August 6, 2010. Friday.
Situation: This morning when I looked out the kitchen window while getting my coffee I saw in the weed bed by the house (where Steve Gray Wolf fears to tread) a number of the same white flowers I saw yesterday in the clearing. So I’ve just gone out there with my Audubon to try to identify them. The flower is trumpet-shaped and appears all white, with white pistil and stamen. The one specimen I looked at (the others were too far back in, and I was not wearing my walking clothes) appeared to be on a vine entwined around a goldenrod stem; its leaves were arrowhead-shaped. Damn if I could find anything like it in the Audubon. Then, while out there, I saw some white, pink-tinged, bell-shaped flowers, their leaves thick, big and dark green. The flowers kind of look like what I see in Aububon for teaberry, bearberry, leatherleaf, nodding onion, and spreading dogbane, but damn if I can tell what they are either. Moi has gone into town, so I can’t ask her right now for help. Today looks again like I’ll have to work both afternoon and evening, so might as well take Mway for a walk now. It’s 9:39.
State of the Path: Today I do notice berries on the “chokeberry” on the path before the walled garden; it’s the main bush there these days, bigger than the multiflora bush, which, once the biggest bush, now has started (like all the multifloras around) to decline (life span? weather conditions? competition?). I see the arrowhead vine a couple times along the path, entwined always around another plant, but I don’t see any more of its flowers again until I reach the clearing. I avoid the side path along the old orchard, but I do decide to take the one along the skating pond. When I see it overgrown with goldenrod, though, I just take a quick jaunt over to the creek and back. The tall meadow rue, I notice, has lost its flowers, and in their place are tiny green, spiky seeds. I notice a couple of boneset plants standing among the ironweed in bug land; their leaves are indeed starting to look withered, as well as bug-eaten.
State of the Creek: When Mway goes into the creek, I again hear, instead of the splash of water, the crackling of rocks. All the pools are shrinking. The vinyl siding sits a good yard away from the shrinking pool at the narrows.
The Fetch: Before I toss the stick I take a quick look at the trumpet-shaped flower, with its arrowhead leaves, growing up the branch of a “chokeberry.” I don’t see the other two flowers I saw yesterday. Mway surprises me today – she ends up fetching the stick about five times, then coaxes me to play “Put it down” about four or five times, even though I heard her out barking with Moi early this morning.
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A strange thing happens when a body capable of referring to itself by means of the first person pronoun commits that word to (what I think we can still call) the page. Immediately, irretrievably, the word refers to something else,* one body is replaced by another: it is now the ink calling itself “I.” Beckett explores this phenomenon in his novel The Unnamable. When I finished this journal last year, I realized that (omitting any consideration of aesthetic standards or values) it was now a novel. It didn’t matter whether it was based on fact, partly fact, partly fiction, or all fiction. The “I” that speaks here was now out of my hands, or rather, beyond my vocal chords. It was outside my speech, removed from the realm of my care, free from my anxiety, revisable perhaps but only by an act of disinterested surgery. I and all the things around me were now something other than what they originally were. Body transfers occurred across the board, all references now being identifiable with parts of a certain carefree aesthetic space. Unfortunately, though, these body transfers are not complete when they occur: the original body is not effaced, the connections between the two bodies only become increasingly tenuous over time. Behind “Walks with Mway,” the bloggersroman, still beat the hearts of everyone I love and care about. What am I doing ? I think to myself – I shouldn’t just sit here all day long in front of the computer, working on my “novel,” as Moi, wiggling quotation marks with her fingers, often criticizes me for doing. I should go on Facebook.
The Boy just called and said that yesterday while riding to work on his bicycle he ran into a taxi door someone was opening and fractured his thumb. Boy oh boy. I’m glad he wasn’t hurt more, and I told him he has to be more careful. Man oh man.
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