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[tseneipgam]

"The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock

If an animal has previously suffered escapable shock, and then she suffers inescapable shock, she will be happier than if she has previously not suffered escapable shock - for if she hasn't, she will only know about being shocked inescapably. But if she has been inescapably shocked before, and she meets the conditions in which she was inescapably shocked before, she will behave as if being shocked, mostly. Her misery doesn't require acts. Her misery requires conditions.

If an animal is inescapably shocked once, then the second time that she is shocked she is dragged across the electrified grid to some non-shocking space, she will be happier than if she isn't dragged across the electrified grid. The next time she is shocked, she will be happier because she will know there is a place that isn't an electrified grid. She will be happier because rather than only being dragged onto an electrified grid by a human who then hurts her, the human can also then drag her off of it.

If an animal is shocked, escapably or inescapably, she will manifest deep attachment for whoever has shocked her. If she has manifested deep attachment for whoever has shocked her, she will manifest deeper reactions of attachment for whoever has shocked her and then dragged her off the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for electrified grids. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for what is not the electrified grid. Perhaps she will develop deep feelings of attachment for dragging. She may also develop deep feelings of attachment for science, laboratories, experimentation, electricity, and informative forms of torture."

"I am a dog who can never be happy because I am imagining the unhappiness of other dogs."

"There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.

We embarrass each other with comfort and justice, happiness or infirmity. It is embarrassing to be pornography; it is embarrassing to not be pornography. That requires a succor like limitation. Let's be happy insofar as we were for a few days not infirm. Happiness is only the absence of some ailment, but arousal is a source of un-happiness: I am writing to you in a long paragraph so that I will not be pornography. If you read this you will not be turned on."

'The classic example of positive contrast is produced by hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. The pain produced is part of the ordered dimension and so the more of it the more you get adapted to. Thus, when you stop you "feel great." "

"I didn't intend for this to be an invitation. In the kitchen I was chopping vegetables and thinking about how discourse is a con-spiracy, then how discourse is a conspiracy like 'taste, then how taste is a weapon of class. Those guys have gotten together and agreed on their discourse; it will make them seem middling, casual like a sweater. Who dips in or out of it? What does it mean to give stuff up? There is a risk inherent in sliding all over the place. As if the language of poets is the language of property owners. As if the language of poets is the language of professors. As if the language of poets is not the language of machines. I would prefer to have a different name, that way in the strip malls I could be someone other"

"I think mostly about clothes, sex, food, and seasonal variations. I have done so much to be ordinary and made a record of this: first I was born, next I was a child, then I learned things and did things and loved and had those who loved me and often felt alone. My body was sometimes well, then sometimes unwell. I got nearer to death, as did you."

"Sometimes when you look at smoothly joining at least two different-sized pieces of flat but pliable material so that these pieces might correctly encase an eternally irregular, perspiring and breathing three-dimensional object that cannot cease its motion you think that there is no way ever this could happen, yet sometimes it does."

"Not Writing

When I am not writing I am not writing a novel called 1994 about a young woman in an office park in a provincial town who has a job cutting and pasting time. I am not writing a novel called Nero about the world's richest art star in space. I am not writing a book called Kansas City Spleen. I am not writing a sequel to Kansas City Spleen called Bitch's Maldoror. I am not writing a book of political philosophy called Questions for Poets. I am not writing a scandalous memoir. I am not writing a pathetic memoir. I am not writing a memoir about poetry or love. I am not writing a memoir about poverty, debt collection, or bankruptcy. I am not writing about family courts. I am not writing a memoir because memoirs are for property owners and not writing a memoir about prohibitions of memoirs.

When I am not writing a memoir I am also not writing any kind of poetry, not prose poems contemporary or otherwise, not poems made of fragments, not tightened and compressed poems, not loosened and conversational poems, not conceptual poems, not virtuosic poems employing many different types of euphonious devices, not poems with epiphanies and not poems without, not documentary poems about recent political moments, not poems heavy with allusions to critical theory and popular song.

I am not writing 'Leaving the Atocha Station' by Anne Boyer and certainly not writing 'Nadja' by Anne Boyer though would like to write 'Debt' by Anne Boyer though am not writing also 'The German Ideology' by Anne Boyer and not writing a screenplay called 'Sparticists'."

"But I had been striking against geography for a very long time. Or rather, the systems I believed would end my loneliness amplified it, though I managed most days to feign delight in the wide expanses and simple clothing styles of my native land. These systems that amplified my loneliness included cars, airplanes, computers, and telephones. These systems included universities, literary presses, major American cities, the U.S. mail, and several private mail carriers including U. P. S. and Federal Express.

All my breathing apparatus rejected the air around me as not fit for breath, and storms turned streets into rivers. There was a city I didn't always remember, and then once in it, I recalled it like all cities are recalled by birds.

There were gas lamps. There were dead sows full of living birds. I thought about the poet Marcia Nardi who wrote 'as if there were no connection between my being stuck at the ribbon counter in Woolworth's for eight hours a day at minimum hourly wage, and my inability to function as a poet. I was melancholy and wrote defenses of my melancholy. I totally forgot to shop.

The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they were such sad things.

