Making Room for More World

Dave claims to have been around only a year. I've done some poking around. The first link I have recorded to Via Negativa was on January 31, 2004; but I know I'd been reading Dave's blog for at least a couple of weeks by then. So I must have found him soon after he opened up shop. As with nearly every blog I especially like, the history of how I found it is lost in the mazes of beginningless time.

I guess I'm supposed to believe that since the Via has only been open for traffic for a year, I must have stumbled across in in the past year, but that's hopelessly reductive linear thinking, and it doesn't square with my experience at all. I was a raw teenager, full of despair, when he gave a me one of the kindest dope-slaps I've ever received, along with the gift (not be divulged in public) of the secret meaning of dragonflies. It was early in my marriage that I shared his account of his affair with Kwan Yin with Martha (his only venture, he claims, into the popular genre of religious porn), and we both laughed till we had tears in our eyes. And it was late in the evening of my days that I heard the words of his pianist, reminding me that I should

...Let outlines grow
fuzzy, liberated from their shadows.
Play all the fractional notes
between white & black, hemidemi-
semiquavers in milkweed pods,
seed-clouds of goldenrod, bare
branches. Their ordnance spent,
freed of primary obligations,
the empty casings have room
for more world -

Making room for more world. Via Negativa has been doing that for me for a year now. That's Dave's story, anyway, and I suppose he's wise to stick to it.