redemption shoes

okra

2010-12-26T10:11:00.004-06:00

returning home on Christmas day, it is cold and tonight it will freeze. The garden is barren except for the okra that juts up like punji sticks, leafless and yet continuing to produce, miraculously, okra, inedible and alien in shape.

this day extraordinary blossoms emerge. overnight a hard freeze, and I wake to check on them. they are vibrant in the morning sun bathing fragile petals in warmth. tonight another, harder, freeze. I am not sure they will make it, these hot summer plants that delight me with their insistence upon bringing forth beauty into the gray cold day.

present

2010-12-19T14:08:00.001-06:00

Leavenworth, WA Summer 2010

My God, I look at the creek…If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek…
Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: “Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.” Let me twist his meaning. Here it comes. The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and the light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 102-3

Escape

2010-12-01T20:24:00.003-06:00

It often feels best to lay low, inconspicuous, instead of waving your spirit around from high places like a lightning rod."
--Annie Dillard

ghost limbs

2010-11-27T19:02:00.001-06:00

Tonight I am thinking of Sudek and the war, his desperate searching for the limb that he lost in the war, furious at this war and that war and the wars we wage among ourselves, and the fear that war is as much who we are as love, and a part of me nods and knows that is true and I am not afraid but just resigned to the dark side of life that takes away what you most love when you least expect it, and you are looking for that thing the rest of your life, like some condemnation to hell, while others shop in malls or online and watch the fashionable TV shows, you reside in the black shadows of a pain so exquisite you would release yourself from it, but cannot because what you love might be out there, might be found.

The deep, necessary excavation begins. Last weekend or the week before I was listening to Selected Shorts on NPR, and transfixed by a story by T. Coraghessan Boyle about a man delivering a kidney for a transplant. He is, like all of us, caught in the immediacy of the everyday, of the things that we think of moment by moment of our urban lives as important. He is furious and frustrated as traffic impedes his delivery due to a mudslide at the nearby town of La Conchita.

A young woman frantically accosts him, begging for his help. Her child and husband are buried in the mud beneath the house while she had gone out only for a few minutes. Begrudgingly he abandons the everyday world of the traffic jam and follows her to the mess, where he hurls himself into digging, becoming the digging itself, excavating for he knows not what or why, but to uncover something that suddenly takes on more importance than even the awaiting recipient of the kidney still in the trunk of his car.

Maybe it is as much the abandoning as the digging. As we commit to the excavation, so maybe we abandon those things that no longer matter.

I had to search. Far outside the city, toward dawn, in the fields bathed by the morning dew, I finally found the place. But my arm wasn’t there—only the poor peasant farmhouse was still standing in its place. They had brought me into it that day I was shot in the right arm. They could never put it together again…
--Josef Sudek

5.

2010-11-27T09:23:00.002-06:00

The seasons on the farm passed, and for Grace time was calculated only in quotidian measures: the sudden paroxysms of weather, the familiar appearances of certain transient species of birds, the planting of seeds, the ripening of things upon the vine, and the sweet hovering of bees. Time's more intimate units were marked by the uninterrupted arcs of the sun and moon, the cooking, the laundering, and the tireless search for the elusive thing that would offer up some bit of her mother, like a delectable drop of nectar drawn form a honeysuckle blossom.

At fourteen, Grace discovered that when she would stand outside her father's bedroom window with her hands pressed against the glass, letting her eyes drift off in a mist of vision, she could see Lizzie pressing her ear against her father’s chest as he slept, his hands folded over him like a corpse. Like a bird then Lizzie flutters off the mattress, picks her way across the floor barefoot between the newspapers and journals and papers scattered everywhere to the high bookshelves that lined the walls of the rooms.

The smooth pine boards of the floor had recorded hundreds of such passages of her bare feet between the bookshelf with its sacred languages and the bed, where the grounding touch of his hands on her skin freed fragments of poetry, fecund and unformulated, from every cell of her flesh, releasing unutterable syllables that flashed like sparks from her skin, where his mouth gathered them gently back into an utterance that flooded back into her, coherent and whole. As she rested in his arms, she would often see her own death flicker around her like a firefly. Seeing these flashes like lightning behind the lids of his eyes, he did not know that he also was witnessing her death, that he had already lost her.

