Matthew Schmidt in response to Dennis Hinrichsen’s “[mosaic] [With Henry David Thoreau and a Glove]”

I don’t know much about Henry David Thoreau. It seems his name is regularly bandied about without much context other than his general standing as an American naturalist, essayist, poet, transcendentalist. Like many people, I’ve made my way through Walden, though the thing that sticks out most in my mind is Thoreau’s need to measure Walden Pond. Supposedly a number of locals thought the pond bottomless, a not unhealthy thought, a not necessary-to-dispel thought, though Thoreau, being Thoreau, using fishing line and a stone, calculates and provides a pond schematic. Surely, it doesn’t remain accurate today for one reason or another. Still, because Walden is a memoir cornerstone, an early DIY manifesto, an ecologically sound existence, and a study in independence, its importance is retained. What is more American than independence, at least in the mythos or zeitgeist or bootstrapping vigor of the country? And what determines America, the Americas, more than water? 

Moreover, water, or large quantities of it, evokes the unfathomable. Similar to space, water/the ocean remains one of the truly unexplored areas of human existence. Sure, we can dive with oxygen, pilot submersibles, or send cameras below the surface, but because we can’t actually breathe in water the sea will forever remain unknown. If you can’t linger, can you truly experience? 

While I can’t inhabit Dennis Hinrichsen’s brain, I tried to linger in his words. I read them silently and aloud. I let them sit for a week and read them again. I recorded myself reciting “[mosaic] [With Henry David Thoreau and a Glove]” and played it back. I fooled around on a guitar while listening to myself say Hinrichsen’s words. I chopped up the recorded guitar a little and rearranged it. I lingered in the diction and space and rhythm and dashes. Like Thoreau lent a hand to Hinrichsen, I took both of their hands in mine and let our hands sound. The depths. The volume. The flow. 

I thought about “smithereens” on “fire”—thought about “parasites” mounting an “invasion”—about “memory” as “act”—bout a “dying” “palace”—out “peace” “weeping”—

I’m not really saying anything concrete, I’m moving tiles around, looking at their pictures, etchings, the ridges I can feel with the ridges of my fingers, the echoes that resound, the “boon” of the given given back, different, the sound of me mixing with the sound of Hinrichsen with the sound of Thoreau with the pond the rivers the lakes the oceans the water inside us vibrating. This is the conversation undulating.