to peruse it

[continued from the last post]


It's a nightmare of dying for the small thing, everybody stands there, nobody reacts, the player character runs on unconcerned, the non-player characters go on shifting their feet or bouncing on their toes, and yet the scenery the little creatures run through while they're living (call that living) is sweetly fresh, O the green slopes, O the high silent trees on their beautiful roots, and the little morsel collapses with a squeak, gone, gone, gone -- I once shot a moth and it flew on with the arrow emitted upwards for at least three seconds, distressing even now.

The wild joy depends on the presence of the second rock, and then an implied third rock, a fourth rock, and unnumbered other rocks, infinite rocks, untold wildness, limitless joy, freedom promised to Saul, who feels glum and impermeable, a brick wall sitting there, depressed in spite of David's singing and his lyre: depressed when the younger man came into the tent to cheer him up, his chest heaves, he folds his arms, he pushes David by the hair and and stares at him.

Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: thro' my hair
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, with kind power --
All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower.

But my point, which I was going to reach sooner or later, is that ideas might come from corporeal instances, we hear a description of death and so we think of death, or we see something else and think of death, as in Proust, or we see death and think of something else, eg, spoons, letter-openers (one string of our internal web has been touched), we see a stork chase a bat away from its nest and conclude that the bat must be damaging the eggs (though why the Ancient Greeks and Romans thought it made them sterile I don't know -- there's an unanswered mystery) -- and so we have to wonder where this love of pairs comes from, we think, we consider, we look around, and the conclusion comes with massive logic:because we have feet, and how many feet?

Two feet -- which require maintenance, and which reward us by carrying us here and there, the brain understanding its situation and developing an innate respect for pairs as it feels those two feet moving parataxically, ie, constantly near one another yet not intimately connected anywhere along their length. The hip bone bridges the gap between the legs but it doesn't remove that gap. So we love pairs, it's very natural. Which leads me of course to think of the mysterious recurrence of threes and trios in fairy tales, and my brain is conducted to a further conclusion -- which is? -- that in the past we must have had three legs, and developed a love of threes, and either jolted across the earth like mobile tripods on three staffs or else rolled like the triskelion in the story that one character tells the others in Christina Stead's Salzburg Tales. Possibly a fossil record of this somewhere, quint-limbed in the lava.