Infinite Ground, Martin MacInnes

When a person goes, that habitat never comes back. An occupied room is a great diversity of life. The inspector would have limited time in Carlos’s office. It was the place to start. He was working against extinction. When his wife had died, it wasn’t just her body that had gone. She had been an incalculable volume, and there was nothing unusual about that. She didn’t stop at the edge; she had a field of life around her. Her scent, her appearance, her effect would have been wholly different if even one day of her biography were omitted. There was a frame around her, a hive, a community created by the kind of thoughts she had and the way she spun her hands and moved her feet. It wasn’t just that she had gone; more than her had been devastated. Biodiversity was weaker.

.

.

.

It was only later that he thought of further evidence for his theory, wishing he’d presented it at the time. In long-established couples, especially the elderly, who are very sensitive to change, the death of one frequently leads to the death of the other. It is not a romantic thing, not a death of the heart, he had thought, and neither is it simply a matter of grief-induced stress weakening the immune system and leaving the widowed more vulnerable to infection; no, it is about a home space undergoing a sudden violent extraction, disordering a balance that had been slowly and painstakingly built up over many years. It is about a new toxicity entering the home. Without her being there he was more exposed: her contribution to climate and atmosphere was significant, and now it was all shot to pieces. How could he trust the air in a room that was his alone? The idea was ridiculous. There was no evidence to say that his routines and behaviours were fit and able, any longer, to make a viable living space – such things ought to be checked, he thought, as soon as someone leaves, rather than simply trusting them to get on with it, just as if nothing had happened.

The Garden of Forking Paths- Jorge Luis Borges

 I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind.

I Envy the Wind

 I envy the wind

Lucinda Williams

That whispers in your ear
That howls through the winter
That freezes your fingers
That moves through your hair
And cracks your lips
That chills you to the bone
I envy the wind

I envy the rain
That falls on your face
That wets your eyelashes
and dampens your skin
And touches your tongue
And soaks through your shirt
And drips down your back
I envy the rain

I envy the sun
That brightens your summer
That warms your body
And holds you in her heat
That makes your days longer
And makes you hot
And makes you sweat
I envy the sun
I envy the wind, I envy the rain, I envy the sun, I envy the wind

Best Laid by Maureen N. McLane

it’s clear
the wind
won’t let up
and a swim’s out —
what you planned
is scotched.

forget the calls,
errands at the mall —
yr resolve’s
superfluous
as a clitoris.

how miraculous
the gratuitous —
spandrels,
cathedrals.

on a sea
of necessity
let’s float
wholly
unnecessary
& call
that free

The Diseased, Katchy Acker

The diseased

I want all of you out there to shut up.
I'm going to live the ways we want to live.
What do you want of me now?
Liver, blood, guts?
The only thing left is madness.

You too’re gonna drive yourself to the pits:
You're gonna walk on coals through blazing fires:
You're gonna drink down the world's most painful poisons:
That's what wanting love is.

My man isn't like other men.
He can keep you in prison.
He can make you do anything.
I know why all of you want him.

But worse, what happens
if my Slave Trader
for some stupid reason
happens to like you?

Then you’re screwed:
no more sleep
Nor will he let you keep your eyes.
He compulsions alone can fetter forces wildness.
How many times a spineless being you'll run to

all the weaky friends you formerly despised,
tremulous sorrow will arise with tears shuddering
warts and pimples and fleas’ll appear on your skin
all your wishes’ll go, words are no more,
you'll never again now who you are.

You'll learn to serve him, girl, to be whatever he wants,
to disappear whenever he wants you to go.
You'll learn why people who want, want to die
why the whole world are lies.
Your rich parents ain't helping:
cause Love's more powerful than social climbing.
But if even small you have given footsteps of your failure
how quickly from such a reputation you will be a murmur!
Not I then I will be able to comfort to bear to asking you

‘Cause I'm sick too.
At this point sicker than you.
My disease is forever.
I know no comfort.
Since we're both maniacs,
let’s be nice to each other.
I myself want to live.
I want to burn.
all I ask is no one loves me
in return.

Studio 5, The Stars (The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1), J G Ballard

 Every evening during the summer at Vermilion Sands the insane poems of my beautiful neighbour drifted across the desert to me from Studio 5, The Stars, the broken skeins of coloured tape unravelling in the sand like the threads of a dismembered web. All night they would flutter around the buttresses below the terrace, entwining themselves through the balcony railings, and by morning, before I swept them away, they would hang across the south face of the villa like a vivid cerise bougainvillaea. 

Once, after I had been to Red Beach for three days, I returned to find the entire terrace filled by an enormous cloud of coloured tissues, which burst through the french windows as I opened them and pushed into the lounge, spreading across the furniture and bookcases like the delicate tendrils of some vast and gentle plant. For days afterwards I found fragments of the poems everywhere.

Some Thoughts on Narrative (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places), Ursula K. LeGuin

 Surely the primary, survival-effective uses of language involve stating alternatives and hypotheses. We don’t, we never did, go about making statements of fact to other people, or in our internal discourse with ourselves. We talk about what may be, or what we’d like to do, or what you ought to do, or what might have happened: warnings, suppositions, propositions, invitations, ambiguities, analogies, hints, lists, anxieties, hearsay, old wives’ tales, leaps and cross-links and spiderwebs between here and there, between then and now, between now and sometime, a continual weaving and restructuring of the remembered and the perceived and the imagined, including a great deal of wishful thinking and a variable quantity of deliberate or non-deliberate fictionalizing, to reassure ourselves or for the pleasure of it, and also some deliberate or semi-deliberate falsification in order to mislead a rival or persuade a friend or escape despair; and no sooner have we made one of these patterns of words than we may, like Shelley’s cloud, laugh, and arise, and unbuild it again. 

In recent centuries we speakers of this lovely language have reduced the English verb almost entirely to the indicative mood. But beneath that specious and arrogant assumption of certainty all the ancient, cloudy, moody powers and options of the subjunctive remain in force. The indicative points its bony finger at primary experiences, at the Things; but it is the subjunctive that joins them, with the bonds of analogy, possibility, probability, contingency, contiguity, memory, desire, fear, and hope: the narrative connection. As J. T. Fraser puts it, moral choice, which is to say human freedom, is made possible “by language, which permits us to give accounts of possible and impossible worlds in the past, in the future, or in a faraway land.”