Friday, February 02, 2007
Love bugs
What I saw and how I saw it
The sun does what it can, this time of year, and that may be more than we hope for. There is an extending and ramifying of discrete objects across the visual field. This is not the compression and isolation of the lovelier but less hopeful sun of June.
This morning, two hawks above the ridge implied by our neighborhood. The land contour is subtle, merely the slight tipping point at the edge of the ancient lakebed, and anyone who chooses to can think of our houses as simply in the city rather than on a ridge. There must have been enough air spilling upwards from this, though, because the hawks widened one gyre, secured some height, and were quickly gone.
I sat in the sun wearing nothing on my torso but a dark coat of nylon stuffed with bird feathers in plump panels, opened to the south. I’d come in from skating the city, eating the whole thing with my blades, amassing bits of tape on the handycam which will enrage Sebastian when he comes to edit it one day.
I haven’t begun the quirky and unlikely eye method which may or may not help me overcome the sudden loss of visual acuity which came upon me at age forty-six. But I haven’t repudiated it, either. Anticipating its confines and freedoms, I don’t wear glasses, and I tend to blunder a bit in our dark north-facing duplex.
I was out there reading Descartes’ Discours de la method in an odd mood, sun on my naked belly. French comes to me sometimes less as something I know than as something half forgotten, like the speech of dragons.
It was not from the hawks I learned the lesson of shadows spilling out sideways on the first of January. I came to Descartes in desperation, not for ideas but for book-sanctioned ones, for—and here is the end of this line of thinking—for money, because I need to teach this city course at the university, and I had taken the hint from another book that Descartes gave us the straight lines of cities and an enlightenment of ruined trees and for animals and bugs, contempt.
And so to the fourth part of the Discours, in a bit of sunshine in a country so sodden with months of rain that as I’d skated earlier I’d had to avoid a kind of slush, a paste which reminded me of the effluvium from Mt. St. Helen’s back in ’80 settling on the windshield of our Nova 6-cylinder north by northwestbound out of Chicago. It was everywhere in heaps, then and now, and here I think it’s from litter and motor oil whipped to a froth by tires in the rain. If there’s been a darker country than this one, I’ve forgotten it the way a woman cannot recall the moist nightmares of labor.
Two bugs alighted upon my Descartes. We were three, then, two bugs and me, but with a single consciousness, one solar plexus. I’d have never seen them in the house, and might well have crushed them into the folds of the Descartes without ever noticing them. But out there in the sun I could not only see commas but objects inside the commas, and the pulp of the paper whispered a thousand things in microshadows the text had not dreamed of. And as commas first the bugs alit to break up my reading.
But that lateral light had a trick that was best of all, for as the one bug climbed the rugged folds of the words “claires et distinctes” on the right page, the other ascended into the white space on an accent mark above “les choses materielles” on the left page. As he did so, he turned, and was suddenly enlarged in shadow, and I could see the imprint of him fully across three inches. He scratched himself, and licked his face, and the resolution thus amplified was such as to fall just short of telling me his expression.
What I saw and how I saw it
The sun does what it can, this time of year, and that may be more than we hope for. There is an extending and ramifying of discrete objects across the visual field. This is not the compression and isolation of the lovelier but less hopeful sun of June.
This morning, two hawks above the ridge implied by our neighborhood. The land contour is subtle, merely the slight tipping point at the edge of the ancient lakebed, and anyone who chooses to can think of our houses as simply in the city rather than on a ridge. There must have been enough air spilling upwards from this, though, because the hawks widened one gyre, secured some height, and were quickly gone.
I sat in the sun wearing nothing on my torso but a dark coat of nylon stuffed with bird feathers in plump panels, opened to the south. I’d come in from skating the city, eating the whole thing with my blades, amassing bits of tape on the handycam which will enrage Sebastian when he comes to edit it one day.
I haven’t begun the quirky and unlikely eye method which may or may not help me overcome the sudden loss of visual acuity which came upon me at age forty-six. But I haven’t repudiated it, either. Anticipating its confines and freedoms, I don’t wear glasses, and I tend to blunder a bit in our dark north-facing duplex.
I was out there reading Descartes’ Discours de la method in an odd mood, sun on my naked belly. French comes to me sometimes less as something I know than as something half forgotten, like the speech of dragons.
It was not from the hawks I learned the lesson of shadows spilling out sideways on the first of January. I came to Descartes in desperation, not for ideas but for book-sanctioned ones, for—and here is the end of this line of thinking—for money, because I need to teach this city course at the university, and I had taken the hint from another book that Descartes gave us the straight lines of cities and an enlightenment of ruined trees and for animals and bugs, contempt.
And so to the fourth part of the Discours, in a bit of sunshine in a country so sodden with months of rain that as I’d skated earlier I’d had to avoid a kind of slush, a paste which reminded me of the effluvium from Mt. St. Helen’s back in ’80 settling on the windshield of our Nova 6-cylinder north by northwestbound out of Chicago. It was everywhere in heaps, then and now, and here I think it’s from litter and motor oil whipped to a froth by tires in the rain. If there’s been a darker country than this one, I’ve forgotten it the way a woman cannot recall the moist nightmares of labor.
Two bugs alighted upon my Descartes. We were three, then, two bugs and me, but with a single consciousness, one solar plexus. I’d have never seen them in the house, and might well have crushed them into the folds of the Descartes without ever noticing them. But out there in the sun I could not only see commas but objects inside the commas, and the pulp of the paper whispered a thousand things in microshadows the text had not dreamed of. And as commas first the bugs alit to break up my reading.
But that lateral light had a trick that was best of all, for as the one bug climbed the rugged folds of the words “claires et distinctes” on the right page, the other ascended into the white space on an accent mark above “les choses materielles” on the left page. As he did so, he turned, and was suddenly enlarged in shadow, and I could see the imprint of him fully across three inches. He scratched himself, and licked his face, and the resolution thus amplified was such as to fall just short of telling me his expression.
# posted by The Bad Yogi @ 9:03 AM 
