11 december 2022
i've learned that the giant tube worms that live in and near deep-sea hydrothermal vents use hemoglobin in their little fronds, the same protein we use to carry oxygen. different animals have evolved various oxygen-carrying proteins, which results in a variety of blood colors. these guys are just as red as our blood, which is incredibly uncanny. their biology, substrate and environment is completely different from ours, they live in water filled with hydrogen sulfide and feed on bacteria which produce energy without sunlight; yet they have circularly produced this blood, linking back with us on such a specific elaborate aspect. idk.
i need to write about electricity pylons, fields, hummocks and lawn-mowing; a poem has been slowly growing, molting, and i have ideas on the elements i want to use:
- first person plural : a more general use should come (a wiki post about the nature of "we" too)
- plurals emphasizing the nonspecificity of place
- references to iconography, old things, structures, their drawings of people (specifically the depictions of humans and gods in chinese seal script : 天 "heaven" comes from the symbol fora person, with a large flat head)
- from there, the contrast between the purely functional nature (and more widely the extrinsic telos of human structures) and the spiritual, representative, fetishistic use of such symbols
- vines which will in the future grow onto these metal armatures
long ago in mesopotamia they used to carve in great slabs of alabaster human figures winged, in a dominant stance, fertilising self-braiding trees of life.
a small piece of alabaster i also cut and wore into a small, flat figure of a leaf, with uncertain scratches, in the psych ward, high on quetiapine and exsolation.
cool word of the moment: man-of-war
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09 december 2022
today the world is still, and dust particles run straight through the air,
and the sunbeam is interrupted by no specks of decay and breath and skin,
nor does it shine on them. all is void of being. i feel a yearning to return
to a field, any field, hopefully green with artificial or wild life, still,
despite the threat of the looming solstice.
we are almost at the time of the longest nights and yet, though i already
feel my hands numb from the cold, it will still get much worse.
the syntax of being is not quite clear today. nothing much is happening,
and i long to close my eyes and witness with more awareness the churning
of my mind to distract from the body of my languishing person.
i think i will try to work. there is a poem i have been incubating and
i feel this is as good a day as any to let it out. i'm still paralyzed
by the fear of exams which have now passed, as exams and deadlines do,
with marginal success. so much of my life, it seems, is about waiting
things out, when i want the good things to happen now. what will save me?
but i'm not so unhappy anyway.
--
in french, the structure of the negative originally used the simple negation
"ne". then, in the middle ages, for hyperbolic effect, it became said with
"ne pas": not a single step. now, in this era of linguistic shift and
dissociation from the tradition, people say "step" to mean "not".
i had never thought of this.
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06 december 2022
more formulaic :
not the one nor the other
but the nth..
the scent of pine, which comes from spruce,
lingers and mixes with exhaust and piss,
and conjures the impression of moronic place
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05 december 2022
my walk home from the metro station every day brings me by a florist's shop in my street. the plants that are arranged there
are different every day, though sometimes a shrub will be brought in and out of the shop for days, unable to find a buyer.
but i digress. tonight, as i walked home, i caught the smell of conifers, of spruce needles;
at first i wondered what it was,
but then out of nowhere a grove of small, tidy, portable christmas trees (of indeterminate species: not that i don't care
about it, but that their function is so much more "valuable" in the cities than their nature, kinship and nativity) sprung up
engulfing a small section of the sidewalk. dressed (rather tied) in white plastic netting, they seemed corseted, carrying
within the viscose lace the promise of lush, thick, ample branches, waiting to unfold by themselves to reach a state somewhat
similar to that which they had silently stood in, circulating watery sap, in the strange fake forest where they were planted
with the express and single purpose of growing to adolescence (these are not the spruces which have grown adult and rise
higher than haussmannian buildings) and being chopped down, and quartered, and sold. it is strange to walk in a city street
enbalmed by the oils of evergreen trees; stranger still, though banal now, is the sight of this arboricole youth, raised
in a province with an encrypted name, dressed in Chinese plastic, standing on a Parisian street.
but to most, to the florist, it is just a product, perhaps imbued with some presupposed beauty.
another time, not too far from there, i smelled the smell of humus, and mycelium, and mushrooms as we smelled in the
country, after rainy nights. of course, the bitumen had fruited neither cep nor chanterelle, and the smell must have been
imported, like that of the trees, from outside the city limits. for nothing grows here, but only is transformed.
what could i have been?
do forests grow in the cities? surely it is the other way around,
but maybe not for long.
Nowadays, the Christmas tree ('le sapin de Noël') is a farm culture in its own right, the production methods of which closely
approach those of grapevine or of small fruits such as currant.
-- association française du sapin de noël naturel
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04 december 2022
a dog with worn-down canines.
a gateless gate which is
and is not open and closed.
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02 december 2022
First time on town, glad to be here.
Don't really know how things work yet, stumbling around
but excited to discover a new small part of the world.
Exams are coming up so hopefully I don't get too into
exploring the place.
Cheers,
~caz
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