Consider certain tiny lizards, and that
long before
anyone could count
there was still math.
— Linda Kasischke
Is Art matter? Does Lizard matter? Ontological questions. What is not in doubt: Gravity. Matters every moment. Dark crevice, weightless.
Humans take gravity as granted. Antique certainty, wheels spin, rain falls, ice melts, water drips. Trickles. Remembers. Rivers flow, flood, pool, press dams. Gravity “generates” in the techno-version of Genesis spinning magnetic jostling electrons spawning Electricity. Bonneville: god of appliance desire.
None of this new to Lizard. Lizard knows gravity. Lizard Is Gravity. Actually and metonymically. Lizard stands forth. Lizard not to be seen, omnipresence unknown. Simply gets by, gets on with it. Lizard still, then gone. We say dart, dash, disappear, adios. Gravity has its verbs.
“Climate Change” no longer grasped. Idea cracking, concept fracturing, spalling, spilling. The Great Fault where no fault lies like polycrisis lies. Bar graphs, peaks, valleys, picturing nullspace, glacial shimmer. Cards on the table. Shards in the dust. Gravity wins. Lizard knows.
NOTES
— Photos: Block and Fault country, Northern Great Basin; waters seeking the deep do not run to the sea. Lizard abides, memory lingers, dreaming.
— Foreground of second photo: groundstone mortar for grinding or crushing.
— Linda Kasischke from the poem The Accident in The Infinitesimals (2014 Copper Canyon Press)
