Root Cap

Walking With St. Augustine

Dilige et quod vis fac. ( If you love, you may do as you will.) The world does & if this were not the way it "hangs together", not the way we disperse & why we gather, than the liberty Love gains for us, our great proclivity to create & decay, might offend community, corrupt another constitution, pollute some other plurality governed by some other principle of association. But Love does not. It gives injury to no one. Love is what an atom does in its uncertainty, what clever elements do with the electric, what dim particulars as pregnant molecules do in speculation, or in memory, or in reason. Energy itself is a matter so endeavored. It is what a tree does when it grows; what water does when land empties a river; what the dead do in soil; what every aim does in the embryo of pleasure. It is why a planet does no evil. It is why there is no end to novelty as there is no end to mortality. Why gods are ambitious of earthworms. Let us imagine Augustine had in mind the people of debris (some call them garbage,  others the fallen)—they are all willful, love their way as well as any bishop. 

Inside Novelty

The thought of a thing precedes the thing itself, but not its potentiality. The unthought thing, never certain of its potent "to be" (to be decay’s necessity & increase’s sufficient determination) cannot conceive till thought itself & of things passing, be perpetuated. This means Memory is a power we live by; learn of by the likes of the dead & of sex----our more celebrated among  "recent", thoughtful perpetuations (lest we forget gravity, time & emptiness).      

Appetite

As the perpetuation of the thought of things, memory is the errant power that figures in all the genesis, pollution, compenetration, association, dying, decay & preponderance of ancestral stuff that spires us, be it the light that quickens the thinking tree, water that flees the fingering root, or the beast’s great annuli & its years that flee; figures in its rings of lignin & that lignin's rings of phytonutrients, companion energies of bond as those of division, each sink & fountaining, every ascent out of the emptiness, every ascent of remembrance touching the ineffable newness of what is not yet a thought of a thing, but will be.

To learn is not unique—we’re certain that knowing is as abundant as all the time & emptiness that floats & currents the variety that makes for ruined pines & whispering snow, or the oil of worms & their heated, unguent holes; that quickens mycelium threading its chalk-white hyphae through naked waste, or makes its way among the excesses that commune as humus; as common as the breathing fundament that exhausts & issues—learning is the effort of the ignorant: of silt loam, of root, of nematode, of protozoan & dying bacterium, of the discarded feathers, the ravished carcass, the corrupt bark & tree-throw, the gravel bar & braided river, the foot-hill of breccia & lava flow, the abyssal plate & whet sierra, the fire of viscous plumes engorged & frenzied for these heaving seas, fossil light, not even plenished, penetrating vast distances, laboring thought through all this dark & all this emptiness.

Egg

A black hole must be erumpent, or else be absolute, just as the dispersed must nourish or else starve immortality. Even the dead must grow—the increase is never everlasting else what lived was never dead & what is death has never died.

Erumpent

Nothing ever of fruit or of appetite; nothing of the egg or of the shallow grave; nothing that was, is, or is to be; nothing that carries us away into the emptiness, nothing that gathers us again into emptiness; nothing of you, me, a dog, a dragon fly, the river & trees, all these moribund stars is ever is finished, ever complete, ever entire & therefore ever perfect, ever ideal.

Though desire maybe the push of the perfect, the push of the ideal, it shoulders not into the Pure, nor into the Complete; it presses on with accident, endeavors the unexpected; it shoves & grunts & cruses the mean effort---this earth where birth is Witness against platonic certainty. New life cries: Truth is born of failure.

For instance, look at how the Absolute never pollutes, never corrupts & never becomes soil. How it never abounds; never the particles of carbon that quicken from nuclear fire; never the knowing larvae that abide the incited scat; never the scant crystals of silica that help cohere the knowing diatoms, nor gaseous nitrogen fixed by blue-green algae; never the polymerase complex of a few tens-of-thousands of atoms that labor eukaryotic transcription; never the dirt animated incomprehensibly into eukaryotes thriving—protist, fungus, plant & animal alive & thoughtful by the generosity of how many specimens turned to soil?

Look at how it is not even empty of all making of dust & ash. Void of the dead in our backyards, void of the remains in the crook of a tree, of the waste within an ocean trench (indeed even so much in the din of turbulent upwelling), never with ground’s potential in planets adrift the dark wash of emptiness, never with till in the cold gas of stellar necromass; never with bog soil & desert sand, alluvial fill & abraded loam dread with error—soil’s kind not unlike the litter of an island universe reconsidered at the core of a black hole where, like every protist, fungus, plant & animal flourishing the earth, egg & appetite incite the Hole to know.

Thinking is shared by all. Heraclitus