By David Capps
A woman passing by with friends leans over her sleeping daughter’s stroller to say brightly, this is where the bird talked to you. But two minutes later she’s buying a coffee, without letting on what the bird said. As if she just dropped the subject, or it was some bizarre inside joke between her and her child. It would have interrupted flow of commonplace inevitabilities to ask what the bird said when it spoke—zoom zoom—it’s an expression that makes you go fast, she warbled (though I thought maybe she misspoke) and proceeded to enumerate various body parts: stink foot, stink shins, stink ears, two stink eyes…as though she were some medieval conjurer of spirits.
There it is, a scene from real life, which obviously makes the mistake of trying to keep pace with it. Cinema verite stands the best chance there. When we say a piece of writing paints a picture, something too active, or active in the wrong way, may be meant; for if writing has a painterly quality it resides in its stillness (without its being a photographic snapshot quality), which makes it possible for the reader to fix their attention, in order to imagine changes—
is there a single word for the summer breezes that arise just after sundown?
*
Not that it matters how long I’ve been here, trying to feel the feeling of it, like a weakened whorling through your bottom row of teeth, oxygenatingly good. Stillness—as I mean it is clear, not indefinite. It is like the song you know by heart, and because you know it so well plays differently every time, though it feels the familiar way under your fingers. In the asylum of the body the mind is free to wander over prose as over stained glass, searching the trickling sunlit source of the waterfall. For in stained glass backlit by natural day, light itself served as the imprimatura which provided a source of color contrast, breathed life into flesh-tones. The potentialities of bodily movement are sensed in the stillness of prose. Lots of scratchings, crossings out, crumplings, throwing away.
A person should know their body in this way, the exact point at which strength gives out and rest becomes necessity, for rest also is a kind of mechanical stillness that deserves to be noticed between interludes of stretching, straining, groping toward some final physical form which, if you let it, can become an end unto itself. Admire those who have mastered the art of taking pleasure in virtue. The virtuous person is the runner on the hill, spurred on by the glances of those in descent, who, when he reaches the summit grimaces from the pain. Alone he lives the pain, because he has met the exhaustion of his own physical form. So sometimes you sit in stillness with no thought of ‘what’s next’.
—Yet what I have been trying to paint as water is the shining stream of the soul. To give name to all things that grow in the depth of every shade. It should be like this: that with age comes an enhanced ability to profoundly lose oneself in the significance of memories. A lake clear to the bottom. A limpid surface. But it isn’t. You reach a point when all knowing ceases, not because knowledge is an achievement and there is no longer a longing to attain; but the recognition (sometimes immediate, sometimes at the end of the trailhead) that the depth of knowledge regarding any given fact, no matter how obvious, is immeasurable. Even that you are you—which one, in the dropdown menu of you?. The red one of intoxicated melody? The melancholic blue bordering veins of soft lead? The-verdant-though static-green-of-the-ladybug-bookmark-forgotten-in-the-middle of-a-novel-that-was-supposed-to-change-you you, as a woman passing by with friends leans over her sleeping daughter, and proceeds to remind you of the basic importance of naming.
Naming the stillness where name meets object and molten glass is pressed into a mold of twirling grapevines.
If the bird spoke, you wouldn’t understand what it said I thought to say but didn’t.
*
Leaves fell like glass from winter trees, quartz crystals grown in a mine or in an alchemist’s lab; breezes danced tarantellas down the slope in pairs, the etesian swept the earthen breeze off her feet, and together they created something mild, like the clay jugs of water they used to set out to by a sloping roof to keep cool, a presence rustling in the shadow of the mountain just after sunset. A rock, a boulder, I call the Sentinel of Sleeping Giant watches us all. The jogger struggling up the hill, trying in vain to sense the breezes. One man bowed to tie his shoe. A girl with headphones in spread her arms as an airplane flew overhead. Chipmunks chased up and down the gravel passes. White-tailed stillnesses at the interstices of every intersecting path. I knew it was impossible the leaves were falling, but because it was impossible it had to be true.
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