Evensong XV (20 June 2024)

Sunset on the Mississippi River. New Orleans, LA. A gravel path on the levee parallels the water's path. There's an orange sunset on the horizon in the distance.

Does an expanding light straighten the crooked path? Does a light extending to its furthest point in time illuminate the burls and gnarls and chasms and cliffs? Or will I be dazzled to blindness and continue to wander in a new form of unknowing?

Mystery is its own beauty.

Yesterday, I met a person who pointed to my language on a page and said keep going. They said my path-making is its own true direction. Keep going. You're already doing it. You're already making your way.

How is it that language never fails, even when we say, "There are no words"? We make new words or we make new meanings. There are always words. The path is built by words.

There are five soil horizons and three forms of twilight. These are the physical properties of earth and light. Add one sun and one moon and the art of math and the way-making begins.

Go now, on this longest day, to study the paths: the ones you take, the ones you make.

Even when walking out of the light, along a soil horizon, through three forms of twilight, lean on linguistics to define where your foot falls.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evensong X (19 February 2024)

 In praise of scales, ascending, descending, alternating tones from one octave to another - a call and response - arpeggiating like running away, a crescendo, a denouement. Da capo. Here we go again. From the top. From the head. From the beginning. Da capo. When I revise my writing I lean into my piano practice, running scales and chord progressions, sometimes blues riffs, sometimes a simple phrase: 2 quarter notes, 3 halves. Rest. I play the same thing over and over, for years, since my last lesson. Practice makes practice perfect. Unlike my writing, the piano practice is pure exercise. Weight-training for grey matter; a commitment to functional, at least. Functional so the writing, the thing I practice that is more than just exercise but for (hopefully) sourcing strength to other thinkers/dreamers/lovers, can be made. In praise of scales. Footpaths to stability. My latest essay in progress excavates the memories of a month
Read more

Evensong I (12 December 2023)

 I write from a closet in New York City. In my mind it’s October 2023 but the calendar tells me it’s 12 December. Since mid-September, when I returned to New York, there has been an unsteady suturing of days and nights and places: New Haven and Queens and the West Village and Morningside Heights and Grand Central Station and Staten Island and Princeton and Philly and Bay Shore. The times and places form a puckering seam. There are remnants of the recent past I’m stitching into a new present. There are fibers too tattered and frayed to be anything more than a decorative gesture of what used to be. Little flags of the former life. I fly the colors of truce. In 2020, like many others, I lost my job to CoVid-19 cutbacks. I worked in the university system for 10 years creating international education programs and building relationships for study abroad programs. In 2021, Hurricanes Ida and Henri damaged my home. I financed the repair and, having not yet secured a ne
Read more

Evensong V (25 December 2023)

In my dream she sends me Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell , the Vince Mendoza arrangement from 2000. I know I’m dream-remembering the conversation I listened to about music arrangements that featured the maturation of this song. The musicologists cited the atmospheric sensibility of this latest arrangement and then played it in its entirety. I cried from Queens to Harlem. From Harlem to the West Village. I cried from New York City to D.C. to Upperville to Charlottesville to Chattanooga to Bristol to Auburn to New Orleans. Savannah, Atlanta, Wilmington. To Galveston to Austin to Carlsbad to Truth or Consequences to Phoenix to Los Angeles to San Francisco to Reno to Idaho Falls to Twin Falls to Cody to Rapid City to Sioux City to Tomah to Chicago to Detroit to Pittsburgh, back to New York. In my dream she tells me this song reminds her of when she was alive. I know I’m dream-remembering and dream-longing for you. In my dream I was able to unlock your iphone and see th
Read more