[tseneipgam]

"That's how it used to be in a town that wasn't betrayed yet by the onslaught that would eventually take so many of the finer gestures out of our hands; stolen from us, taken into the innards of so many machines. We are the graceless and dumbfounded, insane with our own insatiable desire for another time and place and a sense of movement, we gesture hunters. One movement of a tongue over a dry lip will do for us; a woman in the graveyard weeping at the foot of her husband's grave, her navy blue skirt hiked up over her calves, and the flat worn soles of her shoes the color of dry sand—that's just it, all we need, all we strive for in this world, nothing more or less. We have our modus operandi, our techniques, some preferring to await the passing of some perfect movement, to sit all day, day upon day, waiting. It's a heartless means of searching, I think, to let the movement of the town go about you, but there are those, my fellows, who are content to work that way; and I say, go your way in peace."

[tseneipgam]

“returned from his world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth. This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant —who came himself from a foreign land, or whose father or grand-father came—has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and senti-ment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres; — all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise…Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”

“One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four- footed brethren, was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast-meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or turkey under one's very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate, that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been food for worms”

“It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate”

“There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I had been, without transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I never considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and whenever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would come.”

“It was a folly, with I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance.”

“A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.”

[tseneipgam]

I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair. I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair. We should meet in another life, we should meet in air

-Sylvia Plath, Lesbos

[tseneipgam]

"I didn't tell anyone but I had taken Patricia's glasses because they had fallen off her when the ambulance took her away. I cleaned them until they sparkled. I felt like they were her eyeballs, and if you could see you were somehow still living. I placed them on my bed, facing the TV, and left movies playing when I went in for my shifts, thinking by the time I finished I would find the whole Patricia on my bed, grown out of her glasses."

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giant isopod (x)

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Frogfish can walk on the ocean floor by using their fins as legs.

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paulassie pootoogook (1927-2006), telluliyuk sea goddess, 1960, stonecut

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 Bottles in the shape of pomegranates, 1295BC-1070BC, Egypt.

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"No more low wet grounds, no more dykes and sluices, no more of these grazing cattle - though they seemed, in their dull manne, to wear a more respectful air now, and to face round, in order tha they might stare as long as possible at the possessor of such great expectations - farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my child. hood, henceforth I was for London and greatness: not for smith's work in general and for you!"

[tseneipgam]

"I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”

‘Is there any language in which there is a word for that tender runnel that joins the mouth and the nose?’

‘We lived in paradise. We fled on bicycles to lie in buttercup fields, beside railway bridges, near canals, in waste land awaiting housing estates. Ours was already a suburban countryside, but it was as lovely and significant to us as the Garden of Eden’

‘I ate three oranges at eleven o’clock this morning. Oranges should be eaten in solitude and as a treat when one is feeling hungry. They are too messy and overwhelming to form part of an ordinary meal. I should say here that I am not a breakfast eater though I respect those who are. I breakfast on delicious Indian tea. Coffee and China tea are intolerable at breakfast time, and, for me, coffee unless it is very good and made by somebody else is pretty intolerable at any time. It seems to me an inconvenient and much overrated drink, but this I will admit to be a matter of personal taste. (Whereas other views which I hold on the subject of food approximate to absolute truths.)’

‘I gave myself up to that not unpleasing slightly mad feeling that always comes over me when I enter London, the catering anonymous feeling of returning into oneself in the great tragicomic metropolis when the bond of society, whether in train or car, is suddenly snapped.’

‘I felt a need simply to see a few ordinary human beings who were living ordinary human lives, having holidays, honeymoons, quarrels, trouble with their motor cars, trouble with their mortgages.’

‘Then I saw below me, their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward, four seals, swimming so close to the rock that I could almost have touched them. I looked down at their pointed noses only a few feet below, their dripping whiskers, their bright inquisitive round eyes, and the lithe and glossy grace of their wet backs. They curved and played a while, gulping and gurgling a little, looking up at me all the time. And as I watched their play I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me.’

‘..how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after…of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us"

"One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better."

"Today there is a pleasant very light haze over the whole sky, and the sea has a misleadingly docile silvered look, as if the substantial wavelets were determined to stroke the rocks as hard as they could without showing any trace of foam. It is a compact radiant complacent sort of sea, very beautiful. There ought to be seals, the waves themselves are almost seals today, but still I scan the water in vain with my long-distance glasses."

"'Come, darling, don't let your tea get cold. And look, I've brought you such a lovely present, a stone, the most beauti- ful stone on the shore.' I laid down beside her plate the elliptical stone, my very first one, the prize of my collection, hand-sized, a mottled pink, irregularly criss-crossed with white bars in a design before which Klee and Mondrian would have bowed to the ground."

"Thus people can be light sources, without ever knowing, for years is the lives of others, while their own lives take different and hidden courses. Equally one can be, and I recalled Peregrine's words, a monster, a cancer, in the mind of someone whom one has half forgotten or even never met."

"James said, 'Can you hear the sea?' 'That was Keats' favourite quotation from Shakespeare."

"I pulled myself up, knelt, and began to shake my blankets and my pillow which were wet with dew. Then I heard, odd and frightening in that total stillness, a sound coming from the water, a sudden and quite loud splashing, as if something just below the rock were about to emerge, and crawl out perhaps onto the land. I had a moment of sheer fear as I turned and leaned towards the sea edge. Then I saw below me, their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward, four seals, swimming so close to the rock that I could almost have touched them. I looked down at their pointed noses only a few feet below, their dripping whiskers, their bright inquisitive round eyes, and the lithe and glossy grace of their wet backs. They curved and played a while, gulping and gurgling a little, looking up at me all the time. And as I watched their play I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me."

"Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obli- gations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow"

[tseneipgam]

"My first conscious memory of science' (or was it religion?) comes from my kindergarten class, which met in the old Grange Hall. We all ran to press our noses to the frosty windows when the first intoxicating flakes of snow began to fall. Miss Hopkins was too wise a teacher to try and hold back the excitement of five-year-olds on the occasion of the first snow, and out we went. In boots and mittens, we gathered around her in the soft swirl of white. From the deep pocket of her coat she took a magnifying glass. TIl never forget my first look at snowflakes through that lens, spangling the wooly sleeve of her navy blue coat like stars in a midnight sky. Magnified tenfold, the complexity and detail of a single snowflake took me completely by surprise. How could something as small and ordinary as snow be so perfectly beautiful? I couldn't stop looking. Even now, I remember the sense of possibility, of mystery that accompanied that first glimpse. For the first time, but not the last, I had the sense that there was more to the world than immediately met the eye. looked out at the snow falling softly on the branches and rooftops with a new understanding, that every drift was made up of a universe of starry crystals. I was dazzled by what seemed a secret knowledge of snow. The lens and the snowflake were an awakening, the beginning of seeing. It's the time when I furst had an inkling that the already gorgeous world becomes even more beautiful the closer you look."

"Within the circle of stones, I find myself unaccountably beyond thinking, beyond feeling. The rocks are full of intention, a deep pres- ence attracting life. This is a place of power, vibrating with energy exchanged at a very long wavelength. Held in the gaze of the rocks, my presence is acknowledged. The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet yielding to a soft green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces, grain by grain bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the dialectic of moss on stone - an inter- face of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yang.* The material and the spiritual live together here. Moss communities may be a mystery to scientists, but they are known to one another. Intimate partners, the mosses know the contours of the rocks. They remember the route of rainwater down a crevice, the way f remember the path to my cabin. Standing inside the circle, I know that mosses have their own names, which were theirs long before Linnaeus, the Latinized namer of plants. Time passes"

"We poor myopic humans, with neither the raptor's git of long distance acuity, nor the talents of a housefly for panoramic vison However with our big brains, we are at least aware of the limits our vision. With a degree of humility rare in our species, we acknon. ledge there is much that we can't sec, and so contrive remarkable wars to observe the world. Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of out own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We think we're seeing when we've only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems dimin-ished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens."

"No starfish. Disappointed, I Straightened up from the pools to relieve the growing stiffness in my back, and suddenly - I saw one. Bright orange and clinging to a rock right before my eyes. And then it was as if a curtain had been pulled away and I saw them everywhere. Like stars revealing themselves one by one in a darkening summer night. Orange stars in the crevices of a black rock, speckled burgundy stars with outstretched arms, purple stars nestled together like a family huddled against the cold. In a cas- cade of discovery, the invisible was suddenly made visible. A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told me that the best way to find something is not to go looking for it. This is a hard con- cept for a scientist. But he said to watch out of the corner of your eye, open to possibility, and what you seek will be revealed. The revelation of suddenly seeing what I was blind to only moments before is a sub- lime experience for me. I can revisit those moments and still feel the surge of expansion. The boundaries between my world and the world of another being get pushed back with sudden clarity, an experience both humbling and joyful. The sensation of sudden visual awareness is produced in part by the formation of a 'search image' in the brain. In a complex visual land- scape, the brain initially registers all the incoming data, without critical evaluation. Five orange arms in a starlike pattern, smooth black rock, light and shadow. All this is input, but the brain does not immediately interpret the data and convey their meaning to the conscious mind. Not until the pattern is repeated, with feedback from the conscious mind, do we know what we are seeing"

"I find the language of microscopic description compelling in its clarity. The edge of a leaf is not simply uneven; there is a glossary of specific words for the appearance of a leaf margin: dentate for large, coarse teeth, serrate for a sawblade edge, serrulate if the teeth are fine and even, ciliate for a fringe along the edge. A leaf folded by accor- din pleats is plicate, complanate when flattened as if squashed between two pages of a book. Every nuance of moss architecture has a word. The students exchange these words like the secret language o a fraternity, and I watch the bond between them grow. Having the words also creates an intimacy with the plant that speaks of careful observation. Even the surfaces of individual cells have their own descriptors - mammillose for a breast-like swelling, papillose for a little bump, and pluripapillose when there are enough bumps to look like chicken pox. While they may initially seem like arcane technical terms, these words have life to them. What better word for a thick, round shoot, swelling with water than julaceous? Mosses are so little known by the general public"

"In indigenous ways of knowing, all beings are recognized as non-human persons, and all have their own names. It is a sign of respect to call a being by its name, and a sign of disrespect to ignore it. Words and names are the ways we humans build relationship, not only with each other, but also with plants."

"Looking at mosses adds a depth and intimacy to knowing the for- est. Walking in the woods, and discerning the presence of a species from fifty paces away, just by its color, connects me strongly to the place. That certain green, the way it catches the light, gives away its identity, like recognizing the walk of a friend before you can see their face. Just as you can pick out the voice of a loved one in the tumult of a noisy room, or spot your child's smile in a sea of faces"

"At a larger scale, I encounter these layers of air every spring. on the first mild day in April, our beautiful kites that have been hanging draped with cobwebs on the porch all winter rustle in the breeze and remind us of blue sky. So, we take them out to play in the boundary layer. In our sheltered valley, the breezes are seldom strong enough to immediately catch the big dragon kites that the kids and I love. So we run crazily back and forth over the back pasture, dodging cow pies and trying to generate enough wind to carry the kite upward, Close to the surface of the earth, the winds are too slow to support the kites weight. They are trapped, beyond the reach of the breeze. Only when our mad dashes loft one of the kites up to escape the layer of still air does it pull and dance on the string. Its wild pitches and threatened crashes show that it has ascended into the turbulent zone. And then at last, the kite's string pulls taut and the red and yellow dragon sails into the freely moving air above. Kites were made for the airy zone of laminar flow; mosses were made for the boundary layer."

