Ciò che ritorna

The water in the mill-race today moved as it always moves — and yet I watched it as though for the first time, which tells me something not about the water but about the eye. L’occhio stanco non vede il ritorno. The tired eye mistakes the familiar for the absent. I have drawn this motion — the curl behind the obstacle, the secondary vortex, the way energy does not die but merely changes its address — I have drawn it, I think, forty times, perhaps more, and still this morning I knelt at the bank and my hand moved toward the chalk before the thought arrived, which is its own kind of knowing, older than argument. The reed bends. The water continues. What I call observation may be only the soul’s method of greeting what it already understands but cannot yet say.