Wheat like Air

"The wheat," one said, "they always say that is the main thing. No, it isn't the main thing. Ah, no, indeed! That is just the point. Of course it is necessary. Of course it is exactly like the air you breathe. If you stop breathing, you can't keep it up a long time or you'll die. If you have nothing more to breathe, you die; we know that. We know the beautiful, great, powerful value of wheat. Who says any different? Nobody. We least of all, because we are the ones who know it best. But it must be exactly like the air we breathe. We ought to use wheat as we use air. We ought to use it without thinking about it, mechanically, involuntarily, like something without value. That is just the way to put it. Exactly that, like something without value, like the air. Like something inexhaustible that you take and swallow and there it is, with no value, absolutely like air. Because you would not need to devote so much time to this food that you swallowed, and that was an end to it. I don't say it is not agreeable; certainly I know it is pleasant to eat. It is a joy. That is what makes blood. That counts. But what I mean is that it doesn't count for everything.
   "I mean that when one has only one single joy, it is like when one has only one lamp or an only child. Suddenly all might go out, or even, I mean, that a single lamp, although it is lit, sometimes isn't enough if it is all alone in a big room. For the fact is we have many needs and not only the need of wheat. If you consider, look how many things we want which seem important to us, and if someone said to us: 'Give up eating to get them,' we would willingly give up eating. But it is as necessary for us as it is to breathe. And so, let's make it so it doesn't weigh us down, so it isn't hard for us, but very easy, and then we'll have time for all our other needs. When all is said and done, things are simple if you go about them with a good will."
    "Yes," said Carle...
    "Joy and peace," thought Bobi. "Joy must be tranquil. Joy must be a habit and quite peaceful and calm, and not belligerent and passionate. For I do not say that joy is when one laughs or sings, or even when our pleasure is more than bodily. I say that one is joyful when all the habitual gestures are gestures of joy; when it is a joy to work for one's food; when one is in an atmosphere that one appreciates and loves; when each day, at every moment, at each instant, all is easy and peaceful. When everything that one desires is there." And unfortunately, there was Josephine; and the sound of the loom and all the voices could be a roar fit to burst one's ears like the roar of the torrent, yet what he heard plainest was the sound of Josephine's breathing. And the dull blows of the loom could be repeated by the echoes beneath the earth and the foundations of the house, and make the soles of his feet vibrate; what really made him shudder from head to foot was that warm little shock of Josephine's breath as it struck against his right cheek. And he knew that she was beside him, that she was looking at him with her green eyes. He knew that her mouth was full and hot. He knew that her breasts were just the size of his hollowed hands, that for him she was full of joy, which, when he felt it, was more than a bodily joy. He was aware that henceforth for him joy would not be peaceful. And he stood there fighting and struggling because joy is nothing and is not worth the trouble if it is not abiding.
     "We might first...." said Bobi.
     "Listen."
     "Be quiet, Barbe."
     "What?" shouted Barbe.
     "Stop a minute, we can't hear ourselves talk."
     Barbe stopped working.
     "This is what we might do," said Bobi. "This year, since it is too late, we will start, if you like, by having a common harvest. We'll cut each field, but we'll tread all the wheat on one threshing floor, on the floor of all and every one of us together. We'll put the grain in a single barn. It will belong to neither one nor to another; like the stag. It will belong to all. As much to Randoulet as to us. And next year we'll choose a field where we'll all sow our wheat together. We'll have a little more time," he said with a grey little smile, "to spend on what we want to do."

Prose: Jean Giono, from his novel, "Joy of Man's Desiring." 1935. 
Photo: J.G.  

this moment / Sonnet

this moment

it's a farce, the great actors, the great poets, the great
statesmen, the great painters, the great composers, the
great loves,
it's a farce, a farce, a farce,
history and the recording of it,
forget it, forget it.

you must begin all over again.
throw all that out.
all of them out

you are alone with now.

look at your fingernails.
touch your nose.

begin.

the day flings itself upon
you.


Sonnet 

One who speaks of the multifariousness of voices
one through whom the voices speak speaks twice
one through rapt inflections breath on fire
once as metal fathers rising in the blood
the voice becoming wire and things said through it
thinner still so that
one who standing on the outside of a logos looking in
is one who sits within and reaching for the phone
arrives at speech his own by way of voices
he but replicates and theirs ventriloquized in him
are later written down: tundra, reindeer
permafrost that lives beneath the breath
all Spring partly vocable and partly simply cold;
the witness is unspeakable someone dead
who speaks the name a footstep leaves ahead.

Poem: "this moment," Charles Bukowski, from "what matters most is how well you walk through the fire." 1999. 
Poem: "Sonnet," Michael Davidson, from "Post Hoc." 1990. 
Photo: "Vegas Hustle," Tony Rohrbach

...the air shook with a colored ferment.

