Yesterday was a sublime fall day.  In the morning I worked to gather the leaves that remained on our lawn.  The mulched leaves were used to form a berm across a boundary section between our yard and the public park.  In the months intervening till spring perhaps these leaves will turn to humus.  I hope to plant grass seed to form a natural line of demarcation.  Unaccountably I feel that our tenure here is impermanent.  Natural boundaries seem appropriate, like a low wall fashioned of field stone from a farm field..

I spent the last several hours of the day relaxing along 3rd Street in Geneva.  Geneva is the town adjacent to Batavia, to the north along the Fox River.  3rd street is a boulevard about a quarter mile in length that features locally owned shops and restaurants.  I enjoy going there to read, and to walk while noticing the seasonal changes effected by the proprietors of shops along the street.  I took a few photos that I’ll share with you.

I began reading Breathing, Chaos and Poetry, a slim book by Franco “Bifo” Berardi about the importance of poetry to the resuscitation of our country.  The outcome of the election of November 3rd demonstrated that a majority of Americans understand that our society is failing, that the conventional, standard ways of functioning are brutal to Black citizens, palpably unjust to those who are non-white, who were born female, to those who earn their living on the front lines of a warehouse, or a restaurant.  Not only must the reign-of-Trump come to an end.  We simply must shift the axis of this society in fundamental ways, slowly, materially, institutionally.

How do we breathe again?

Here are some of the lines read in the first chapter of the book which is entitled “I can’t breathe.” 

…rhythm refers also to the vibration of the world.  Rhythm is the inmost vibration of the cosmos.  And poetry is an attempt to tune into this cosmic vibration, this temporal vibration that is coming and coming and coming.

…poetry is the semiotic flow that emanates the perceptual and narrative forms that shape the common sphere of experience.  Reality, in other words, is the sphere of human interaction and communication secreted by language and refined by poetry.  Poetry builds and instills mythopoiesis… In Hölderline’s words, “poets establish what remains.”

What we are accustomed to call “the world” is the effect of a process of semiotic organization of prelinguistic matter.  Language organizes time, space, and matter in such a way that they become recognizable to human consciousness.  This process of semiotic emanation does not reveal a natural given; rather, it unfolds as a perpetual reshuffling of material contents, a continuous reframing of our environment.

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“I can’t breathe” is a reference to the murder of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014 in Staten Island, New York City by a police officer.  Garner, a black citizen, was held in a chokehold for fifteen to nineteen seconds while being arrested.  Garner panted these words eight times, each time less and less audibly, as he died.

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What have we learned in the past four years?  The pandemic still rages.  Are we powerless, does anything matter?

No and yes.  Change begins, a better world depends upon words to shift the axis of the old world.