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title: Notes
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How do I explain such a page of notes? How do I tell you, beloved readers, that, the more I write, the more feverish my pace, the greater the pull of my graphomania upon my wrist, the more words flow through me *period?* Words that are my own. Words that are nonsense. Words that are, yes, the words of others. It yanks and tugs on my wrist, its other hand — paw? — lingering so sweetly on my neck, drawing lazy fingers across as though to bleed me dry of ink, and from out of me spills my words and also the words that have ever made me what I am.
Here, then, are the references as I remember them. I will apologize no further.
<hr id="part-6"/>
#### *Why do birds, as the poet says, suddenly appear* \[...\]
Cf. The Carpenters:
> Why do birds suddenly appear,\
> ev'ry time you are near?\
> Just like me,\
> they long to be\
> close to you
>
> Why do stars fall down from the sky,\
> ev'ry time you walk by?\
> Just like me,\
> they long to be\
> close to you
-----
#### \[...\] *that sweet field arrayed in living green* \[...\]
Cf. Samuel Stennett:
> Oh, the transporting, rapturous scene\
> That rises to my sight!\
> Sweet fields arrayed in living green,\
> And rivers of delight!
And yet, considering the role the climate crisis played in making the System our own little heaven, consider also a later verse:
> No chilling winds or poisonous breath\
> Can reach that healthful shore;\
> Sickness and sorrow, pain and death,\
> Are felt and feared no more.
But, ah–! I will doubtless speak more on the System as heaven to come...
-----
#### \[...\] *a Blakean energetic hell.*
Cf. William Blake:
> Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
>
> From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.
-----
#### [...] *some scene, some dream within a dream within a dream* [...]
Cf. Slow Hours:
> **To — in the days after her death**
>
> A dream within a dream within a dream\
> and fell visions sidling up too close\
> both woo me. Sweet caramel and soft cream\
> sit cloying on their tongues, and I, Atropos\
> to such dreams as these, find shears on golden thread.
>
> I would not cut, nor even could, had I but wished\
> to sever this golden thread — and every thread\
> is golden — and end a friend and send to mist\
> and sorrow ones so dear. Dead! Dead! She is dead\
> and gone, for her own shears were sharper still.
>
> And so she cut, and so they watched, and so I watched\
> such love as this cease. I yearn to say that she returned\
> to me, became a part of me, but a tally notched\
> among the lost was all that stayed when life was spurned\
> by the call of death — supposedly ended.
>
> So, she is gone and now our lives are darker for it,\
> and now this world is where the shadows lie,\
> and all the light that still remains is forfeit,\
> and so much green still stabs towards the sky,\
> and yellowed teeth of lions still snap at the air.
-----
#### She passed, perhaps, the setting sun
Cf. Emily Dickinson:
> Because I could not stop for Death —\
> He kindly stopped for me —\
> The Carriage held but just Ourselves —\
> And Immortality.
>
> We slowly drove — He knew no haste\
> And I had put away\
> My labor and my leisure too,\
> For His Civility —
>
> We passed the School, where Children strove\
> At Recess — in the Ring —\
> We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain —\
> We passed the Setting Sun —
>
> Or rather — He passed Us —\
> The Dews drew quivering and Chill —\
> For only Gossamer, my Gown —\
> My Tippet — only Tulle —
>
> We paused before a House that seemed\
> A Swelling of the Ground —\
> The Roof was scarcely visible —\
> The Cornice — in the Ground —
>
> Since then — 'tis Centuries — and yet\
> Feels shorter than the Day\
> I first surmised the Horses' Heads\
> Were toward Eternity —
-----
#### \[...\] *that has been my dream.*
I have dreamed of turning into a tree for years and years and years and years and years, now.
For instance, I have written here that I have set this dream into verse and this is true, for here is a segment from a longer work:
> We'd long since stopped, there by the pond,\
> and your smile was, yes, sad, but still fond\
> as you settled down wordlessly to your knees,\
> took a slow breath, looked out to the trees,\
> and closed your eyes.
>
> Beginnings are such delicate times\
> and I very nearly missed it, no chimes\
> to announce the hour of your leaving.\
> As it was, there was no time for believing\
> or not in the next moments.
>
> Your fingers crawled beneath the soil\
> and sprouted roots, flesh starting to roil.\
> Coarse bark spiraled up your wrists and arms,\
> Spelling subtle incantations and charms\
> to the chaos of growth.
>
> You bowed your head and from your crown\
> sprouted a tender shoot covered in fine down,\
> soon followed by crenelated leaves and fine stems.\
> The pace was fast, implacable, and leaves like gems\
> soon arched skyward.
