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| squint to see the ginormous crane |
[post title steals an infectious term from Stephanie Trigg]
More things that have helped me get work done: crisp mornings that make running a pleasure. Birds, because their energy and song are omnipresent right now. (They just sing for no reason, right? It's not a mating thing is it? Because that would sully the role of chorus that I've assigned them -- they are supposed to exist to help me get work done, not for any primal reasons of their own). A huge and out of place bluish crane I passed as it fished from Little Falls brook, which has brought me luck. A porch that we added to our house last year that has become my favorite place to write. Engagement with what I've been undertaking; nothing ruins writing like making a chore of it.
As this abbreviated week comes to its end I find myself in a surprising position. I've completed the drafts of three essays (only the shortest of which was written from scratch). Welcome into inchoate being "Race" (for Blackwell's Critical Theory Handbook to Middle English) "Queering the Inorganic" (for the collection Queer Futures: Reconsidering Normativity, Activism and the Political) and "Giants" (Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters). Whew!
I've also managed to put together a possible table of contents for a new edited collection that has me energized. Its point of departure is this blog post, but I don't want to jinx it other than to say orange, greener, pink, blue, brown, possibly grey or white, with others on the way. Very preliminary, I know, but I will post more in the not too distant future.
Can't say for sure, but I think that's a Great Blue Heron there, not a crane. Just trying to keep you honest.
ReplyDeleteAlso, your spectrum has been rattling around my head, and I keep coming back to brown, which to me is the color of muck and decay in all its fecundity. I think of summers tromping through the marshes of the Eastern Shore; some people say they are ugly and stinky, but to me they look and smell like greenest paradise.
oh that spectrum is beautiful.
ReplyDeletebut i have to agree with ben that brown evokes a more natural environment... (natural is not the work i'm looking for but you know what i mean.) i'm currently plonked in the middle of a very ugly built environ, and it's more grey than anything else... grey streaked with garish colour.
and your productivity is terrifying.
Ben, having now looked it up on line, I think your eye is very good: a great blue heron. It was HUGE, and flew away when I tried a closer picture. What it was doing fishing from an urban stream like Little Falls I have no idea ...
ReplyDeleteBen and Meli, as to brown: I updated the post to reflect that an inspiration during running had a famous theorist of blue ecologies email me last night to change his color to brown, the shade of decay, fecundity, and marshiness.
Meli, built environments can, I suppose, be any color. In the original post I chose brown because I always think of the brown smear you can see in the atmosphere as you approach a city from a distance. But you know what, if someone would be do "graish" as the color of a built environ, I'd be totally into that!
They just sing for no reason, right? It's not a mating thing is it? Because that would sully the role of chorus that I've assigned them -- they are supposed to exist to help me get work done, not for any primal reasons of their own
ReplyDeleteBut! Remember! We all do what we do for reasons that exceed what we know. No reason to flatten out the psyche of the bird.
No reason to think in terms of psyche, anyway. An OOPer might observe that the song impacting you (among others) creates a new object. Take this object as you receive it. And Know it better to enjoy it more. And know that your enjoyment, like the bird's, and like the object you and the bird make of your contact, is always slipping away from any one explanation.
There's an interior to that song object inaccessible either to you or to the bird to itself, and accessible to others in other ways in enjoyments beyond our imagining or time.