from “Notation”
Jordan Dunn | Notation | Thirdhand Books | December 2024
4-15-21 Ames, IA
. . . the call of a red-winged blackbird as I lift my head to study the maple buds against the deep green backdrop of the pine, where the maple buds serve as a bright visual cue to keep dwelling there even though the source of the sound remains hidden despite the feeling of visibility in the blackbird’s call or my recognition of its pattern, like the buzzing robin-like sounds emanating from the starlings along the creek whom I listened to this morning, their near-mimicry sly yet resplendent with the whistled trills for which they are best known: “the robin’s voice seemingly set in the starling filter of morning, the call's memory as I crouch to examine the large-flowered bellwort rising from a wreath of trout lily and hepatica leaves, its yellow flowers drooping at the end of thin stems, and as I lean further to see if I can view the inside of the flower without propping it up, my ear nearly touches the ground as my cheek brushes the ephemeral leaves from which the bellwort rises; there must be some greater point to the day than lying prostrate along the trail, I'm thinking, as I lift my head to study the boxelder buds sprouting liberally from beneath the chainsaw cut on the margin of Bear Creek, the buds are insistent that the roots' energy is expressed despite the trunk’s non-existence, and there is little evidence I have tried to live a single moment with such vigor, there are only repetitions of sunlight across the sand shallows of the creek fading and growing with intensity as the clouds come and go and I find my footing upon the trail, where there is nothing profound, where there is no profundity in the long-beaked sedge, only this song of visibility to carry further into the day as I remember the various forms of assignment I have given myself to justify the splendid non-being of my mind in relation to the ironwoods” — “no more singing // milkweed seeds floating in and above the / river as I paddled past the forest a huge / cottonwood and the fir beside it // a forest to look at those two floating by // light in the highest west-facing / cottonwood leaves and in the shadows / the same orange in the cones hanging / from the smaller fir tree’s upper branches // a yellow leaf floated by suspended steady / and floating below the surface,” which patterned for me the mimicry of desire, that is, the desire to go outside and become a thing in a world despite already being a being in the world, the desire to be more than oneself through the observation of the outer world and its way of becoming internalized through this music we bring forward to the moment of composition — a dryad’s saddle on the felled boxelder is fresh and therefore deeper brown with less conspicuous spotting than those marks on older specimens, which calls to mind, for some reason, the dark red chevron on the jumpseed leaves newly risen below the mushroom shelf, where supposedly the dryad, the nymph of the forest, would sit in contemplation, and though I myself have not seen a nymph I remember my friend’s mother who told me she had stopped cutting her lawn because the long grass was more pleasurable for the nymphs that lived in the woods behind her house, and I remember the feeling of not knowing what to say exactly, I mentioned something about fireflies, there were more fireflies in her yard than her neighbor’s yard, and she said yes, the firefly spirits too, it is good for them as well, both the firefly spirits and the nymphs who speak to them, and if I sit out in the clear evening I can hear the murmurs of their conversations, she said, though she didn’t know what they were saying exactly, but she was certain the nymphs were speaking to one another and that they were tending to something essential in the forest that we, as humans, don’t know how to nurture, so that now as I reach out to touch the dryad’s saddle I try to parse out her madness from her intuition that we fail to listen carefully enough to powers whose voices grow faint in the confines of our own effacement; that same summer I read Speak, Memory and twenty years later it looped back again in Sebald’s butterfly man: “I did not know what to reply, but I nodded, and, though everything else around me blurred, I saw that long-forgotten Russian boy as clearly as anything, leaping about the meadows with his butterfly net; I saw him as a messenger of joy, returning from that distant summer day to open his specimen box and release the most beautiful red admirals, peacock butterflies, brimstones and tortoiseshells to signal my final liberation,” I have been waiting for the butterfly man all these years though he has yet to arrive, however, the mourning cloaks are out today