The sun can always come back out, trees can always at least be spoken to, or rather, coaxed into engagement, given that they have hollows instead of tongues. I took a photo this evening of a tree stationed along the border of Tompkins Sq park in the periwinkle dusk and called it a Lorax moment…I loved that book so much as a child, and I also understood from the start that the enmity and righteous negativity within it was not my own, and so I didn’t "eat" it, just as I didn’t need to eat the second bread I’ve made in two days, this morning—what matters more so is the process of creation, of fulfilling a task set before me by some other, inner voice. When I was a baby, instead of the Lorax, I ate Clifford. I nibbled at his big red blob. As I was baking earlier I was listening to the various songs I’ve been attached to lately, including the one below by Bill Withers, a former janitor who received the original Maurizio Cattelan Guggenheim toilet as a gift when this record went gold…the song is about the home we find within ourselves, it is clear from the male narrator’s perspective that his female partner represents home for him, and holds it in her person. He knows he doesn’t really know her, but more so her value in what it does for him…he misses her sun. I am touched, I guess, by him recognizing the eye-burning opacity of the feminine, and wanting more…wanting she who has left to return…and beam on, the way even Rupert Everett found Beatrice Dalle entrancing to go out with…or like a favorite short story of mine as a preteen, Cynthia Ozick’s The Pagan Rabbi, in which the organic entices the human into slipping away and merging with it...but just as you go forward, take care as to who is left when you’re gone.
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