Certitude kills writing. (Are you sure, Chris? No.) I read writing in which the author is certain of his or her ideas, and I never want to read anything by that person again.
There is a weed blooming in the backyard this week, something in the carrot family, whose bloom is a cluster of smaller flower clusters, each cluster a rough mirror of the ones it comprises — and the one it belongs to as well. From the vantage point of my porch I see three levels of cluster, three iterations of group-in-group. Have I gauged the complexity of the bloom from twenty feet away, or does the pattern extend down to the level of the individual flower atoms? At some point this week I will wander back there to take a closer look.
Certitude dismisses the fractal structure of the world, paves it over, turns meadow into concrete slab and then ignores the grasses struggling up through the cracks.
I exploded in a rather messy fashion this week at a man whose certitude led him to express hideously offensive sentiments. Or did the sentiments prompt the certitude? It occurs to me that I don’t really care. My anger had no effect.
Where are the stories of rabbits and birds and wildflowers struggling up through hard-baked clay hills? From what dark center comes this writing of bleak politics, of friends lost, of the massive and persistent harms we do one another?
I feel something welling up inside me these days. I cannot find the border between politics and prairie. How can I mention the mockingbirds that dive-bomb Zeke on our walks without noting my fear that they will be gone next year? How can I mention mosquito-borne bird plagues without raging at the liars who hold that climate-borne disease vectors are an acceptable cost of next quarter’s profit margin?
And how can I protest the liars without describing the world that could be, in which we would each have time to consider the structure of stray weeds growing in our path?
A friend — this one gone but not yet dead — once described me as someone who “listens to ravens and raves at the listless.” We agreed it was a clumsy phrase, but I liked it very much. There is something to the raven’s bark that defies interpretation. It sounds to my ears much as my rage must have sounded to the racist I berated this week: an unintelligible yet earnest entreaty to move in an unknown, inaccessible direction.
It seems a dreadfully confining world the certain inhabit.
I think about the stories I tell of absent friends, the walks through Buffalo streets and coffee in Nevada bars, the arguments and the companionable silence and the late night telephone conversations about baby names for a child who would never arrive. At times I regret that those stories will mainly die with me. At times I imagine a world laden with a trillion untold tales, entombed in silence. All those who once remembered them are long gone. They are a blanket on the earth. They push their way through the sodden ground in spring.
