[Image: “81,” by the user known as “Fu Ke,” on Flickr. I came really close to using a half-dozen or so photos by this user instead; finally decided that this best aligns with today’s theme (such as it is). It’s very… Escherian, no?]
From whiskey river:
For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord.
(G. K. Chesterton [source])
…and:
Nights Our House Comes to Life
Some nights in midwinter when the creek clogs
With ice and the spines of fir trees stiffen
Under a blank, frozen sky,
On these nights our house comes to life.
It happens when you’re half asleep:
A sudden crack, a fractured dream, you bolting
Upright – but all you can hear is the clock
Your great-grandfather found in 1860
And smuggled here from Dublin for his future bride,
A being as unknown to him then as she is now
To you, a being as distant as the strangers
Who built this house, and died in this room
Some cold, still night, like tonight,
When all that was heard were the rhythmic clicks
Of a pendulum, and something, barely audible,
Moving on the dark landing of the attic stairs.
(Matthew Brennan [source])
…and:
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
(Vladimir Nabokov [source])
…and:
Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
Ever dreamed of existing.
(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Massachusetts
(excerpt)We fought in Salem,
as she nosed the rented car
through streets that
stubbornly refused to match
the squiggled lines
accordioning from my lap.
She pressed me for direction
as I spun the folding paper
like a compass point,
urged me for instruction
as I traced the lines like Braille,
my fingers blinded,
tapping out the spell of history;
I could not navigate this town.
[…] My lover, steering wheel in hand,
stared into narrow streets
with the eyes of a dark bird.
“Which way,” she cawed, “which way?”
But mine glowed with the blankness
of a woman swaying from a noose,
clothing asunder,
curses drowning in an airless throat,
spirit driven from its home;
it circled now above our heads.
The useless atlas crumpled at my feet,
it could not lead me to a place
where threat did not bear down like heavy stones;
we fought in Salem.
(Terry Wolverton [source])
…and:
The Gargoyle in Our Backyard
…only two patients are alive and free of tumor at the time of this report, both 7 years after resection…. “Oat Cell Carcinoma of the Lung: A Review of 138 Cases.” Cancer 23.3 (1969)
Forty years ago, my father made medical history:
Staved off the cancer storming in his lung,
A squall that had sunk everyone else on board
His boat, capsized in cold, uncharted waters.
Last year, dismantled off our coast, he foundered
For good. We planted what’s left in our inland grove.All day, today, the western sky wore black,
Widowed young by a sun buried too soon.
At five, the darkness drove east, then unleashed
The grief of straight-line winds that leveled
Our ancient elm as if it had no roots.
It crashed across the fence whose white boardsFlattened like broken teeth. But amid the split spar
And a thousand chips, the gargoyle stands intact:
It guards the bits of bone and ash shipwrecked
Beneath it, emboldened by what survives.
(Matthew Brennan [source])
…and:
So you have all these big fears waiting for you and the main one is: we’re all going to die. You deal with that by making everything into little fears, so that if a samale [a spirit] proceeds through the village and you look at it through a crack in the hut wall, then something terrible will happen. If you don’t, you just carry on with your gossip, you’ll be fine.
Now that’s just the same as all the taboos on a trawler, how you really must not say sheep or pig, or rabbit or even salmon. And above all you mustn’t wear green. But that tells you, the spirits of the sea, they not only care about your speech, they care about your fucking dress sense, your sense of fashion. It becomes personal — that’s the way to get it down to human scale. And it’s immensely comforting. But if you say “rabbit fish,” everybody’s touching cold iron. Cold iron’s everywhere — that’s what it’s about — it enables you to cope with this horror out there. It seems to me that’s the basis of religion. That’s what ritual is about, to make things human, to make you forget the vast, indifferent 3.2 billion years of evolution that have gone on. They must have looked at the night sky and thought, Jesus, that’s just too big, so you make those stars into angels, you transform it.
(Redmond O’Hanlon [source])
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