Notes on Turning
Thinking through Change
“Winter Epigrams” (4 and 23) in Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand (Duke, 2022)
The normal changes into the monstrous, the fortunate into the unfortunate, and our bewilderment goes on and on.
Chapter 58, “Living With Change” in Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu / Ursula K. Le Guin (Shambhala, 1997)
Turning feels like learning a new move — at first the mind rejects, rebels even, but with time and intent to integrate new fields of possibility (and perhaps also an adaptive life-drive) new positions are taken (I take new positions) so that different directions may be followed (we follow new directions).
To turn — not to re-turn but to rotate, to move a body on its axis. Earth, a body, turns yet we think not to feel it. The body of Earth turns and we with it, constantly.
To turn toward something important or even crucial (for example, light) as an act of self-preservation.
To turn away from something important and yet unknown (for example, dark) as an act of betrayal.
Turning, as if toward nothing sacred. The wise leaf withers lightly like light leaks and lingers in some low corner.
In some cultures, turnings large and small, grand and of the common sort, are marked (they mark them). In my culture, we do at least.
Turning as the seasons always do, I am always in process, always marking turns.
That turning, insofar as it denotes a fundamental ontological shift, is a piece of me (past) to share with me (future).
That turning, as this year does into the next, is not an act of will is one thing for which I may be grateful.
That turning, as leaves do every Autumn is a given is not a phenomenon I wish to take for granted.
Like ashes, like seas peopling themselves, in the submerged slowness, in the shapelessness, or as one hears from the crest of the roads the crossed bells crossing having that sound now sundered from the metal, confused, ponderous, turning to dust in the very milling of the too distant forms, either remembered or not seen, and the perfume of the plums that rolling on ground rot in time, infinitely green.
"Dead Gallop" (1-10) in Residence on Earth by Pablo Neruda, trans. Donald D. Walsh (New Directions, 1973)
infinitely green.