Asakiyume mita

Patricia Russo writes weird, wonderful things, full of heart. "The Placeholder" is a flash piece about planting a stray seed.

I love it on its own merits, and what it's saying isn't the same as what "Semper Vivens" is saying, but there are some harmonies:

What his heart wanted was to lick the leaf that was touching his lip and then bite it, chew it slowly, taste it thoroughly, swallow it, and then the next one on the stem, and the next. Even if they tasted bad. Even if they made him sick. Even if they transformed him in a way he didn’t, not yet, entirely want.

There are all kinds of other lovelinesses in this story though--the curl of your body around a cat, half-remembered lullabies--and this story is short and free to read. Enjoy!

Where I am, at this time of year it's the moss that comes back to life first, intense green. It sends up the thinnest straight green things--they look like thin, tiny blades of grass but really they're called setae: they're the stalks for the moss's spore cases, which form on the ends. These then ripen and, when they're ready, they release their spores.

Yesterday I was in the woods, and I came to a big puddle, and by the puddle was a rock, and on the rock was a quantity of moss. This moss:



See how the setae aren't thin green things anymore? Now they're red-brown, and they have heads on them.

I brushed my hand across them and to my surprise and delight, released CLOUDS OF GREEN SMOKE. Not tiny little wisps: a billowing cloud, thick. Like a special effect, like being on another planet. I did it again, and more came out, powerfully green, hazy, drifting. Like when you kick an old puffball mushroom and you get a gray-brown mass of smoke--but this was green!

Magical. A very Annihiliation-shimmer sort of moment.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy (Matthew 6:19)

That's a common enough adage and moral lesson, but for some reason the portrayal of it in our current Colombian series was visually super affecting and got me thinking.

One of the secondary characters is an army officer, undercover in a mission to take down the supply portion of a drug operation, but he seems at times to have lost himself in his role, though he insists to one of the main characters that that's not the case. In a scene about halfway through the series, he hies himself off on his own in a canoe, drags it ashore, and heads off into some portion of the rain forest armed with a map. He digs into the wet earth and uncovers two pots that contain guns on top and underneath---

Cash money! Benjamins!



Cackling with delight, he plunges his hand in and pulls out a fistful.



And then...

It comes apart in his hands. Turns out a shallow grave in a humid location isn't the best storage decision for paper.



And the character is almost driven mad ...



(The actor's name is Toto Vega. The show is called La Ley Secreta/Undercover Law)

In that moment, the money goes from being a symbol and source of power to rotted paper. When an authorized agent prints money, it's like it imbues the money with a kind of soul. A soul of commerce, I guess. A soul of exchange. No longer a piece of paper, now it's a token that gives you access to things.

But he went and buried it in the ground, like a dead thing, and deprived of its role as a token of exchange, it did in fact die. And now he's holding mere corpses.

.... Well then! That concludes my weird meditation on cash.

Today's sleet and rain has broken the spell that hid the true nature of our driveway. In reality, it is a whale shark.

Sorry we've been parking on top of you, whale shark!