But do we grow like mushrooms, beans, crystals or soil? Underground in networked transport? Spirals to a flickered sun? Solidifed from saturation with all prep hidden fluid, or clung to stone in face of flood and fall? Certainly some care must be taken, grace and foresight valued, flexibility rigidity maintained to stretch while holding; and perhaps simplistic metaphors more calm than help to dance with such uneasy partners as acceptance and desire. But how do you? I've been trying to consider insecurity as boon as possibility, and indeed it has kept me from the proffered grains of woods, abnegation a temperature to dissimulate annealing (consider then discard growth as optimization,) but its instability challenges connection and I yearn often for the mollusc life, foot-tight yet fancy free in surf.
Nevertheless we play, build shells from crumbled castles and dodge the tides of sand in careful distractedness, as when a third polarizer lets in more light than display and ideology admit alone. Or if individuals are the light that travels, not source or sensor, that might explain each I's strange time. We twist, certainly. But there is more in sparkling “than had been expected when four and six were wrought”. How do you make sense of things? Sense is not now in sentences for me but travels on their motion in and out. How do you make stillness of a life? Though life makes still us all. If we were pigeons stept from puddles making 4-mementoed prints one points back, and what means it if we fly?
As to which came first imagine a moment of joint origin for poetry and music, a sequence of linked sounds bringing "that delightful disorientation we call significance" creating meaning and ambiguity both, a voice out carrying an inward turn, one of those times in which understanding outwalks hearing to confuse causality. A moment of thrilling upset; "listen to me with your whole body" says Lispector, and I imagine our listener, pre-human, caught so; perhaps the ear was invented only later, physically or in that concept distancing sense and being that many think of when they think of consciousness; the parasitic ear, a false hole which wriggled itself across the scalp until its limbs atrophied of long symbiosis, though some still wiggle.
Or I read once of muscles inside that push to hear, a drummer for the eardrum, that a musician with tinnitus put a microphone inside it and heard her demon beat. What's next, a light from eyes to push away the gaze of others? This activity so intrigues me, the active ear, though through a grasp so vague that I must imagine prehensile hairs curling to bring sound down or straightening in rejection. What a strange reclusive sense, sight much more transparent to me; maybe because microphones are so simple in their actuation while our bayer-filtered cameras mimic us to more detail. Machinic regularity blurs perception throughout, grids more rigid than the weed-like growth of cells.
But what do you think on in rainy days like this, what other delightful debates that crossed your roads like tumbleweeds might tumble into mine to spin their seeds? There's a love of conversation I want to hold in these times, something important in worlds set on columns of interactive presence, speech as a textile of threaded minds rather than an isotropic extrusion from one self. Perhaps this aligns with your goals for bookstore entanglement, the pedestalling of something other than the author, seats in circles rather than in ranks. how do you accomplish this? or how do you know when it's arrived; is it like music or like poetry at first? Broadcasts were originally of seeds, by walking lines of planters throwing overlapping arcs from the proclivities of arms and shoulders; could we talk so, from the shoulder, at once? And let our chaff be felt as mulch.
In imitation of a rain’s puddle I'm lying low and rippling this morning, shape identity and adjacency left to the chaos that created me, writing letters. Warm hurricane airs whispered climate hopes to me once, but I don't find myself feeling outside how I did then, a casualty of the apartment building or what my windows face. What's rain to you? A yemeni tesla owner told me yesterday he always used to check the forecast to take off rainy days, a double play of the pleasures of rest in gray and the problems of a felt obligation to be active under sun. And wouldn't that be the finest world, if everyone could take rain days as needed?
There is a wear in weariness but there is both burn and wear in burnishing, and oxidation presents such beautiful texture and color that the new and unscratched lacks, the tar in tarnished. O to be a patina pattern bronze, a browning silver in the fellow-feeling of the pickling bath, a gutter afuzz with verdigris and clung to rain. Perhaps compost is patina in reverse, a skin of tar corroding into ductile bulk. What cycles and restrictions circulate your time? where do you find yourself returning, learning?
So here's to the flowers these showers bring hope to, the anxious dreams of bulbs and flows of fields; neighbor, can you spare a cup of muck?
Watersheddingly yours,
Ned