dennis thoughts

From: Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
Date: Friday, October 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: Followup thoughts after a month

Hi Eve,

I've been faithfully reading your pages, looking for signs and signals. It's been a month, and my paralysis finally let me loose a few days ago. But what began as one horror now transforms into another as I watch the nation's leaders revel in another war -- disappointed that the Cold War is over, they have found a new one (which has been 'pre-announced' as to be as long as the Cold War was). They seem to have lost the capability for re-invention or re-imagining, so piling horror upon horror seems to be the only response they know. We will make more exiles that will look like those racing away from the Towers. And so we begin the transformation of our rage into our outrage.

I was in despair over the former, and now the latter. I have been trying to speak through my musical voice (my only true voice) and day after day finding no sounds; then a simple moment of seeding the future happened: We have a white ash tree that grows among the anonymous locust near the house. The autumn wind came up. A single samara from the ash-among-the-locust spun in the window and down onto my keyboard, where it lodged, its single wing pointing upward, its head burrowing downward to find what was under g and h and t and y. A single seed from the white ash, wood of baseball bats -- it's the season now -- and of the Abenaki legend: "In the beginning, there were only plants and animals on the Earth. The Great Spirit, satisfied but bored, also wanted humans to live there, and he sculpted them from a large straight ash, or mkazawi maahlakws. It was thus that the People of the East were born, and their origin explains the Abenaki people's special relationship with the ash."

So "The Key of Locust" spun out of me in only a few days. The paralysis is over, replaced by knowledge that winter is about to arrive here in Vermont, a long period of dormancy -- but not death. I can only hope for renewal.

Love,
Dennis

NB: to hear The Key of Locust, please visit the musical gallery Dennis has been compiling.


	From: Dennis Bathory-Kitsz Date: Friday, October 12, 2001 10:36 AM Subject: Followup thoughts after a month Hi Eve, I've been faithfully reading your pages, looking for signs and signals. It's been a month, and my paralysis finally let me loose a few days ago. But what began as one horror now transforms into another as I watch the nation's leaders revel in another war -- disappointed that the Cold War is over, they have found a new one (which has been 'pre-announced' as to be as long as the Cold War was). They seem to have lost the capability for re-invention or re-imagining, so piling horror upon horror seems to be the only response they know. We will make more exiles that will look like those racing away from the Towers. And so we begin the transformation of our rage into our outrage. I was in despair over the former, and now the latter. I have been trying to speak through my musical voice (my only true voice) and day after day finding no sounds; then a simple moment of seeding the future happened: We have a white ash tree that grows among the anonymous locust near the house. The autumn wind came up. A single samara from the ash-among-the-locust spun in the window and down onto my keyboard, where it lodged, its single wing pointing upward, its head burrowing downward to find what was under g and h and t and y. A single seed from the white ash, wood of baseball bats -- it's the season now -- and of the Abenaki legend: "In the beginning, there were only plants and animals on the Earth. The Great Spirit, satisfied but bored, also wanted humans to live there, and he sculpted them from a large straight ash, or mkazawi maahlakws. It was thus that the People of the East were born, and their origin explains the Abenaki people's special relationship with the ash." So "The Key of Locust" spun out of me in only a few days. The paralysis is over, replaced by knowledge that winter is about to arrive here in Vermont, a long period of dormancy -- but not death. I can only hope for renewal. Love, Dennis NB: to hear The Key of Locust, please visit the musical gallery Dennis has been compiling.
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