"As their name suggests, waterbears are reliant on the abundant moisture held in the interstitial spaces of a moss clump. They cross between plants on fragile bridges of water, spanning the capillary spaces in the moss. A typical place I go to look for them is in a moss with deeply concave leaves. The tiny pool of water held in a spoon- shaped leaf is the perfect resting place for a waterbear, as plump and gelatinous as a candy Gummi Bear. The moisture in a moss mat is as vital to the moss as it is to the waterbear. But, since mosses are non- vascular, their water content fluctuates with the amount of water in the environment. The moss leaves shrivel and contort as water evapo- rates, leaving them crisp and dry. The waterbears, too, simply shrink when desiccated to as little as one-eighth of their size, forming barrel- shaped miniatures of themselves called tuns."

"Neither the moss nor the waterbear is damaged in the process of desiccation. In this state of suspended animation, they are invulner. able to extremes of temperature or other environmental stresses. The moment that fresh water becomes available, as dew or a welcome rain shower, the waterbear and the moss soak up the water and swell back to their normal size and shape. Within twenty minutes, the moss and the waterbear, in perfect synchrony, resume their normal activities."

"Waterbears were the subject of intense experimentation to test the limits of their endurance. In their dry state, they were subject to conditions that would kill any known organism: boiling, being held in a vacuum only o.oo8 degrees above absolute zero. But, without fail, they tolerated these abuses and were revivified with a drop of water. The addition of water unlocks the chemistry of life by a mechanism that is still largely unknown, but utilized by mosses and waterbears every day.After 35 years of lively debate and experimentation, it is generally agreed that life does not cease in anabiotic organisms, but continues at a barely perceptible rate. Sophisticated technologies are required to document the infinitesimal rate of metabolism, which permits life to be suspended indefinitely. The process that allows these beings to hover or the boundary between life and death is still a profound mystery that is continually played out in the mosses beneath our feet."

"The Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis has been verified in a host of other ecosvstems: prairies, rivers, coral reefs, and forests. The pattern it reveals is at the core of the Forest Service's policy on fire. Fire suppression with Smokey Bear's vigilance produced a disturbance frequency which was too low and the forests became a monocultural tinderbox. Too high a fire frequency left only a few scrubby species. But like Goldilocks and the Three Bears (one must have been Smokey himself), there is a fire frequency which is just right,' and here diversity abounds. Creation of a mosaic of patches by mid-frequency burning creates wildlife habitat and maintains forest health, while fire suppression does not."

"A forest's resilience after disturbance lies in its diverse composition. A whole suite of species is adapted to disturbance gaps of different types. Black cherry comes in to intermediate-size gaps where the soil has been exposed, hickory into small gaps on rocky soils, pine after fires, striped maple after disease. The landscape is like a partially completed jigsaw puzzle in varying shades of green, where holes in the landscape can be filled with one particular piece and no other. This pattern of forest organization known as 'gap dynamics' is known in forests around the world, from the Amazon to the Adirondacks. There is something reassuring about these patterns which speak of order and harmony in the way things work. But what if the forest is composed of 'trees' only a centimeter tall? Are the same dynamics of gap creation and colonization also played out at a micro-scale? Do the rules for assembling the jigsaw puzzle of a landscape also apply to mosses? Part of the fascination of working with mosses is the chance to see if and when the ecological rules of the large transcend the boundaries of scale and still illuminate the behavior of the smallest beings. It is a search for order, a desire for a glimpse of the threads that hold the world together."

"perhaps you' ve noticed that chipmunks, in their busy- nes, rarely run on the ground. Instead, you see them following the twisted path formed by rocks, by stumps and wood, like the don't touch the ground games we used to play as kids. They use logs as highways through the forest. For days, we sat quietly watching chipmunks travel along our D flagellare-covered logs. Each was traversed many times a day as the chipmunks moved between feeding places and the safety of the burrow. They run with a start and a stop, sporadically putting on the brakes to do a bright-eyed check for predators. We noticed that when they came to a halt little bits of moss were kicked up from the surface, like gravel spun out by a hard-braking car. It seems that the chipmunks in their workaday lives were making the small gaps we found in the moss turf, like potholes in a roadway. And with each traverse they regularly deliv- ered a sprinkle of D. flagellare propagules from their toes. Here was the missing puzzle piece. So this was why D. flagellare was found only on top of logs. Only where chipmunks run back and forth making oppor- tunities for a small moss to live. How amazing to live in such a world where order arises from the seeming coincidence of the smallest things. In time, the wind-thrown trees become mossy logs and the after math of the storm is a tapestry of mosses on a log, mirroring the same dynamics that shaped the forest around it. Aspen seeds flying in the wind of a tree-throwing gale create a new forest. Tetraphis spores spread green over a landslide gap on the side of a log. Yellow birch quietly takes its place in a single tree gap, while D. fagellare fills small patches on a log top. There is a home for everything, the puzzle pieces slip into place, cach part essential to the whole. The same cycle of disturbance and regeneration, the same story of resilience, is played out at a minute scale, a tale of the interwoven fates of mosses, fungi and the footfalls of chipmunks."

