CORNERS
We speak of „turning a corner“ as if life contained a geometry so precise, a landscape so clear, a series of hairpin turns so well defined, that we could shimmy willfully and easily along in it, moving from forest to mesa, prairie to desert, mountain to ocean. But‑‑ change being slow, laborious, painfully resistant to itself– the landscape is rather one of small bumps and rivulets, increments and diminutions of tide so minute and recurrent they are virtually lost among their own repetitions. Wishing to see ourselves as open, malleable, easily capable of change, we map out a terrain that supports our wishfulness.
The truth is shifty, intractable, relentless in its pursuit of its own destination. So that‑‑ after announcing, time and time again, that we have „turned a corner“‑‑ we find ourselves once more on the same road… Until, perhaps, the stubborn platelets of the self shift so dramatically that there is a kind of earthquake in the soul, altering the map so completely that the corners themselves are obliterated. Then, when even the old metaphor is no longer functional, it is speech itself that needs to be altered and something new is „turned“… not exactly a corner, and not exactly a road. But something else, something not yet speakable turning in your own throat… like a poem, or a silence beyond speech, like a whole new landscape.