Notes from the Editor’s Desk — 6/3/21

Up before the dawn, tired representatives of an unexciting corner of an unexciting state, we sustain the banter developed with other vendors the weeks before, as we or they finish setting up tents, and speak with attendees who begin to traffic the corridors while the grass is still laden with dew and the sun has not yet surpassed the foremost leafs in the diadem of native trees. Traversing the roadways through neighborhoods that are familiar right when the morning breaks has an air of the ultimate about it. It is as a funeral march, a movement that is less than exuberant and yet, for all its bilious presentiments and colic comportment, cannot be waylaid. Mortality feels similarly purposed, as though it, a nothing, was a strain, for indeed the route taken to get here would not be travelled without a deadline and a purpose, namely this market, whereas the fault of glands and heaviness of eye are but panes upon this nothing, before which we might stand, but whose country we cannot observe. The experience of early morning puts in mind the cold tones of any day, even in the noons of summer, when all sense else succumbs to the impassioned observance of overtones. Traveling produced this tiredness, this pilgrim’s resignation, but I explore now the matters that youth wished to extrapolate upon in actual doings, regardless of the cost involved, in the abstract and in miniature. It is difficult to see how this morning figures into the sweep of a life, as in Rousseau’s Confessions, or inspires the rustic strength of songs by the Watersons, even though the set and setting follow in function, if not in form, of those bucolic modes. I take up my notebook from a stack of Husky plastic tubs as my folding chair sinks into the earth.

A moth and assorted other airborne insects hum about the garden. Orders of magnitude more insects, without the graceful adaptation observed at present, move about unseen. With thoughts bound up in the seed of a new venture, this time I set aside, idling in the mid-day sun, to feel again the action of all that plays out above the soil. Having returned from the lake, where I joined in the action forever at work, and lost my tiredness in its cold embrace, I do not plan to move until I, and the impression on the flagstones, are alike in that we are naught. My physique and my inclination, as I am discovering, may have always been that of a miller, and no more. Generations past must have carried the kernel in bags across the broad back I inherited, on and off of ships, or to market. Milling produces an expression of consciousness, as an integral, self-sufficient vehicle passes en masse into a dark receptacle, and produces with much clamor and in a violent fashion in a new form, a form more amenable to an express purpose and reward. An alive mind is forever at work at the task of foregrounding experience. An acolyte’s mind tries to offload this process to the actual matter of experience, and so seeks and seeks for it without comprehension. A dead mind feigns the act of foregrounding by adopting popular opinion, popular parlance, and popular practice, but thereby abandons meaning to history’s accidents.