(no subject)
Chasing the sunset, over the sloping hills of solid stone that formed the shore, I thought maybe we were on to something. Trees grew amidst the rocks, dense enough to make the setting sun elusive, giving us something to follow. We saw it set once, then followed my sister further down the shore, stepping out of the trees to discover it was still there, going down a second time. Time travel never seemed so easy. We watched it disappear in silence; or near silence, the best three breathing animals can manage. I watched the last of the light reflect off of C's shoes, slowly changing colour.
At some point, on the way there or back, I had noticed the trees; evergreen, but sparsely-grown, with long branches outstretched and their tops all bent, leaning away from the shore. I love trees like this, trees that make the wind visible; not only visible, but present even when it is no longer there. Maybe it's because Vancouver's shoreline is so sheltered, that they still seem novel to me. Certainly they are everywhere, trees like this, it's just how they grow.
But they were beautiful to me, especially there and then and in that company. And they made me think of monks, or devoted mystics -- the half-leafless, extended branches in particular, like arms with palms facing up. Their tops like faces, also facing up -- but not straight up, because God was not something you could look at straight up. Because God blew you sideways. And I thought to myself -- and maybe I thought it aloud too, I don't know -- how brave these trees were. Not to grow there, because they had no choice, but to let themselves be bent. To let the wind, or God, or whatever else came and spoke to them at night, to let it shape them. To be transformed by a foreign body.
Trees of course just grow where they are, how they grow, vulnerable to whatever local gods preside. But not us. And on a road trip, maybe, where you make your own wind -- where time travel is just another side effect of cruise control -- it is easy to be brave. Easy to be shaped, too, when you know the shape is temporary. And also easier because of so few distractions, nothing but the immediate concerns of landscape and people and the beauty that's right there in front of you.
But carrying that home is harder. I have a lot of natural defenses. I live in a house and it's never windy enough here. The sky doesn't get so big. And of course I'm scared; and what is there around me, that I want to shape me?
Today I was thinking about permeable and impermeable objects. I was imagining a mountain made entirely of sounds. Then I was imagining the world as a giant wax sponge -- a device for recording impressions. I saw a landscape, and then a shout passing through it like a thunderclap -- a wave passing right to left, and as it passed through, every object was shattered. Shattered but left standing, with all the tiny holes and cracks acting as a record, piling up; every impact accreting, until it became a palimpsest of what-broke-when, of its own missing pieces. And what if every planet were like this, cast into space like scientific probes, not to sustain life or orbit suns but to see what it was like. To be pulled back in and collected and compared -- all the different shapes of a sphere, like apples with their skins sheared off by time.
And I thought, what could be less interesting than an impermeable object, an indestructible thing? It could never tell you anything, except I guess the same thing, over and over. Like an advertisement for itself.
At some point, on the way there or back, I had noticed the trees; evergreen, but sparsely-grown, with long branches outstretched and their tops all bent, leaning away from the shore. I love trees like this, trees that make the wind visible; not only visible, but present even when it is no longer there. Maybe it's because Vancouver's shoreline is so sheltered, that they still seem novel to me. Certainly they are everywhere, trees like this, it's just how they grow.
But they were beautiful to me, especially there and then and in that company. And they made me think of monks, or devoted mystics -- the half-leafless, extended branches in particular, like arms with palms facing up. Their tops like faces, also facing up -- but not straight up, because God was not something you could look at straight up. Because God blew you sideways. And I thought to myself -- and maybe I thought it aloud too, I don't know -- how brave these trees were. Not to grow there, because they had no choice, but to let themselves be bent. To let the wind, or God, or whatever else came and spoke to them at night, to let it shape them. To be transformed by a foreign body.
Trees of course just grow where they are, how they grow, vulnerable to whatever local gods preside. But not us. And on a road trip, maybe, where you make your own wind -- where time travel is just another side effect of cruise control -- it is easy to be brave. Easy to be shaped, too, when you know the shape is temporary. And also easier because of so few distractions, nothing but the immediate concerns of landscape and people and the beauty that's right there in front of you.
But carrying that home is harder. I have a lot of natural defenses. I live in a house and it's never windy enough here. The sky doesn't get so big. And of course I'm scared; and what is there around me, that I want to shape me?
Today I was thinking about permeable and impermeable objects. I was imagining a mountain made entirely of sounds. Then I was imagining the world as a giant wax sponge -- a device for recording impressions. I saw a landscape, and then a shout passing through it like a thunderclap -- a wave passing right to left, and as it passed through, every object was shattered. Shattered but left standing, with all the tiny holes and cracks acting as a record, piling up; every impact accreting, until it became a palimpsest of what-broke-when, of its own missing pieces. And what if every planet were like this, cast into space like scientific probes, not to sustain life or orbit suns but to see what it was like. To be pulled back in and collected and compared -- all the different shapes of a sphere, like apples with their skins sheared off by time.
And I thought, what could be less interesting than an impermeable object, an indestructible thing? It could never tell you anything, except I guess the same thing, over and over. Like an advertisement for itself.