Spelunking the Extraordinary

[Image: illustrations and captions from “Radio Milks Cows, Runs Street Cars,” in the February 1931 edition of Modern Mechanix. Found it here, at the Modern Mechanix blog (it’s a bit extraordinary that such a blog even exists). To see the whole page on which the photo appeared, including more detailed text, just click on the image.]

From whiskey river:

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Saving Daylight

Suppose for a moment you live in a land,
Amazed at what happens during summer solstice.
Very strange things begin to occur,
Instantly, there is little darkness,
Night that we are so used to
Gone; what is left is the brilliant colors.

Daylight from dusk to dawn to dusk again,
Alight in all its energy and brightness.
Yes, we are north of the sixtieth parallel;
Land of the midnight sun.
I have been here before and seen things,
Gazed upon the horizon, waiting for darkness to reappear,
Holding on to summer in all its life, love and beauty;
To see it ebb once more as daylight fades to night.

(C. M. Davidson-Pickett [source])

…and (italicized portion):

There is purity in living beautifully. To indulge in the small ecstasies, the small pleasures. Silk dresses, white tea, gold, sunshine, carved crown molding. It is all malleable, atmospherically — our lives. Simplicity, blue palms, white wines, whipped espresso. You create your paradise out of all these simple luxuries, and that’s purely religious. True divinity wades in the warm oceans of bliss.

(“Dove Mother” (quoted by Linden Fern) [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Annunciation

I learned to hide my wings almost immediately,
learned to tuck and bandage them down.
Long before the accident, before the glass shattering
and that scene going dim, dimmer, and then dark,
before the three fractures at the axis, three cracks

in the bone, it had already begun. My voice
had begun to deepen, the sound of it
suddenly more my father’s than my own. My beard
had started growing, my bones growing, my bones
sore from the speed of their growth, and there,

at fourteen years of age, the first tugging
of the muscles between my shoulder blades.
It began as a tiny ache. It was just a minor irritation.
Day after day passed, and this ache grew,
and then the tips of the cartilaginous wings

began to tent my skin. Father Callahan
had already warned that in each of us
there was both potential for bad and good.
When trying to shave for the first time, I nicked
my cheek, the bleeding slow but continuous.

Standing there, dabbing at this small cut with tissue paper,
the first tear surprised me, the left wing heaving through
that fleshy mound of muscle between my shoulder blades
and then the skin. I buckled and, on my knees, the right wing
presented itself more rapidly than the left.

When I stood, there in the mirror, my wings outstretched
with their tiny feathers wet, almost glutinous, a quick
ribbon of blood snaking down my back. You wonder
why I am such a master of avoidance, such a master
of what is withheld. Is there any wonder, now?

I had no idea then they would wither and fall off
in a few weeks. When Father Callahan patted
my head in the sacristy and told me I was
a good boy, a really good boy, an extraordinary boy,
I wanted to be anything but extraordinary.

(C. Dale Young [source])

…and:

“#50: When you were very young, everything you encountered represented by definition a miracle: a thing never before encountered. You are not very young anymore; the garish colors and extravagant music of those miracles have faded. But in memory, the experiences of them linger — making plain (if you will but listen) that the miraculous essences of things have not changed… only your perception of them. If you hold them the right way, inspect them properly, squint and peer into the spaces between their atoms, there you will find again the miracles. Keep looking.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)