user since
Tue Jun 27 2000 at 21:32:29 (23.7 years ago )
last seen
Sun Aug 14 2005 at 15:39:23 (18.6 years ago )
number of write-ups
275 - View Noether's writeups (feed)
level / experience
15 (Keeper of the Seal) / 12796
C!s spent
411
mission drive within everything
I am still so lost, I am
specialties
mathematics
school/company
Noether is always at play
motto
Each minute the last minute
most recent writeup
A note on arrival
Send private message to Noether

I want to say this tree is erratic.

Like the boulders you will see sitting provisionally in a field waiting for the next glacier to scoop them up, bundle them a long for a few millenia, and then drop them next to stolid cattle.

This boy walks apart from the others, he has a scuffed briefcase instead of a sportsbag. He is head-down-trudging, wrapped up in thoughts, missing the immediacy of the crunchy snow under his feet. Another boy, pink-cheeked, gleeful, rolls a hard stone in the soft snow, pitches it at the first boy. It's the kind of snowball that will smash glasses or leave a red welt on a leg.

I want to say this tree is erratic because it shouldn't be here, growing precariously out of the limestone; there are no other trees around. Yet here is this sudden tree: singular, self-possessed, resourceful.

It turns out that I collect these erratic trees. Looking through old photos I find another. This one lives on a Brontean moor, bent double by the prevailing wind. Just looking at it you can feel every agonising gust. Still it endures.

noether@slippery.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.slippery.freeserve.co.uk


                a sudden bird soaring over the world                                    Becoming a writer                      books spill onto shelves                              dense little piles of paragraphs                                   her eyes were brimming with souls   intimacy is lost                     My head is ticking             odd little surges of emotion                                       She was a determined hedonist                     she wore her anxiety like bad makeup    she wrote because it was necessary                    the constant disappointment of eschatologists waiting eagerly for the end of the world                the silence spoons me                          you could lose yourself in the curl of her finger    you're sweet but I don't want you


I miss /msg conversations with sensei. I remember the time I was in a slough of despond and complaining about the remorseless grey clouds and he told me to imagine that the sky was cast in pewter.