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Sep 26, 2021Liked by Callum Angus

I like this so much. Story isn't matter, but it does matter -- but the urge to possess and dominate something so often occurs via the need to translate it into story. I just today read this line in a poem by Natalie Diaz and dog-eared the bottom corner of the page so I wouldn't forget to come back and write it down: "To read a body is to break that body a little." How can we touch something and love it without trying to keep it, either literally, in our hand, or by breaking it into comprehensibility? ("Keeping" is about possessing, and caring for, and it's also about disciplining, right? You keep house. You keep livestock.) Is love-making, in this case, the alternative to story-making? But what about when story is how we access love? I have been seduced by Annie Dillard's suggestion that humans could live like weasels (the single line: "We could, you know.") for 20 years now. I love and aspire to the storylessness of a weasel because of Annie Dillard's story about weasels (and maybe I'll fall in love with a cow pattie now too). Maybe story-making, at its best, is love-making rather than body-breaking. It could be, you know. Thank you, Cal!

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