On Meandering

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Me (+ also the LOVELY world!)

Down the road is a flooded field, and it has turned into a marshland. The marshland is an Alice-In-Wonderland, topsy-turvy place, with clusters of oversize daisies and miniscule sunflowers, bright blue dragonflies, black and white birds gurgling up and outwards from the lake, spilling skyward. There is light on early summer leaves, grape-green clusters, bright.

The poppies have sprouted up all over, and I start to think of the beauty in disease - how it moves in exponentials, follows the same poetry, the same maths as any other explosion. A cowslip forms white flecks like those on old bread, blue-forget-me-nots a speckling, and tufted thistles stretch upwards, purple spikes protruding from a dark core, virusesque.

I can hear the low buzz of crickets, and the half-sound, half-feeling of shwerrrrp as you pinch wheat and run your fingers upward. Above are looping low red kites, and below a single six-spotted ladybird. The slow bouncing gait of a rabbit moves in front of the dendrites coming from the trunk of an uprooted tree.

Now I’m thinking of how unsuited we are to blank expanses, silences, absolutes. Silences should never be wholly silent, but shot through with the white noise of bugs. Air should never be fully flat, still but shot through with dust motes. Seas have crested waves, and even the clearest sky has different blues. Walking through I feel a light breeze - we don’t walk into a flat nothingness. And even water has a taste.

***

(Later on)

Brown Eyed Girl is playing. I have just drunk a cappuccino, and when I put the sugar in it dissolved slowly and then all at once, like a wave, sort of toppling in over itself. I have the news, and I am reading it slowly, the words are also sort of toppling in over themselves, a column that is a series of short sentences that build over one another, the writers advice to her younger self.

There are things that are going to happen, and things I am going to do, but I am so enjoying the not-doing, the sense of deferred plans and the ability to be still now because I know that things will happen later.

I think this is a particular kind of contentment, this license to be still and stop, given by the busy-ness (business?) on the horizon making stopping feel allowed. Nothing is being crammed in. Nothing much is being thought of, so thoughts sort of spin, half-complete, and dissipate.

I should call Granny today.

You’re making my dreams come true.

The words to the song, and then how I would dance to it.

Some others but they fell out of my head and now I can’t write them.

It feels like I am savouring time, taking this moment for what it is, not engaged in a project or something that extends beyond it. This has been written in fits and starts because my attention keeps wandering.

How can you write of wandering attention? You almost need a reel of paper that spins at a constant rate, and the writing would be punctuated with the reams of space that build up. This would at least attest to the existence of a gap, even if it cannot tell its content. Give a sense of the selectivity of what is put down, the extent to which the written is surrounded by the unrecorded. I am in an enjoyable state of dustiness and it is very pleasing to sit in the slowness of the reel. A sort of lazy, bumbling lagoon.

Other life spans, time spans.

Which span matters? Years on Earth? Time awake? Time spent Thinking, capital T, Conscious, capital C? Is a life worth more if it is awe-dense, joy-dense? Live time and Dead time. Thought-times. How much of the spinning ream of paper is written on? What if (I think, I hope) I liked the blank spaces?

***