To be a friend with animals is to be a friend and a child of the world, connected to it, nourished by it, belonging to it.

-Le Guin, The Beast in the Book

These two kittens in some ways define the shape of the second half of this year for me. I’ve waited as long for something worthwhile to say about them.1 I find them deeply interesting but it can feel pathetic to try and convey to the outside world this sort of internal fascination. Which for me actually expands to all cats everywhere all the time. Will I ever formulate that unifying insight on the perfection of cats? Without a strong thesis volunteering itself, I’m pivoting to something lazier. Collecting thoughts from the junkyard of ideas and quotes I’ve jotted down over the past months.

Many of the thoughts captured in my notes of late relate to these animals, and animals in general. The epicenter of the thought generation would be the place on the ground in the backyard, under my kitchen window, where the two kittens were raised starting around late June. How easily overlooked are the mundane miracles that pile up around us over the course of a life. Embarrassingly maudlin remarks on this small family of cats carrying on their basic lives abound in my notebook … ‘I’ll never contend with the wholeness of a mother cat nursing her young.’ Yikes. But I mean, look at them.

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Most of the observations I’ve encountered this year concerning the wonders of animalia have come from an ensemble of incredible women I’ve been reading; Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Annie Dillard, Ursula Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Oliver, Marie Howe, Maria Popova (merrily we row along). But toward the end of the year, another voice with a lot to say on the subject has elbowed right to the fore (innit just like a man to?). David Abram’s writing is lending me a vocabulary to form more complete sentences about the interrelationship of earth’s creatures. In the grips of recency bias, I find myself parroting his style in my own thought processes. Abram’s words on intersubjectivity,2 the ‘consensus among a plurality of subjects,’ fit so well to my animal convictions that they might as well be my own.

The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or ‘reality.’

- Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous

I take his plurality of subjects to be all perceiving beings; humans and animal counterparts. No need for that particular distinction, really. While we often set ourselves counter to the parts of nature that surround us, that’s a narrow and impoverishing framing. We are in the larger frame together, richly, and less different than we are alike to an outside observer. My notebook is full of scribbles from past months wherein I make this case to myself through the lense of cat + me interactions, written about mostly in an overwrought mess of symbolic, philosophical, and pseudo-physics language…3

• Our overlapping perceptual and cognitive fields give shape, color, and texture to our shared world… like projector transparencies of maps with interlocking outlines, affirming our conception of things, telling us we are on the right track. We world-build together…

• fates braided. glancing bodies. spin charge flavor. for all our difference we interact … them in my orbit. i in theirs. life at the same time. a shared gravitational center about which we revolve. tethered ribbons around a maypole, weaving.

• Prediction-error-correction-repetition. This is how conscious beings construct theories of outer reality, and how the solidity of the material world takes its shape in minds and helps us to navigate life in space, despite intransigent nearsightedness. When a mental model proves reliable across minds and species, in that the external stimuli that we experience seem to exert similar force on other beings, we peer beyond the confines of (specist) solipsism (the boundaries of the platonic cave?) and find there is a shared reality outside ourselves… Constellations of overlapping subjective fields end up summing to the one hyperreality we, the subjects in subjective, share.4

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The love within us and the love without 
Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,
We scarce distinguish.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

To a certain disposition—shared by Dickinson, Le Guin, Dillard, Oliver, me—thoughts on shared lives can’t help but commingle with thoughts on death. And on shared earth. The earth being through time a salient symbol of death, but also of rebirth and life, in the way that earth begets life, and bodies nourish bodies. I’m closing this discursion with a salvo of earthy, deathy, nature stuff from some of the muses of 2025.

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there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted

- Oliver

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called “love of nature,” seemed … to be something much broader than love. There are souls … whose umbilicus had never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as the enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see [her] take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

- Le Guin, The Dispossessed

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But these are the woods you love
Where the secret name
of every death is life again

- Oliver

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We never know we go—when we are going.
We jest and shut the door—
Fate following behinds us bolts it
And we accost no more.

- Dickinson

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the earth of your body
where no memory fails to grow
into something
a blossom in a strange place
a withered root . rhizomal decay
rare earth . common earth
compounded into this briefly persisting
myth of a vessel

- me5

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Remarkably, as we sit on a new section of shoreline closer to the roiling turquoise sea, my eyes alight on the tiny fleck of ejected blotter paper. Scarcely bigger than the head of a pin, no doubt a multitude of tiny angels dancing on it, I scoop up the paper and force it back into Charlie's hand.

He had spit it into the wind an amount of time ago that could be seconds, minutes, or hours. At the time I had declared its contents to be very human-soluble so swallowing the stamp seemed unnecessary. But I am becoming increasingly concerned that our doses differ too much and that I’ll be out here on my own since I ate all of mine. It feels like no small miracle that I am encountering this forgotten-about needle in a haystack now. Perhaps more than a stroke of luck. Finish this sacrament Charlie. The silt covered chit of cellulose goes back on his tongue after sufficient prodding. “Show us!” Like a psych ward nurse, I'm demanding to see the medicine in place before the jaw shuts and the throat gulps.

The laughing fits that demarcate each chapter in the story begin again. Hysteria but a joyful kind and naturally fitting to the moment. A call-and-response spectacle crescendoing into a shared ecstasy that feels too intimate even between old friends. We gather ourselves, wipe our eyes. I blush a little and look down. We carry on.

We have staged our voyage on a tilted plane of sandstone. Toward the ocean our platform juts proudly up above the heaving water. The declined aspect tapers down and buries itself under crumbling cliffs that outline the end of the continent. Below where we are seated, a perfectly clear tidepool has gathered in a depression formed where another canted shelf of rock subducts into cliff face. Protected from the windswell shoving against the craggy coastline, the pool is a flat long triangle of inviting stillness. A work of holy architecture. There's a piety in its repose, like a baptismal font that calls one to enter naked and be cleansed by its searing cold water.

Charlie initiates a crossing of the sun-beaten slab down sharp steps to the pool, disrobing along the way and submitting to its invitation. I look on in awe and envy. I know myself better; I'm never equal to the allure of a plunge this cold. Nonetheless I follow suit. With my shifted perspective I've picked up a little coping strategy. I latch onto a short phrase and mutter it over and over, focusing not on external sensations but on the repetition of the syllables. So engrossed in the simple recitation, I am able to proceed from ankle-deep to knee- to thigh- to crotch- to waist-deep and there to pause the muttering and the shuffling, to breathe in, and to bow in reverence ‘til my whole body folds under the surface of the pool. I come out with my magic phrase lost and a wordless beastial howl rushing out in its place.

Will the journey end at this point of crossing? Dry to wet and warm to frozen–I expected the effects to be sobering and final. They are not. This is but one passage on a journey that continues through many more.

The technique of phrase repetition continues to serve me well. Alone in the shadow forest, the thought sing to me in all the sounds I've ever known becomes something steady to latch onto as time rushes by and through the branches all around. The forest rustles, creaks, hums, and bellows as the steady onshore breeze animates the canopy. Limbs and trunks jitter and yaw against one another like bows on strings. The trees sing without ceasing while I float in place, tethered to a lifeboat’s mast by my incantation. Jagged stumps of low-lying branches close in like body traps laid in gridded corridors that recede deeper into the forest, daring me to allow fear to swell up in my chest. Before it can gather momentum my spell deflates the fear and the forest reaffirms her benevolent intention.

Sit beneath my branches and bide some time with me, eye-level with my long grasses and awash in my love.

I see now even as I saw then, inside of all the sensations and surprises, a yearning for that peak experience that would somehow transform the soul. I thought I had it too. I danced and raved about it. “It happened! I disappeared.” Maybe it did happen and maybe I did disappear. What would that be like? After wandering out of the canopy I find myself accosted by an overbearing sun. I retreat to a narrow band of shade by a small dirty waterfall. From there I meditate while listening to the gentle splash and babble of the creek and look out on a beachhead stuffed with smooth stones of all sizes and one conspicuous piece of driftwood laid down like the subject of a composition. A bleached and overexposed Godard set arranged around this ragged log, salt- and sun-weathered to purple, gray, and orange. Passively radiating wonder. I must remember this I tell myself. Insistent, like I can feel deeply the loss of the memory while it was still being recorded.

