Inside Undivided, a series of fragments & notes about
Chance, Fate, Context & Intention, #32
from Dara Wier
Beauty is moss. Truth is a tomb. Your name doesn’t matter. Emily Dickinson
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it could be argued
how and when why might be more significant and more usefully pursued than how so,
as in when
when how each and every book serves some purpose
or serves something
maybe as a vitrine-like holding tank,
a suspended area
of indefinite quiet, still-motion, no unfolding, waiting to be engaged by someone or something some how,
maybe for some reason, maybe for some good reason, maybe for no reason at all,
the unread book takes part in a funereal austerity
anyone of us might associate with the repetitive assault of signs and situations in cemeteries,
the ominous silences in funeral parlors,
the mechanical hush of crematoria, the catacombs, skull ossuaries anywhere,
semi-recent Victorian death obsessions,
our cautious examinations of time past along
with just about anyone’s or everyone’s walking waking fear
of the private property of one’s singular mortality
and that of anyone who matters to anyone
the interior, the very inside silence in and of an unread book, a book that’s waiting to be read
at times that silence inside that book is approaching the famous though little witnessed silence of the tomb
with some exceptions, if amplified, as say maybe the steady infinitesimal
paper gnawing certain paper loving insects make
who was it anyway who
determined without a doubt
the silence of a tomb, who put the little microphones in there to record, to keep a record of, that silence
what ultra sensitive microphones have been installed to verify
what micro micro micro phonic pick up chips trained on delicately determined micro erosions of little bit by little bit steady on, incremental changing
what little determined avalanches of sound
what galvanizing, could be sometimes aggravating, bits of accumulations
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and what can be felt about sound without sense
and what is sense without consciousness
and what is consciousness without anything at all
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My ordinary fondness for cemeteries began as I think many fondnesses and inclinations do for many of us –
---we’re small, we’ve barely been alive for very long though soon all around us evidence of our eventual demise crops up----someone in the family dies, strangers die, pets die, a river dies, a town dies, a friendship ends, disasters come, battles continue, tornadoes and tidal waves end lives, disease does---- we’re small and we take all this in---we take it all in and it stays there---
I like to walk in cemeteries, day or night, rain or shine, I like to sit in them, to stay in them, to read a book there, to have a conversation there.
Unlike most of the day to day places I inhabit cemeteries are quiet and no one there asks anything of anyone. To sometimes feel close to the dead is what I’ve always felt ought to be done, at least by me, and I’m sure by many another. And also by some.
If anyone questions these things, yes, it’s true one can say the relationship isn’t all that fair, the dead and buried aren’t having a lot of say in this, being not in the position to speak much less choose, much less act for themselves.
On the other hand the dead hold their true course with a very steady sure presence that can’t be denied.
Anyone might be forgotten, ignored or gradually dissolve while some what of some something remains and can’t be denied.
Odd and weird and just a little bit off what passes as something to remind us of anyone who’s died-----
some quarried and milled stone, some stacked rocks, some poured concrete, an old iron bedstead in place of a headstone and a footstone, the extravagant statuary certain cemeteries collect----(a good North American example of one of these cemeteries is the Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vermont)
---with or without all that I feel close to the dead----- just as I feel close to the first new life a poem provides when it begins to see the light of day
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being faithful
to the dead is something sometimes many humans do
when not being afraid
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The culture of dying and death isn’t particularly gruesome or kitschy in my hometown and home base, New Orleans, Plaquemines Parish, Naomi, Belle Chasse, Algiers, La Réussite.
That is the name someone in my past gave to my extended family’s little cemetery, La Réussite in Naomi, Louisiana, on the one road running from New Orleans south to the mouth of the Mississippi on out to the Gulf of Mexico.
Someone had a kind of a sense of humor then when they named that cemetery Success, similar in insistence, I guess, to all those cemeteries named Hope.
It’s there now in all its small, decrepit crypt-built glory, whitewashed, crumbling below sea level, protected by levees and canals and ditches, and more often most of all by luck, dark in the shadows of mossy oaks and some kind of super sized chemical plant, one in the string of chemical plants the Mississippi seems to have attracted without pause once chemical plants came into being.
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somewhere I read how we no longer have The Muses to support poetry’s cause……I’ve probably read this a thousand times in a hundred different places,
as if it’s something really important to know—
---really?-----why could or how could it be that that is that important-----
are there many of us in danger of keeping faith with Muses on such an active and day to day way as to need to be warned away from that sort of activity
good muses keep to themselves, they have essentially private lives, they’re not all that easy to spot,
they’re not so obvious as to be in need of being judged obsolete
and how can anyone presume to say so-----
as if
as if an idea as clear as what a muse is for
and what constitutes a muse
might be ephemeral
by virtue of its nature it is not possible to turn a muse away
muses never go away
Ever faithful Calliope, deadpan Melpomene, without a doubt Euterpe, careful Thalia, long-suffering Clio, good old Erato, blissful Polyhymnia, watchful Terpsichore, star struck Urania, and so on through the many other muses without names or with pseudonyms or an AKA, an alias, a nickname,
a heteronym when necessary……………………they’re in hiding everywhere.
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was there someone envious of them who wanted to erase their legacy and lineage and to encourage disruptions and abandonments of all these things
did someone believe it to be as a favor to someone’s anti sentimentality inclinations
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linearity and the past
linearity in the future
linearity in the present
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being able to see where one is going, as say one does north of Missoula, Montana on the way to
Choteau, Montana-----
----on my last visit there, a friend in the car said, “this is what I like, I like to see where I’m going long before I’m able to get there------maybe 40 miles up ahead, I can see the ridges toward which we’re headed,” not having thought of that before, never having had a thought to put a thought like that into words
-----pretty much just the opposite of what typically a writer will often say, which is: I never know where I’m headed, I don’t want to know, I need not to know,
I need to just about always be facing having to go around a corner unknowing of what to expect, or take another turn around a bend I’d never been around before----
I appreciated her insight and foresight and pleasure with reading what’s lying in wait right before our eyes, a landscape of a certain kind letting us, in its own way, see far enough into the future.
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Gillian Welch “Wrecking Ball”
