I accepted an invitation to visit new friends in the mountains nearby Lucerne. They are artists and also trade in illuminated manuscripts. For a week they shared the most beautiful experiences, objects and stories from their life. Switzerland provided an overwhelming abundance of beauty, curiosity, thoughtful design and delicious cheese.
Coming down from the mountains, culture paled into distraction and consolation.
A friend described a photo I sent as breathtaking and I responded
also breath giving… I was in the lake this evening after a quick strong rain and I was on my back with split tail birds flying overhead, very close and I put my feet on the ground with the water up to my chest and my head in the air and experienced the sublime, a feeling of one and something like laughing and crying moved through me and I wept into the water, it was so beautiful.
It was not the most poetic writing, and feels like muddying the waters of the ineffable.
I remember earlier swimming up slowly to an insect on the surface of the water. I had seen the swallows each night at dusk when they would careen through the air. The insect was remarkably calm as I swam up to them. I watched the common swift (I learned) take them in two attempts and it colored the sublime in a terrible hue. I felt for some reason like the insects presence was related to a passed relative.
The birds felt closer to me that day and my mother came to me in a dream later, at least preparations for her and I to take a flight to the ocean, or so I remember in the half-sleep. I was concerned with the effects of air travel on her health. Something feels loosened or unblocked, though far from healed, resolved.
I’ve been thinking of Simone Weil and a recent translation of a little known essay on Occitan troubadour poetry that has been folded into another life. Lisa Robertson troubles this muscular piece of insightful juvenilia with annotations, poetry and dialogue. With humility, respect and uncertainty towards her subject, and their long shared times. I gave my copy and Crary’s Scorched Earth to my hosts.