I close my eyes and let the vision of the waterfall and the beach, the stones and the driftwood, and me, an object placed arbitrarily into this mise en scène, dissolve. I feel my breath and hold it. The vibration of the world and everything in it down to the matter that I am built of becomes the only presence. No stuff. No thought. One sense, all-encompassing. Euphoria? Peace? I beg myself remember it, keep it safe. The feeling of being there sticks in my ribs. I try to write it down but such feelings don’t surrender easily to words.

What mental imagery in these instances is artificial and what is authentic? From dorm room posters and screensavers, exaggerated Hollywood depictions, and a hundred other culturally-scripted preconceptions, we embark with the visions that a trip is meant to evoke already preloaded. When I dissolved I saw the same convergent wave patterns that I’ve seen soft sand make when disturbed by low-frequency sounds in subwoofer commercials and sci-fi flashbacks. Are these visions lifted from elsewhere then, or are they authentically mine? They seemed to rise up spontaneously. And after all I was surrounded by sand, and by waveforms, in the form of actual waves. And small waves on the backs of waves, and smaller ones on those.

As evening sets I lay down and play music (CRJ, what’s new?) from my dying phone–it travels on down my ear canals and along the auditory nerves to somewhere deep in my brain. Instead of one unified track I hear each track in the mix distinctly. Like all the parallel recordings on an old eight track tape are playing at the same time, as isolated outputs. Every synth strike and auto chord, drum machine pop, slapped bass note, vocal melodies and harmonies–peeled apart into individual ribbons with simultaneous interweaving streams of imagery, geometry, and color. A synesthetic kaleidoscope.

I listen to the same songs now and they seem flat and homogeneous. Oddly, in recollecting the music, the forgotten phrase from the tidepool baptism also comes back to me now. It's one of the dozen or so acid-etched inanities jotted down in my yellow notebook.

I’m still clinging to this slow death. I’m still clinging to this slow death.1

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4.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

- Mary Oliver, Sometimes

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My only wisdom is knowing how to make pots. Who am I to preach?

No matter how humble the spirit it's offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.

"The great Way is very simple; merely forgo opinion," says the Taoist, and I know it's true — but there's a preacher in me who just longs to cram my lovely pot with my opinions, my beliefs, with Truths.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Teasing Myself out of Thought

Old Jonah comes out of the belly of the fish as naked as a new child, save for guts, scales, and seaweed matted in his stringy hair and splotching his wet skin. Disgorged onto the gritty banks of a foreign shore, he is truly born again. Reeking of bile and quickly surrounded by black beach flies, he is a picture of helplessness, like a newborn streaked in rust and amnion.

In moments of rebirth it's the world surrounding a person that seems new really. Like the medium of reality itself, the atmosphere enveloping a person, is the thing being midwifed into the world. The former state of being in all its worn-out familiarity dissolves and a stirred-up new temporality settles, clarifies, and firms up around the body.

This ecstatic, suddenly-screaming newborn world presses densely in on the enfeebled frame of the smelly castaway; at this moment maybe the one thing holding Jonah up on his wobbly sea legs. Standing alone on the unknown shore, he now exists as a container only for himself, dispossessed of clothes, papers, coin, and all else that would otherwise define him and did define his fellow Nazarenes.

A great unburdening. Bereft of the trappings of the civilized and socialized, Jonah is finally an essential being, and in the essentializing process he has cast off from himself prejudices against the purported wickedness of those Ninevites he had been sent to enjoin. Viewing this strange land with the wide-eyed openness of a newborn and disarmed at last of the grown-up weapon of a redemption message, he begins walking in peace.

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You were once a citizen of the country called: I Don't Know.
Remember the boat that brought you there? It was your body. Climb in.

- Marie Howe, What the Earth Seemed to Say

My puritanical nature (with a sprinkle of nurture?) has me pleading lightly for forgiveness, at the level of a low background hum and with no specific offense in mind. This reflexive guilt might have been the gift that Jonah was meant to give Nineveh come to think of it. In any case, I understand this odd resting state to be more of a quirky pathology (widely shared among lapsed protestants?) than a particularly terminal disorder. There does seem to be a teeny measure of reasonableness to it though. Willful and avaricious, we humans are always wanting for something more — esteem, control, acceptance, longevity — which does feel a bit of an imposition on natural order. Little irritations rubbing against the smooth sufficiency of an impassive universe, we disturb its peace like grains of sand in a great oyster’s maw, turned over endlessly in anticipation that with enough nagging we’ll come out lustrous pearls.

For sanity, for contentment, or just to keep the streak alive, I meditate most mornings, seeking to at least momentarily tune down that irritating drive for moreness and instead reach for an even more elusive quantity — nothingness. Immaterial and immeasurable; to want more or less of it is to want the same amount. In its indivisibility, nothingness isn't subject to degrees of longing. Wonderfully, it poses no demands for forgiveness. It is an untouchable, acausal thing, and the only thing that in attainment doesn't cast light onto some farther horizon where more potential attainment entices. A real thing in a desert shimmering with mirages.

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6.
God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body

- Mary Oliver, Sometimes

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Another of Ryan’s swirly masterpieces

If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden's dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.

Ross Gay, Thank You

This poem paused my heart for a couple of beats when I came across it. I’m setting the bar too high following it with a couple poem-like species of my own. I’m trying to resist the temptation to editorialize too much about my verses though. Generally they will stand just as tall as they are regardless of the stature of other work. Meanwhile its worth a disclaimer about getting intimate with what I am putting down here, so excuse the overshareiness. It’s on-brand anyway (the feelings of it all) and is hopefully sufficiently abstracted to blur resemblances to real events and things.

Tickle, caress. Press against flesh.
Stretching to stitch into taut freckled linen.
Unzippering skin.
Gently flaying rhythm,
struck between push and release.
Breath drawn
in tight. Held.
Jaws work. Teeth seek
a knuckle to bite.
Weld the seam. Nerves arrested,
anticipating the sting.
Pulses of recoil and longing.
There is shelter in pain
and warmth
and purification.
Too long undone and over too soon,
a body acquires a taste for small agonies.

If you are put off, the subject matter for that one is just first-tattoo stuff, nothing prurient. This next one is a little cringy too, but mostly harmless. Just feelings and impressions. Insubstantial things. Unsubstantiated and uncorroborated. But an accurate evocation of how reality looks/looked from my peculiar perspective.

Words on paper help me move through these dissociative feelings and memories and to some extent come out more whole on the other side. And the snapshots leaf together into a flipbook whose story makes me understand myself better and maybe feel better understood.

An orientation in case you are not acquainted with the placename Ojai. How you pronounce it is like a casual salutation: “Oh hi.” The accent goes on the first syllable. OH! hi. This is important if you haven’t come across the word before, as the verses will land softer than they would with a bunch of hard “j” sounds rattling through them.

Ojai is a place I remember often
and visit from where I sit, lie, and walk.
Ojai is a home I had and never had.
An impossibility and an illusion,
Ojai is a haunting.
A refuge I return to when I am sad, forgetting that it makes me sadder.

Richly fragrant orange groves humming with busy pollinators.
Near-ripe avocados on long branches draped over footpaths.
Heavy sullen marine fog and also dry heat like a glowering kiln.

Ojai is a failure. An occasion to which I couldn't rise.
A mockery like an invitation lost in the mail.
A dried riverbed etched with spits of round polished rocks, crusted in dust
and shrouds of clinging algae.
A meadow bursting with tiny frogs. Corrugated leaky plastic roof panels
over shelves of moldy paperbacks.
How to garden. How to ferment.
How to heal the inner child. Cure illness with urine.
Cure brokenness and broke-ness
with self love and an abundance mindset.
Ojai is cosplay for grownups.
Millennials coming into inherited fortunes
alongside retired actors and crypto capitalists,
all dressed up for the Oregon Trail.

