Notes from the Editor’s Desk — 4/7/21

I watch a mourning dove produce from the shadow of shrubs that obscure the base of dwarf tress and watch as it move along in study of the ground before it. With a purpose plain to it and obscure to me, it takes a stem in its beak, hesitating for a moment, before its wingspan carries off the weight as though the stem was weightless. The flap of wings delivers it to a light fixture where I see the unruly collection of many such deliveries. Looking to the other fixtures, I become aware of the work of many beaks, many the flaps of wings that plied their industry to fulfill spring’s imperatives, all of which had been as though invisible to me. I make a conscious effort to identify the interests of nature by name, referencing a clutch of field guides, and find that the process of cataloging the lineaments of nature does more than ornament — it rather allows me to see the extent of what surrounds me. A theme of Joyce’s heterocosm is the signification of names. Bloom is associated with the body; but the propagation of his thought, akin to what in a flower, as it unfurls at nature’s bidding, we call a bloom, is borne out from the instruction of the entrails. Life’s furthest reaches are derived from its basic elements. It is in our present panic that we can either let our bowels sicken us or become the basis of our health.