April 9

It’s a swift work time does, & then there’s our inclination toward epochism hanging over it, begging its taxonomies. Call it an ocean when it’s a multitude of wave & current. Call it a river when it’s eddies & silt & braided channels & fluxing limns of shore. I think of the last decade that way, thinking it through its recognizable consistencies, as if they speak to some breed of continuity, or as if they need to. Somehow that sense that we tame the past in the discovery of its patterns, that we stitch a quilt of its disparate parts & are somehow contented to pull it over us in sleep. It’s an odd inclination, tamping things down when at their base there’s really only disparity. (Even comparison actively calls attention to fundamental separation, even as it yokes together). It makes you wonder.

This morning, it makes me wonder at how we revise experience, & how those revisions alter over time. What clings to them, what falls away, & what within us finds ground to speak again. I awakened thinking for some reason about walking down the dirt road in Salem to the old graveyard, canopied in by weeping willows & black oaks, unkempt, its grasses high & swaying with that motion particular to flora in abandoned places, with that same susurration amplified by virtue of being the only discernible sound. It was after my brother’s divorce, after my grandmother’s death. I remember how the tombstones fell into worse & worse repair the further back you walk, tilting over slumped ground, heaved over, weather-worn, with fine tendrils of black fractures snaking through the slate grey. In the rear, there were only bricks, tiny slabs half-swallowed by moss & lichen, the letters of the names taken entire by wind & rain, or, stranger still, barely intimated on the pale surfaces, as if the tombstones themselves were already haunted by the spectered syllables of names. & I remember the crumbled black walnuts scattered around. Thinking I had a friend who made ink out of them once. Thinking this is what we do, this is how we celebrate the life in us, by coming to its precipice & looking over its edge, wandering quiet among its dilapidating grubstakes. & my brother, alone, his back to the rest of us, along the western edge of the plot. That attendant silence. & the thing that strikes me in the recollection is the pure sensory wonder of it, the song of wind-rustled willows, the humidity in the air, the smell of fertile soil in the nostrils. That, & the way my heart swelled in me, swells in me still, with simple, ineffable love, for my family, for that place, for that breath in me. A kind of mellow, leaden exultation, that. & my compulsion, in remembrance, is toward exegetic comprehension, predictable narrative, comfort & order. & it spurs me to wonder if the act of recollection isn’t almost always purposive, teleological in some way; if there isn’t some kindred feeling or sense or sympathy that we don’t want to cull each time we remember. Which in turn makes me wonder how we negotiate phenomena atavistically, or if we can, really, in an entirely honest way. Honest, sure, but if recollection always performs some violence on memory, then aren’t we altering our past every time we conjure it up, & aren’t we constantly reshaping our sense of our own narratives? & if so, aren’t we always already fluxing, too, ourselves?

That’s no revelation, I know, but even the most banal things cast a spark time to time. It’s interesting, too, to be actively shaping a course for things, to be implementing goals, building intently, & all of it under an auspice of love & positivity, all of it active rather than reactive, all of it ex nihilo instead of shaped from some pile of ash or ember. I’ve not shared that, truly, in the past, that sense of untainted, graspable dreaming. & what one discovers in sharing these things is that a fundamental openness to phenomena can in fact be coeval with an intention. Hope, fragile thing, is not so ruinous as I once thought it to be. Under that cover of over-arching linearity, the sheer wonder of our daily-ness.