Ojai is a winding road with blind corners, steep banks,
and still-hot tire rubber streaks
painted right up to the silent body of a dead rider.
Washouts and road crews.
Single lanes and detours.
Ojai is blacktop and a black cat,
content in the languid hours to torment bugs and lizards or,
draped in cobwebs, recline on mulch under a bush of thorns and waxy leaves.

Ojai is amnesia and a mirage that graciously grows distant
when I try to draw near. A fading memory
rezoned, redeveloped, paved over with fantasy and delusion.

Arcades, colonnades, public parks and meadowlarks.
A sanctuary aviary. Oat milk latte, hold the dairy.
A playful place and not just a mausoleum.
A bottle of hope stashed in the bottom of a backpack, to be uncorked
when the journey has dragged on too long.

Not just a burr in the saddle or the sole
Ojai is confetti shot from a cannon.
Ojai is kinetic. Ojai is still.

Ojai is a mirror that shows me what's behind me, objects shrinking
toward a receding horizon, while also giving me back my face.
I'm dead now going on a year, sweet Ojai.
My soul, carried on currents to the farthest reach,
only now comes back to me.
In the manner of dewdrops condensing on my cold body,
seeping through my skin.
Reconstituted from formlessness to the bounded shape of my flesh.

In the reflection of Ojai I lock eyes with my eyes,
am gifted with compassion,
and practice winking goodbye.

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A hallmark of amateurism is being in awe of a process that eventually you hope to be so proficient at that it will be second nature and unremarkable. While I try to write, I still continue to be distracted by the shiny objects I encounter along the way. It must be nice for the naturally talented or practiced enough writer who is able to pay no attention to the process while it happens. Many of my favorite authors appear to write / have written that way; Didion, who I reference all the time, being my favorite example. Even if it weren’t actually the case, the illusion holds, which is just as good.

I’m breaking a promise to myself not to engage in that most-irritating habit - writing about writing - that amateurs are prone to. Previously I kind of disparaged this tendency, which I had been seeing so many Substack contributors indulge in, but as in most things it turns out I’m no better than the least of them. And honestly life under the self-imposed prohibition was oppressive. Wannabes like me find the writing process endlessly interesting as subject matter, like a toddler clutching and slinging spaghetti instead of just eating like a mannered adult.

Eventually it becomes more tedious to avoid writing about writing than even reading about it is. So I’m absolving myself of that commitment for the time-being, and I don’t promise not to write more about writing next time too. I have some juicy stuff in the hopper!

Tone

Putting your stuff out there, your art, writing, or other expressions of the self, can feel very… self-important, and risible. Earnestness is cringe, a cardinal sin of our time. “I took myself seriously … ewwwww!” The best way to disarm this? Irony! As if vulnerability were the most debasing behavior imaginable. Pretty rich criticism coming from someone who registered a domain name about their feelings just to beat anyone else to the punch.

Detached irony seems to blight so much of the current age’s cultural output. Sounding aloof and disinterested, while oddly authoritative, or just self-confident I suppose. Is it accidental or inevitable that this tone would be so rewarded by algorithms in an increasingly fractured, unpredictable, and tech-deranged world?

Anyway, I’m not breaking new ground offering finger-wagging commentary on detached irony, but I reckon it merits the opprobrium it receives. At its root, this cynical posture’s coolness is cover for something sad; avoidance of vulnerability and preemptive defense against criticism. I know because it’s a part of the writing voice I have cultivated too.

I want it to be believed that my little essays are just found objects; trifles that I hold no real attachment to. Not labored at or endlessly edited and worried over, or else they would be more perfect. Nah, I just stumbled onto these odd little fellers myself.

Perspective

To further ratchet up the self-consciousness and self-seriousness of my project space here, this week I tried writing a thing not only earnestly but also in the third person. Yikes! I have a strange reflex (that might be widely shared?) to judge amateur writing in the third person, especially if autobiographical in nature, as grandiose and pretentious. Why?

My brother recommended that I try it. Not the grandiosity - I already do that - the third person. I did. I squirmed. Then re-wrote the piece in the first person. It seemed silly though to backtrack like that and it appeared to lose some honesty in the process, even though the content is highly autobiographical. The point was to try something new, bravely even, and to resist that ironic detachment that comes so easily in the me voice…

Well, it’s not without a blush and groan (and a long, distracting smokescreen of a preface… my strategy for detachment I suppose) that I hit publish. Incidentally hitting publish is also the most reliable way to manifest the missed edits and glaring typos. Here they come.

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Storytime!

He sinks deeper into the couch, blanket drawn over his head and face, warm exhalation circulating back through his nostrils. The air lean, wrung out of oxygen, shortening his breath. He likes it in here, like this. Since he can remember he's been good at this thing that everyone else claims to be bad at. Stillness. Modern life is meant to be relentless busyness, but he has little trouble checking out for long stretches of time, like this, sunk deep into a tattered old couch, stowed away and daydreaming. If that's what it's called. Navigating a sea of memories and visions, stories woven with truths, embellishments, and fantasies. Indolence someone called this daydreaming habit, but in the trance of stillness the recrimination is a far-off voice disarmed of sharpness.

Daydreaming through a sea of stories, he remembers a book he read as a child, also of the sea and of a stowaway, belowdecks on an icebreaker navigating arctic waters. Seeking some northern passage and the riches promised on the other side. Where slowly the ice closes in around the ill-fated wooden vessel, sticking it fast and squeezing it tighter and tighter in a gelid embrace. The ribs along the keel cracking and popping as the ship heaves up, listing as deck boards splinter from the pressure. From a certain vantage the boat might still look well, like it is sailing into a strong wind and heeling hard, racing fine across a jet white sea. In fact, other than crushing in place, it's deathly still and racing only into a cold and treacherous winter that meticulously slays the members of the crew, one at a time. By hypothermia. By starvation. If he remembers right, by polar bear encounter too. One survivor alone remains; the stowaway tucked in a corner of the misshapen hold, generating heat enough to sustain himself, barely, under a tremendous heavy pile of furs. Reindeer? Seal? Impossible to remember. He read the story decades ago as a child, but with such an acute imagination that he might as well have been in the ship with the lonely survivor. No, been that survivor, as he fights off a hunger that squeezes tighter than the ice outside, nourished only by meager portions of hardtack discovered in the wreckage of the galley. Eventually he resorts to chewing the leather from the edges of the pelts, working up saliva to quench thirst and hunger, a pitifully short-lived relief.

Mostly, inhabiting the experience of the stowaway, he remembers the warmth of the brandy and the comforting drunkenness buoying his mind and his body, floating in a strange disorienting bliss, pitch dark and suffocating under the heavy pile of skins. Day by day he draws down one cask of brandy then another with larger draughts as the season progresses. Thankfully it's the one comestible not in short supply on this ship; the one thing that sustains him through the long dark season. He passes months of darkness, hunger, and impossible cold like this, in his blanket midden, alone, imperilled, but drunk and at an incongruous peace. He, the child reading all this, had never actually experienced drunkenness of course but that fine-tuned imagination, aided by the simple descriptive language of the forgotten author of the forgotten book, had been enough to recreate the state of mind with remarkable precision. Years later, head swimming, and gut wrenched from Boone's Farm and Mickey's Fine Malt, he'd remember having felt just this way in the frozen hull of an icebound ship long ago.

He imagined that this retreat into himself was his unique form of bravery; surviving against these slim odds, wasn't he tougher than average and cooler than most? But under that veneer of confidence he felt at times pangs of survivor's guilt. A term he, the child, wouldn't have heard for many years but understood perfectly when he allowed himself to remember his shipmates' frozen and gnawed bodies abovedecks.