"We tend to devalue the flora of cities as a depauperate collection of stragglers, arising de novo with the relatively recent development of cities. In fact, the urban cliff hypothesis suggests that the association between humans and these species may be ancient, dating from our pre-Neanderthal days when we both took refuge in cave and cliff dwellings. In creating cities, we have incorporated design elements of the cliff habitat and our companions have followed."

"You've probably walked over millions of Bryum without ever real- ting it, for it is the quintessential moss of sidewalk cracks. After a rain, or a hosing down by a sanitation worker, water lingers in the tiny canyon of a fissure in the pavement. Mingling with the nutrients provided by the flotsam of pedestrians, the crack becomes ideal for Silvery Bryum. It takes its name from the burnished silver color of the dry plants. Each tiny round leaf, less than a millimeter long, is fringed with silky white hairs, visible with a magnifying glass. The shiny hairs reflect away the sun and protect the plant from drying. Under the right conditions, the pearly plants will put up a host of sporophytes to cast their young into the aerial plankton, so that a New York Bryum could easily end up in Hong Kong. However, the much more common toute for dispersal is by footsteps. Bryum shoots are fragile at their tips and in fact are designed to break off. The broken tips, scuffed along by a pedestrian, will take hold in another sidewalk, spreading Silvery Bryum all over the city, The native habitat of B. argenteum"

"Another tenet of indigenous plant knowledge is that we can learn, plant's use by where it occurs. For example, it's well known that a medicinal plant frequently occurs in the vicinity of the source of the illness. There's nothing in Jeannies' telling that negates the scientific explanation. It expands the question beyond how coltsfoot lives beside the creek, to the question of why, crossing over a boundary where plant physiology cannot follow. The plant's purpose can be read through its place. I remember this when I'm tromping through the woods and mistakenly grab a vine of poison ivy to haul myself up a steep bank. I look immediately for its companion. Remarkable in its fidelity, jewelweed is growing in the same moist soil as the poison ivy. I crush the succulent stem between my palms with a satisfying crunch and a rush of juice, and wipe the antidote all over my hands. It detoxifies the poison ivy and prevents the rash from ever developing. So, if plants show us their uses by where they live, what is the mes- sage from mosses? I think of where they live, in bogs, along streambanks, and in the spray of the waterfalls where salmon jump. And if this weren't sign enough, they reveal their gifts every time it rains. Mosses have a natural affinity for water. Watch a moss, dry and crisp, swell with water after a thunderstorm. It's teaching its role, in language more direct and graceful than anything I've found in the library. Perhaps the limited information on mosses in nineteenth-century anthropology is rooted in the fact that most of the observers of indig- enous communities were upper-crust gentlemen. They focused their studies on what they could see. And what they could see was condi- tioned by the world they came from. Their notebooks bulged with records of the pursuits of men; hunting, fishing, and making tools."

"The conventional wisdom of anthropologists is that menstruating women were isolated from daily life because they were unclean. But this interpretation grew from the cultural assumptions of the anthro- pologists and not from indigenous women themselves, who tell a different story. Yurok women describe a time of meditation and speak of special mountain pools where only moontime women were permit- ted to bathe. Iroquois women tell that any prohibitions on women's activities in their moontime arose because women were at the height of their spiritual powers at this time, and the powerful flow of energy could disrupt the balance of energy around them. In some tribal people, menstrual seclusion was a time of spiritual purification and training, akin to the sweat-lodge training of men. Tucked among the objects in their huts must have been baskets of mosses, selected with great care for their purpose. It seems an inescapable conclusion that women were skilled observers of different moss species, knowing their texture and creating an intimate taxonomy long before Linnaeus. The good mis- sionary ladies must have grimaced in horror at this practice, but I think something was lost in the transition to boiled white rags."

"The people gather together to give thanks that the plants, the grand and the humble, have once again fulfilled their caregiving responsibili- ties to the people. Tobacco will be burned in their honor. In my culture, tobacco is a bringer of knowledge. I think it's also important that we honor the different paths that lead to knowledge, the teachers in the oral tradition, the teachers in the written tradition, and the teachers among the plants. It's the time we should also turn our thoughts to our own responsibilities. In the web of reciprocity, what is our special gift, our responsibility that we offer to the plants in return? Our ancient teachers tell us that the role of human beings is respect and stewardship. Our responsibility is to care for the plants and all the land in a way that honors life. We are taught that using a plant shows respect for its nature, and we use it in a way that allows it to continue bringing its gifts. The role of our sacred sage is to make thoughts visible to the Creator. We can learn from this teacher and live in such a way that our thoughts of respect and gratitude are also made visible to the world."

"I have no doubts of his sincerity in wishing to protect them from harm, once they con- formed to his landscape design. But I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the possessed. If he truly loved mosses more than control, he would have left them alone and walked each day to see them. Barbara Kingsolver writes, It's going to take the most selfless kind of love to do right by what we cherish and give it the protection to flourish outside our possessive embrace: When the Owner looks at his garden, I wonder what he sees. Per- haps not beings at all, only works of art as lifeless as the silenced drum in his gallery. I suspect that the true identities of mosses are invisible to him and yet he wanted authenticity more than anything. He was willing to pay huge sums to have authentic moss communities at his doorstep where his guests might praise his vision. But in pos- sessing them, their authenticity is lost. Mosses have not chosen to be his companion, they have been bound."

