MICROCOSM,MACROCOSM

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writers’ musings:

“…language describes the idea of the one who speaks…”

August Wilson

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MICROCOSM, MACROCOSM                                                                  

It would have been the Catskills, in the east.  It would have been a leafy humid road.  It would have been summer, when all was fecund and nourished, with deep layers of green unfurling into the depths of the woods on either side.  And what else?  Black deepening the green.  There would be a darkness, a little frightening, a little beckoning into the trees and the underbrush.  There would, too, be a startle of color, an upsurge of orange wanding out from speared leaves, tiger lilies in bloom, wild and wonderful at roadside.  There would be the deep thrum of insects living, dying, eating, procreating.  The invisible ones forming the thrum were somehow more mystical than the crazed little no-see-ums that assault the nostrils and eyelashes, tiny airborne torturers irritating the complexion of Eden.  The macadam of the road would roll out ahead, undulating, and there might be no certainty of destination or distance even if one knew how long and how far.  There might be a sighting of cranes, flying out of and back into the summer’s haze.

The tangle and weight of the humus dank with moisture on a country road in summer in the east, in the Catskills, are so different than the findings of a sojourner in the west.  Water.  So palpably absent on a summer’s day along a road in pinon pine country where scented cedar permeates the air, the dry needles underfoot breaking in submission, the soil white or red with minerals, forming the dried clay of the earth in the west with no black undertones.  Grey, rather.  A silvery metallic heat-tinged light would seemingly come up from the ground and there would be nothing resembling haze in the distances, only a clarity that could hold a threat to the seduction of space.

All this I have had in my life.  And more.  Much more.  An alpen stroll.  An Australian desert.  A Caribbean beach.  The English Lakes.  A Canadian track.  And it is said that Johann Sebastian Bach hardly traveled more than fifty miles from his birthplace.  The same is said of Shakespeare.

written 2.17.15

byline Judith Auberjonois