As the indolent daydreamer sinks deeper into recollection, the microfiche machine of his memory abruptly jumps forward, reels whirring, warm backlight illuminating racing film and blurred print, scrolling until it halts on a different time and place. In the viewer, the image resolves into another record of head swimming and stomach turning, and an evening breeze carrying wisps of sand across a mostly deserted beach along the Pacific Rim.

Sometimes in these prolonged moments of stillness and dreaming the recrimination does come for him, and from closer to home. Even practiced in mindful indolence, the lack of production at times takes a psychic toll, paid for in anxiety and self-doubt. Shouldn't he be doing stuff? He giggles at the thought; "doing stuff" always calls to mind his highschool drama teacher directing her plays with a manic energy, running the aisles and stomping her feet frenetically, long wild tresses of unnaturally red hair waving madly, as she bellows "DO STUFF!" to the lineless extras milling on stage. You must always be doing stuff. Especially if you are only an extra.

Far south, where most of the constellations are strange and the people's tongue is not his own. Where he's learned to communicate with few words and no grammar. Grunts and gestures and at this moment guitar chords and laughter, interrupted periodically by fits of nausea as he sits with his host brother on the expanse of soft sand by a lifeguard tower looking out on the cold dark surf. Strumming, singing, pulling big slugs of la cerveza verdadera, these fits grow more intense as the night closes in. The steel coils of the thick guitar strings sting his finger tips. The shared beer glass empties and is inverted, rolled in the palms, and the last drips slung to the ground, pa’ pachamama, before being quickly refilled. He takes his turn and passes it back, then digs a pit in the sand and vomits there where he sits. Searing saliva and tears run down his face after. He wipes it all away on his gritty beach blanket and shoves the mound of sand back over the improvised catchment. On they go, singing and drinking until he, increasingly haggard and depleted from the sickness, vomiting, and surging fever, can no longer hold the guitar, and finds in trying that he also can no longer stand on his own.

He has become a wrung out husk, like the dried kelp pods by the tide pools, gummy and crusted in salt, smelling of decay.

He only wanted to keep the party going, to not be a burden, to be seen as rising to the occasion. As tougher than average and cooler than most.

Acrid film coats his mouth. The beer goes down easy but comes up tasting of the same acridness.

He becomes acutely self conscious. Is it noticeable that he is dying?

He comes to briefly at the sound of grinding gears from a sticky clutch in the rusty Volkswagen he's been shoved into; his host brother still laughing as he pilots the little lurching vehicle forward over the crest of the hill that slopes down toward the center of town. Lights out in all save a couple of buildings where generators pop and whine in the otherwise bashfully silent seaside village.

He comes to again with hard cross bars bearing into his skinny frame, through the impossibly skinny mattress of a hospital bed. He's in a sparsely appointed medical clinic, one of the buildings where up on the hilltop the lights could be seen glowing. A dusty cinder block rectangle like all the rest of the buildings in this dusty cinder block rectangle of a town. A miracle this clinic was here, staffed, and ready. The IV needle strains against his forearm as he rolls over and pukes clear saline IV fluid onto the floor. The fever and nausea make an efficient liquid processor out of his body, refusing to let anything rest inside him, until the nurse injects sedative into the line. Soon the body relaxes and goes heavy, pushing into the bedding as though it were buried under the weight of all those reindeer pelts. Ears muffled with cotton balls, head swimming, stale oxygenless breath stifling under the blankets.

He comes to with a start on the beat up couch, bolting upright and clear of the covers to draw a deep lungfull of fresh air.

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I’ve gone and spilled decaf black tea all over the pink book where I secret my thoughts these days. Multitasking generally leads to more tasks being undone than done for me. The words of prior essays, letters, and vignettes have bled off of pages, through pages, and onto other pages. That was yesterday, but the pages are still a bit sodden even now as I try a new ballpoint pen on them between bites of an airport lunch. Prepackaged vegan soba with an almond ginger sauce, and a compostable clamshell. What an age in which to live. The end times are full of signs and wonders. I doubt by the way the compostability of this packaging, other than in some extreme heat and pressure situation in which you might call any plastic compostable. Misleading, some of these end times signs.

Maybe on the flight to Paris I’ll see about reassembling some of the mottled thoughts, or seeing how they might fit better in their new forms, or formlessnesses, as the case may be. Assuming the jet comes apart over the north-Atlantic as one in three flights from SFO to Paris is known to do, the pink book will end up in the ocean, even more sodden, and all the words are soon to be intermingled anyway. The blur on the pages then might be a better reflection of my mind TBH. To take it in and understand it best at that point, assuming it’s found floating in a slick of plane rubble or washed ashore on some far-flung land, the best course of action will be to paper-shred all the pages, then coffee-grind the shreds, then steep the resulting tatters in 190°F water for a couple of minutes.

Enjoy the inky, woody, salty, decaf black tea (residual from my previous spill) flavored beverage you’ve just made. From the pulp of lignin and cellulose maybe you’ll also extract a few sugars to sustain you, along with whatever of my earthly thoughts have slunk into your body and passed through your blood brain barrier. Nourish as nourish can in these end times when all you have is inky salty tea to fill your belly. Perhaps the psychoactivity induced by the warm drink will offer some nice relief too. Enjoy my memories, my ecstasies, and my anguishes as little distractions and curiosities to take your mind off of the roving blood cults coming for your possessions, your tribe members if you have any, and ultimately your life. Put up a good fight! For yourself, and for what’s left of me – all that is left of me – inside of you now.

The joke is on them in the end anyway. In their cannibal practices, they will break you like bread and swallow you – and thus me – most likely without the ceremony befitting such as sacrament. But you and me will transubstantiate like the good host we have become. Oh wait, no need! You’re already flesh… My bad. But a card laid is a card played, so it’s bread that we become instead. Reverse transubstantiation... Oh well, we can salvage this! Not just any bread do we become but bread of rotten grain (its the end times after all), shot through with ergot, that european fungal miracle. Madness will be their last supper. Possession becomes these filthy creatures, convulsing out on the beach like the swine they are. And so in madness will they drive themselves into the sea, drowning. It’s back to the sea for us too then. Back from where we came, and to where we ultimately belong.

This dispatch was originally taking shape around a meditation on a line of dominoes. I don’t recollect now how the original seed of the idea blossomed into exploding liquid orbiculars. I’m not trying to care too much though. I decided from the outset that today’s exercise is first- and only-draft stuff. A one-hitter. Incongruous, alinear, of questionable utility. Utterly disrespectful to the reader in other words. Apologies then; feel free to duck out now, though I promise talk of eyeballs is over. The composition method I’m preferencing here is a basic act of resistance, a refutation of all the grating (but useful) writing advice that the Substack algorithm is heaping on me (edit more! first drafts are trash!), having (falsely?) identified me as harboring some kind of greater ambition and therefore needing to take my project more seriously.1 I’m good, ‘Stacks; thanks though!

The dominoes image that was resolving in my mind was something blandly symbolic of the deterministic nature of lives in relation to one another. Banal stuff really. The needle slips too easily into the grooves of worn metaphors… oops that itself being another worn metaphor. Anyway the vision was objects arranged by the creator and set in motion with a big ol’ Sistine Chapel index finger poking at the first tile. Big. Bang. Weeeee. Weee. We fall, one onto another, and onto the next and the next. The succession of a life traced by a domino’s arcing path, toppling with that strange effect of radial velocity where the center of rotation barely budges while the extremity races with dizzying speed. Are we powerless in the face of fate’s cascading momentum? Are we redundant? Not totally. Our hyperspecific charge and spin, manner of falling forward, and the very texture of ourselves is imparted on impact to those next tiles, rippling uniquely on through all the rest, clear to the end of the game.

