Holzwege Stew

Hunger is for words. 

I crave becoming obese with vocabulary; having my skin fold over itself with proper diction, Fat roundness of the tongue, eloquence with where I step and impress my impressive weight. And perhaps because I cannot have-I wish to always eat. A state of bliss where an aftertaste never leaves the palate, jumping from taste to taste and always linger thereafter over and over certain notes. 

Like perfume that stays in the room when all the bodies have vanished. 

Words, like bread crumbs, that entice, lead us along...And with such small tokens, 

we become hungrier for more sustenance, 

we desire more savory, deeper into flavor.

The crumb is not enough to sate the insatiable, 

a curiosity toward where the feast resides, 

even toward the end.

Molten is not merely hot in temperature. 

It is a state, a past participle of melt. Molten on the floor. 

When we feel indescribable love, we resort to these new lands, we have melted into a pool, we become molten. 

We may make new lands with our liquids. 

We are moved by this process, changing stats, become obsessed with outside forces which we cannot control such as changing climates, vapors and invisible streams of electricity both man-made and manufactured, conjured around us. 

And yet we marvel at the sparks that fly, the connections that do not fire and the new trend toward the path of least resistance.

Nowhere is closer to infinity than we should like to think.

I suppose being called spacey is an insult. 

The astronaut experience, however, revered as talisman, meaning only man’s experiential, literal otherworldly transcendence while a passenger, a feeling wholly attainable here on the gravity-bound planet. We have defied our gravity. When will we be successful? When we are Martians? Or Jupitarians? Or all Anuses? 

Seeing things as they are from afar, being called aloof, a strange enough word, considering the world and not your little, worn path, yes, strange, but real. Real scary. Real worth it.

Why did my grandfather teach me fractals as a small child? A question I have pondered, his choice of entertainment for me in lieu of coloring books. I loved it. 

When I close my eyes I can still see the green type in DOS on the rolling black screen and feel the bated breath sensation as my pointer finger becomes cocked over the enter key for the final stroke of the magic formula. The explosion. 

I quickly learned from typing so much code how to play with the shapes and colors. 

I tried to trick it. To kill the fractal. 

I made better fractals.

After contemplating the very telephone wires he used his own spindle to take part in weaving, Alexander Graham Bell was noted to say the following of his revelation at that moment:

“Don’t keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so, you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before.”

Scary or intriguing? Your answer is everything. It is your path. Your path with smooth easy bends and soft wide open dusty barren earth or our wildflowers, mushrooms, dragonflies, deer and falling stars.

I learned an interesting flavored word recently, ‘holzwege’ in German, loosely trail leading nowhere or “timber tracks”. An instance of this very word in action was described along with the definition of ‘following a path the leads to a clearing and disappears into a meadow of stumps, promptly ending, as though it spilled its destruction, like magma, there in front of you.

When I was around twelve years old, my parents, along with their friends, took our last camping trip together. The destination had been an unofficial routine for several years- to pack up at the last moment and journey to a little town at the base of a volcano named Mount Lassen. I think it was a state park but it had no designated campsites, nor facilities. 

For that reason and the dead body perhaps, it was the last year any of us went back. 

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad.  I hiked to the top of Mt. Lassen with one of my parents' friends who may be dead himself. 

Volcanic, not Vulcan, Viral.

I remember needing to be alone in those woods with my poetry book and wandering off to seek a location of pure solitude. I sought hard or just succeeded in eliminating humans. 

And I was also lost. Lost and unprepared. Circa pre-cellphones. 

I was lost until just past sundown, when I gratefully heard the crackle of a strangers campfire. 

Along the day-I met more than one such path, 

that led not into a meadow, but a hillside. 

Deer path perhaps. I was led along. Is it led when you are willing, or is that lead...Wanderlust. 

That’s another great word that tastes utterlessly delicious.  

Images credits in order:

'The Queen of the parlor was eating bread and honey' c. 1860 -the original uploader was Cactus.man at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Painting by Jules Tavernier, 'Volcano-Hawaii', 1888 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Painting by Eero Järnefelt, 'Siami in the meadow', 1892 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Fractal art By Soler97 (Own work), 'Supervolcano', 2008 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

By ALAN SCHMIERER, MT LASSEN AREA (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sloalan/3924819490/) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Image By OSU Special Collections & Archives : Commons (Mt. Lassen in eruption-California) [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.