Gravel

Go get some. 

But don't be surprised if you go back to earth eventually. It catches your eye, and thrills your senses, because it is unusual, extracted and refined, as it is, a product of water, once again, the anti-earth? The earth other?

Sugar, white flour, cocaine . . . gravel is the same. Its tactile clacking, its strange motility. It will excite you but it will let you down, eventually, and back you will go to earth, from which both you and it came.

When Europeans first came to what are now the Americas, they described corn as having 'Small fatness'. I feel the same way about gravel. Humus it is not, and therefore not nurturing to biological life. Exciting . . . captivating, yes, but not nurturing. Unlike soil, gravel lacks a plant component.

Here is a stanza from Sappho's 'Supreme Sight on the Black Earth'

Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is the one you love

For some reason, the person who produced this translation, Scott Horton, chose to use 'black' instead of 'brown', which is how I typically see it in Italian. But fair enough, I like black. Even what might be called green olives can be 'black' in Italian, as can red wine. It makes me wonder if specificity is really so important to expression. Maybe the more general term, if I can put such a label on the color black, is the more accurate one, for its greater inclusion, for its vague boundaries.

Oops, I got that wrong, what might be called green olives can be called 'white' in Italian, but the relation is the same. After all, red wine may indeed be red, but white wine is not really white, at least not in the same way that red - or black - wine is red.

When I was a child I began watching television when all that was available was black and white (as it came to be called only after the emergence of color television). I could not understand all of the excitement. The colors that I saw were perfectly clear to me: grass was green, sky was blue, et cetera. So much of what we consider to be some kind of external and objective reality happens in our minds.