Buber 10

 

Separation isn’t magic, though it works for some. My dog and I are housebound by an inconsistently strong rain. I hear burbling, bubbling, bubering outside the sliding glass. Rain comes as volume without button to adjust: loud, soft, loud. The longing for relation is primary, the cupped hand into which the being that confronts us nestles. Cat motor in my bed at night; dog snores or sleep barks. There’s a consciousness in their sleep, as in my being awake. In your 60s, you’re awake a lot with the dead, the old ones, the new ones, the ones you find out about later. Time flew, though we presumed only for us; everyone else is fixed in the fore-time of our acquaintance. Children remain small, adults uncreased. Are the dead separate or collaged into us, like poems layered with voices? Move the radio dial to hear its cacophony. We intend as little as Eucalyptus. Its (in the sense of an It that is a You) eruptions of tar and color and peeling bark come from no central consciousness (do they?). Our voices do, but they splatter without our control, like the rain we wait out until we can walk again. Dog wants walk, I want walk, Eucalyptus may want to see us, but the day’s lesson is to stay. A stay in deliberations, meditation on staying put. Put that out, fire or word hoard, and watch it accrete or dissolve into ash.

The drive aims at reciprocity, at “tenderness.” That comma. Does it divide reciprocity from tenderness, while suggesting they’re close? Is it an equals sign, denoting synonym? And why the quotes around “tenderness”? Is reciprocity necessarily tender? Gentle or sensitive to pain? Fusion or a con? But it also determines the inventive drive . . . through taking or tearing apart. Is that or an and? Eucalyptus is torn apart, but there’s no agent acting upon it, except when I pull tenderly at a small piece of bark and touch it. To touch is to alter, either taking or tearing apart. Or offering, in its dual sense. Let my photos be my offerings to you. These images are small, not so much shattered mirrors, but constrained ones. The form of the photograph is small; that of the meditation claims to be larger, but keeps getting away from the central trunk of the matter. The lighter tan of the interior, unveiled by bark’s peeling edges, like a wound or an origin or both. An origin along the way. Biology’s as much an interpretive dance as adoption, though adoption seems perfectly biological to me. Have I adopted this tree, relation not of possession but of being near-by? Has it adopted me, in those moments of my not wandering, the stillness that offers an image back? You think too much, my mother always told me. When it was not a tearing, it was an offering, pleasure to be aware of this life’s walk.