CLICK HERE FOR BLOGGER TEMPLATES AND MYSPACE LAYOUTS »

Sunday, January 25, 2009

dry snow-covered plain

wind-swept drifts shift ceaselessly

miscarrying time

Posted by Pat Trombly at 7:50 PM  

3 comments:

Pat Trombly said...

First draft of this was Friday night after the one about the egg - of which I'm quite proud - but ironically, it took me three days to come up with "miscarrying."

This was influenced by Creative Evolution, a book by Henri Bergson, who ironically, typically wrote entire sentences with more than seventeen words, much less seventeen syllables.

Time is such an artificial construct - humans feel a need to mark time, to measure everything, and this requires a definite beginning and end. But in reality, all creation just perpetually advances - the past is constantly evolving into the present. The present moment is just all prior moments pushed forward to now, culminating in now - except that the present then evolves again. We, for purposes of measurement, assign values. Nature knows cycles, seasons, but not time per se. Nature has processes that occur and recur but it is not time the way we perceive it: there will be another Spring but it won't look exactly like last Spring. I thought the barren blankess, the whiteness of the snow-covered plain would illustrate this - it is obviously winter but the reader cannot tell what month it is, or where precisely the narrative is taking place. Just a dry wind-swept plain - it could be high, low - it could be Kansas, it could be Mongolia. Either way, a white abyss.

January 25, 2009 at 8:20 PM  
diana l. said...

"A white abyss"? -- methinks winter's dragging on a bit too long for many of us by now...

January 25, 2009 at 9:18 PM  
diana l. said...

By the way, I think that the word "miscarrying" was definitely worth the three day wait. This is just beautiful.

January 27, 2009 at 11:25 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)