December 19, 2006
Love and loathe

I loathe the idea of cars, though not so much the notion that they are machines — not least because one almost ran me over in its haste from a Point A to a Point B on my way home — but more how we have come to use them and be used by them. That our feet have been mysteriously lifted off the road, so we have lost the ability to distinguish concrete from cobblestones. How they have allowed us to give importance to the destination rather than the journey, how they have the ability to take away a life to be able to give an arbitrary gain of time. How speed somehow became more important than time; time is money, therefore speed must be money too.

But speed changes the perspective of things. How does one gain an ability to recognise the silent resilience of dry winter's grass, carving moonlight shadow into a rock, if one has always passed too fast to see? What a marvellous catch-22, that those who are precious about their modern miracle of a vehicle, travelling much too fast to notice the earth from which they leech, that it should ever occur to them what could be lost — if they had never stopped?

~~~~~

People are surprised when I tell them I love the winter, the snow, and even the cold. Everyone knows that the snow is white, unforgiving, and dismisses landscape in an indiscriminate sweep. Everyone tells you so in their stories, in their movies, in the poems they wrote but never recited. But no one tells you that fresh snow sparkles at night, that walking in snow could make you feel like a tiny plastic creature in a snow globe that has been rigorously shaken. No one tells you snow ranges from white to grey, that it changes shape, that it could become ice sometimes, but not everywhere, and never all at once.

No one tells you that your winter is special because it's not winter everywhere at this moment, and probably not the same kind of winter. No one tells you that it could get too cold to snow ... No one dares break the news that perhaps we have forgotten how to look for the umbra and the penumbra, the mysterious point where they meet, how one cannot be entirely too certain where they begin and where they end, because we've flooded our lives with bright electric lights in the vain hope that they would help us see better.

(How can we even begin to partake in poetry, when we no longer have the ability to see?)

Posted by sniffles at 01:19 AM | Comments (1)