[Image: illustration from Mountains and Molehills; or, Recollections of a Burnt Journal (1855), by one Frank Marryat. (Click image to enlarge.) For the complete book in various formats, see the Internet Archive. For more information about this image in particular, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
The Swan
Across the wide waters
something comes
floating—a slim
and delicateship, filled
with white flowers—
and it moves
on its miraculous musclesas though time didn’t exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happinessalmost beyond bearing.
And now it turns its dark eyes,
it rearranges
the clouds of its wings,it trails
an elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy-colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:I miss my husband’s company—
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heavendoesn’t lie down in flat miles.
It’s in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,and the gestures
with which you honor it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those white wings
touch the shore?
(Mary Oliver [source])
…and:
Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning, on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born on have traveled all over the world. The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.
(Jeanette Winterson [source])
…and:
Living
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamilymoves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.Each minute the last minute.
(Denise Levertov [source])
Not from whiskey river:
The View from Zero Bridge
My father made his way to Zero Bridge
before the sun slipped up the riverbed
and lighted plum groves—long before the cars,
carts, rickshaws, trucks, and bicycles emerged,
dew-slick at dawn, into the dust. He passed
our shuttered shop, passed Ram Bagh Road, arrived
and, with his camera, peered over the edge.
The long shikaras jostled side by side,
their pointed noses wedged on the stone slab,
their open bellies full—kohlrabi, beets,
red carrots, long green kuddu, string beans—rows
piled patchwork, high as each small boat could hold.
The farmers, barefoot, balanced at the edges,
haggling, counting, weighing. He framed and shota young man in an orange, cabled sweater
swinging a bale of okra to his shoulder;
a pyramid of eggplants on a scale;
a farmer setting weights to balance them,
the wind across the Jhelum billowing
his gray pajama. After the shutter closed,
the farmers tipped their heart-shaped paddles, turned,
rowed back to Dal Lake’s maze of floating gardens.It must have been our last year. Had he known,
he might have waited for the shot he missed:
the empty boats, the paddles poised to break
morning’s gold film, laid thin across the lake.
(Lynn Aarti Chandhok [source])
…and:
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child’s mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life
I have my iron desk that I hauled up three flights of stairs, with ropes and wedges. I have my pencils that I sharpen with a paring knife.
There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?
(Don DeLillo [source])
…and:
Early in my research, I came across a moment — forty minutes into the eighty-eighth hour of Gemini VII — which, for me, sums up the astronaut experience and why it fascinates me. Astronaut Jim Lovell is telling Mission Control about an image he has captured on film — “a beautiful shot of a full Moon against the black sky and the strato formations of the clouds below,” reads the mission transcript. After a momentary silence, Lovell’s crewman Frank Borman presses the talk button. “Borman’s dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute.”
Two lines further along we see Lovell saying, “What a sight to behold!” We don’t know what he’s referring to, but there’s a good chance it’s not the moon. According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.
(Mary Roach [source])
…and:
Amos Calloway (Danny DeVito): Forget it Kid. Don’t waste your time. She’s out of your league.
Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor): What do you mean? You don’t even know me.
Amos Calloway: Sure I do. You were hot shit back in Hickville, but here in the real world, you got squat. You don’t have a plan. You don’t have a job. You don’t have anything except the clothes on your back… You were a big fish in a small pond, but this here is the ocean, and you’re drowning. Take my advice and go back to Puddleville. You’ll be happy there.
(Dialogue from Tim Burton’s Big Fish [source])
About the image: Frank Marryat’s 1855 journal records his time spent in, among other places, a gold mining community called Tuttletown (a/k/a Tuttle Town, Tuttle-Town, Mormon Gulch), California. Although no caption is specifically assigned to the illustration (also by Marryat), the surrounding text tells the tale:
Who talks of hope and disappointment in the same breath? Shall a day of the one efface or tarnish the recollection of a year’s happiness brightened by the other?—Not with me whilst I live. “See here, now, boys,” said a Tuttletonian miner, one day, as he held up to an admiring crowd a small and well-constructed lady’s boot. “The chunk aint found that can buy this boot; ‘taint for sale, no-how!”
A lady’s boot to you, or I, reader, is not much unless we are married and have to pay for a pair occasionally; but so long as we can associate our hopes of earthly happiness for the future with some emblem held out to us even at arm’s length,as was the miner’s “lady’s boot,” we may go on our way to work as did his gratified spectators more cheerfully and light of heart.
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