Reading Wittgenstein

First, though, I suited-up and hand-sawed some wood, built a little fire, spilt some kindling. Just enough wind to drown out any ambient noise. Kneeling on a foam pad, using a hatchet, taking care, I stop often to listen, hear before I see the fox coming out the path to the graveyard. I've got an apple in my bibs and I roll it across the logging road, she watches so intently I have to laugh. It's not lost on me that we're talking apples here, might as well call her Eve and be done with it. I don't want to totally stop work and the first few times I split off a stick, she starts, but she catches on to the rhythm, flattens down on her belly, grips the fruit between her paws and eats the whole thing. At one point she gets some apple-skin (I think) between her teeth and does a lovely head-shake --- tongue thing to dislodge it. She leaves, we never say good-bye, any contact is on her terms. I used to laugh about Tesla and his pigeon. Not laughing anymore. So I'm still on my knees, kneeling on the pad, looking into the middle distance, listening closely to this contained universe I call home, my conceptual unity, my concentrated unity, I slip into a fugue state. Something has fallen into place, but I'm never easy on myself, and I need to pry it loose. I tend to set the jumps a little higher than is really comfortable, that way, if I hit the first one, I can excuse myself from the race. This time, though, I see where I was going: the essence of modernism is in its break with nature. It strikes me like a blow. I think I could defend this argument in any discipline. Look at painting: dot dot dot, then realism, then impressionism, then post-impressionism, then abstract expressionism and so on. Steady moving away from the natural. Moving into the topology of closed spaces. The windowless monads. The Venn Diagrams that could be drawn from this. I come back inside and heat some chicken broth, pull "Tractatus" from the shelf, then all the other Wittgenstein, and I make some notes which I use to start another small fire after a strange dinner of cheese and crackers, pickled jalapeno slices, and an egg I poach inside a circle cut in a piece of toast. Life as usual. I no longer make claims for being normal, nor give a shit for what anyone thinks. I merely do what I do.