Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Ghost Gathering

That is, there comes a time to let them be, and a time to gather. A time for sewing, and a time for reaping. A man must go away while the garden grows, and what is out of sight, it seems, is often out of mind. He forgets, and call his favorite angel, Anamnesis, whom the Greeks called Mnemosyne, and asks, what was I about again? And she inspires in him the voices of her daughters, certain daughters paired with certain men, until they revive him to the story of his garden growing. To which he hastily returns, ashamed of his forgetting.

And there the ghosts have sprawled up from the soil, new again, ready to be gathered to the man. Each time he plants the same, a word in planting spoken over them, and forgets; and each time they come anew as something more fully realized toward the language he's constructing. Each time the plant's names become more sophisticated, by becoming less private. So that when the day comes that the man no longer undergoes the calling on of Mnemosyne, a stranger may upon his garden stumble, and find himself in the midst of nameable, assignable ghosts, each one bearing something very much like, if not identical to, fruit.

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