Weekends, weeks, months, even years speed by, entombing life in a retrospective vitrine: a dim reflection of what it could be, or, even more passive, what it could have been. Life actually holds no interest for me except as it is. Five days on the road, three of those on foot in the bush, walking dry washes, wet canyons, fracture zones, sage forests, and several fault lines. Ancient barbed wire: almost garroted at one point. That would have been messy and, off trail, not discovered until late in the season, a scatter of catamount-stripped, bleached and cracked bones. Plenty of those stumbled on over the years. The only other impingement on body was a gashed shin whilst climbing high up on the flank of the Mitten Park fault scarp, will carry that scar for many moons, trace of a single misstep.
Some random conversations ensue in the campground, but mostly solitary bush-walking, ravens are curious when I initiate a dialogue, they circle closer (with sun at their backs in a clever move to keep me blinded, watching). The dry washes become the site of photographic essay, so empty and barren is the imagination. The in-sight of things draws mind to travel that thin line between madness and be-ing. It is impossible to re-present those things because they aren’t things at all. They are merely manifestations. They are fields of action, activated flow. No wonder that the representations are so pale and thin. Sagebrush, flower, rampart, water-washed stone, lizard, and, finally, days later, skin, activated and living skin.
Driving, I return ‘home’, though this supposedly ‘special’ house in Golden is hardly that. I am joined on Friday evening by a special guest who accompanies me first to Target to pick up new ‘computer glasses’ of a mo-dern style, Massimo, then to dinner at Qdoba (and who, via some stealth and rationale manages to pay for dinner), and who chooses a movie to go to via a fine twist of logic. The title forgotten by today, less than 24 hours later. The whole shared time surfaces as sleep deprived and intellectually far too dense to digest comfortably. I no longer have the mental tools to cope with precocity. But who cares anyway for that? When there is the simple experience of instability: back to muse. Muse turning world inside out. with whispers to back of mind, whispers that charge behavior in electric-stained darkness. Whispers that contain, are contained by beauty, a certain sweetness, and ferocious thinking that flickers across visage. All this wrenching the world apart as it should be wrenched apart. Whispers, and the rare touch of finger-tip to embodied Self. Shivers entirely penetrate body.
So much has been given up (gefist upp) upon. Little more remains. Capacities are rarefied. Muse carries more to life than I am able to absorb. Small treasures come through to me. Through all my inabilities to absorb more. Beautiful treasures. Some only spoken (or faintly whispered), words, wisdom, insight. Reciprocation is far too feeble in the face of fierce and pointed intellectual power, and the exceptional cogency of this particular mind.
Embodied presence tempered radically by the anxiety of contact: guided by historic trajectories. Greater-than one-point-five ft — zero-point-four-zero m — distance brings a swing to calm and ease to the untranquil soul. Sweet peaceful sleep with a visage blissed in guileless beauty. But it’s dark, I say to myself, far predawn yet, and eye unpracticed. Yet eye still sees in the star-Light, and in the shadowed Light of Saturn’s rings. A hold-over from night-watching for Andromeda, M-31, in Echo Park. Photographs are the only resort, the only tool-wielding that holds up to the onslaught. But that incursion is, actually, a gentle brush of life-on-life, of beauty, of spontaneous and momentary presence.
Cynicism-be-damned. Age-be-damned. Consequences-be-damned. Sweet Djeezuz, just make that image, there in the morning Light that presses the technology beyond shaky hand, and soft eye-sight compressed by Saturn’s grey un-iris’d eye.
Moments later, blinded by sunLight, image is thin essence of presence itself. Image is never enough.
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