"A specialized class of fungi, essential to forest function, also resides beneath the moss carpet of the soil. On the surface, scraggly turfs of Rhytidiadelphus and mops of Leucolepis cover the forest floor. Beneath them in the humus live the mycorrhizae, a group of fungi which live symbiotically with the roots of trees. The term literally means "fungus' (myco-) 'root' (-rhizae). The trees host these fungi, feeding them the sugars of photosynthesis. In return, the fungi extend their filamentous mycelium out into the soil to scavenge nutrients for the tree. The vigor of many trees is completely dependent on this con- genial relationship. It has recently been discovered that the density of mycorrhizae is significantly higher under a layer of mosses. Bare soil is far less hospitable to this partnership. The association of moss and mycorrhizae may be due to the even moisture and nutrient reservoir beneath the moss carpet."

"The patterns of reciprocity by which mosses bind together a forest community offer us a vision of what could be. They take only the little that they need and give back in abundance. Their presence sup- ports the lives of rivers and clouds, trees, birds, algae, and salaman- ders, while ours puts them at risk. Human-designed sys- tems are a far cry from this ongoing creation of ecosys- Frond of Hypnum imponens, common on mossy logs tem health, taking without giving back. Clear-cuts may meet the short-term desires of one species, but at the sac- rifice of the equally legitimate needs of mosses and murrelets, salmon and spruce. I hold tight to the vision that someday soon we will find the courage of self-restraint, the humility to live like mosses. On that day, when we rise to give thanks to the forest, we may hear the echo in return, the forest giving thanks to the people."

[tseneipgam]

"What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?”

[tseneipgam]

"When you have four hundred pounds of beans in the house, you need have no fear of starvation. Other things, delicacies such as sugar, tomatoes, peppers, coffee, fish or meat may come sometimes miraculously, through the intercession of the Virgin, sometimes through industry or cleverness; but your beans are there, and you are safe. Beans are a roof over your stomach. Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold."

"Danny retired from the field, for if one little mention brought such clear and quick refutation of his project, what crushing logic would insistence bring forth? The window remained as it was: and as time passed, as fly after fly went to feed the spider family with his blood and left his huskish body in the webs against the glass, as dust adhered to dust, the bedroom took on a pleasant obscurity which made it possible to sleep in a dusky light even at noonday. They slept peacefully, the friends; but when the sun struck the window in the morning and, failing to get in, turned the dust to silver and shone on the iridescence of the blue-bottle flies, then the friends awakened and stretched and looked about for their shoes. They knew the front porch was warm when the sun was on the window. They did not awaken quickly, nor fling about nor shock their systems with any sudden movement. No, they arose from slumber as gently as a soap bubble floats out from its pipe. Down into the gulch they trudged, still only half awake. Gradually their wills coagulated. They built a fire and boiled some tea and drank it from the fruit jars, and at last they settled in the sun on the front porch. The flaming flies made halos about their heads. Life took shape about them, the shape of yesterday and of tomorrow. Discussion began slowly, for each man treasured the little sleep he still possessed."

"Occasionally the friends procured some wine, and then there was singing and fighting. Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra."

[tseneipgam]

"What do I do all day, you must wonder, V? How do I fill my hours without you? I picture you picturing me. Do you see me in your mind's eye, reeling with desperation? Do you see me with pity? Do you see me taking my stupid little walk in the morning, along grey pebble, wet sand, concrete promenade? I try to go further each time, even if only a step. One day I'll end up on another coast, another edge of this country. I'll be the miracle woman who walked until her feet were worn to the bone. Perhaps you can walk a thing away, or walk yourself away, wear yourself into a slip of sinew. The trick is forgetting for one moment and then forgetting for another moment and then look, the moments run together like a string of beads, and there is heartbreak in the forgetting of heartbreak, in the forgetting of pain, which returns bright and pulsing regardless of the seconds it has been put aside. Do not leave me here, it tells you. Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you. If it rains I wrap myself in oilcloth. I don't mind my hair dripping down my neck if I can look at the sea, the waves which don't end and will never end. There's no arguing with a tidal pattern. It comes in, and then it goes out again. One step after another."

"In the hotel room I took off my dress, examined how the little-worn girdle from years ago tugged me in at the middle, examined the long piece of flesh that was my body, and I felt hope, and I felt com, taipy,and mainly I felt grief at the waste of all the years, how much "body could have been touched, and yet how rarely it was touched. *tateps the years should have preserved me like a thing in a museun, bus boatiesdon't work like that if a body isn't touched it falters faster, legermingis visible at the surface, much as you might try to hide"

[tseneipgam]

"The sun had now moved on, as it must, as we all must move on, which is what I thought the dream was trying to convey to me. A small yellow car stopped at the traffic lights. Standing in the back were four llamas. I checked to see if this could be true. The red lights took a long time to change and it was true. All their heads were pointing in the same direction. That is to say, they were looking to the right, so I looked to the right. They were gazing at the light bulbs strung around the scaffolding of the market stalls at Place Maubert. How serene it is, I thought, to sit still for a while, in one place. It's possible that a yellow car will pass by with four llamas stand- ing in the back. And it's certain that someone poor will ask you for money."

"suddenly someone was shouting at him. Can you read English? A man, about sixty, walking his dog on the path was pointing to a sign fixed to the railings, It says in English picking flowers in the park is forbidden. It didn't have to be so ridiculous, one man picking a sprig of berries, another man harassing him, but it was how it was. I pointed to the dog who had now run off the path and was franrically digging up the grass. Can you see to your dog? Fuck off, you ugly bitch. He was white, angry and flabby, and the Bird Whistler was the opposite, brown, toned, gentle. It just happened to be how it was. You can't get parakeets to come to you if you're aggressive. The Bird Whistler ignored us both and walked away, light on his feet. The white man's head was so infected with anger and self-pity it made his eyes stupid and small. It didn't have to be like that, he could have been educated and handsome and still stupid, but it happened to be how it was."

"Listen, he said, and then he listed the whole composition, almost word-perfect: slut, dyke, mental. He left out hag but made up for it by adding some extra insulting words about the Rastafarian, nothing new, always the same old. After all, he'd actually asked me to listen to his composition, ending with: You shouldn't be riding your bicycle in the park. I'm not riding it, I'm walking it, I shouted back. Which was true. When he waddled towards me, swinging his dog lead like a whip, I asked myself: What would Marie do? I swung my leg over my bike and cycled fast towards him until he had to jump off the path and get out of my way. It was always the same people making the same old."

"Arthur wanted to try the chocolate ice cream straight away. Andrew fed him with a spoon. No, angel, he said to Andrew. You must keep the spoon longer in my mouth so that I can relish it. That's what it comes down to in the end days. A little ice cream on a teaspoon is everything. His mind was wandering. He said everything on his mind without cancelling his thoughts. I made you who you are. And I made you who you are, I replied. Andrew laughed and started to spoon the ice cream into his own mouth."

[tseneipgam]

Everyone looked at her in astonishment. 'You are going to have a baby?' asked Jane. She nodded her head. It was extraordinary to see the different expressions on their faces. A sort of hum went through the room, in which I could catch the words 'impure', 'baby', 'Castalia?, and so on. Jane, who was herself considerably moved, put it to us: 'Shall she go? Is she impure?' Such a roar filled the room as might have been heard in the street outside. 'No! No! No! Let her stay! Impure? Fiddlesticks!' Yet I fancied that some of the youngest, girls of nineteen or twenty, held back as if overcome with shyness. Then we all came about her and began asking questions, and at last I saw one of the youngest, who had kept in the background, approach shyly and say to her: 'What is chastity then? I mean is it good, or is it bad, or is it nothing at all?' She replied so low that I could not catch what she said. 'You know I was shocked?' said another, 'for at least ten minutes.' 'In my opinion,' said Poll, who was growing crusty from always reading in the London Library, 'chastity is nothing but ignorance - a most discreditable state of mind. We should admit only the unchaste to our society. I vote that Castalia shall be our President?' This was violently disputed. 'It is as unfair to brand women with chastity as with unchastity;' said Poll. "Some of us haven't the opportunity either. Moreover, I don't believe Cassy herself maintains that she acted as she did from a pure love of knowledge? 'He is only twenty-one and divinely beautiful'; said Cassy, with a ravishing gesture. 'I move,' said Helen, 'that no one be allowed to talk of chastity or unchastity save those who are in love.' 'Oh, bother, said Judith, who had been enquiring into scientific matters, 'I'm not in love and I'm longing to explain my measures for dispensing with prostitutes and fertilising virgins by Act of Parliament.' She went on to tell us of an invention of hers to be erected at Tube stations and other public resorts, which, upon payment of a small fee, would safeguard the nation's health, accommodate its sons, and relieve its daughters. Then she had contrived a method of preserving in sealed tubes the germs of future Lord Chancellors 'or poets or painters or musicians; she went on, 'supposing, that is to say, that these breeds are not extinct, and that women still wish to bear children ' 'Of course we wish to bear children!' cried Castalia impatiently. Jane rapped the table. 'That is the very point we are met to consider' she said. 'For five years we have been trying to find out whether we are justified in continuing the human race. Castalia has anticipated our decision. But it remains for the rest of us to make up our minds.'

'On we went through a vast tangle of statistics. We learnt that England has a population of so many millions, and that such and such a proportion of them is constantly hungry and in prison; that the average size of a working man's family is such, and that so great a percentage of women die from maladies incident to childbirth. Reports were read of visits to factories, shops, slums, and dockyards. Descriptions were given of the Stock Exchange, of a gigantic house of business in the City, and of a Government Office. The British Colonies were now discussed, and some account was given of our rule in India, Africa and Ireland. I was sitting by Castalia and I noticed her uneasiness. 'We shall never come to any conclusion at all at this rate,' she said. 'As it appears that civilisation is so much more complex than we had any notion, would it not be better to confine ourselves to our original enquiry? We agreed that it was the object of life to produce good people and good books. All this time we have been talking of aeroplanes, factories, and money. Let us talk about men themselves and their arts, for that is the heart of the matter?'

