[Image: “CROATOAN,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For details about this photo, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river:
Adrift
Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.
(William Stafford [source])
…and:
Human beings from the moment of entry into language are ready to become dreamers and fiction-makers, not to mention liars, fetishists, and perverters of the real. Our fiction-making capacity may be foundational of our search for truth in our selves and in the world, but it does not guarantee it, nor assure our mental stability. The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same. But fiction-making does seem to be crucial to the ability to carve out a space within reality for attempts at understanding and reflection.
(Peter Brooks [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Kaldren lived alone in the old abstract summer house on the north shore of the lake. This was a seven-storey folly originally built by an eccentric millionaire mathematician in the form of a spiralling concrete ribbon that wound around itself like an insane serpent, serving walls, floors, and ceilings. Only Kaldren had solved the building—a geometric model of ?-1—and consequently he had been able to take it off the agents’ hands at a comparatively low rent. In the evenings Powers had often watched him from the laboratory, striding restlessly from one level to the next, swinging through the labyrinth of inclines and terraces to the rooftop, where his lean angular figure stood out like a gallows against the sky, his lonely eyes sifting out radio lanes for the next day’s trapping.
(J.G. Ballard [source])
…and:
If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.
(Olivie Blake [source])
…and:
A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness
Even 3 + 2 is like this.
A photograph of a face half lit, half in darkness.
A train station where one train is stopped
and another passes behind it,
heard, but not seen.A person proud of five good senses
lives without echolocation.Dogs pity our noses
as we pity the bee that blunders the glass.Take out every other word of the world,
what is left?A half half darkness.
A station one is and passes.
We live our lives in one place
and look in every moment into another.As on a child’s map,
where X
marks both riddle and treasure.It is near, but not here.
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
#8: You may be surprised: my favorite fond reminiscences aren’t my own, but those shared by people who claim they don’t read fiction — because, they say, they prefer facts and “the real world.” I’m sorry if this sounds patronizing, but these people are almost cute; I want to hug them.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
_____
About the photo: This is one of several hundred photos I’ve posted on Instagram and tagged #jesstorypix. Here’s the complete text accompanying this one:
The little group of a half-dozen friends had set out on a two-week camping trip in April: hiking deep into the North Woods after being dropped off, following an entire day’s drive, at the end of a long, twisting logging road. The smiling adventure-tours operator said, just before driving away, “See you right here at this spot, two weeks from today. Right?” As one, they all shouted, “RIGHT!”
One thing followed another… Over five months later — two of their party lost in the disaster on the riverbank, another now feverish and malarial and fading fast — the survivors finally made it back to the spot at the end of the logging road. There they found a note in a zip-lock plastic bag, nailed to a tree; they could see the letterhead of the tour company, but most of the handwritten text was obscured by some kind of fungus which filled the bag. (They didn’t dare open it.) Only one word remained visible: “CROATOAN.”
After another two days’ limping travel down the road, and a third day to bury their now-dead companion, the final three came upon a sign: “Ranger Station Ahead.” Any hopes for salvation were quickly dashed, though…
Like most installments in the storypix series, I like about this one that it ends inconclusively, in an ellipsis: challenging (I hope) the reader — even (especially) subconsciously — to plug the hole in the narrative, which is to say in their own experience.
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