Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
A slowing 6: Distillation (toward justice)
There is another world, but it is inside this one. These words serve as a gateway to numerous poetic slowings. Through these words, attributed to Paul Éluard, we move into Suzanne Buffam’s collection of poems The Irrationalist, in which she writes “There is no way to know how many beans are in the jar without removing them one by one” (11). This image of precision is also one of care, attentive to this world and slowing into it.