'"Surely you could teach her to believe that a man's intellect is, and always will be, fundamentally superior to a woman'sps I suggested. She brightened at this and began to turn over our old minutes again. 'Yes, she said, 'think of their discoveries, their mathematics, their science, their philosophy, their scholarship - and then she began to laugh, 'I shall never forget old Hobkin and the hairpin, she said, and went on reading and laughing and I thought she was quite happy, when suddenly she threw the book from her and burst out, 'Oh, Cassandra why do you torment me? Don't you know that our belief in man's intellect is the greatest fallacy of them all?' *What?' I exclaimed. 'Ask any journalist, schoolmaster, politician or public house keeper in the land and they will all tell you that men are much cleverer than women.' 'As if I doubted it,;' she said scornfully. 'How could they help it? Haven't we bred them and fed and kept them in comfort since the beginning of time so that they may be clever even if they're nothing else? It's all our doing!' she cried. 'We insisted upon having intellect and now we've got it. And it's intellect,' she continued, that's at the bottom of it. What could be more charming than a boy before he has begun to cultivate his intellect? He is beautiful to look at; he gives himself no airs; he understands the meaning of art and literature instinctively; he goes about enjoying his life and making other people enjoy theirs. Then they teach him to cultivate his intellect. He becomes a barrister, a civil servant, a general, an author, a professor. Every day he goes to an office. Every year he produces a book. He maintains a whole family by the products of his brain - poor devil! Soon he cannot come into a room without making us all feel uncomfortable; he condescends to every woman he meets, and dares not tell the truth even to his own wife; instead of rejoicing our eyes we have to shut them if we are to take him in our arms. True, they console themselves with stars of all shapes, ribbons of all shades, and incomes of all sizes - but what is to console us? That we shall be able in ten years' time to spend a weekend at Lahore? Or that the least insect in Japan has a name twice the length of its body? Oh, Cassandra, for Heaven's sake let us devise a method by which men may bear children! It is our only chance. For unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare!' 'It is too late, I replied. 'We cannot provide even for the children that we have.' 'And then you ask me to believe in intellect,; she said. While we spoke, men were crying hoarsely and wearily in the street, and listening, we heard that the Treaty of Peace had just been signed. The voices died away. The rain was falling and interfered no doubt with the proper explosion of the fireworks. "My cook will have bought the Evening News; said Castalia, "and Ann will be spelling it out over her tea. I must go home. 'It's no good - not a bit of good; I said. 'Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in- and that is herself' 'Well, that would be a change' said Castalia. So we swept up the papers of our Society, and though Ann was playing with her doll very happily, we solemnly made her a present of the lot and told her we had chosen her to be President of the Society of the future - upon which she burst into tears, poor little girl.'

An Unwritten Novel

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one's eyes slide above the paper's edge to the poor woman's face - insignificant without that look, almost a sym- bol of human destiny with it. Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of - what? That life's like that, it seems. Five faces opposite - five mature faces - and the knowledge in each face. Strange, though, how people want to conceal it! Marks of reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge. One smokes; another reads; a third checks entries in a pocket book; a fourth stares at the map of the line framed opposite; and the fifth - the terrible thing about the fifth is that she does nothing at all. She looks at life. Ah, but my poor, unfortunate woman, do play the game - do, for all our sakes, conceal it! As if she heard me, she looked up, shifted slightly in her seat and sighed. She seemed to apologise and at the same time to say to me, 'If only you knew!' Then she looked at life again. *But I do know, I answered silently, glancing at The Times for manners' sake: "I know the whole business."

The String Quartet

Well. here we are, and if you cast your eye over the room you will see that Tubes and trams and omnibuses, private carriages not a few, even, I venture to believe, landaus with bays in them, have been busy at it, weaving threads from one end of London to the other. Yet I begin to have my doubts - Ifindeed it's true, as they're saying, that Regent Street is up, and the Treaty signed,° and the weather not cold for the time of year, and even at that rent not a flat to be had, and the worst of influenza its after effects; if I bethink me of having forgotten to write about the leak in the larder, and left my glove in the train; if the ties of blood require me, leaning forward, to accept cordially the hand which is perhaps offered hesitatingly - "Seven years since we met!' The last time in Venice? 'And where are you living now?' *Well, the late afternoon suits me the best, though, if it weren't asking too much "But I knew you at once!' "Still. the war made a break -' If the mind's shot through by such little arrows, and - for human society compels it - no sooner is one launched than another presses forward; if this engenders heat and in addition they've turned on the electric light; if saying one thing does, in so many cases, leave behind it a need to improve and revise, stirring besides regrets, pleasures, vanities, and desires - ifit's all the facts I mean, and the hats, the fur boas, the gentlemen's swallow-tail coats, and pearl tie-pins that come to the surface - what chance is there?

How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world! Also in jolly old fishwives, squatted under arches, obscene old women, how deeply they laugh and shake and rollick, when they walk, from side to side, hum, hah! That's an early Mozart, of course -' But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair - I mean hope. What do I mean? That's the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now - I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency. Hah, hah! I'm laughing. What at? You said nothing, nor did the old gentleman opposite… But suppose - suppose - Hush!' The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy:. Woven together like reeds in moonlight. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow - crash!'

'

wanted to or furniture. so he said, and he was in procause their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train. But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh dear me, the mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have - what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilisation - let me just count over a few of the things lost in our lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses - what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble - three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ all gone, and jewels too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a racehorse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard. But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour - dim pinks and blues - which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become - I don't know what…'

'What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrowheads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of - proving I really don't know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really - what shall we say? - the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of house- maids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain? Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases… Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water- lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs…. How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections - if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack - if it were not for the Table of Precedency!"

' Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of…. Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself. first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes…. One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately - but something is getting in the way…. Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, filling, slipping, vanishing… There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying 'I'm going out to buy a newspaper?'