On grass. // One “touches grass” to better understand Homer. One reads Homer to better understand grass, and to meet its myriad sensations.
(Grass is one of my favorite things to think about, as an example of thinking about nature. I had a revelatory moment with grass, decades ago, when I read Aristotle’s Physics for the first time. I was taking a break from writing a paper, the night before it was due. It was well past midnight. I smoked a Du Maurier cigarette on the back porch of my sketchy apartment, sitting in a plastic chair, looking at the grass. The lawn in front of me was… rather like I was, struggling. In human landscapes, grass is so often kept constantly chopped, to be treated like a manufactured rug, a servant to human use. To the point where you might never have noticed it, but
grass
really
is
its
own
thing.)