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I imagine myself a beast in the wild, seasons tormented, roving so much inhospitable terrain. No matter how expansive, the boundaries seem only to close in day after day. Thick sucking mud around my ankles. Unyielding sharp grasses saw at my hide. Relentless exposure. Cold rain pelts at night, and searing sunlight flogs mid-day, when even the tallest grass casts hardly a shadow. Welts and scabs have formed along my flanks. My wide vacant pupils - no irises, no whites - loll under leaky crusting eyelids.2 Through insensate eyes I look up to an inattentive sky. I find no explanation or direction above though even my simple beastly mind wishes to know where I am and how long I'll be here, and where I must go and how I will get there. I find no answers to these questions anywhere in this foul place that engulfs me and would swallow me. This place will not relent because there's nothing to relent. It holds no will toward me, tender or ill. It holds nothing.3

there is no continuity to these thoughts. they come and go in flashes. starting up, ebbing away, and without warning wrapping back around to the beginning. memories recorded in brief spells, left like bread crumbs to trace a fleeting path. I was there then here then here. this I observed then. that I thought once. from crumb to crumb I might follow steps backward, but the spaces in between are quickly lost to time, and then the bread crumbs too. the islands I hopped between on the voyage that led me to this nameless place unstable, eroding, shaking and calving apart. no waypoints remain, crumbs or islands, for a return home. then, where I sit presently is a little raft adrift on a lightless sea. maybe the sea isn't exactly lightless. was it Prince Caspian that set out for the edge of the earth aboard a great ship, to find what lay at the farthest reach of the ocean? where mists gathered all around, thick oily and uniform like carded wool. all gray but glowing bright, and endless in all directions.

No raft actually; just a body. I lie buoyant in this thick miasma disconnected from distance and the passage of time. Raising my hands in front of me I find them entirely transparent. My body is boundary-less and numb, feeling neither cold nor warm, dry nor wet. Am I essentially just describing the insides of a sensory deprivation tank? Soupy saline water held right around body temperature. Generic new-age muzak piped in through hidden speakers. Caspian’s Sea is cheapened considerably when I realize it's only a few inches deep and held in a molded plastic basin through which paying customers in downtown Oakland cycle their naked bodies one at a time, a dozen or more a day. Films of oil, and drains and filters rimed over with hair and flakes of skin. Here come the lights, pulsing slowly brighter, interrupting the floating timeless trance, abrupt even in their engineered subtlety. Awake. Rinse off. Move on. Back to the overexposed outside world. Noisy and disorienting. Fulvid bloated faces on the slouched heads of shuffling eyeless strangers processing along grimy sidewalks through an undistinguished afternoon.

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The tapestry of the heavens - the firmament - along with the skin of the earth and the variegated forms that life takes on it - these must be the base elements of all visual art; the reference material for codified aesthetic beauty. Aloft in the eerie zone delimiting the firmament and the surface of the planet, the essential rightness of this world among all possible worlds1 is plain to those that bother to look. Funnily enough on this particular trip, I am passing over the vast icesheets of Greenland, that headline-grabbing frozen mass I used to go a year or more without hearing a peep about. The brilliance of the recent limelight doesn’t seem to have melted Greenland yet. For long stretches, no lines of any kind appear on its surface. Only a palette of a thousand different shades of white, stretched out over endless subtle contours. No lines and no boundaries between sky and land, land and water. No lines, only light and shadow.

Too normal now to move us as it should, this vantage point miles above the earth ought to be understood as a forbidden perspective, as dangerous as the moral perspective illuminated by the fruit of the tree of good and evil. An eye-view meant only for the gods. From up here it all feels too awesome and too heavy for me in all my feebleness to consider properly. I'm not sure anyone else onboard has even noticed that there are windows on this craft.

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Taking in the stark nobility and apparent emptiness of Greenland below, for no clear reason I am reminded of my cat waking me up, maybe 2 AM on a brightly moonlit night. He beckons for me to join him crouched on the rug by the screen door facing out onto our backyard. We huddle together there shoulder to shoulder, like co-conspirators. Like vagrants by the tracks in an old freightyard listening for the iron murmur and clack that softly signals the advance of a distant train. But this night is dead silent. Hearing nothing, we watch. We watch the strange and beautiful procession of two skunks rummaging through the weeds and dirt in the yard, unearthing grubs and bugs. My cat on his haunches and me on my knees and elbows, moonlight playing at his whiskers and along my eyelashes, there is something deeply moving about the night’s invitation to witness this bonded pair going jointly about their feeding routine. So simple and sacred.

When they forage like this, in focused vulnerability, they do so with their butts up and their magnificent and iconically striped tails held proud, like horsehair plumes atop old-fashioned cavalry helmets. They are advertising clearly the species that they are members of, lest they be misidentified by passing predator or adversary. Neither my cat nor I need the visual to recognize them. A distinct vegetal funk accompanies them everywhere, pungent enough to wake me up on the nights they grub in our yard.

With those tails up and noses down, they look for all the world alien, even like alien craft roving through moonbeams, scanning for signals of insect colonies. Running lights along the port and starboard flanks wouldn’t seem out of place on the bodies of these emissaries of a different world. They demonstrate to me a different way of leading natural lives. Like Greenland, they hold a promise normally ignored and largely misunderstood. Disdain is generally heaped on these stinky creatures, but their shared chore of grubbing through the yard together strikes me as a humbling act of love and a most holy spectacle. I can think of no natural wonder more marvelous than the vision of those skunks that night.2

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The story poses an unsettling question on the transferability of identity - and who is who after the exchange. Might you have already jumped unwittingly from mind to mind, species to species, over the course of your life? The problem with identity swapping is that if the memories, instincts, and priors that comprise a phenomenological “self” are stored deeply in the the physical medium sustaining it (they seem to be), the former “you” mightn’t necessarily come along for the ride. On transfer, you’d just become this new identity entirely, and unlike in Freaky Friday or the aquarium in Paris, you’d retain nothing of your former self. Then, did anything really happen? It's sort of a circular thought experiment that other Hollywood productions have probably already explored more expertly than I can.

Body swapping aside, what about the persistence of a single identity in its own assigned container? Dubious. No one with sufficient maturation could look back on their myriad former selves and disagree with Didion, who said it best (and good enough to be repeatedly quoted here2). “[We] forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.” The people I used to be! Me, aboard Theseus’s ship as the acting captain, the crew, the boatswain and bilge pumper; the very vessel itself. Does even a barnacle remain from the prior voyages as we continually tend to our ever-dilapidating masts, sails, deck, and the rest?

A more visceral metaphor for our changey-ness can be found in the collection of apocrypha that masquerade as commonly-held facts. We are meant to believe that the human body cycles through all of its cellular material every seven years; regeneration as constant a process in animal physiology as it is in boat maintenance. While the specifics of the cell cycling myth are not strictly accurate, the point is. We shuffle off our mortal coil time and again in the course of our lives! And do emerge repeatedly from the chrysalides of ourselves, reborn for better or worse and leaving only castings of who we were in the wake of our metamorphosing.

As identity across time proves slippery as a salamander or a moth pupa, so does it de-compose if I freeze the frame on any given moment. Into seemingly infinite layers. The autonomic self that is the mere biological carriage for the mind, the conscious but uncritical self acting out a life, the critical self judging the value of those actions and course-correcting as necessary (the homunculus up there in the control room, poorly regarded by philosophers of the mind), and the metacritic seated one more level up, weighing in on the logical and moral soundness of those judgments and nudges. Evidently no limit to the number of these layers, these Matryoshka dolls. They call it infinite regress.

Perplexing! The mottled picture this chorus of selves makes seems to point to the irreality of any of them... illusory phenomena tricking one into feeling there is a one in the first place. So through time and without time the puzzle holds. The great game of self-consciousness played out in the arena of the mind with mysterious rules and mysterious players toward mysterious ends.

Even now I mostly just rehash the ideas of others, poorly and with little added originality. So it's not apparent there's a lot of “me” present as the word-assembler types characters across a screen. I'm just instantiating little flecks of other thinkers’ minds without their awareness. Freaky indeed. Then again, the forebears were likely doing the same when they passed these ideas along. And so on, back to that infinite regress. Starting to feel like a hollow echoing drum in here... But, losing myself for a moment in the act of shaping the thoughts; that's the great relief of the creative process. Losing myself for a moment in the act of shaping. The end was oblivion all along.

