04.07.05 - 5:40 p.m.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us look to the stars. --Oscar Wilde

I ignored my alarm (as, ah, usual) and slept another 20 or 30 minutes this morning, and thus absorbed a local news story. My sleeping mind (just, barely) transformed it, and since I heard the actual story a bit later, after working out and showering, but before blow-drying my hair, I was able to compare the two stories. I think I like my sleeping mind's version better.

In my sleep-translated version of the story, Ms. A owns a farm in Greenbriar County. She has trained the underground streams to rise up from their usual course in the warren of limestone caves below ground to water her fields. The streams cut across the fields, keeping them green, then disappear into adjacent hillsides, and her livestock periodically disappear into opening sinkholes. And the caves: the warren of caves beneath her land, well, the caves are her work, too. She shaped the land the way a smith shapes metal: coaxed it and molded it until it concealed a whole other world beneath it, a world no more than suggested aboveground, by an odd opening, or a particularly verdant circle of grass. Ms. A, the artist, requested assistance from the Nature Conservancy in preserving her masterwork, and they agreed to help her. The whole will be preserved forever, a little slice of almost(not quite never)where.

The reality is ever-so-slightly more mundane. Ms. A owns a lovely farm in Greenbriar County, and the streams run of their own accord. They don't water specific fields, like near-living, half-sentient guardians. [What was I imagining? Something like the song Peace is Flowing Like a River (flowing out of you and meee-ee-ee. Flowing out in to the deeee-e-sert. Set-ting all the cap-tives freeeeee.). I can't quite capture the vision - but the central idea is there: the river feeding the fields, then sinking back to ground.] Some disappear into the earth, others don't, and Ms. A was not the architect of all this strange loveliness beneath her feet: she simply owns it, and loves it, and would like it to be preserved. In order to preserve it, well, they're doing pretty mundane things: fencing off pastureland, limiting the livestock access to the natural streambeds, ripping out the invasive, foreign species and instead planting native species, particularly trees, to shore up crumbling streambeds.

--

Sometimes I don't have any thing to say, and the words in my head feel as smooth and marbled as the words in my mouth, smooth but hard, like a pea-sized chunk of glass in the lentils, enough to break your teeth. I read Wallace Stevens this morning, as a distraction. The first stanza was perfect: precisely the level of tension I would love to achieve in my lines, but never do. The middle, well, it struck me as off, somehow. Just a bit broken, or even adolescent - not bunny-hugs adolescent, but, well, arrogant-philandering-philosopher adolescent, and I've had enough of that in my life - I've been enough of that in my life - so that I need very little more. Still, I think that's where most people are stuck, really, and me, too, I suppose.

I paged back through the book to find the poem I was reading earlier, but I couldn't find it this time. Instead, I was struck by "A Primitive Like an Orb" and "Final Soliloquoy of the Internal Paramour."

"Final Soliloquoy of the Internal Paramour"
by Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

It's still too much for me - too formalist, the language is too obtuse, but that's the point, right? I have to push through the distancing language, I have to work to actually get it, but when I do get it, the it, well, resonates in that wordless, hollow space somewhere between my throat and my chest.

That urge, there, undefined - and, and - what? and too much, too much mystery to be contained in human words, especially after so much ink and blood has been spilled to define it and refine and kill it off and let it grow wild again. We know it and we don't, we give it words, and then we take them away. We steep ourselves in delicious, somewhat sinful irony to get away from the people who take it and dress it up in flowers and puppies and sunshine and bloody fucking gods, but there it is, back again, thumping hard in our chest in the afterbeat echo of the stacatto pumping of our wretched hearts when we wake up at three a.m. and see an arc of stars curving across the black night sky. The words or the something, the act of waking up, the moment of communion when a word is brand new and perfectly strange on your mouth, in your mouth, the act of will that it takes to speak, the wash of neurotransmitters across the receptors in your brain, because the color orange makes you happy, and is now spilled across the sky.