bing/bing

Sometimes, while I have stood listening to the owl’s song drifting through the trees, when it is ten degrees above nothing—and life for any small creature is hard enough without that—I have found myself thinking of summer fields. Fields full of flowers—poppies or lupines. Or, here, fields where the roses hook into the dunes, and their increase is manyfold. All summer they are red and pink and white tents of softness and nectar, which wafts and hangs everywhere—a sweetness so palpable and excessive that, before it, I’m struck, I’m taken, I’m conquered; I’m washed into it, as though it was a river, full of dreaming and idleness—I drop to the sand, I can’t move; I am restless no more; I am replete, supine, finished, filled to the last edges with an immobilizing happiness. And is this not also terrible? Is this not also frightening?

“One problem with lyrical waxing, as Snediker has it, is that it often signals (or occasions) an infatuation with overarching concepts or figures that can run roughshod over the specificities of the situation at hand. (Winnicott once accused Freud, for example, of using the concept of the death drive to “achieve a theoretical simplification that might be compared to the gradual elimination of detail in the technique of a sculptor like Michelangelo.”)

black cat