Freshman philosophy, where the fixity of identity was put under a microscope and subjected to leering and prodding, guided by essays on the matter from the most esteemed classical thinkers whose names I forget.3 I do remember delighting my professor with my own Socratic discourse on the non-essentiality of the self, written in the voices of Ground Control and Major Tom in conversation as the Major slips the bonds of earth’s gravity and of self, losing his present, his past, the very borders of his suit and his body, enveloped in the womb of space. Style over substance I'm sure, and probably not much style at that, but the bar wasn't particularly high in the lecture halls of freshmen electives. A+ stuff, and on to the arboretum! To read Borges4 or more Cortázar under a great magnolia tree.

Perhaps we maintain the continuity of identity - the self - mainly through the creative processes that drive humans. We imagine things, conjuring in our minds the shapes of unmade stuff. We then set about making them, until at some point something is realized. Some durable thing (an earring, a structure, a vessel, a hole) or some transient thing (a meal, a mood, a gasp or a laugh) that resembles well, poorly or somewhere in between, the imagined thing. An enterprise carried on the backs of our persisting selves. We who thought, endeavored to create, then stood at the other side taking in the result, measuring how well it fit its original conception. The blacksmith folding steel. The farmer threshing wheat. The writer’s study, the potter’s studio, the bookkeeper’s office, the preacher’s pulpit. These are the spaces where we hammer out, negotiate, tally and sum our identities. The dark rooms where we fix them onto film with silver and developing agents. Does the substance of self persist only so long as we are about our crafts and passions? Apparently god sustains theirself thusly as well. “See I am God: see I am in all things: see I never lift my hands off my work, nor ever shall , without end” said Julian of Norwich.

I think of my former self (or selves) as whole but incomplete; an apparent contradiction, but there it is. I think of my emerging self as a greater wholeness, a widening radius concentric with who I've been but describing a larger potential. A more complete self. But in deeper reflection I feel the wholeness I seek asking that the boundaries encircling it, no matter how expansive, be dismantled so that my identity might flow out unrestricted by self-confinement and find its own level. Sinking and settling in clefts and hollows. Pooling here and evaporating there. Steam off of a piping kettle, or sublimation off the crust of a settled snow, when the clouds clear and rays of sunlight play lambent on its surface. The pressure relief as the self becomes self-less.

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If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder and the whole world sparks and flames.

― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek1

As I fix breakfast this morning a tiny pang of guilt reminds me I’ve neglected myfeelings.com and the cobwebs have begun to gather over it. That’ll be its own ongoing theme I’m sure. What’s a vanity project if not another small self-imposed anxiety to have simmering on the backburner? But most of what I’ve lately been on about in my little pink journal is too personal even for the craven exhibitionism of this website, so it hasn’t been clear to me that there is anything fit to transcribe here.

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At this time of day my cat, typically poking around amidst the dew and the denizens of the backyard at first light, exercises his paranormal knack for sensing just when the cereal milk is poured. Now matter how far or wide and how engrossed in exploration, the moment the milk comes out, he bounds through his door and over to the kitchen counter at full speed, to make a nuisance of himself until I finish eating and allow him to lick the bowl clean. This is surely one of his most endearing traits. And utterly distracting if you are trying to attend to chores like feelings posts.

I did just now come across an excuse for inaction within the raw emotions on the pink book pages. It is unseemly self-disclosure after all, and so, very much back on-brand!

The weariness of long-sorrow reaches all the way into the bones and makes simply mustering words a great chore. It drenches the fabric of the creative sails so thoroughly that, sodden and drooping, they fail to catch even the strongest wind. The craft that carries the heart then stalls among the heaving waves; listing and swiveling, it remains in place though the currents of sea and sky move swiftly on. Even the slick of splinters and drift floating on the churn when the ship is taken apart by these forces remains unmoving, anchored by sorrow’s inertia.

Enough already! I did have a fantastical dream sequence I put to page a while back - somewhat reluctantly, I’ll share it below.2 The reluctance being that I find the recounting of dreams somewhere between banal and outright degrading. Like most prejudices, the one I hold against retelling dreams has no real claim to logic. In fact I find the riches of the dreamscape rarely surpassed by waking reality, and I spend half my waking life dreaming anyway, so of all people I should be among the most thoroughly bought in on dream-telling. I have barely anything else to talk about. But now I remember the seed of this predisposition. I read once from some etiquette coach or cultural critic a definitive statement that the most boorish and least forgivable subjects to bring up at dinner parties are the weather and dreams. Being impressionable to authoritative statements like these, this has been lodged in my system of values ever since. Maybe the noblest life, after collecting a wide range of such prejudices early on, sheds them one at a time through time, until there are none left and the heart reaches its widest possible aperture. Honoring this theory, you can find my silly dream below. Names haven’t been changed; everyone is innocent.

Vikas, my steady climbing partner of late as well as confidant and sometimes co-pilot, is behind the wheel driving too fast on an iced-over highway along steep embankments with no guardrails.3 Around a bend in the slippery asphalt, at considerable speed, our vehicle loses all traction and, spinning around exactly half a turn and facing backward, we launch off of a sheer ravine, clearing a stand of dead trees barely and plummeting upside down into a small pond that turns out on this frigid winter day to be both impossibly warm and impossibly deep. We find ourselves, for reasons lacking all causality like the succession of most dream events, outside the wreckage of the car, which begins to sink immediately as though the cabin were full of lead rather than air. With Vikas and me underwater are two other former passengers, his brother Vishaal and a fourth person whose identity is lost forever to the impenetrable mists of a dream on its way to being forgotten.

We are at this point at least a hundred feet submerged in the silty warm pond water that I remember being certain is at least a thousand feet deep. The scene is chaos. Vishaal floats by thrashing and in clear need of rescue. The unidentified fourth person meanwhile is swimming upward, apparently to safety. Vikas I judge at the moment to be able to handle himself too, though he is entangled in a long ribbon of seatbelt that trails like a streamer from the rapidly-sinking leaden vehicle. Held fast at the ankle, he is being hauled down into a lightless unknown. In a split second of decisive action I grab Vishaal, thinking to help him up and to shore and there grab a deep breath so I might dive down to retrieve Vikas, confident he can hold out a while longer. Sometime around arriving at the pond’s surface, assured of Vishaal’s safety, I find myself perusing the menu for vegan options at a Mexican restaurant, settling on taquitos after a lot of deliberation that evidently annoys my table of fellow diners. One being an imposingly mature and attractive woman with whom I feel somehow involved. She seems impressed neither by my order nor my speed. It's becoming clear I will lose her tonight. But I'm growing more concerned with just how long the restaurant is taking to fill my order. It's been hours, my companions have long since gotten and eaten their entrees, and Vikas is still at the bottom of the warm pond in the snowy ravine awaiting my assistance.

I finally abandon the dining area and my fugitive vegan taquitos altogether, refusing to pay the bill and causing a scene that culminates in being upbraided by both the waiter and this mysterious love interest who clearly detests me and will be taking her last leave of me now. All the while, I am executing my breathe-up routine... deep but rapid three second inhales followed by three second breath holds, then seven to ten second exhales through the nose, controlled, concentrating on relaxing my body and slowing my heart rate in preparation for the last breath, packing all the air I can handle in my lungs and up my throat for this thousand foot rescue dive.

Only now do I let the thought enter my mind that Vikas might not have made it, and that alive or dead I'll need a powerful light to find him at those murky depths, and that he too never received his dinner order and must be equally put out. It's really all beginning to feel like a mess, truly a lost cause. I'm not sure I can hold my breath for a thousand foot dive anyway, especially given how shallow my breath-up feels whenever I attempt it in my dreams, which is often. My breath hold lasts only seconds and I startle awake gasping for air. The predicament of my drowning friend and my dinner order begins to dissolve but I'm left wondering. Who was that woman? Who was that fourth passenger? Would there have been a sour cream alternative for my taquitos?

