At times I feel my thoughts are cushioned by my porous, spongy way of sensing, I worry I am inoculating myself against a certain terrible clarity with this myopia, this ancillary reality. My eyes dwell on the sky too often, and so my writing is overfull with remarks about the weather and the land, or stimulated by memories of broad seascapes and great forests that only exist to me now, at this moment, as a series of inconstant photographs accompanied by a lingering perfume. What stands outside of people, the objects and daily phenomenon of our lives, when transmuted into a substance of our body, are utterly unique to us and are absorbed and nourish us singularly. The things beyond the thin border of our skin, those objects and animals are only created by our witnessing them. Beyond that margin are the mysterious things of another plane, and it is on their terms that we all must relate, with our garbled, languishing tongues.
A thunderstorm penetrates, the hot sun penetrates, but to one another people only come close but never breech any barriers. They press their mouths to one another’s, they try to enter into each other’s eyes, try with words and gestures to hypnotize or teach each other. They mumble and grasp for permanence, looking for immortality under the flesh of another, in the veins of the other. All in all they try despairingly and fiercely to find a mirror and an echo.
The first human words uttered perhaps were imitations of a thunderclap. Animals sing and call in a language that is a burlesque of inundations, skies trembling with storms, the imperceptible noise of the growth of plants, the erosion of mountains, and the cold wind blowing sand in the desert. I am no different, acquiring my speech and my temperament from the confluence of forces and objects inhuman, seeking out a mirror and an echo in the lightning spirals of a tourbillion.
