Quarantine Walk

Watch on Vimeo.

quarantine walk
stopping at the sound
of a jet

I can’t stop marveling at how quiet it’s become under lockdown. In normal times I find the close horizons of this narrow hollow in the hills a bit claustrophobic, but now that there’s so much less noise echoing around in it from adjacent highways, the nearby quarry, and factories and businesses in town, it feels more spacious. A pair of local Canada geese fly over at dusk and I hold my breath, listening to their wingbeats. I no longer envy animals that live underground their superior soundproofing.

last week’s rain
that hush
in the moss

***

Process notes

I think of the relationship between the prose and haiku portions of a haibun as a conversation, or better yet, antiphony — call-and-response. When it becomes a film/video, two other elements, image and sound, join in for what might hopefully resemble four-part harmony. What’s fascinating about this from the creative side is how the editing proceeds, with each element continually getting tweaked in response to the others. Even if, as is often the case with me, the video arrives first and calls up the text, where to cut and how much to process it can still change up to the last minute, as the haiku morph and I adjust the prose to make everything fit into the span of a minute. Our internet in Plummer’s Hollow continues to degrade as the pandemic crisis intensifies; best to keep the upload as small as possible.

The haiku here assumed their final and shortest form after I got a few more hours of sleep and rose in the middle of the night when the internet is fastest. There’s something about the wee hours that favors concision. Ultimately, I take my inspiration from the moss, which crowds so much into so little space. It carpets the mountain’s steep slopes where the ravages of the first clear-cutting, more than 200 years ago, might as well have been yesterday as far as the soil is concerned. No matter how great the chasms that open between them during a drought, moss plants always manage to heal all wounds and join up again in a harmony that must be perfect — how else could such a teeming mob maintain such silence?