JAMES AITCHISON

And The Pursuit Of Happiness

The unfastening of frontal consciousness might be a circumstance, and if happiness is this half-mind faculty then it cannot be pursued.

Once it was music, not music in the mind but mind’s metamorphosis in music’s metaphors: moon-pull tides and thermals of angels’ breath.

Now it might follow the end of seasonal tasks, repetitive, rhythmic practicalities of wordless garden work.

And even before a task’s complete I sometimes overhear my illiterate brain in a preternatural buoyancy celebrate my mind’s oblivion in the hydrophonic yawning song of whales, the hum of obedient bees in foxglove bells, the snuffle-grunt of a truffle-hunting pig.

I make no explicit wish for happiness: it happens, or not, only afterwards when I get my mind back whole or nearly whole.

Self Isolation