6 January 2024

There is no system to perception. Systems are coercive, perception an escapee. Pain lacks system, though the cures, rife on social media, suggest a method of release. My hips are recidivists this morning, muscles sending Morse code I can’t comprehend. I’m a weak tripod, even with my stick. Sangha suggests I sit in the road and look through binoculars at the plants, but then I wouldn’t see the tether that reads New Haven or young webs of the trumpet plant striking out on their own. We traded an outfielder today, Sangha tells me, and I wonder if perception isn’t also a trade. Even if I make a discipline of looking out my window, I miss what lives outside its frame. Simone Weil loved the creatures who exist by chance. All of this is chance, except in our inventories.

The television was our intermediate witness; we sat in the living room three years ago, witnessing systemic anarchy at two removes. “Where is the National Guard?” I kept demanding of the air between me and the screen. Later, we saw insurrectionists enter the Capitol dome and walk between rope lines. Today, someone blamed Nancy Pelosi. The incoherence of our witness is part of the problem; what you saw differs from my seeing in more than vocabulary. Pull the knob on a word that works now, because the future's to be written later. A historian who’s used to whitewash history is not a good witness, though others call him “revisionist.” A rioter most wants his Daddy.

We look to see if what is most stable is still there. Compared to Mt. Tamalpais, this rain forest is chaotic; drum beats of rain carry no rhythm, just unorganized splats. One musician played the sax, while the other used brushes to drum the beat. His drum was a vinyl album cover by Steve Miller. No matter, material. You could try to monetize the white sap from inside a cacao bean, but there’s better money in making chocolate. Poets can’t change the world, because—however sweet--they aren’t cost effective. You might demand that I care, but not what I care about. The preposition qualifies, like a loan.

A small boy had been caught in traffic in Alexandria, Virginia, his eyes fearful, cars weaving around him. I cared about him, without being able to care for him. Covid showed us that gulf between caring and touching. The doctor touched her patients through latex, prophylactic against care’s consummation. And now they’re telling us all to have babies again.

Note: Debts are owed to Etel Adnan's "Journey to Mt. Tamalpais."