Rich with Entropy

Turn it up.

These days, I think a lot about meadows. Partly because in the Westward view from my Chicago apartment, I see nothing green or golden or violet - only blues and browns, all gray. Partly because this Westward view also is a meadow - a nested ecosystem of homes and lanes, of fireflies that line up neatly on the horizon waiting for their turn to touch down. Mostly I think about meadows because of their life-promise. How something as dense as the rewilded portions of Lincoln Park are able to sustain and balance themselves indefatigably, each stalk feeding from and returning to the soil, each seed finding its right place as lunch or stem. A.R. Ammons’ Corsons Inlet reads -

[…] thousands of tree swallows

               gathering for flight:

               an order held

               in constant change: a congregation

rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable

          as one event,

                      not chaos: […]

A congregation rich with entropy. The beekeeper moving the hive, the wind moving a cloud. I see a meadow sending out her stalk, pulling her back in, gathering a burst of sparrows, letting them go, digging down, down down with all the interwebbings of roots and mycelium and bug-channels and whatever else like a conductor building and settling her orchestra.

My wonderful friend who has an 8-foot marimba in her apartment (as well as a gourd/vase that sounds like a question mark) reminded me recently that we never reach a crescendo. A crescendo is a motion - a transitional space that only exists in comparison, where a phrase of music crescendos from quiet to loud. And yet, common language so casually tries to pin it down - Ah yes, Spandau Ballet reaches a crescendo in the chorus of Gold. Wrong! In fact, Spandau Ballet richly crescendos from its piano verse to a rousing forte bridge over the course of a held note - “tall” - thereby offering an orchestral parallelism to the emotional turmoil that seeps from the line: “And love is like a high prison wall / And you could leave me standing so tall.” The crescendo teeters between its relativity and its identity - it is “an order held in constant change” - “separable, noticeable as one event.”

Also, this Rodin sculpture in the Art Institute:

When this sculpture was first exhibited, it was criticized for its inaccuracy. The man’s feet aren’t shaped the way a walker’s would be - both are planted solidly on the ground. And yet, it feels like he’s walking? His torso shifts, his front foot is weighted. Rodin has given a “walking-ness” to this unfinished man. He is at once in motion and entirely still - “rich with entropy.”

A meadow is one thing. It is a million small things, scurrying. It is the crescendo and the diminuendo and neither.*

I’ve also been thinking about meadows because I’ve been wondering where humans go in all this. Can we still be an ecosystem, somehow? Where there’s motion and extremity and growth and death and revolution but also a harmonious unity? A life-force that faces drought and infestation and change but ultimately finds balance? That does not destroy itself entirely? And, if we never reach a crescendo, how do we know when to turn to the bassoonist next to us and say: “Let’s take a break, shall we?”

A Poem

Enough of that rambling. Here’s the beginning of Corsons Inlet. Read the rest of it - if only to bask in the poem’s beautiful final lines. Let’s all tuck those words into the little pocket protectors of our souls, shall we?

Note: Eddies of meaning! Delightful. See how Ammons flows the text between the two margins like a stream bouncing off its banks? See how he keeps exploring singularity, motion, and collectivity?

Other Songs With Crescendos:

• Spandau Ballet - True

• Barry Manilow - Weekend in New England

• All Opera

• This movement by Béla Bartók - (See 3:25)

• I think that’s probably it?

A short one for you! Big thanks to my friend Aemilia for inspiring me to write again through the launch of her own absolutely charming (and objectively better) Substack My Lover Gave Me This Cane, which advises, “When you’re stuck between two endings, write both.” Shouldn’t we all be a bit more like Aemilia?

May you be released from perpendiculars,

Robiny

*Or, in the words of my restorative yoga teacher, it is the “buzz of the here and now.” On Thursdays, she regales me about the power and prize of the present moment while I hover on the twitch-stage of near-sleep, laying troutishly across two bolsters, two blocks, and a blanket. That’s a sort of buzzing, I think?