Elsew/here I could hear particles that are in that air … that they have
something to say to the particles that are below me, in the water. That those
that have entered the sieve of The Sea, and through its motion (longing for the
land) have been ground so light as to wash up somewhere to be taken up by the
wind, that spoon the sky uses to stir, lift, and mix. The greater the scale of
your vision (in your head), the less the descriptor entropy becomes
appropriate. There are so many things happening. And we arenʼt in control. And that is beautiful. That means the
small moments of our lives exist in a system, and what joy they bring is
perfect and especially enigmatic. This is a permission to look at the world, open to feeling, like yourself a net,
things to remember, or interest, or excitement; the beauty is in the collection
of things that you become. A collage. A good diary never makes that much sense
to the little brother. Like a walk, ice cream, a performance, a book, or a
painting ... the things they stand for, remembered.
Elsew/here: The sun goes down. The sky and sea become indistinguishable.
As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on,
covering houses, hills, trees, as waves wash round the sides of some sunken ship
… The light had faded from the tool house wall and the adderʼs skin hung from the nail empty. All colors in the
room had overflown their banks. The precise brush stroke was swollen and
lopsided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown masses into one huge
obscurity. (2)
Elsew/here, like a grain of salt becomes known by every molecule of
water in a boiling pot and has the effect of raising the boiling temperature of
that water, so is the effect of our buildings on The Sea. And just as the
boiling potʼs water becomes vapor slowly, sending it and
its humid saltiness into the air introducing itself to the air in the same way
the salt met the water. All at once, a chemical wicking at light speed. As much
as the waterʼs mood affects the land, so it affects the
air, and in this way great changes happen slowly. Like the Seaʼs assault on our shores, The Sea is content with
slowness. It takes the parish churches of our towns, as it always has, and
introduces them to the air, the clouds, and those grains that were walls that
protected our worship, or our thoughts, come back to us and try to find their
way into the folds of our clothes, moving with an assist from the breath of
wind to find the spaces at the threshold of our houses, to re-occupy. Stone is
our most permanent building material, but its life isnʼt the width of a human hair on a 300 foot timeline of this world. It may
be that you are breathing the parish church of St. James right now, a lone
microscopic particle that remembers finding a hair in your nostril, now a part
of you. And its time with you will be relative to the start of a blink of an
eye. But that doesnʼt mean it doesnʼt happen. The gravity of a moment isnʼt judged in terms of its duration.
Elsew/here entropy is a microscopic phenomenon. Such a thing does not
exist when viewing the earth from space, or the universe from the stars, or
space from the edge of space. Matter has no death.
Elsew/here particles cluster into voices: (in order of encounter) Stan
Laurel, Paul Valéry, Stan Laurel, Herman Melville.
Well I couldn't help it, I was dreaming I was awake. And then I woke up
and found myself asleep. (Laurel) I was walking on the very edge of the sea. I
was following an endless shore … This is not a dream I am telling you. I was
going I know not whither overflowing with life, half intoxicated with my youth.
The air deliciously rude and pure, pressing against my face and limbs,
confronted me – an impalpable hero that I must vanquish in order to advance.
And this resistance, ever overcome, made of me too at every step an imaginary
hero, victorious over the wind, and rich in energies that were ever reborn,
ever equal to the power of the invisible adversary …
That is just what youth is. I trod firmly the winding beach, beaten and
hardened by the waves. All things around me were simple and pure: the sky, the
sand, the water. I watched as they came from the offing, those mighty shapes
which seem to be running from the coast of Libya, charioting their glistening
summits, their hollow valleys, their relentless energy from Africa all the way
to Attica across the immense liquid expanse. At last they come upon their
obstacle, the very plinth of Hellas; they shatter themselves against those
submarine foundations; they recoil in disorder towards the origin of their
motion. When the waves are thus destroyed and confounded, yet seized in turn by
those that follow them, it is as though the forms of the deep were engaged in
strife. One sees white horsemen leaping beyond themselves, and all those envoys
of the inexhaustible sea perishing and reappearing, with a monotonous tumult, on a gentle almost imperceptible slope, which all
their vehemence, though it come from the most
remote horizon, will yet never be able to surmount … (2)
Do you believe me or believe what I see? (Laurel) … consider them both
the sea and the land; and do you not find an analogy for something inside
yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the
soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but
encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life ...
Elsew/here the Sea is massive and its featureless-ness helps us to
understand the size of those systems at play on this planet, whereas land
betrays us into the lullaby of geographic specificity. Humanity is just as
geographic as land, and we are function of these systems, and the motion of
these systems is whatʼs awesome, and
my impact, your impact, on these systems is nano, but the crater of impact isnʼt the measure of meaning, itʼs only a physical resonance. What is beautiful is inside you, the
viewer. And to feel beauty is great, but not material, and not truth, and not
eternal. In fact, beauty does not exist where one can smell eternity.
Elsew/here things are remembered, and their pattern comes together like
a cloud atlas. A system viewed too closely for connections reveals none. Latent
connections are like mist. Heat the air with your breath and they disappear
like so much vapor. Intentions turning into words often sound like pain. Keep
your love locked down. Internalizing the world happens like a collage, not like
the linearity of external living.
Elsew/here erosion reveals fossils. Layers working back on themselves,
patterns appear in complex systems when given the chance (time).
Elsew/here … “in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened and
a wind came up, blowing the dust across the arid land in sinister spirals. The
last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all contours
disappeared in the grayish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon lashed by
strong, unrelenting gusts. I crouched behind a rampart of tree stumps that had
been bulldozed into long lines after the great hurricane. As darkness closed in
from the horizon like a noose being tightened, I tried in vain to make out,
through the swirling and ever denser obscurement, landmarks that a short while
ago still stood out clearly, but with each passing moment the space around
became more constricted. Even in my immediate vicinity I could soon not
distinguish any line or shape at all. The mealy dust streamed from left to
right, from right to left, to and fro on every side, rising on high and
powdering down, nothing but a dancing grainy whirl for what must have been an
hour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavy thunderstorm had broken.
When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan that had come to grief in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed. There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. And although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down.” (4)
When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan that had come to grief in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed. There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. And although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down.” (4)
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