I am starting a new thing. Every once in awhile I think that I will share with you all some of the pictures I’ve taken as part of working for the environmental company. Mostly they are not high quality, but I have never been a great photographer because my brain has always been more effective than a camera. Now I have to take pictures, all the time, & some of them have turned out alright & some of them are just plain interesting & things that people outside of the field may never see or notice. It is a strange world when you know it’s there.
That’s the spiel though; now to your regularly scheduled programming:
The guy I worked with on Tuesday, a wizard with ground penetrating radar, & a passion for rapids & rivers, got it out of me that I was writer. Actually, I probably told him. He was a real chill dude & I felt surprisingly comfortable letting my guard down. After awhile, after more words had been thrown between us, he asked a question that surprisingly few non-writers ask; how I kept finding things to write about.
When I tried to explain that I just did, & that it had gotten better recently, but that really there was no controlling or directing the cosmic flow of ideas, he went on to describe the writing process of a girl he once dated, from Newtown, who went to Purchase. Really, he understood the way it worked, but not the how, & described constantly being shocked or baffled or curious that even when he and this girl would be doing something so simple, so ordinary, she would suddenly trigger; something in the atmosphere of her eyes would shift & her hands would go immediately to notebook & pen, & words would just tumble out of her like dust shaken from the rafters of the universe.
I should have told him that it was visiting places like this, a concrete batch plant in Cromwell, that kept me writing. Or rather, at least, that it was old metal & transitions; the way that the larger things are, the more beautiful they become as rust reshapes them, or that leaves as they go from green to red, & fall, & turn to brown, & then to earth, to me, is just like watching the decomposition of my life. Always I find I am being led back into the earth.
I did tell him though that the longer I have pursued poetry, the longer I have tried to glean new words from the starry tongues of the great spirits in the howling beyond, that more & more this has led to my seeing people as the things in nature, which fascinate me most.
I once wrote notes about a piece of fiction where a man saw everything in code; would look at a tree & see it from the atoms up. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what’s happening to me; that when I look at a sugar maple I see only the words that I can extract from it, twist & bend into whatever shape I please, & that I will one day never see the sugar maple itself.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s not already too late.