HERON II

The world is dark and without form.

Not without sensation. There is 

a constant whirring noise, low, as 

though there is a distant storm.

There is the sensation of black and 

dark blue. The ocean at night.

It might be healed by the orange of 

the sun, but not yet. 

And the world was without form,

and darkness was on the face of

what was yet without form. 

In the deep. Black and dark blue.

4am. 

I can't keep describing the

lack of things forever. At some point

something has to happen. At some point

I notice that the tide has gone out

slightly and there is a visible rock

that was not there before. Not that

rocks are easy to distinguish from

everything else that's black and blue

but it's visibly black and a slippery

thing, covered in seaweed and pools of

a viscous substance known as water.

Maybe there is sand in the pools too.

The wind is cold. The sky is dark.

4am.

Something comes along. There is a 

figure on the rock. At this distance

it's impossible to identify what bird 

it is. It's large, and whitish, with

a long neck and some other long features.

It is probably a heron by the looks of

it but maybe the rock is closer than we

think and it's actually a very small bird.

Though the long neck seems to indicate heron.

This is the dark; this is the place where

all of the seaweed has gone to die and nothing

nothing nothing serves to change or to provide

an example to anyone or anything. Nothing

can be known and nothing can be worth knowing.

These are the tides of the river Lethe, the

water that one drinks when one wants to be 

scraped clean on the inside. 

4am.

The tide recedes. The heron speaks.

*

"This is the song that covers the world. This

is the song that has been chosen to link things

with things. When the song is sung the first time,

the composite sensorium that is seen and felt 

by the listener at the time of hearing the song 

is recorded, as it were, to be played back when

the song is heard again, or sung again, sung 

probably being the better word.

Through the song things are linked

to other things, future to past, traditions of thought,

an idea of our collective sensation and attention,

our bodies, our memories. We exist in collective memory;

without others to describe our experiences to 

we would be unable to form convincing explanations for these

experiences. Or at least none that would convince me.

And every day the song is renewed in the collective work

of our attempts to describe experiences to one another.

We all know that we have had certain experiences and we try

to link these experiences to things that are happening in the

song. Not entirely successfully; no song can ever describe

all the things you need to be thinking about. Your situation

may never have previously occurred and so there may be many

notions where their absence in your calculation might

mean you draw the wrong conclusion. But whatever. 

The song is renewed as we continue to sing it and as we
 
remember our souls when we first heard the song."

*

Well said. And you can get -all that- from the squawking noise

the heron makes, if you listen carefully. It's not even sped up.

That's just the sort of thing they have words for in heron-language.

The tide recedes, the darkness softens as the heron says its word again.

***