Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.61.0411220302030.29430@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: less and less seems to matter and it's good i'm not
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 03:02:14 -0500 (EST)
less and less seems to matter and it's good i'm not Cold Mountain and can't turn towards moss. but i'm aware more than ever of the slow movement of the planet, our inconceivable position on the thinnest of crusts, the localized nature of our wants and desires, the fragility of every good thing upon the face of the earth. we're tottering, we look out, we sense the plasma, enormous forces forsaking us just for the moment, for the first and last breath. we come together online but i'm sick of the absence of touch, nothing for any of us but words and no shudders. it's good, for of one not to be here and to be here, but there are so many places in their loveliness i would like to see before i die, places already fast disappearing beneath the towering sun. this is not metaphor, not the world as if it were the world, but a gentle disassociating as i feel myself slipping into some long sleep, some disconnecting denouement. only then will leaves grow quietly and unseen, scurryings meandering beneath the grass and sightless for so many of us. there is no irony here, not for a moment, no cynicism, only the desire for the beauty of the world and nostalgia for so many opportunities that will remain permanently missed. how many people have we made promises to, that we will never see again? promises made beyond wars and peaces, beyond births and slaughters, cures for new diseases, sudden earthquakes, floods, extinctions. i am thinking of quiescence, the fineness of sunsets one might never see, conversations ending decades ago - i can hear them now - that will never be revived. and i would leave all belonging among them, and i would leave all desire among them, all holdings and possessions, all plans, short and long term, imminent and transcendent, all of the length of a pine board. our strategies fade before our eyes, as do the sounds of voices stilled forever, the slightest movement of a hand, that particular gesture that defined you, that slight of hand, that slightest gesture, forgotten after the passing of personal knowledge, so that books may get it wrong, reconstruct nothing, theorize and pretending, holding off their own harbingers of death, as death they announce, as death they proclaim, the oldest of charms. one only can hope for the forgetting of this and these, for the releasing, so that others may be seen momentarily in their scurryings as movement beneath and within the stars, as designs enfolding, unfolding, but never of commitment impossible to conceive, retain. these books and wires, this natural world, retains and moves beyond, always beyond in each and every direction, of the quarters and fifths of directions, of the firsts and seconds of directions, this movement uncharted, forgotten, the tiniest smile at a joke only half remembered, times that were always those which were, of the scent of a spring evening and certain trees and flowers, of changeling worlds and the sound of winging birds __