ON SPACE AND TIME
What is The revolution of cells upon us? The revolution of cells upon us is what should be added to the wall text
of drawing exhibits everywhere, even if all you have is a pencil, and even though most pencils are
made of cedar and cedars have tree rings whereas tropical trees have none on account of their
constant spring growth, I guess you could say you can't have one without the other, winter and spring
I mean, which is actually just like how fingerprints make themselves into fingerprints, I'm saying the
blooming and the burying, only the seasons don't really have anything to do with it, that was just a
metaphor! But metaphorically speaking it's definitely true that the top layer is kind-of a springtime, in
terms of human skin I mean, and the bottom more of a tundra, on account of the slow-mo growth, I
mean the way the bottom layer grows so much slower than the top layer so that the top layer literally
shoots out over the sides and down into its own winter, buckling in on the under-layers into little
mini-ridges and valleys, cold and stark across the field. Now what seasons falls from our hands? Cover
the roof in mud and it will be covered in seeds! Even though it can be hard to get enough pressure
from a pencil the way you can with a pen, I mean in terms of welting deep into the wall so that it
really takes a good amount of sanding to remove any residual inscription on the inner wall like if a
drought came along one summer or insects one year ate up all the leaves, which almost never happens
to century plants! And is another example of timeless vegetation that doesn't actually bloom every
hundred years but more like every ten or twenty maybe more depending on the climate, and so being
less time-oriented and more space-oriented really gets to the whole point of how things are a
returning, like how Kenneth Patchen said, not returning, but a returning. The tips of my hands upon
the tips of my hands. And a going, a going, and the stars!
**
WHY THINGS GROW UP
Plus all sun-bleached things are a kind of nebulae if you look at them close enough, like how garlic
pollen-grains look like flying saucers and evening primrose is a dead ringer for Saturn! O barriers of
the cosmos! Which is just like how ancient people used to go out and cut down wild date palm
branches along the riverbank to bring back and parade around their own date palm orchards dancing
and singing harvest songs like "Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow" only a different version of course
with more appropriate grains and fruits to their time and place, and you could probably just make up
the jig part, but the point is galactic pollen wilding upon the earth, you just can't have one without the
other! Which is just like how calling the stars a light show is always ridiculous unless you've ever been
to one of those choral concerts where the singers all pour in from the back of the theater and then
down the aisles and then climb up onto the stage in waves, which makes you feel like you're waving
too and is probably the point. Some non-Freudian psychologists say the reason we say falling in and
out of love is on account of our human orientation of limited space, but Michaux talks about
accidentally walking on the ceiling instead of the ground in a moment of distraction, so I'm not sure
how that plays into love per se but it works for space and bodies, like how one little yellow pollen-
grain on a single strand of silk makes one little yellow kernel in an otherwise solid white ear of corn.
Where are you falling now? And what about the seeds of potatoes that practically no one uses to grow
anything anymore? Where do the barrel-shaped pollens of the potatoes go? Where do they bury their
faces in the bleached bleached hands of the earth?
**
WHY THINGS GROW ANYWAY
Two fingerprints diverged in a wood. Good thing they were tied together! Actually it's common
practice all over the world to give camels the hides of their dead calves to let down their milk, also
cows, which is just proof again that holding is only ever remembering. Leathering the light.
**
ON CYCLES AND RETURNINGS
Some people say chicken of the woods is called chicken of the woods on account of the way it sticks
out from the tree just like how chickens stretch out their necks and pop up onto the tips of their toes
at the first sign of any kind of atmospheric circus come up off the trees, in long silent tails that string
out from your hands and momentarily bathe you in some kind of backwards time just before you
realize you better get shaking, I mean weathervanes don't look like chickens for nothing, people! But
then other people say it's on account of the color and feather-like cascades down the side of the tree
and then even other people say it's because of the texture, but obviously they're talking about cooked
chicken, into the wind the body of the bloom, like how no matter which way you turn an egg around
the yolk always goes right back up to the top, chicken eggs I mean but it's probably true for all eggs,
right back up like a barrel at sea or a barrel at river or even a barrel at little creek in the earth because
obviously it doesn't actually end anywhere, the sea I mean, not the barrel, and even as I say this I'm at
sea which is also the clouds, but that's another cycle, and also has everything to do with the way the
air washes through all the little invisible holes of an eggshell, I mean for the oxygen, to get back to the
chicken that is, once the yoke-umbilical-cord dries up and it starts to get the idea that it's time to crack
out of there, prepare our teeth to take ourselves with us.
**
ON KNOWING, KIND-OF
And while we're at it, it's totally natural to read "starlathered" as "slaughtered," so don't ever feel bad
about it if that happens to you, I mean first of all they have practically all the same letters, not to
mention the shared root words, and that's even before you get to the build-up of light, and who can
ever expect to read the word "starlathered" anyway? Like that parrot who only knew how to say, "My
feathers are not a tail because I cannot wag them," and who could ever expect a parrot to say that?
Every creature on earth denying their own existence, actually any bird can be taught to sing the song
of any other bird if you isolate it and play a recording of the other bird's song on repeat, which people
used to have to pay for and pretty steeply too but now it's free on youtube, so that the second bird
learns the first bird's song so well it replaces its own song completely, and then that way when the first
bird dies, its song lives on safe and sound in the second bird, although obviously meaning that now
the second bird's song is actually lost forever, which is maybe OK on an occasional basis but the
problem is when it's happening across whole species, and then genetically and generationally all the
way down to the very last one, I mean obviously, but it happens. Which makes me think of Kafka's
Josephine who died by her own piping, so to speak, strike a bell and touch your fingernail to its edge
for as long as you can feel the bell moving. Wait for the others to joins us. One way of explaining to
children how different languages developed is to say One day the children traveled too far from home
and being all alone with no adults to teach them had to start all over. Which happens, which happens.
Wrest Identity from Nothing shouldn't be said for anything but how Baldwin meant it and yet it falls
everywhere upon the mouths of the earth, upon the mouths of mouths, like the margins of fruit, like
the margins of margins.
**
ELIZABETH ZUBA is the author of two works of poetry, Decoherent The Wing’ed (SplitLevel Texts) and the chapbook May Double as a Whistle (The Song Cave). Her most recent book Frog Pond Splash: Collages by Ray Johnson with Texts by William S. Wilson (Siglio Press) was listed as a New York Times Best Art Book of 2020.
