One Way

I needed a couple of things, could have waited until tomorrow, but, unusual for me, feeling a bit stir-crazy, so off to the library, pick up some cream at Kroger. There's a large dead raccoon exploded on Mackletree. It's on one of the numerous 'S' curves and coming back home I surprise a huge Turkey Buzzard with its head buried in the raccoon's body cavity. I slow, the bird flaps slowly up and away, barely clearing the truck, with a dripping rope of intestines hanging from its jaw. Must have been a six-foot wingspan, bright red wattles (or gills, as one dictionary calls them) and it's clear in a flash why this vulture is called a Turkey Buzzard (Bustard), Cathartes Aura Septentrionalis. So close I could have touched him, or snatched away some raccoon chitlings (chitterlings, chitlins). Chitlings is properly only those of swine, prepared as food, so probably more correctly guts. Strong visual image. For several hours I can close my eyes and replay the scene. If someone else had been in the truck with me, what would they have seen? The bird fly over the driver's side, so the angle would have been different. I didn't notice the feet. Interesting that Carma asked me last Friday to recount the incident with the eagle in Colorado, but there I was almost completely focused on the feet, as I was reasonably sure they were to be the instrument of my demise. Big buzzard, little head. A giant pea-hen (large African Chicken with a very small head, excellent eating, all dark meat), but I never ate a buzzard. Ate a crow. Ate an Anhinga once, on a camping trip in Florida, it was all right but we'd been drinking, also, that night, ate a rattlesnake and fried some minnows. An owl hooting over near the outhouse, mid-afternoon, must mean something. Bright day, light cloud cover seems to intensify the sun, very still, 60 degrees. The fox dug through the compost last night. I was taking out some ashes and there was a neat hole in the center of the pile, her dainty footprints everywhere. I can read her tracks now, having followed her in the snow, I can see where she danced around, digging from all sides. There wasn't much there, some rib bones, a few withered parsnips; everything was gone, the hole was completely empty. Holes are always empty, by definition, what is a hole? An empty space in a solid mass. I do a Wittgenstein on that for an hour, define each of the words in the definition to see if I get it. 89. In Zettel "(Thoughts, as it were only hints.) Isn't it the same here as with a calculating prodigy?--- He has calculated right if he has got the right answer. Perhaps he himself cannot say what went on in him. And if we hear it, it would perhaps seem like a queer caricature of calculation." Zettle keeps climbing back to the top of the pile, I never put it away, it doesn't have a place to be put away to. There's an actual Wittgenstein section on one of the shelves, but this book has not been there. It's a great shelf too: James Clerk Maxwell, Claude Levi-Strauss, Pound. Interesting company. I have to get a writing hat, the afternoon sun is killing me, a long-brimmed sword-fishing hat, my favorite for this is Head-Smashed In Buffalo Jump, with thimble sized buffalo falling off the edge of the hat. Pay homage to the household gods. In the library at the museum, the other day, I was telling Sara about the Lares and Penates, the Roman household gods, after Janus at the door. Ritual. I have to think about that. I'm habitual, which teeters on the edge of ritual, but I don't subscribe to any dogma. I only do what I do to get to a place to write. It's hard. It means giving up everything else, drawing down the focus to a narrow point of survival. I'm oddly alive there, aware in my senses. There are risks involved in everything. I'm careful. I choose this life. Glenn said the footage from the graveyard was good, I reread the transcription of Lane and Linda, I think he's on to something. There is a sadness about the wrack, the used, floating away. I'll keep a few, as testament, but the rest of the balls should be set free. I'll burn the show, but I'll know where it came from. Making sense out of things. To make it hard for myself, I have to start over, almost every time, that's the rule. Just one way to do it, you could do it any other. I can think of a dozen. There is no path, everything is overgrown and impenetrable, like green-briar in the spring, we can agree on nothing, but we finally carve a trail, look at scratches on rocks, nod, and seem to agree. Something is buried here.