vis-à-vis Chuck’s text in response to the picture I sent of my children balancing on the hackberry log, “look at them kicking up the mourning cloaks,” his reference to the butterfly’s use of hackberries as host trees, his distinguishing the tree in the photo by the ridgelines and furrows of its unmistakable bark, the text arrived while I had coffee with Cage’s book M lying open before me: “To finish for Lois programmed / handwritten mushroom / book / including mushroom stories, / excerpts from (mushroom) books, / remarks about (mushroom) hunting, / excerpt from Thoreau’s Journal / (fungi) / excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal / (entire) / remarks about: / Life/Art, / Art/Life, / Life/Life, / Art/Art, / Zen, / Current reading, / Cooking (shopping, recipes), / Games, Music mss, Maps, / Friends, / Invention, / Projects, / + / Writing without syntax,” Cage's impulse to exclude nothing, to include everything, to create an open frame that functions as a material network served as a model for me during the devastating weeks after Brad died in 2019: “I’ve started this open notebook approach to my writing in which I am unable to imagine containing things in styles any longer, putting everything together: notes, pictures, sketches, poems, attempts at poems, etcetera, and since moving here last August I’ve thought about writing a book of letters, a relaxed epistolary as a way out of isolation,” I put it down around the time I was helping to organize Brad’s memorial service, then life fell into the pandemic, but for me the idea of the perfect book remains thousands of unbound sheets, photographs, and notes spread across a vast table in a skylit warehouse, as this is where I find myself now, studying the text of my walk, the names that fill the pages of the walk, the endless referents opening along the trail as Creeley’s lines grow resonant, “words, words / as if all / worlds were there,” my attempt to step out of foolishness while remaining in a parallel lightness is not so hard if I lose a grip on expectation, sit by the river, and breathe deeply with the kingfisher; is this Lispector’s interval, the moment between moments that I do not remember, the invisible matter of the interlayered network of being, I am not so sure, yet further up the trail there is a field overtaken by sumac that forms a savanna where I’m greeted by what appears to be a Psychomorpha, a black moth, a daytime flyer, small, seemingly a butterfly but decidedly not a butterfly, it moves on above the sumac then down toward a juniper: “Into that arena of radiance, moths would come drifting out of the solid blackness around me, and it was in that manner, upon that magic sheet, that I took a beautiful Plusia (now Phytometra) which, as I saw at once, differed from its closest ally by its mauve-and-maroon (instead of golden-brown) forewings, and narrower bractea mark and was not recognizably figured in any of my books,” thinking of how Ratcliffe opens More Rocks, “cloud, suddenly / there is one and // after that two, / how mitosis // in cells goes on,” wondering whether the perception of the clouds shifted during Ratcliffe’s hike in the Sierra Nevada in 1994, whether he saw one cloud at first that then proved to be two, like the cell that is one but then becomes two, then becomes four, “stopping to look / down at it, I // who also stop / thinking this, that // is, what might be / in syllables // meant by this, this / being the end,” as though there is a necessary difference between this moment of perception and the reality of the clouds, their division and the relation between memory and the access to memory in the clouds of time, not a narrative, I remember, but a pathway between other pathways with no good reason for my having chosen one or the other, such that when I look back through a thicket of time I grow satisfied not by the plain texture of my life’s story, not by the secure structure of its becoming, but by the sheer unreliability of its patterning, as if my self divides but I remain unaware of its division until I return to my starting point — the call of a red-winged blackbird as I lift my head to study the maple buds against the deep green backdrop of the pine, several photos atop a stack of books illuminating the present moment along with Rick’s manuscript, A Duration, the moments I appear there as Jordan, and when L or Lewis or L or Lisa appear in the same passage I desire completely to be transported inside the text, to take up residence there, the way one may for a long time stare into a photograph and actuate the contours of its prior reality that somehow brushes against the present with such startling intensity the interval evaporates beyond the serviceberry flowering on the hillside above me . . .