"Today I investigated the whole villa from nearby. For weeks I have been hanging around the crested wrought iron gate. My opportunity came when two large empty carriages drove out of the garden. The gates were left wide open and there was nobody in sight. I entered nonchalantly, produced my drawing book from my pocket and, leaning against a pillar of the gate, pretended to draw some architectural detail. I stood on a graveled path trod so many times by Bianca's light feet. My heart would stop still from blissful anticipation at the thought that I might see her emerging in a flimsy white dress from one of the French windows. But all the windows and doors had green sunshades in that house. The sky on the horizon was overcast; there was lightning in the distance. No breeze moved the warm rarefied air. In the quietness of that gray day only the chalk white walls of the villa spoke with the voiceless but expressive eloquence of their ornate architecture. Its elegance was repeated in pleonasms, in a hundred variations on the same motif. Along a blindingly white frieze, bas-relief garlands ran in rhythmic cadenzas to the left and right and stopped undecided at the corners. From the height of the central terrace a marble staircase descended, ceremonious and solemn, between smoothly running balusters and architectural vases, and, flowing broadly to the ground, seemed to arrange its train with a deep curtsy.

"I have quite an acute sense of style. The style of that building worried and irritated me, although I could not explain why. Behind its restrained classicism, behind a seemingly cool elegance, some other, pointed, too full of unexpected adornments. A drop of an unknown poison inserted into the veins of the architect made his design recondite, explosive, and dangerous.

"Inwardly disoriented, trembling from contradictory impulses, I walked on tiptoe along the front of the villa, scaring the lizards asleep on the steeps.

"By the round pool, now dry, the earth was parched from the sun and still bare; only here and there, from a crack in the ground, sprang a tuft of an impatient fantastical green. I pulled out some of these weeds and put them into my drawing book. I was shaking with excitement. Over the pool the air hung translucent and glossy, undulating from the heat. A barometer on a nearby post showed a catastrophic low. There was calm everywhere. Not a twig moved. The villa was asleep, its curtains drawn, and its chalky whiteness glared in the dullness of the gray air. Suddenly, as if the stagnation had reached its critical point, the air shook with a colored ferment.

"Enormous, heavy butterflies coupling in amorous frolics appeared. The clumsy, vibrating fluttering continued for a moment in the dull air. The butterflies flew past, as if racing one another, then rejoined their partners, dealing out in flight like cards whole packs of colorful shimmers. Was it only a quick decomposition of the overripe air, a mirage in an atmosphere that was full of hashish and visions? I waved my cap and a heavy, velvety butterfly fell to the ground, still fluttering its wings. I lifted it up and hid it. It was one more proof..."

Prose: Bruno Schulz, chapter XXIII of "The Book," from his short story collection "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass." 1937. 
Photo: Robert Doisneau "Saint-Germain-des-Pres, 1951- #371" from his collection "Doisneau Paris."  Artsy Page on Doisneau

In This Life Like Weeds

"The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare to say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations. Who can predict the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who can measure the action and counter-action between the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the play of causes in the depths of being, the cataclysms of creation? The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is the large and the largest is small; everything balances within the laws of necessity, a terrifying vision for the mind. Between living things and objects there is a miraculous relationship; within that inexhaustible compass, from the sun to the grub, there is no room for disdain; each thing needs every other thing. Light does not carry the scents of earth into the upper air without knowing what it is doing with them; darkness confers the essence of the stars upon the sleeping flowers. Every bird that flies carries a shred of the infinite in its claws. The process of birth is the shedding of a meteorite or the peck of a hatching swallow on the shell of its egg; it is the coming of an earthworm or of Socrates, both equally important to the scheme of things. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose. A patch of mold is a galaxy of blossom; a nebula is an ant-heap of stars. There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable, between the things of the mind and material things. Elements and principles are intermingled; they combine and marry and each increases and completes the other, so that the material and the moral world both are finally manifest. The phenomenon perpetually folds in upon itself. In the vast cosmic changes universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, borne by the mysterious flow of invisible currents, making use of everything, wasting not a single sleeper's dream, sowing an animalcule here and shattering a star there, swaying and writhing, turning light into a force and thought into an element; disseminated yet indivisible, dissolving all things except that geometrical point, the self; reducing all things to the core which is the soul, and causing all things to flower into God; all activities from the highest to the humblest- harnessing the movements of the earth and the flight of an insect- to the secret workings of an illimitable mechanism; perhaps- who can say?- governing, if only by the universality of the law, the evolution of a comet in the heavens by the circling of infusoria in a drop of water. A machine made of spirit. A huge meshing of gears of which the first motive force is the gnat and the largest wheel the zodiac."

Prose: Victor Hugo, from his novel, "Les Miserables" 1862.
Painting: Keibun Matsumura (1779-1843) "Drooping Cherry-blossoms and Pigeons"