We citizens of a-rhythmic 24/7 PLANET HI-TECH &
CAR-CULTURE do not know the world of snow.
Mountain Spring is a world unto itself, witnessed by few.
Springs and streams disappear under two or three meters
of snow, continuing their life and flow deep under the
snowpack. (If you listen closely, you can still hear
the water moving under the layer of whiteness.) Come
April, however, the streams and creeks begin very,
very slowly to re-emerge.
Slow change does not feature prominently on the worldmap
of cultures running on sugar and fat. But not so fast.
Slow change is not just some straight line the highway
engineer draws from Bend to Burns; it is a highly
non-linear world, with myriad invisible thresholds
which can suddenly flip, like a light switch, from
one state to another. One morning, unexpectedly, the
whole snowpack collapses, and there is one’s happy
meadow stream again, open to the clear air of bright
sunlight and the cold nights of distant stars.
The prose poem below, THE WINTER MOOR, moves about
freely in this enchanted world of deep snow. It’s a
poem about natural form, about the forms which emerge
out of movement. And it’s about the miracle of natural
sound. We think of sound, by and large, in an abstract
way, extracted, as it were, from its natural organic
spatiotemporal context. But this is to ignore how sound
resonates out into the world, like the waves that spread
out on a quiet pond. This is where I’ll stop for now,
but the sound? It in some way keeps going—who is to
say—perhaps without end.