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When viewed from the point of view of the perceiving mind, it becomes evident that nothing is certain. If all that I perceive is real to me, where is the distinction, within the parameters of "all," between real and wrong? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? And if one person should hear, but perceive it not as the sound of a tree falling, but as the sound of the earth splitting itself a new canyon, does the sound still belong to the tree? Or has its cause been transferred by the perception of the listener? And does that transference diminish the value of the listener’s perception of the sound as that of a canyon yawning itself into existence? And if, on her long hike through the lonely woods, the tree sound mis-perceiver should happen upon a canyon, would it not be logical to attribute the canyon’s sudden existence to the sound she heard? Perhaps our hiker is a writer, and she sits down at the edge of the canyon and narrates a long story, a monologue perhaps, into her notebook. It is a true story, the exact retelling of the experience of hiking the quiet green trails when suddenly her world was ripped inside out by the frighteningly abrupt sound of rock and earth shearing apart from each other, of bedrock cracked awake into a gaping wound exposing the guts of the earth’s crust. She writes of pointing her compass toward the noise and heading off to find the newborn canyon. And that, indeed, she does. She describes its beauty, its geology, its spiders and snakes, poetically archiving this precious memory of being present at the birth of a peacefully catastrophic geological event. The memory is true. It is preserved in ink exactly as she perceived it. In years to come, as she retells the story and rereads the archived memory, it will become all the more real to her. She will replace troublesome details like the impossibility of foliage growing from freshly ripped earth with memories which fit her true story. I remember it clear as yesterday, the canyon walls were jagged and smelled of earthworms. The rocks were angry in their pointedness. I trembled. And that memory would also be true, as she believes it and it came through her senses, becoming archived in the layer of text she placed over the memory during the recording of the moments of perception which serve to reinforce each other and support the faulty structure of this particular column in the archive. Faulty because the canyon was already a million years old and the sound was that of the tree falling over. But of what fault is her true story if it teaches? If the writer’s monologue were to reach the audiences of storytellers across the continent, teaching reverence to the powerful strength of nature, what purpose would it serve to expose the story as a fraud?
Or, is it not a fraud at all, as it is exactly as our writer perceived it? |
back to the front
silent reading
words too many
moving through montana
all text copyright © 1998 - 2002 wendy blake