[Image: “GRAVES BHAMALA (x2),” by John E. Simpson. When I photographed these bricks, I thought I’d stumbled on some kind of mystery : a reference to a Hindi deity whose name was embossed on building materials at an historic site in the Deep South. Well, duh: the punctuation in the second line — which I hadn’t seen until enlarging the photo — makes a lot of difference.]
From whiskey river:
On the surface and maybe underneath, this may be regarded by some as an idiot’s life. In the very long struggle to find out your own true character there is the real possibility you’ll discover a simpleton beneath the skin, or at least something deeply peculiar. But then you slowly arrive at a point where you accept your comfortable idiosyncrasies, aided in part by the study of your sporting friends, who are capable of no less strange behavior. A few years back I tried to explain to a long table of studio executives the pleasures of walking around wild country in the moonlight. They nodded evasively, but I could tell they thought I was daft. The same tale told to two or three of my favorite hunting or fishing companions would be received as utterly ordinary, say on the level of drinking too much good wine. It’s simply the kind of thing you do when your curiosity arouses you.
(Jim Harrison [source])
…and (italicized lines):
Belief in Magic
How could I not?
Have seen a man walk up to a piano
and both survive.
Have turned the exterminator away.
Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine.
Seen rainbows in puddles.
Been recognized by stray dogs.
I believe reality is approximately 65% if.
All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas.
I believe we’re surrounded by crystals.
Not just Alexander Vvedensky.
Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in.
Nonetheless.
Nevertheless
I believe there are many kingdoms left.
The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.
A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life
even though
even though this is my second heart.
Because the first failed,
such was its opportunity.
Was cut out in pieces and incinerated.
I asked.
And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart
in a jar.
Strange tangled imp.
Wee sleekit in red brambles.
You know what it feels like to hold
a burning piece of paper, maybe even
trying to read it as the flames get close
to your fingers until all you’re holding
is a curl of ash by its white ear tip
yet the words still hover in the air?
That’s how I feel now.
(Dean Young [source])
Not from whiskey river:
“There is a button on the remote control called FAV…”
There is a button on the remote control called FAV. You can program your favorite channels. Don’t like the world you live in, choose one closer to the world you live in. I choose the independent film channel and HBO. Neither have news programs as far as I can tell. This is what is great about America—anyone can make these kinds of choices. Instead of the news, HBO has The Sopranos. This week the indie channel is playing and replaying Spaghetti Westerns. Always someone gets shot or pierced through the heart with an arrow, and just before he dies he says, I am not going to make it. Where? Not going to make it where? On some level, maybe, the phrase simply means not going to make it into the next day, hour, minute, or perhaps the next second. Occasionally, you can imagine, it means he is not going to make it to Carson City or Texas or somewhere else out west or to Mexico if he is on the run. On another level always implicit is the sense that it means he is not going to make it to his own death. Perhaps in the back of all our minds is the life expectancy for our generation. Perhaps this expectation lingers there alongside the hours of sleep one should get or the number of times one is meant to chew food—eight hours, twenty chews, and seventy-six years. We are all heading there and not to have that birthday is not to have made it.
(Claudia Rankine [source])
…and:
There are moments of harmony that rise to the level of serendipity, coincidence, and beyond, and certain passages of time that seem dense with such incidents. Summers and deserts seem best for them. I remember lying in the shade of my truck in the Great Basin reading The Divine Comedy. As I finished the last lines of the Paradiso, when Dante approaches the light and is turned like a wheel by “the love which moves the sun and other stars,” a car pulled up. The Franciscan father who ministered to Skid Row characters in Las Vegas and to the cause of peace in the desert stepped out, a comic saint with a thick Breton accent who seemed to have driven up straight out of paradise into that desert that resonated so much with Dante’s tale. Or a time walking in another desert when I thought of the obsidian bird-point arrowhead I’d found in that area the year before, then recollected the creamy chert arrowhead a man had given me since then, and with the latter picture in my head looked down to see its twin, another pale arrowhead with a wide base, a perfect match two thousand miles away six months later, so startling a coincidence that my sense of cause and effect was rattled for a day. Countless times when I traveled hundreds of miles to meet a friend who arrived simultaneously at our remote destination, when what we were looking for appeared unexpectedly, when two people spoke the same thought in the same words at once. Such moments seem to mean that you have surrendered to the story being told and are following the story line rather than trying to tell it yourself, your puny voice interrupting and arguing with fate, nature, the gods.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
Leave a Reply