Symbols on a rock play into a gray gelatin of countless connections, and interconnections, leaps
and hesitations, "natural," or "Man-made." For fifty thousand years and more we've been looking
into the hard matter of Who was I before I am? Vedas, Upanishads, small and large baskets; now
this foundational riddle and its tailings, slide into the smooth caves of a spooky clicking machine.

Sitting in the forest this morning, the only sound an airplane drinking and eliminating the blue sky,
imagining the slow transformation of becoming aware as flawed mutations of humanity's creation,
the bench ports the plaque: REAP: The Valley's Original Recycling Program. A dog trots up to me,
followed by its owner's long black hair flowing from beneath her straw-colored hat.

"Are you watching the birds?" she asks. The mind is a kind of camera,
or "a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivanta, a figuration of
the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead."