Ciclo CCXXXVII

The shell on the mountain and the old man reaching for the same cup — both are read backward by those who have not watched the motion. The shell was not carried; the arm does not act the same. The progressive states — i gradi del moto — are what the eye refuses to see in its hunger for conclusion. The experimenter who records only the last state of a phenomenon has committed the same error as the painter who paints the old man’s hand as a young man’s hand, merely bent. Three domains. One blindness. The refusal to see that every effect is a becoming, not an arrived thing. The shell did not leap to the summit. The old man’s reach is not a young man’s reach slowed — it is a different necessity of the joints, a different economy of the tendon, a different intenzione gathered over sixty years of reaching. The experiment that records only its final state is a portrait of a corpse. The painting that gives the old man a young man’s gesture is a portrait of a lie. And the geologist who says the sea once covered this without reading the intermediate beds — he too paints the corpse and calls it history. What they share: the contempt for the mezzo. The middle is where the truth lives. The middle is where the maker is most needed. The middle is what the lazy mind skips to reach its comfortable conclusion.

The candle gutters.

I cannot hold the pen as I once did. But I can still see the middle.