Pushed away: Water Chestnuts

It lives entirely at the level of the literal object, with the symbolic dimension of experience simply not in service, so nothing stands for anything, ceremony reads as decoration and the sacred does not register as a category at all. Rejection beginning before birth left it without the early exchange in which a small person learns that one thing can carry another, and what was never built cannot be missed in the ordinary way. What it asks for is to let one object mean something beyond itself for the length of an afternoon.

A thing is what it is. I've never understood what people mean by more than that.

It echoes Enkidu before the city, who lived among the animals at the waterhole and knew grass, water and warmth exactly as they were, with nothing standing for anything else. The form implies a task: to let one thing be a sign.