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.It is sheer coincidence that upstream from me the creek’s bed is ridged in horizontal croppings of sandstone.I never merited this grace, that when I face upstream I see the light on the water careening towards me, inevitably, freely, down a graded series of terraces like the balanced winged platforms on an infinite, inexhaustible font.“Ho, if you are thirsty, come down to the water; ho, if you are hungry, come and sit and eat.” This is the present, at last.I can pat the puppy any time I want.This is the now, this flickering, broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping me buoyant and giddy with praise.My God, I look at the creek.It is the answer to Merton’s prayer, “Give us time!” It never stops.If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek.You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.You’ll have fish left over.The creek is the one great giver.It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation.This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: “Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.” Let me twist his meaning.Here it comes.The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks.The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.7SpringIWhen I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English.I thought that “hat,” say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word “ibu,” say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word “hat.” I knew only one foreign word, “oui,” and since it had three letters as did the word for which it was a code, it seemed, touchingly enough, to confirm my theory.Each foreign language was a different code, I figured, and at school I would eventually be given the keys to unlock some of the most important codes’ systems.Of course I knew that it might take years before I became so fluent in another language that I could code and decode easily in my head, and make of gibberish a nimble sense.On the first day of my first French course, however, things rapidly took on an entirely unexpected shape.I realized that I was going to have to learn speech all over again, word by word, one word at a time—and my dismay knew no bounds.The birds have started singing in the valley.Their February squawks and naked chirps are fully fledged now, and long lyrics fly in the air.Birdsong catches in the mountains’ rim and pools in the valley; it threads through forests, it slides down creeks.At the house a wonderful thing happens.The mockingbird that nests each year in the front-yard spruce strikes up his chant in high places, and one of those high places is my chimney.When he sings there, the hollow chimney acts as a sound box, like the careful emptiness inside a cello or violin, and the notes of the song gather fullness and reverberate through the house.He sings a phrase and repeats it exactly; then he sings another and repeats that, then another.The mockingbird’s invention is limitless; he strews newness about as casually as a god.He is tireless, too; towards June he will begin his daily marathon at two in the morning and scarcely pause for breath until eleven at night.I don’t know when he sleeps.When I lose interest in a given bird, I try to renew it by looking at the bird in either of two ways.I imagine neutrinos passing through its feathers and into its heart and lungs, or I reverse its evolution and imagine it as a lizard.I see its scaled legs and that naked ring around a shiny eye; I shrink and deplume its feathers to lizard scales, unhorn its lipless mouth, and set it stalking dragonflies, cool-eyed, under a palmetto.Then I reverse the process once again, quickly; its forelegs unfurl, its scales hatch feathers and soften.It takes to the air seeking cool forests; it sings songs.This is what I have on my chimney; it might as well keep me awake out of wonder as rage.Some reputable scientists, even today, are not wholly satisfied with the notion that the song of birds is strictly and solely a territorial claim.It’s an important point.We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing.We need someone to unlock the code to this foreign language and give us the key; we need a new Rosetta stone.Or should we learn, as I had to, each new word one by one? It could be that a bird sings I am sparrow, sparrow, sparrow, as Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests: “myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.” Sometimes birdsong seems just like the garbled speech of infants.There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.Today I watched and heard a wren, a sparrow, and the mockingbird singing.My brain started to trill why why why, what is the meaning meaning meaning? It’s not that they know something we don’t; we know much more than they do, and surely they don’t even know why they sing.No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question.It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing.If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formulae for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant.The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? I hesitate to use the word so baldly, but the question is there.The question is there since I take it as given, as I have said, that beauty is something objectively performed—the tree that falls in the forest—having being externally, stumbled across or missed, as real and present as both sides of the moon [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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