Summit

A summit, a climax, a gathering toward something definitive, from this point you can travel no further unless you change the medium through which you are traveling, from the summit of a peak, if you want to continue moving in the same element you must go down – sure, we are capable of continuing up but we need wings, we need wind, we need tools that we have not used to get us this far: a summit is a culmination, all paths converging in this one element to come to a point, and in writing a period is a summit and since this piece has overtones of punctuation as defined by a mountain summit, periods are not included, have been shunned, it has been decided that the real summits about which are being spoken are more potent than the periodical summits of punctuation in writing and that this piece, for those reasons, is not broken by periods, but by the rolling waves of commas, the direct arrows of dashes – and the doorways of colons: not that this is unique in writing, I’m doing nothing new, Kerouac and Hemingway paved the way, many others before them of whom I’m not aware, just as earlier climbers have paved the way to the mountain summits around these parts of Patagonia, many of these people connected in text by hyphens: Terray-Magnone, Comaseña-Fonrouge, Kearney-Knight, etc. . . ah the ellipsis, the staccato “b-b-but wait there’s more” of the ellipses but I'm speaking no more of this because really this piece is not about punctuation but about summits, the way they collect the mass below them and bring it to definition, like the Earth Summits, collecting the mass of the environmental movement and defining it and in the same way a mountain summit, such as that of Fitz Roy bring the rocky mass of the peak to definition, the clearest, most concise way of saying, “This is who I am,” and so it is toward that definition that seekers seek, arrows point, mountains rise, summits entail this and on that unique point of Fitz Roy, the aspect that holds not a single nook of protection from the relentless winds off the Southern Patagonian Icecap, something poignant is pushing at your feet, with the mass of this mountain aiming up at that point on which you stand, and you feel something quite definitive.