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Bouleversement
The apparently sudden appearance of
blossoming-out
afresh, out of reach,
aiming for extinction, abandonment
other
fossils, then again no fossils
because of having previously lived on earth,
deviating and branching into use and disuse,
what in it that is transmitted by heredity,
that cannot help the lowest plants and animals
what is "the lowest", where ends "environment",
"he was therefore unable to provide a unitary theory of
evolution",
to use reason to arrive at faith,
to bring the sacred into the branchings of the un-
reasonablethe blue between the branches
pulling upwards and away so that branches
become
branching, their tips failing at what comes to be called dis-
appearance,
as if by too much compromise, straining towards justice till it
cannot
but
fail. Alongside faith [leaping] always the
demon,
the
comparative. The presence [only the mind can do
this]
of
inner feeling up against living force,
what exists without having been perfected or made
complex,
what exists without having been made,
what exists without having been,
(therefore unable to provide a unitary theory)
(of evolution)(of regret)
what exists inside the sensation of duration
(inside duration where is the aside to go)(how
far under)(or is it into?)and then, in the aside, the off-
hand, half-formulated, half-heard but yet still
living
breath of a
thinking, down in the deep station of feeling
though
still (barely) out-
lined so as to be [branching] as-
certainable
and seizable, so as to be dragged up: there she
thought,
is my thought before me. Like a planted
thing in its pot. Not quite in nature
yet
still alive
andmost cruciallyself-evident.
And that I can feed it. [Yet she was unable still
to provide a unitary theory]. It is
(she thought looking away momentarily)(so that
looking back it could be there more fully in all
its glory: her thought) however small, a
catastrophe,
leafing and branching, making of itself a higher
and
a lower
part, catastrophic, down to its
shadows cast upon the floor,
branchings so still where the leaf-ends
sway
in the breeze the curtains have
touched
and left off.
Outside, she thought: the point of origin.
They can call it, if they wish, she thought, the
supreme
being (blossoming-out afresh)(feeling as if one
had previously lived elsewhere on earth)
(out of reach even of catastrophe)(there had been,
she knew, extensive extinctions) her
thinking
this now
deep in the duration [wanting
so to come back up][but up into what
organism
of
time][or is it organization of?] the lasting of the minutes
for
example,
the sensation of their being somewhere clocked
out
in a re-
sistant form, a wage for example, attached to
their beginnings and endings, beginnings and endings
somehow
capable of being
exactly
cut off. That not catastrophic, therefore, for
example.
Not the organism of catastrophe like a
shaft of light breaking down through the crowning trees
just now [in the just now] as she looked out.
And could she be associated with it, for example,
that
instant
of looking-up and light breaking through, could she
be imbricated into the fate [the fates non-
durational
nature for example][even the recess in which
these "for examples" go][always in it, all
levels
of
inwardness
the progress by the abandonment
of some aspects of creation
to
fate]
[we call this progressionism][but there is
also the correlation of parts][in order
to determine the space to which we, each,
belong][or could it be feltor thought
that everything happening now was strictly
connected to something that happened in
the past][it was the word "happened" stopped her]
the problem as always was the problem of how
something could come out of nothing.
There was no other question: inside her,
the nothing [she could just feel it] and before her,
[the plant on the table] the something, the thought
of the nothing [for example]. The Creator loomed
(as
it always happens)
outside, a bit far away, but still filling-in for
the unexpected. She heard the kitchen clocks gears and also the
noon
churchbells
on the far hill. She thought of the idea
of
happiness
where to place thatlike a string of
christmas
lights
dropping down into a darkened well
or
tomb [or was it
catacomb]. She saw the images flash on
and
off
according to the swinging of the lights. Down there
she
thought. She thought
of happiness, the principle part of the
thinking
of the thing,
its highest part, still reachable from up here by the
mind, she thought, as though a pronounced
looking-down,
vertiginous, a squinting, yes, but as if
one species of ones self could look back
far
enough
(although of course here it was down) to
see the previous existent one had been
the mark of design there upon the gap
between them now (the christmas lights)
(the swaying intermittence
of)
(the hiddenness between the frequencies)
(the frequencies)She felt as if she could
reconcile
this present to that one, and that the
thinking
wanted that so. And that it strived.
Jorie Graham
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