July 11
There is something to it. Even raindense, or wrested behind some window or heavy door, that light filtering through the marled cloud. The seagreen tufts of wet needle clustered under the boughs of spruce, or the windblown white of the one we named dogflower, or just the sound of the rain over the corrugated roof, the felt curtain blown just so. Or in the sun, dappled willow, the sibilance of the aspens. & I can do nothing & find its grace—ask nothing of it, expect nothing, & still, its gift.
You grow up thinking on other lives like books unread on a shelf. & suddenly you are living some old tale, some familiar trope that has been your steady carriage the years through. & your imaginings are such brittle things, & the wind is very real. The x-ray & the light. What you regarded once in some other’s telling & colored in hues presently unavailable. Which is to say, I think, inhabiting a dream from childhood clothes you again in childhood’s robes. Or that childhood dreams through you when you enact its old longing. Or that we can grow towards a simplicity. Or none of the above; I don’t rightly know. I think of Gide’s Narcissus, or of the Prelude in its entirety, of a river flowing backwards, toward its origin, wherein every reflection is borne in regress, fled. & so our time is only to give, witting or no, & our every breath already fugitive. & each word always another’s. & it isn’t that I think some atavistic Eden awaits us—this is how ideals work, after all—but nonetheless I regard the absence of logical architectures with a particular reverence. We delimit to hem in, “murder to dissect.” & while struthiously denying the absence of any & all complexities is no better answer, I think maybe under the right contexts we can at least sieve all of that through some filter that lets us wonder yet. I am pressed by daily exigencies even if they are not mine, but I know better than to believe them rooted. Every narrative unthreads eventually. But in that a kind of freedom.
Which is all maybe only to say I that I am thinking about how I live my life now in comparison to how I’ve lived it in the past, & that comparison finds me grateful, in the end.
You grow up thinking on other lives like books unread on a shelf. & suddenly you are living some old tale, some familiar trope that has been your steady carriage the years through. & your imaginings are such brittle things, & the wind is very real. The x-ray & the light. What you regarded once in some other’s telling & colored in hues presently unavailable. Which is to say, I think, inhabiting a dream from childhood clothes you again in childhood’s robes. Or that childhood dreams through you when you enact its old longing. Or that we can grow towards a simplicity. Or none of the above; I don’t rightly know. I think of Gide’s Narcissus, or of the Prelude in its entirety, of a river flowing backwards, toward its origin, wherein every reflection is borne in regress, fled. & so our time is only to give, witting or no, & our every breath already fugitive. & each word always another’s. & it isn’t that I think some atavistic Eden awaits us—this is how ideals work, after all—but nonetheless I regard the absence of logical architectures with a particular reverence. We delimit to hem in, “murder to dissect.” & while struthiously denying the absence of any & all complexities is no better answer, I think maybe under the right contexts we can at least sieve all of that through some filter that lets us wonder yet. I am pressed by daily exigencies even if they are not mine, but I know better than to believe them rooted. Every narrative unthreads eventually. But in that a kind of freedom.
Which is all maybe only to say I that I am thinking about how I live my life now in comparison to how I’ve lived it in the past, & that comparison finds me grateful, in the end.
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