24 February 2020

One gazes at the world with alacrity and courtesy and becomes less.

1 comment

taiji heartwork said...

Tim Lilburn

The world ignites awe. Language heats, grows ejaculatory, protean, physical as it takes on the energies of song; it denies what it asserts because it is in love with what it names. An exhaustion sets in; awe persists; a desire to simply look springs up around the lungs of language. One gazes at the world with alacrity and courtesy and becomes less. Look long enough, faithfully enough at the tree, your seeing a bowing before it, let the deer's stare seep deeply into you, and you lose your name. Eventually a contemplative stance toward the world comes to mourning. Weep at your separation from what is; the mind as prodigal touches bottom and in its recognition of its poverty recovers itself. One does miss the homeland of being where one is. Such mourning, however, is perhaps what knowing the world and being in it, with awareness, is. It asserts the enormity of being and the vast intricacy of individual things, their beauty, their difference from us. It demonstrates an awareness of consciousness' removal from wild things and its consequent ransacking of them. It is a form of reparation. You grieve and this is a way into things and home. In this awareness of things' oddness and in your compunction over your separation from this is a letting-be-of-the-world while you are turned fully toward it. This is a return, fretful, likely to be checked, mind finding its place among scents, grass tips, bloom colours, a tremor of an act building from a quick desire that mysteriously never fully abandons you.