Stone Tools

Uniformly gray. I hiked out to the graveyard, to do my annual count. The sunken graves fill with leaves that rot to a black sludge. I can usually identify between 16 and 22 and this year the number is 18. Rummaging around in the litter I found a lovely arrowhead, quartz and quite small, what's usually called a bird point, used for hunting small game. It makes my day. I was starved when I got home so I fixed the full potato, sausage, egg, and toast brunch, then reclined on the sofa with the latest Lee Child novel. Disturbed, as always, by mistakes in the text. Fact-checking and proof-reading have gone out the window. If it's a library book I make I small pencil line under the mistake and a small pencil dot in the margin, and note the page on the bookmark. That way it's easy for me to go back and collect the mistakes. This is completely an amusement, there is no meaning involved, except that meaning is always involved. Even when Spell Check provides an incorrect word. If I had the time I'd collect this detritus into a volume called That's Not What I Meant To Say. TR called, all excited about the opera project, and we talked for a long time about Bach and polyphony. I hadn't even thought about a chorus, as it was way beyond our budget (our budget is zero dollars) and suddenly we have a chorus that wants to work with us. Who is us? what are we doing? A chorus answers the question. Maybe there's a dance. TR told me to read about Passions, Bach and St. Mathew, so when I get off the phone I go to the 11th Britannica and read for several hours. One thing leads to another. Next thing you know I'm imagining Veronica with her panties around her ankles. I forget which Station Of The Cross that is. I cleaned the arrowhead with my fingernail brush and some dish soap, it's a handsome little piece. I have a box of these, but I don't collect them, they just accumulate. Small points are fairly common. Like fines in the drainage of a creek. Meaning (here we go again) stratifies in layers of rock waiting to happen. Slate, for instance, which is mud waiting to become sandstone but not buried deep enough under ground for the required pressure. I worry too much about extraneous shit, but it's a force of habit, to worry a point. Even the idea of "worrying" a point seems odd, why would you bother? Something in the water. I think of old Basho, retreating to his hut with a bowl of reheated rice and a feather he'd found on the path to the outhouse. My first thought, I have to say, was The Passion of Saint Thomas, but I pretty quickly understood that it needed to be Basho's Passion, which would allow greater liberty and insure I'd be shot sooner rather than later. Pagan, from pagus, out in the country. Drifting snow, it's beautiful, something B said, about covering a multitude of sins. Listen, all I see is a carpet of virgin snow, my own identity seems a closely held secret. This isn't a game.