Ah, the stuff of dreams. Tedious? Boorish? Merrily we row along… Stay tuned for an in-depth post on the weather lately! I kid; the cultural critics are not entirely wrong.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Just beyond
yourself.

It's where
you need
to be.

Half a step
into 
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you'll meet.

There is a road
always beckoning.

When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far
horizon
and deep in
the foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,
that's how
you know
it's the road
you have
to follow.
...

David Whyte

Just Beyond Yourself

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a year ago · 169 likes · 11 comments · David Whyte

Mao had his little red book. These days, I have my little pink one. Rants and reveries, wails and ecstasies. My pink book started as a drug journal, became a book of lamentations, and continues to transmute regularly, closer than ever to being purely uncategorizable … and on its way ‘round to swallowing its own tail, I’m sure. For this project, a pastiche of excerpts from the pink book works fine. Low-key, in this reincarnated space, most of the feelings to-date have been pilfered straight from its pages. Illustrations1 pilfered too, post facto and from the world at-large, but just as I had envisioned them.

On truth, that slippery fellow

We have our signature ways of distorting difficult realities. Fact-flexing. As light passing gravitational bodies bends so that the source never appears quite where it actually is. Shifty, the truth. Exhibiting quantum properties; can’t be observed without exerting effect. Can’t be transmitted from one place without showing up in two others. The interference pattern altering the fabric. Maybe this multiplicity of possibilities is our only bulwark against an otherwise too deterministic and entirely boring version of the world, devastatingly reducible to a few simple initial conditions. Initial conditions. That’s a solid memoir title for this life. Or the opposite: Skip intro.2 A playful Netflix-inflected title for a different version of the memoir. Same life, but you avoid looking at the starting point so you can be surprised how things pan out.

The truth, the faultline-riven truth. The jagged spaces between the parts of the broken thing; is the negative space where the truth lies? Where the truth lies! I’m calling dibs on that title too (tell me you didn’t get there first!?). The truth puzzle is too fascinating, disassembling and resolving as you turn it about. Appearing whole when viewed head-on; decomposing from side perspectives into little floating bits. Every vantage reveals a different fracture and the truth is all to pieces. And left to be reassembled a million different ways.

Contemplation on mortality, with a side of schmaltz, vol. I

The consideration of death is my default mode. Alongside me always; a guileful spectre. That shady faceless reaper with cowl drawn and the rusty arc of a scythe overhead … clearly Disney has informed my mental imagery here. More playful than menacing; I like this relatable character and hand it to western culture for daring some levity in the face of the moribund. How creative do others get? Well there’s Yama, that purveyor of justice (ahem… that’s mostly death), astride a yak and wagging his noose. Implacable and not entirely unlikeable. Kind of cartoonish too, so maybe it’s a universal theme.

Fidgeting so with mortality, I’m in a kind of constant liminal state of mourning. Not a crippling, depressing kind. Nor lurid, nor macabre. A reverential kind. Elegiac. And festive in a Día de los sense. Recognizing that you too will soon be dead, whether you are in the habit of fixing on it or not, I mourn you where you stand. We are in the anterooms of each other’s funerals just now, waiting together. How lovely is that! I hold your hand and celebrate your life that is, and soon to be, was. Mourn me too won’t you please? I am living, but soon enough will have lived, my own little life. Our fingers interwoven, I lift your story up, and you mine.

We are spaces to be left. Impressions. The shape of a life - of a presence - is the size of a body, of a smile or a wink. But the size of an absence, that’s the whole blue sky and the void of deep space besides. There is no proportion to loss when it comes, so let us mourn each other now while we are still together and, described by finite selves, can take each other’s measure. Before that definition dissolves and we cross the threshold to infinity and no longer have hands to hold.

Lastly, what passes for a poem around here

Gathered up in the sameness of our energy,
concentrated warmth, shared heat.
Embers and coals. A massive fire.
Smelted in which, dirty ore.
From which, running metal.
Sticky, shining, precious,
grasping and clutching veins of silver.
Spent and cooling, rain falling.
Smeared in wet ash and grey soot. One body. Fatted calf.
Singed hair. Tear streaks, cleansed hide.

Down the neck the chest the legs, through the cleft, piercing the root.3

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Richard Wilbur: ‘The standard awful poem of the last forty years … a sort of artless diary entry in free verse.’

Myfeelings feel seen!

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It’s looking like there were a lot of accomplished trad poets out there equally unimpressed with this free verse / prose mashup style that might be passed off as poetry.3 Ah well, they are mostly dead. With minimal deference to the grumpy poets society, I’m finding more space in my heart for prosetry all the time. And I believe it’s not for any expert to dictate the rules of meaning-making; isn’t that the fair enterprise of all beauty-beholders? Gauging by the few books of poetry I have on the shelf, vers libre has won the day at least for our lifetime.

I realize I’m kind of mounting an offense for a battle that was won ages ago, but here it goes anyway; a quickly-off-topic soliloquy on prosetry (rolls off the tongue, does it not!) for posers like me. A preamble to later installments here sure to include original … prosems? (yuck, an even less pleasing term!) … proems? (also ewww) …

Ambiguities vex me. Free verse I struggle with. I guess I’m not different than those old grumpy poets. Form poetry was an orderly refuge from the chaos. Consider the sonnet, prescriptive meter and a repeating rhyme scheme. Hip hop. Formal structure. Precision and deftness. Conveying end-to-end some sort of story or moral truth within a tight rule set. But for poetry, the free kind, seemingly lacking in discipline or utilitarian value, I’ve internalized an ugly derisiveness; normative and maybe gendered. Language is meant for conveying ideas, concisely (ok not mine) and like trains on time (neither mine). It is the lines of code to be compiled in the minds of others for predictable cognitive outputs. Building blocks, cellular matter for a narrative body.

Free of constraints, we are talking confusing speech in an already confusing world. Words are meant to pin down flighty ideas into an orderly overview, like an entomologist’s cork board full of exotic moth specimens. Grammar and syntax and rules for verse are the Velcro backing on utensils and hand tools that otherwise float dangerously within an orbiting space station,4 fixing this mess of things to the walls and counters so the vessel isn’t hopelessly cluttered with drifting flotsam.

Formless poetry and aimless prose don’t pin things down. They don’t demand outputs from words. They don’t have to be always tethering ideas and images together sequentially to produce struts and fasteners, trusses and sheathing, in service of larger constructions. Instead they may be contemplations of, admirations for, the materia itself. Matter.

Exempli gratia: Matter. Materies (substance; also lumber, wood). Materior (to fell timber; to procure wood). Madera (lumber (Spanish)). Madre. Mater. Mother! Wood fibers, the mother of matter. For erstwhile jungle primates, the matter that matters most. The tree mother. All packed in a single word that when unraveled, like genetic code in solution, reveals impossibly rich layers of information — the history of a whole species. One word, matter, like Leibniz’s monadic reflections — a single point in space projecting all the truth of one surrounding universe.

OK then, words (and feelings!) suffice. No rules for assembly required. Begrudgingly I allow that some of this stuff I’m working with is meant for poetry. Or something else. A formless form. And a nameless one (better nameless than prosetry that’s for sure). Imprecise. Undisciplined. Hallucinatory. Or perhaps the last gasps of lucidity before a psychiatric patient succumbs to the dulling effects of a tranquilizer. Yes please! Dilating pupils darting in fits, then fixing on a point a million miles away. Still.

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Curvy sinuous natural fibers, these words.
No straight thing then, these crooked timbers, made of words.
Not fit for structural lumber, not my words or timbers anyway.

Hey, if you made it this far, why not shiver my timbers with a message, or better yet a comment for the enjoyment of all the other proets (no!) that make their way here.

