Watching the first ModPo Live webcast of the semester, in which Al Filreis awards Almost No Memory by Lydia Davis, to a caller that a girl named Emily mistakes for a man named Grass (in a week of Dickinson and Whitman, a week of slanted truths and songs of leaves, you realize, what could be righter?), you go off tangenting through the cyberbrush, to see what Lydia's done lately.
And by way of Two American Scenes (momentarily interesting in a mention of two masters of the essay discussing “found material”), you wind up at Bookslut (as one does), where you find this, on travel, by Lightsey Darst (and speaking of names...):
I have never believed that you only learn from traveling. You find yourself traveling and you make what you can of that, but if you could stand still, you could learn the names of everything:
old maples, huckleberry,
wild pear and swamp honeysuckle,
with baybush, box and briar
You could know everyone around you, their histories and their desires and their middle names, instead of passing through, blind to the new scar and the old crush. You could make a memory palace of everything around you, planting knowledge in the landscape:
The Garden of Eden was in no other place
than Grandfather's orchard,
and the magnificent pictures of Milton
could never remove it.
You could travel by looking closer: the grain of the wood soda sign on the wall, a story of centuries of fire, flood, drought, and regular rain.
Later. As you copy-paste this in and read what comes together. What comes together and what comes forward and what comes true. Inevitable as everlasting sky. Of course, you think. To stand still, instead of passing through. To learn the names of everything. To look closer.
Of course.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[sabato 17 settembre 2016 ore 12:44:25] [¶]
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