the photo is by leander o'johnsell taken in a 6th floor installation at the whitney biennial. the artist's name escapes me. i'm always thinking about trees, looking at them, trying to coax them into schooling me about something i need to be schooled on. the two trees i evoke are not trees i contemplated for as long as an altogether other tree i peered at and poked and pulled a leaf off with not a syllable set down in its name. the text is my status update on facebook sunday may 7 2017 with a definition of the word used in paragraph one, a word i only got a day before. this recording is unedited and unexpurgated.

Two Trees

Knowledge, like all things we lack, is only missed because it remains so completely and indissolubly ours: love, consciousness, oneness, ontology, strength, presence — indeed, life itself. All these and everything we find lost to us but for our reason — and for this reason we multiply illusory possessions that possess us like the accursed lot that maddens the late, retarded armies of the damned. There is no wisdom for philosophers to adore by rethinking, no second thoughts to recognize what only time would pretend to offer as if it draws a line that could be real. Think: we cannot know what things are for if we cannot know that we have answered our every question by denying the fact that no one but we had to ask. Think: not again but when we can never touch flesh to object then we must mean an even deeper sense our rulers try to measure in ciphers that resemble symbols for the crests and troughs we resonate in the wake of undulating light-speed out here out of this space everywhere unfulfilled, a sucking vacuum, still and weightless, a shiftless levity exhumed of human gravity stripped of metrics, skinned of scales, ersatz organs piped through dream vessels harried on to lie in wakes that fail to hurry love snapped out of it all at once to be spoken for loud and clear and now here — actually alive, healed of any holes. Whole and on a mend.

normandouglas