. Referring to TV specifically, Marshall McLuhan wrote “the medium is the message,’ but today the internet may be a more primary mediator; the intermediate agency an algorithm. Is the medium still the message if you write about it, study it from within it? In this hyperontological mediated world, what can immediacy be? If we hold immediacy as a desirable value, is it even possible?
The word “immediate” is bound up in urgency, the demand for an “immediate” reply can pressure one who needs time to meditate---either through still silent contemplative yoga postures, or through written discourse expressing considered thought on the subject. Meditation can be seen as a form of mediation, or as Wallace Stevens put it, the act of the mind defending itself from itself. These definitions all come into struggle-play in this collection.
Words themselves (spoken or written) are a medium, and like all media, can both mediate, yet distort. Music as medium can both meditate and mediate. A masseuse may mediate your relationship with your body, as their fingers and your muscles meditate together. For McLuhan the medium was not just the message, but the massage. When Adeena Karasick massages the medium, I wonder what it would be to message a massage while meditating. Can a media(t)ion be more unmediated in an emergency? I don’t know if I’m the first person to title a book “Medi(t)ations” but it doesn’t matter. The word (if it may be called a word) came to me while reading Krysia Jopek, whose collection Hourglass Studies uses that device in wonderful ways, such as “(MELANC)HOLY.” I love that.
Chris Stroffolino has published six books of poetry, most of which are out of print, including Speculative Primitive (2005), Stealer’s Wheel (1999), and Light as A Fetter (1997). Most recently, Crisis Chronicles published Drinking from What I Once Wore (2018). A book of prose reminiscences at the intersection of the personal and cultural, Death of a Selfish Altruist, was published by Iniquity Press in 2017. Radio Survivor.org published his history of the corporate takeover of radio, Radio Orphan, in sequential form, in 2012. He co-authored a study of Shakespeare’s 12th Night with David Rosenthal (IDG Books, 2001). Spuyten Duyvil has also published an earlier collection of essays on mostly contemporary poetry, Spin Cycle (2001). He has released four albums of songs under his own name, including Single-Sided Doubles (2009), Predator Drone (2011), The Griffith Park Sessions (2014), and 12 Songs of Goodbye, and 1 Song of Hello. (2019). Recent poetry has appeared in New American Writing, 14 Hills, Bennington Review, Volt, Konch, Chiron Review, Big Hammer, and The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets (Nomadic Press, 2023). Medi(t)ations is his first full length book of new poetry in 20 years. He has taught Critical Thinking, and, sometimes, Creative Writing, at Laney College in Oakland since 2008, where he lives in a closet with no heat but a piano in a hallway.
