April Diary 31: in conclusion

 

Dear April what have we learned from this so-called diary?

• blogging the way i used to blog is still fun and apparently i still have things to say (not such a surprise since i live alone)
• it’s possible to create blog posts entirely on the phone by assembling notes, scraps of poems and photos during the course of the day
• creating this additional daily post did mean i sometimes had to sacrifice a full night’s sleep, so for that reason i’m glad it’s over—finishing the Pepys diary erasure project is a higher priority right now
• i don’t have a whole lot to say about what i read. i don’t read nearly as much literary criticism as i used to and it shows. sadly (or not) i have no immediate plans to rectify this situation for the simple reason that life is short
• i’m clearly incapable of separating poetry from other aspects of my life. why i thought i could write a poetry-focused diary is a mystery to me
• so glad i decided not to try to use the series plugin for the pepys project years ago. it’s still as buggy as ever

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today i put in all the cole crop seedings from the nursery. after two years of deep mulching the soil is in much better shape than it was last year, so i have high hopes. i even talked to the seedlings as i tucked them into their little hills

also went for my usual walk but it was work. guess i was tireder than i thought. the best thing i saw was two black-throated green warblers having a sing-off from adjacent trees up on the ridgetop where the canopy is lower so i had pretty good views for once. they’d sing, grab an insect out of the air, sing some more, it was a pretty low-key contest, really

now sitting up in the woods after supper i find that the ethereal beauty of a singing hermit thrush becomes almost unbearable the moment i recall some of the unimaginable human suffering elsewhere on the planet. maybe this is why when i do listen to recorded music it’s something harsh and pounding. it makes the heavy truths of the world a little easier to face

(but most of what i hear in the course of a day is natural sound, by which i mean ambient sound (but a high proportion of that is nonhuman in origin, which is sadly a huge luxury in today’s world (but really what i hear is words. words in my head words on the page words on the screen audible words on videos words on podcasts words with other actual humans words words words. from the time i wake up till the time i fall asleep. not even my dreams are free of them. but when you listen really listen to something without words, whether instrumental music or the soundscape of a complex natural ecosystem, that can feel like you’re accessing a higher consciousness and i suspect that’s because a lifetime of language use has trained us to associate complex patterned sound with communication. to listen to natural sound means to hear everything as if it were a composition – a practice very akin to seeing natural landscapes as if they were wild gardens, something i do nearly every day. the concept of found art and found poetry goes far beyond art and literature proper, for me)))

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this dullness in my head all day. i can’t even imagine writing a haiku right now

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some say it was poems that drove him mad. some say henbane

“that’s not the wind it’s just old Mr. Thimblesticks out counting catkins”

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