Dead Reckoning
1.
In the delicacy of the hour, the sun illuminates the underside of spotty white puffs and the linear gassy backstories of last night’s airplanes.
Looking out of my office window, I notice the ground around the ash tree exposed for the first time in years by the gardener last spring—bare earth with protruding root knees — a lifted skirt. He meant to cover the circle with mulch, but didn’t — a report that something hasn’t happened, the blank stare of a sustained opening, the hard- pack of the undeniable. Above the fracas, what seems right- headed in this world: the notion that what we think is what we know, when in fact, what we know is almost always less than it seems, and sometimes something else altogether.
2.
In them, lives a terrain where dream and breath collide, where memory, like an erratic exists in the absence of any other explanation.
A floater, musca volitans, is not the thing but the shadow of the thing as it drifts across the cave wall of a retina, not the event but an aperture, not what’s out of focus but what gives way to clarity: odds that are favorable though still odd. Some days, seeing is nothing more than a stack of ifs, a totem, bird-beat, a craggy fray, a fleck of dust that catches the eye and for a split second makes everything crystal clear.
3.
Observing this, one likewise encounters within one’s self, a place between places, between the perceived and the vacant, the attained and unattainable —
The setting sun, hibiscus and plumeria hued, is not just the photo’s image, but also that which allows the viewer to enter into its sphere, into its periphery. It’s like standing close to a mirror and seeing in that mirror the whole room, even that which is not directly in front of the mirror. Think of the time you saw a hawk sitting atop a pole looking for prey in the ditch beside a road. Think of the breeze that day, the span of pre-stillness, the brush, bits of litter, houses blurred beyond. Think, too, of how you and the hawk simultaneously saw the tiniest movement deep inside the picture frame of that paradigm.
4.
… a middle space, and perhaps more profoundly, an understanding that every moment of every day leads one into it
How can you teach a child about the flux of a river, about variation, when, while standing on the shore, it all seems so simple? Things only become things by naming them: this is this, that is that. Even in the whys all the parts are named. The word salve, for example, might also represent a sense of confidence one feels three quarters of the way across Capilano Canyon on a suspension bridge. Mid-ocean ridge is the name given to the peaked crest of the Atlantic Ocean mountains — mountains and basin that were formed not by a pushing together, but rather by a pulling apart, and then, by a powerful upwelling of an un-nameable force.