Wednesday, November 18, 2020

The Thrum Escaped the Darkness of the Drum

We bought thirteen acres of undeveloped fields and woods of a former farm in Dexter Township, Washtenaw County, Michigan, a perfect twenty minutes away from my daughter's house, and roughly ten miles away from Ann Arbor, an hour, hour and a half from Detroit, traffic depending, near trails mostly flat but in the woods, a disc golf course five minutes by car, half an hour by walk (I've seen the baskets, haven't played, haven't played period since before the plague and months before that, the fuck wrong with me). If I build a course on the acres if you buy me a basket I'll print and post a nice Michigan winter-protected sponsorship sign thanking you, if you get in first the signature hole can be Your Name Memorial Hole

My single goal is if I must be a Michigan citizen it's not until 2025 (and is the rough timeline), I have no desire to live in a state where my vote counts for more than the nothing it counts for in Maryland, by 2028 nobody's vote will matter

This van was parked on campus last Friday, saw the slogan before I knew I can build a disc golf course in Michigan (yes, purpled out, this would be a stupid thing to get hassled over even though in praise of Serendipity)



Nothing more imminent, I love where I live now, and not just because my vote doesn't matter here, this an investment in an eventual future

Reminder: between me and blugger a blegroll disappeared, and now blugger be broken, can't add new blags to blegrolls, until it's fixed please (a) remind me if you were on that blegroll and (b), like Mongo did the day before yesterday, email me if you have a new post

UPDATE! Just was able to add a new bligrall down below Doctor Sevrin's ear from the layout page, bark at me you site, effing blooger seems to have fixed the issue





SIX REVISIONS

Jane Huffman

The doctor holds my chest against the discus, listens like the fish below the ice listens to the fisherman. “Medicine,” he says, “is not an exact science.”

He listens like the ice fisherman listens to the fish. I breathe into a nebulizer and think about translation—inexact art. A fine, particulate mist.

Snow has fallen on
still-green grass,
daubed with yellow leaves.


___

Three takes on a line from St. Augustine’s Confessions. An acquaintance posted one online to the delight of followers, of us, and in delight, I went to the source, the lexicon: three alike, online translators, some fishy, copied, pasted, fished out of the public sphere. And each rings like a different key.

Snow has fallen
on [yellow] grass, daubed with
[still-green] leaves.


___

Poor old pear-thief Augustine, half-biographer:

     1. “Where should my heart flee to in escaping from my heart?”
     2. “Where could my heart flee to in escaping from my heart.” [sic]
     3. “For where could my heart flee from my heart?”


[Grass] has fallen
on [still-white snow] daubed
with [yellow] leaves.


___

In the first translation is a hammering. “Should”—a moral judgment. An oiled object laid bare on a linen bed. “Shouldn’t” tied around the “should” with butcher’s string.

In the second, a yip, a certainty, desperate in its forwardness. “Where could?” as if the possible eluded him. To boot, denied its final mark. The thought falling from “Where could?” like rain from a cloud, a vanishing source.

Grass has fallen
on [yellow] snow daubed
with [snow-white] leaves.


___

“This will cut the cough off  from the brain,” the doctor says, offers me a tiny cup of codeine-orange syrup. The ache escapes like orange silk out of my orange lung. I slide into a mirror of my feelings, my face enlarged, expanding like a sponge. I grab at it.

The doctor says, “I lost it in the war.” He is talking about his thumb.

[Yellow leaves have] fallen
on [white] snow daubed
with [still-green grass].


_____

In the third Augustine translation is a thrum: “For / where / could / my / heart / flee / from / my / heart?” The thrum escaped the darkness of the drum. No “to” this time. The “to” escaped the darkness of the “from.”

Yellow leaves have fallen
on [green grass] daubed
with still-[white snow].

Notes:

Quotation sources, in order of appearance: 1. Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991); 2. A misprint of the Chadwick translation, transcribed on an online resource; and 3. Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown with translations by Michael Walsh (University of California Press, 1967).

7 comments:

  1. I hear it's lovely all year in Not-Michigan. Always between 23 and 30 degrees C and a breeze made to order.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've seen the machines they use to customize those Breezes. Impressive.

      Delete
  2. Congratulations! Assuming there's no house ("undeveloped"). Sounds like a plan. Best wishes!

    re: Eye fatigue. Did you forget the red light article I mentioned? https://scitechdaily.com/looking-at-deep-red-light-for-just-minutes-a-day-significantly-improves-declining-eyesight/

    More: https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/75/9/e49/5863431

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice news about the future course. An old boss once said if he purchased property, he would either build a parking garage or a golf driving range. He was only interested in the Bucks. Fuck him.

    In local news, I just added a Bloog to the Kaiser Roll.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Huron river. Dexter to Delhi Bridge rapids. Kyak or tunes.
    Lots of lakes. Snowmobiling. Greenfield village.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Robert. We've hiked much of the Waterloo-Pinckney Trail system, it's beautiful, what I lost in Maryland hills I gain in Michigan sunsets

      Delete
  5. What do you do when you’re lost in the woods?
    Stay where you are.
    School kids know it

    ReplyDelete