Polylith 018 —

Palm to stone two, slag

Hello you bright minds before glowing screens. This letter comes to you from a peninsula astride summer to the very end, where at sunset dragonfly wings shuffle overhead and monarchs lift from the rattling cottonwood leaves against a luminous backlit mineral sky. Sunlight arrives these days from an angle right at the wheeling edge of memory. Do you know what I mean?

We resume our work this month with the image of the cupped hand holding a little water, which last month inverted before our eyes to a dolomite boulder cool beneath the high-summer heat — and presently inverts yet again to a blazing crucible, awful and numinous as the cyclopean sun-disc itself sinking to the water. Could this be anything but a further invitation? On we go.

You can read the essay that originally accompanied this letter in Rising water / Palm to stone, a pamphlet I published in winter 2021.

A photograph of a reddish-brown clay brick bearing a four line hieroglyphic inscription on its upper face. Behind the inscription a bright blue amulet emerges from the brick in the abstracted form of a tree or spine. The brick sits on a featureless gray surface which fades to black in the background.

Clay magical brick with djed-pillar amulet, ca 1550-1077 BCE, Egypt

So yes, I’ll let that stand on its own for now. I will say that I intend this to be the first in a series of wonderings at the forgetting I mention there at the end. How, from here within the forgetting (remember, I speak as a settler myself), might we begin to dissolve its maladaptive shell? How might we, in the optimistic spirit of Ed Abbey, crack the dam? We’ll pick that up next month, but until then, do engage me with your own wonderings on the matter, wherever you may be.