“Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.” -René Magritte in a 1965 interview

                I ran across this quote sometime in my teens. I found it again in 2019, maybe on the wall of the Art Institute of Chicago, and took a picture of it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Not thinking about it all the time, consistently— the kind of thinking about it that also means forgetting about it, forgetting I took the picture, forgetting I went to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. And then today I ran across the picture on my computer and started wondering, when did I take that?
                Around ten or eleven, I fell in love with watching rivers. The way the current and the waves bend and rise, shaped by (and shaping) the rocks of their riverbed. The rocks, held in place and broken apart by tree roots. The trees, washed by and sipping the water. My parents taught me a kind of ‘reading the river’ that meant looking at what you could see to find something about what was harder to see: the direction of the current, the depth of the water, the way a wave would push a kayak. On Sunday I was out at a glacial river, the water so cloudy gray I could only see a few inches through it, and I thought it must be harder to read a river like that. A river you can barely see into. But I sat watching the water for a bit, and thought, well, it doesn’t seem that much harder. Maybe that’s what we’re always doing. Seeing something and something else beneath it. Seeing a little part of the interaction between river and riverbed and forest, between earth and sky. 
                That reminds me a little of me and the quote from Magritte — a song I hear, and forget about, and stumble back across. And sometimes hear myself humming.