Some reading moves me away from language and onto the land. After Virginia Woolf, Roger Deakin. Wildwood.
I read too quickly, to get to the chapters about Central Asia, land of fruit and honey, vision of fruitful valleys and ancient commonage and interdependence where walnuts are currency and everyone is poor.
Poverty must be based on a lie, on a bed of lies, if people who live close to the history of the land, eat walnuts (which resemble the brain) and apples and honey and kefir, are poor.
They are rich in everything that people in otherwise poor, which is to say, wealthy, countries, pay good money to experience: good air, fresh food in season, communality, harvest.
Le Regain. I should read Jean Giono next. Or John Giorno. For the urban translation.
The harvest here, this summer: courgettes, round, pale and french or dark green and long, sugar peas, pale yellow, lots of runaway Red Rapids lettuce, rocket flowering, fennel coming on, pumpkins (ushiki kuru) making their way through other plants, mice eating the beetroot, for the sweetness and the colour, dark red or pink-striped, beans working to make beans, tomatoes eccentric this year, Atomic Grape, forget it, cucumbers, plenty, herbs, coming on in the greenhouse, basil, coriander and dill.
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