catapult magazine

catapult magazine
 

Vol 12, Num 9 :: 2013.04.26 — 2013.05.09

 
 

Meditation on circular patterns

The record spins to the end of the last song.  As I sit in the darkness listening to the needle’s scratchy silence, I imagine a farmer and horse dragging a plough across a field.  I think about his straight line following the path of the sun as it circles overhead.  “Tsch — tsch — tsch,” goes the record.  The revolution’s rhythmic pulse imprints on my mind.  I follow its circular logic…    

…and remember the magnificent pine tree, cut down last week in my neighbor’s yard.  The house shook when it hit the ground.  The change in scenery was disorienting at first, but it only took two days to get used to the gaping hole where the tree once stood.  When no one was looking I approached the stump and observed a beautiful circular pattern of dark and light lines.   Not being a reader of dead trees, I wondered what mysteries of time an expert like Andrew Ellicott Douglass — whose name is planted on craters of the moon and Mars — would be able to detect since he was…

…the first of the world’s dendrochronologists.  His interpretive technique led to the dating of the Anasazi dwellings in Arizona — circa 1200 BCE, the Early Basketmaker II Era.  The peoples of this era wove bundles of grass into coiled baskets and evolved into a fully agrarian society.  Didn’t Derrida say something once or twice about agriculture being the beginning of written language?  Or, more precisely…

…the moment one passes “from one writing to another.”  

A wise man once said, “The sun rises and the sun sets, then hurries around to rise again.”  Yet there are those who still seek the origin of all kinds of things, who believe that moving from one cause to the next all the way back to the beginning will get them closer to God.  Finding origins to explain what is fearfully unknown requires a linear view of history.  But is history merely a line…

…to get from point A to point B?  As I write, I imagine the farmer again, this time sowing rows of letters, moving from one side of the field to the next.  He deposits word after word on the barren landscape.  When he reaches one end he begins another and then, after a period, waits for his sentence.  This is an act of faith, no doubt.  There will be years of good fortune and years of famine.  His is a cyclical life oriented to the sun and the seasons.   Beneath his feet, layer upon layer of soil, sand and rock accumulate and disperse at varying rates as they have for cycle after cycle of the sun, leaving chronology for the rock readers and nutrients for the trees as they grow their hidden rings.              

In this moment, accompanied by the abyss at the end of a record, everything seems meaningless and still…

“Tsch — tsch — tsch…” 

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