(no subject)
The birds have been ringing my doorbell lately, and knocking faintly on the window. So I went birdwatching for an hour yesterday down by the Bay. I am sick of trying to pencil face-time with the real world into my schedule, but that's all I can do lately.
City, all cities: remember, I'm only your indentured servant. I pledged myself to you for a term. When my contract is up, I am going to cover myself in mud and rematriculate.
I am tired of straight lines. The mind needs order, I think, in order to ignore the world and focus on itself. We like our sidewalks level and our stop sign octagonal and everything easy to understand, so that we can put our attention on how to build a spaceship to Mars, or what's for dinner. But, even though the mind needs order, it loves chaos. It is fascinated by things out of place; we need disorder and surprise to take us back into the world: roots in the path that make us consider our feet, a redwinged blackbird rattling the air from a thin twig. I need a place without lines, to forget myself. I need a prairie, with sun shining on long grasses that cross and uncross their soft blades together in the wind. I think I could watch grass all day.
I don't want to invent myself anymore. I want to be shaped by something beautiful and hardly aware of my existence. Yesterday I watched a harrier hawk hunting snakes, no further from the ground than my eyes are, as if knifefighting with the wind. I want to be a simpler man.
City, all cities: remember, I'm only your indentured servant. I pledged myself to you for a term. When my contract is up, I am going to cover myself in mud and rematriculate.
I am tired of straight lines. The mind needs order, I think, in order to ignore the world and focus on itself. We like our sidewalks level and our stop sign octagonal and everything easy to understand, so that we can put our attention on how to build a spaceship to Mars, or what's for dinner. But, even though the mind needs order, it loves chaos. It is fascinated by things out of place; we need disorder and surprise to take us back into the world: roots in the path that make us consider our feet, a redwinged blackbird rattling the air from a thin twig. I need a place without lines, to forget myself. I need a prairie, with sun shining on long grasses that cross and uncross their soft blades together in the wind. I think I could watch grass all day.
I don't want to invent myself anymore. I want to be shaped by something beautiful and hardly aware of my existence. Yesterday I watched a harrier hawk hunting snakes, no further from the ground than my eyes are, as if knifefighting with the wind. I want to be a simpler man.