A (Not So) Particular Place, a (Not Very) Particular Time

[Image: “The Crossing: Downpatrick Head, County Mayo, Ireland,” by architect Travis Price, his students, and numerous local craftsmen. For more information, see this PDF and the Catholic University of America site.]

From whiskey river:

Between where you are now and where you’d like to be there’s a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it’s a good idea to imagine that you’re already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side.

(David Bohm [source])

…and:

All Winter

In winter I remember
how the white snow
swallowed those who came before me.
They sing from the earth.
This is what happened to the voices.
They have gone underground.

I remember how the man named Fire
carried a gun. I saw him
burning.
His ancestors live in the woodstove
and cry at night and are broken.
This is what happens to fire.
It consumes itself.

In the coldest weather, I recall
that I am in every creature
and they are in me.
My bones feel their terrible ache
and want to fall open
in fields of vanished mice
and horseless hooves.

And I know how long it takes
to travel the sky,
for buffalo are still living
across the drifting face of the moon.

These nights the air is full of spirits.
They breathe on windows.
They are the ones that leave fingerprints
on glass when they point out
the things that happen,
the things we might forget.

(Linda Hogan [source])

…and:

After an old Hasidic master died, his followers sat around, talking about his life. One person wondered aloud, “What was the most important thing in the world for the master?” They all thought about it. Another responded, after a time, “Whatever he happened to be doing at the time.”

(Susan Murphy [source])

…and:

Sayings from the Northern Ice

It is people at the edge who say things
at the edge: winter is toward knowing.

Sled runners before they meet have long talk apart.
There is a pup in every litter the wolves will have.
A knife that falls points at an enemy.
Rocks in the wind know their place: down low.
Over your shoulder is God; the dying deer sees Him.

At the mouth of the long sack we fall in forever
storms brighten the spikes of the stars.

Wind that buried bear skulls north of here
and beats moth wings for help outside the door
is bringing bear skull wisdom, but do not ask the skull
too large a question until summer.
Something too dark was held in that strong bone.

Better to end with a lucky saying:

Sled runners cannot decide to join or to part.
When they decide, it is a bad day.

(William Stafford [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Ultimate Problems

In the Aztec design God crowds
into the little pea that is rolling
out of the picture.
All the rest extends bleaker
because God has gone away.

In the White Man design, though,
no pea is there.
God is everywhere,
but hard to see.

The Aztecs frown at this.
How do you know He is everywhere?
And how did He get out of the pea?

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis.

(John McPhee [source])

..and:

The Singular and Cheerful Life

The singular and cheerful life
of any flower
in anyone’s garden
or any still unowned field—

if there are any—
catches me
by the heart,
by its color

by its obedience
to the holiest of laws:
be alive
until you are not…

those princes of everything green—
the grasses
of which there are truly
an uncountable company,

each on its singular stem
striving
to rise and ripen.

What, in the earth world,
is there not to be amazed by
and to be steadied by
and to cherish?

Oh, my dear heart,
my own dear heart,
full of hesitations,
questions, choice of directions,

look at the world.
Behold the morning glory,
the meanest flower, the ragweed, the thistle.
Look at the grass.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

 

Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.

(Stephen Jay Gould, paraphrasing John McPhee [source])

_____________

Footnote: While researching this post, I came across the concept of ley lines. Per Wikipedia:

The phrase was coined in 1921 by the amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins, referring to supposed alignments of numerous places of geographical and historical interest, such as ancient monuments and megaliths, natural ridge-tops and water-fords. In his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track, he sought to identify ancient trackways in the British landscape. Watkins later developed theories that these alignments were created for ease of overland trekking by line-of-sight navigation during neolithic times, and had persisted in the landscape over millennia.

This led me in turn (in several turns, in fact) to a little side story… It seems that in 2010, a British “researcher” named Tom Brooks posited that these ancient structures were laid out mathematically, in a sort of GPS layout. Per The Guardian:

Brooks has proved, he explains, that there were keen mathematicians here 5,000 years ago, millennia before the Greeks invented geometry: “Such is the mathematical precision, it is inconceivable that this work could have been carried out by the primitive indigenous culture we have always associated with such structures… all this suggests a culture existing in these islands in the past quite outside our expectation and experience today.” He does not rule out extra­terrestrial help.

This bit of news was greeted skeptically by a number of observers, who pointed out that given enough random points, you could discern precise geometrical designs almost anywhere. Among these observers, one with a special sense of humor: one Matt Parker, of the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London.

Matt Parker then decided to apply [Brooks’s] technique to another ancient and mysterious civilisation: that of the Woolworths stores.

“We know so little about the ancient Woolworth stores, but we do still know their locations” explains Matt Parker, “so I thought that if we analysed the sites we could learn more about what life was like in 2008 and how these people went about buying cheap kitchen accessories and discount CDs.”

[source]

The image at above right (click to enlarge) shows a map constructed from Brooks’s “research,” at the top; and, at the bottom, the corresponding map from Parker’s. Amazing, is it not?