Missing something is writing a note in a blank space on a map. Leaving it blank is too much to bear; besides, we don't know what to do with ourselves then. A map of my life would be worth drawing; for one, it would be reassuring, because everything is there- all at once and without effort.
Here, on the hill, my castelo de san joao, complete with high fences and gargoyles on guard, and a little girl practising their faces out a window. Below, on the riverbank, twisting little dingy streets with bookshops and assorted alleyways where poets and the thinking sort stroke their chins at corners and stoke their fires in pretty reasonable cafes. Drifting aimlessly down the water reaches you eventually to the sea, past thickets teeming with undiscovered specimens of dubious emotional stability and adaptability to thought à la mode. Strewn among rock and sand along the seashore will be the comfortable huts: of indifferent quality and invisible to the discerning eye. There's quite a settlement of them, but all soggy at high tide. From there if one raises his head and looks, there is a steeple far inland, ringing its invitation.
The land is different here, rolling and green to the eye (for the Lord is a shepherd, is he not?) and every outcrop might hide multitudes, but there's no one to be seen around. And this is the rule: One never does know about what the others do. Away to the West there is a carnival always running, raucous music and dancing lights and marshes of half-dried liquids that wink in the low light and surprise you.
And running beneath and across all this are the soils, teeming with life and yet invisible, speaking a language that hours of talking transplantation have not taught me. And so there, at the very edge of the known world, a collaborative project of archaeology and mining, so that both the soil we excavate and that which we must leave untouched may have value, humans and machines and all the rest holed up together in a pile of hope and discovery— over there, out of the way, so only a bit of dust will get onto everything else.
Here, on the hill, my castelo de san joao, complete with high fences and gargoyles on guard, and a little girl practising their faces out a window. Below, on the riverbank, twisting little dingy streets with bookshops and assorted alleyways where poets and the thinking sort stroke their chins at corners and stoke their fires in pretty reasonable cafes. Drifting aimlessly down the water reaches you eventually to the sea, past thickets teeming with undiscovered specimens of dubious emotional stability and adaptability to thought à la mode. Strewn among rock and sand along the seashore will be the comfortable huts: of indifferent quality and invisible to the discerning eye. There's quite a settlement of them, but all soggy at high tide. From there if one raises his head and looks, there is a steeple far inland, ringing its invitation.
The land is different here, rolling and green to the eye (for the Lord is a shepherd, is he not?) and every outcrop might hide multitudes, but there's no one to be seen around. And this is the rule: One never does know about what the others do. Away to the West there is a carnival always running, raucous music and dancing lights and marshes of half-dried liquids that wink in the low light and surprise you.
And running beneath and across all this are the soils, teeming with life and yet invisible, speaking a language that hours of talking transplantation have not taught me. And so there, at the very edge of the known world, a collaborative project of archaeology and mining, so that both the soil we excavate and that which we must leave untouched may have value, humans and machines and all the rest holed up together in a pile of hope and discovery— over there, out of the way, so only a bit of dust will get onto everything else.
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