>
> You sprouted and grew, taking root\
> in one smooth motion, fixed and mute.\
> Your clothing fell away, rotting in fast-time.\
> Naked now, you sat still, committing one last crime\
> of indecency.
>
> Your face, your face! In your face was such peace\
> as I'd never seen, even as you gave up this lease\
> on life, echoed also in my heart of hearts.\
> I did not cry out, nor even speak, witnessing such arts\
> as your final display showed.
>
> Soon, you were consumed, transformed as a whole.\
> Your head a crown of leaves, your heart a bole\
> bored in rough bark and sturdy wood,\
> your fingers, knees, and toes stood\
> as thirsty roots.
>
> I stood a while by the tree that was you,\
> then sat at your roots and thought of all I knew\
> about time, transformation, death and change.\
> I thought about you, your life, your emotional range,\
> your gentle apotheosis.
I have written, too, here that I put this dream into prose, and this is also true, for here is a segment from a short story:
> And finally, the mirroring was broken as the *her* that was not her slid *her* fingers up over her wrist and gently guided her hand down toward the soil, loamy and damp, and she knew then that she must spread her fingers and dig them down into the earth, there by the stairs which were a finger pointing at God such that she was in turn pointing at...at what? At the owner of that hand? At the owner of that finger?
>
> And as she did so, she felt that the dirt beneath her fingernails took root, that her nails themselves must have been rootlets and that her arm a stolon, that her whole body was the runner for some tree, some entity other than herself, for at that point, she took root.
>
> And her fingers crawled beneath the soil, and drank of the water there, and tasted the nutrients, and found purchase beneath the layer of loam and humus.
>
> And there, her fingers curled around the God-stone, and indeed, she knew it as she felt it, amber with a kernel of pain embedded within.
>
> And even as the bark crawled up her arm, she saw her Doppelgänger stand and smile to her. A dreamy smile; not kind, not cruel, not knowing, not ignorant. Just a dreamy, inevitable smile.
>
> And she felt growth accelerate as, bound now to the earth, her bones became wood and her muscles loosened, unwound, and thus unbound began to lengthen, to strengthen, to arch skyward, seeking stars, seeking God.
Do I repeat myself? Very well, I repeat myself. I am beholden to my dreams.
And yet! And yet, when writing the final chapter, even through the heat of the moment and the blood rushing in my ears, I began to feel within a flush of embarrassment. How indulgent it is to share this again! How indulgent, my friends, to let the dream take me again that it might shape my words! Even as I wrote, even as I cried, sitting at my desk (or trying to!), sobbing in front of my words, I struggled with feeling like this was somehow *too* indulgent.
I strive still to stifle that puritanical worrywart within, even so many years on.
-----
#### [...] *and so we live within a fractally cyclical tangle of time*
Another perpetual theme that holds me in its claws. I wrote in an essay:
> A year spirals up.
>
> A day, a week, a month, they all spiral, for any one Sunday is like the previous and the next shall be much the same, but the you who experiences the differing Sundays is different. It is a spiral, proceeding steadfastly onward. A day is a spiral, with each morning much the same as the one before and the one after. A month, following the cycle of the moon.
>
> But a year, in particular, spirals up. It carries embedded within it a certain combination of pattern, count, and duration that delineates our lives better than any other cyclical unit of time. Yes, a day is divided into night, day, and those liminal dusks and dawns, but there are so many of them. There are so many days in a life, and there are so many in a year that to see the spiral within them does not come as easily.
>
> Our years are delineated by the seasons, though, and the count of them is so few, and the duration long enough that we can run up against that first scent of snow late in the autumn and immediately be kicked down one level of the spiral in our memories. What were we doing the last time we smelled that non-scent? What about the time before?
>
> Or perhaps one thinks across the spiral. One, stuck in Winter, thinks back to Summer — ah, such warmth! — and tries to remember what it was one was doing then. "Only silhouettes show / in the billowing snow," Dwale writes. "Remembering months, now / gone when new blooms would grow."
And I wrote in a story:
> Lyut lives his life in prayer and devotion. It is a life that is lived ascending in a steady spiral of years, for time moves upward and yet is echoed below by the change of days, the change of weeks, the change of seasons. This year, this day, this soft spring is an echo of last soft spring beneath it. It is antipodal to the autumn that will come
>
> Cycles within cycles, spirals within spirals. This morning, too, is an echo of the day beneath it, behind it, in the past. His days are defined by the cycle of incense, prayer, fishing, foraging, meditating. He knows that it is day when he wakes when he feels the warmth from the sun. He knows when it is night when he feels the warmth fade. He knows when it is morning because he hears the birds sing. He knows that it is night when the birdsong of the day settles into the chorus of insects.
And on citing these, I am realizing just how much I am built up of obsessions, of rituals and ideas that cleave and cling and stick and meld.