Vesuvius
A recent assemblage of soft signals through the noise, and a poem.
The dogwoods are blooming. Those white petals are not actually petals, but bracts — but botany, but who cares, they look like petals and they’re falling all over my front lawn. Renting a lawn and rolling the trash out to the curb on Tuesdays are the most American things about me, I think to myself. Here is a link to call your congresspeople.
Some other recent thoughts:
I don’t like the word ‘impact’ for talking about the ‘effect’ of our lives and our work. It is overused and feels aggressive, penetrative. I wrote grants for years and scoured thesauruses to find alternatives. What if projects were more like fulcrums, melodies, trampolines? Tell me your favorites.
I don’t know what makes skies turn dark before a storm, and I don’t want to look down to look it up.
Do you care about your legacy? I don’t, particularly. I feel no need to be remembered or eulogized. I realize a great deal of technologists do, and I find this interesting and foreign and I want to understand it better.
Aliveness Quotient (AQ) — a measure of how alive you are.
Meniscus is one of my favorite words. It describes the surface tension of water as it meets something else. The shape of the water will change from concave to convex, depending on its surroundings. Sometimes my life feels like a bubble, and I meet other bubbles. Sometimes bubbles merge, sometimes they pop. We are always changed in our encounters with other surfaces and their tensions.
While discerning signal from noise is a useful productivity strategy, I find it can quickly turn crass and arrogant (see: Steve Jobs didn’t care what I thought!). I identify as the whir of cicadas and moaning menstrual cramps and other noisy things that keep this world soft and habitable. The cardinal perched outside interrupting my Zoom calls has something to say. People tell me about their gardens and the things they love, and we become friends.
A rose is actually a microphone if you speak into it.
A poem:
It is again the season of locust flowers
heaped upon themselves—
creaturely clusters, color of pearl
tasty gift of a poison tree.
The time is good morning,
the year is another, this time with retinol,
the season is spring, single.
Tilly and Dash bark at the children,
on the other side of the fence,
in the playground.
They said it’s cancer,
and the thunder shook our houses so hard
you could hear the earth moan for miles
and a man will win a prize for discovering
the origins of life in a volcano1
so my memory moves
from the icy comets
and their mysterious inoculants
to crimson, belching heat,
that make diamonds and cows
lignin and lutes
and a breast is a volcano;
a woman, a mammal,
a mother, a muse,
a morning star with wide hips
and a heart pumping
blood, like a pomegranate
as she glows in the sky
naked at dawn—
voluptuous and feared by the clergy, but
I will miss the Pope.
I’ve exceeded my allowance.
I ask the engines every year if I can eat these blossoms.
I ask the engines how to force escape and quit on a Mac.
I ask the engines what the name of that song is that goes…you know.
New Arcana:
Princess of Prompts
pulled right side up
—that’s me!
I slouch upon surfaces,
I scribble upon papers,
I’ve forsaken my memory—
the palace with all of its big elephants and rowdy mnemonics
(lOcust, O because the leaves are rOund)
gather dust—
"the food is getting cold!”
In the shallows we see
small yellowy fish with fins like arms,
bouncing black bugs with big shadows
and I wonder, as I always do,
What Is It Like to Be a Bug?
We do not look it up,
we keep looking down,
patting mud around our feet the shape of Crocs
by the lapping shore
(it says something about Crocs, she says).
We have three apocalypse conversation tokens per day,
and we can’t explain the system, exactly, but they’re used up when you
wade into a misty horizon,
edge towards the steep ravine,
lean towards the ellipses,
that keep calling us closer.
Greek scholars say Vesuvius means unquenchable and
I once heard a rapper say “life is an STD”
but I’ve braided sweetgrass with my sisters
and seen deserts turn green
so
“Yes, locust flowers (from the black locust tree, Robinia pseudoacacia) are indeed edible — but with a few important notes to keep in mind.”
And girl, do I keep these important notes in mind
and paw
and hoof
and snout.
I shine them like scales on a rainbow trout—
a glimmering ask to come deeper,
wake up,
and swim in the cold.
See David W. Deamer’s Assembling Life: How Can Life Begin on Earth and Other Habitable Planets? (2019) - it is cool.
A lovely soft place to briefly inhabit.
Beautiful