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Mon petit chou chou…

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Nothing lasts.
There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is,
now

I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers.
…
Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
   like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Excerpts from Mary Oliver’s Flare

If my heart is a safe, Mary Oliver’s verses are the instruments of a master lock picker; a stethoscope that listens for every click and precision tools that fit right in the tumblers. I’m not sure you should do this to a poem by the way - excerpting sections out of the whole. If you have time, look up the entire thing. You have time! I arrived late to the Mary Oliver party, by way of a surf edit of all things. Call me basic or uninformed that I hadn’t found my place in the family of things until my early 40s1. To miss the party altogether would have been such a tragedy. I hope you make your way there too.

Leave no trace. I was brought up on this mantra, but it should be obvious to the least attentive observer that we are too late by a long shot. This was never our lot, nor even a natural goal. There’s always more than a trace left by us. Sometimes I’d rather we indoctrinated instead toward leaving traces intentionally, but harmonious ones that respect the natural world while acknowledging and even celebrating our place in it.

This contemplation on trace and place in nature forms in the shower as I am reading the label on my shampoo bottle. I’m trying a low-impact, cruelty-free kind (a hallmark of our species that, even for simple hair care products, freedom from cruelty is exceptional enough to bear mentioning). The label says 93% naturally derived. At this I catch myself laughing out loud - the preposterousness of supposing 7% of my shampoo could be derived from something other than nature. It strikes me as a claim too absurd to ignore. There in the shower I roundly reject it with whatever scientific authority I possess, which is none. But the joke occurs to me spontaneously that there is a parallel universe where I am a respected theoretical physicist. Another little laugh. Pretty bad, right? Borrowing authority from parallel-me, I assert that there is no physics esoteric enough to support this idea of unnatural ingredients.

I am left only with fantasy as a space where I might find a portal through which that non-naturally derived fraction of my shampoo might have leapt. I’d love to believe I’m lathering my thinning hair with something so magical - no doubt the effects would be a more lustrous mane, and maybe access to intergalactic teletransport besides - but I’m afraid if its a constituent of this bottle, or of any other container in the knowable universe, its bound to be of nature. As are we and our containers and all else seen, felt, and fit to be listed on a label or otherwise considered in this world.

Turning over these ideas, I slump seated facing the torrent of raining hot water. Under rising steam the surface of the shower floor feels strangely cool on my skin. Tiny rainbow suds gather and foam behind my ears. Thin runnels form at my temples, converge along my brow and course down the bridge of my nose. Water collects there to form fat drops one after another plopping onto my lower lip, a faint tangy taste of soap prickling on my tongue. Water runs all down my face under my eyes over my cheeks cascading from my chin to my lap splashing onto the shower pan whirling and sucking through the grill down into the pipes and gone forever. Carrying away those traces of magical shampoo and the dust and oil it stripped off of me.

While educating myself on the mechanics of posting to substack, the search engine with unsolicited help from AI assist tells me that articles are basically pointless without a call to action. Well ok, I am tempted to go on here about what exactly I think we ought to do in nature instead of leaving no trace. I have been accused though of lobbing judgements too casually and am sensitive to being seen as overly opinionated. Admittedly I do hold strangely concise convictions about proper attitudes and behaviors in situations ranging from airport security lines to wilderness places. In that way I realize I’m like Larry David crossed with Henry David Thoreau and am apparently sometimes equally insufferable.2

But as we are all of nature (the earth is our country) I believe we must already know intrinsically what we ought to do and have only to do it. I doubt I can add much by formulating a lecture to anyone else on the subject. Instead this morning I think on the traces I do leave in this world and in the worlds of my kith. I’m afraid I notice these traces are at times unnatural after all. Unnaturally cruel, unnaturally demanding. These parts of my nature, or my un-nature as it were; do they come from that sinister extradimension where the shampoo factory sources its unnatural ingredients too? Are they the same components that give freshly-washed locks that dewy sheen?

I detest this part of me as much as I can anything; the 7% or even just 0.7% fraction unnatural meanness.3 Its a hopeful project I’m undertaking though. In scrounging around for the traces of myself I don’t care to leave, I hope to bag them up a little at a time and send them packing back through that fantastical portal for unnatural derivatives. If you find any similar rubbish in the wilderness of yourself, feel free to throw it in there too.

Why not leave a trace while you are in the neighborhood?

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Also, as I clearly have no editor, feel free to send me your notes, cruel or cruelty-free!

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Finally… same cat, different tree:

"I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, A Left-Handed Commencement Address

Amen Ursula, whose words and visions have kept me such wonderful company this dark winter. Turning from the dark earth to the light air, where some favorite thoughts come to me… On airplane rides. I don’t know why. I’m not sure what follows rises nearly to favorite status, but whereas I typically do not find motivation to write airplane thoughts down, in this recent instance I did. San Francisco to Boston gives you plenty of time to run out of excuses not to, and in the window seat there’s plenty of imagery for inspiration too. For some reason, thoughts clarify up there at 30,000 feet. The effects of that stale, poorly oxygenated cabin air on the brain? Or maybe just the barely-liminal-but-always-there anxiety that I might suddenly find myself sharing a horrific and prolonged death with a planeload of terrified strangers? Gives a special poignancy to the products of human cognition I guess.

Lives have their own momentum. Objects in motion. First Law stuff I think; I don’t exactly remember. Don’t fly east in December in the northern hemisphere. Its sordid business taking off in the morning and feeling the sun dim behind you in the mid-afternoon with your flight only halfway over. Heavenly bodies in motion, and somehow at our ludicrous scale we can still manage to make them move faster by transporting ourselves from place to place in little dreadful jet planes.

Soft neatly furrowed rows of clouds laid out longitudinally below. Cool pewter with a peach glow faint on the western aspect as the accelerated sunset drifts in our wake. Dark soon light tomorrow. The two-phase power that turns the motor over and over. Dark soon light tomorrow. Dark light dark light. The motor spins at its steady, determinate frequency. Illuminating with shutter and flash the flip book frames of these objects in motion. The lives of the ancestors and animal kin. The blossoming of forests, blooms of algae. Growth of glaciers. Recession. Flames. Shriveled seed husks, barren plains. Wet blood. Dried blood. Dark soon light tomorrow. Click click click click.

We are entering now in our little jet plane that dark half of the cycle that’s more than half for the season and more again for the forward hurtling momentum of our little jet plane. And a little faster and all we have is dark and that two-phase generator shutting down. Click          click               click                        click 

Anyway, with the new year’s arrival, please find for a moment that transcendent peace, elusive to us but highly accessible to a cat for hours every day.

Subscribe if you like, and leave us a deoxygenated airplane thought on your way out!

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When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose object can be “something” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in the presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.

- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

I enjoy writing, or attempting to, or really just thinking I do, but I’m not much of a story-teller. I wonder if my dreams give me insight into why I have no stories to tell. Dreams are like the stories we tell ourselves. Mine are vivid, and vivifying, almost every night. But they are strange and sometimes terrible, in the “old sense” of the word as I recently read it described (also in Gilead). And sometimes in the new sense of the word too. For all they are, there are no plots to follow and no relatable stories to be told. Messy and impressionistic. But those impressions I do like to tell about. I feel them to be universal, generalizable, and to have some additional value when shared that they lack when held secret. I feel you share some of my impressions if you so much as read words, and that in sharing we validate each other. We see each other and nod. “I’ve felt just such a thing too.” Or if not, I could do. In that case we might be in league for a little while, and the world might be made more familiar; that little bit less strange and terrible.

I wish I had good stories too and maybe one day I will. In the meanwhile I hope a succession of impressions, like lilly pads or paving stones, might form its own dotted path that connects to create a sort of story-like arc. If not, I hope they will do as little islands unto themselves, self-defined and justified, even lacking a greater coherence.

May the price of reading these words be a few of your own. Sneakily I put this plea at the end, after you are already staked and didn’t know it. Share something won’t you? I imagine few will find their way here, and not that often, so it’ll be that much more magical for us when we do, to encounter other human sign.

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Feedback? Notes? Improprieties? By all means…

Please also enjoy my cat in a tree.

Lastly, smash: