Going away for a bit and putting up a few old things of mine, one of them straightforward and the other less so… I was looking over my old writing tonight: so many stupid ideas pursued, so many missed opportunities…. in sum, I’ve spent a lot of time getting things very wrong, I observe.
My thought about writing today is that I pursued it, not for itself, but in the avoidance of something else (which is the only thing that could explain the degree of wrongness); and yet, in the event that this was not the case, and I were to reapply myself to the task, I’m wondering, would I now know what to do? I’m not sure. I know now what not to do, I’m fairly sure! A bientot.
Invisible World
The invisible world he so dreads
Is made of microbes not the dead.
The dead are dead, they are not here,
(he says, applying the sanitizer)
While life is threateningly everywhere.
There did truly seem no escape
Our bodies invitingly agape —
As strange to them as stars to us
To which, inexorably, they rush,
Bringing us sickness and our death
We the host and they our guest.
This was the unseen world to fear,
Of beings minute, of gasses clear,
Hell was this and what was heaven–
To be still healthy and still living
A Grove
“I’m walking in a grove.” I’m walking in a grove, according to Hendrick, because decidedly you are not in a grove but where what is anything else would better suffice. I’m decidedly not walking in a grove, according to Jim, because I was not doing it correctly. Hendrick was walking in a grove (though it was not a grove) Jim was walking in a grove (and doing it correctly), and I was — where I was– not walking in a grove, not walking in a grove correctly, but actually being there, where I was, which also wasn’t it (was even less it than not being there) but I was accompanied I believe by Hendrick and by Jim.
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I’m walking in a grove. I remark to myself that I should know the names of the species of trees that I come upon but I know them only imperfectly and it is a task complicated by the fact that the names of the trees of the grove are somewhat different from those of the trees outside of it, and from those of the place where I first learned the names of all the trees. So that one could come upon an oak for example and discover that it is here called an ‘Oash’ or some such thing. And yet I don’t see anything I would even think to call an ‘oak’. Nothing I know by the name plum, elm, birch, poplar, locust or dogwood is present either. Those trees seem not “in the same conversation” with the trees that I here constantly encounter, which are “just trees,” and generic. There is the feeling that if I could know the name of just one of the trees I would know the names of all of the trees and then I would know the grove itself and then I would know what I am doing in the grove and then I would know what might be found in it, but I know not one, not any, not all, not the grove. If I could just get out of it, if I could just get into it, if I could just know what I’m doing with respect to it, know the first thing about all or any part of it. But I find myself growing quiet beside it, moving along by its side rather pensively now thinking — it’s green and inviting, though not to be entered.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 