4.

2010-11-25T12:41:00.006-06:00

From the pieces of stories that she touched as a child, like scraps of cloth stitched together to keep her warm at night, she began to craft a memory of her mother. Each day she would seek out new evidence of her, digging through drawers, leafing through the hundreds of volumes of books that collected dust on the shelves, such was her hunger to know the truth about the woman in whose body hers had formed for nine months. Who had she been, where had she come from, and why had she abandoned her life even before Grace herself had taken her first breath in this world?

This all happened not far from the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River, near old Salt Creek and the playa lakes where buffalo once migrated, at a time when the landscape was already sectioned off into a tidy grid of cash crops, each a different color, like swatches of fabric. The tracks of travois and lodge poles had long been turned under by sodbusters, but the stories still hung on the air, bits of history tossed about on the wind, catching on cotton stalks and the hems of girls’ church dresses.

It is almost impossible to look out over the expanse of land (where the only vertical interruptions on a completely horizontal plane are the wooden electrical poles that flip by like a deck of crucifixes at sixty miles an hour) without musing on what it must have felt like to encounter such unending monotony on horseback, or in a covered wagon.

In the year that Grace was torn from the belly of her mother, the town of Blessing was nothing more than a small oasis in a sea of dust and corn. The Victorian courthouse in the center of town with its clock tower and pitched roof had already burned to the ground twice after being struck by lightning. It had been replaced in the 1950s with an industrial-looking concrete structure with bare slab walls, whose sole decoration was a series of large black and white photographs of the Dustbowl--entire farms being consumed by a cloud of thick sand as high as a thunderhead. She would often stand for hours in the dimly-lit halls of the courthouse, staring in wonder at the images behind the glass. The new courthouse stood in the shadow of the tall grain elevators blocks away on the edge of town, and was flanked by the drugstore, the Post Office, and the T.G. & Y. The bank and grocery store were less than a block away. By fall of 1970, the population was just reaching two thousand.

The tidy German farmhouse that her father’s parents had built at the turn of the century was still much the same, but had long-since fallen into disrepair. The paint had been sandblasted for decades by strong, unceasing winds, and the undulating sea of prairie grasses had overtaken the once-productive vegetable garden. The interior consisted of two bedrooms, a cellar, a parlor, a dining room, and two kitchens—the summer kitchen, attached to the main kitchen, was sparsely furnished with an iron stove on its backmost wall for use during the hottest days of the summer. The tiny house was a museum, whose interior landscape was roamed daily by the eyes and fingers of young Grace. Antiquated relics still lay atop bureaus and the dusty piano. There was a faded velvet sofa that crunched when you sat carefully upon it so as not to be speared by the occasionally-protruding horse hairs, wicker chairs whose seats had long ago collapsed, and hundreds of dusty books on sagging shelves whose pages flaked away between her prying fingers. None among these objects had been more lovingly caressed than the cast iron stereoscopic viewer perched atop a collapsing box of Keystone Company Polaroids from around the world--scenes of Amsterdam and Paris, the Taj Mahal and Canterbury Cathedral. The effort required to achieve the fleeting suspension of the parallel images into one, unified, three-dimensional view was a metaphor for the way in which Grace apprehended the multiple voices of history, and the delicious moment of the marriage of disparate things--dual images, whispers and silence, light and shadow, longing and hope--was delirious respite from the one-dimensional plane of singular focus.

The well house was one of Grace's favorite places. It was a small stone structure, rounded like a dove côte, but framed and screened on the top with a pitched roof. Even in summer the clear water that bubbled within the stone shelves nested beneath the surface was freezing cold. Gazing into the glassy water, she could just see the heavy earthen crocks that had once held butter and cream and milk, covered with thick cheesecloth whose edges once dipped back down into the water long ago.

Grace's father was a walking ghost in the world of the living. Years ago, he had banished himself to the cellar to emerge only at odd hours of the night. She often listened for his phantom shufflings in the bowels of the house. Although his hinged assortment of bones clothed in flesh resided predominantly in the cellar, his soul was to be found on the overburdened walnut shelves within the dog-eared pages of books onto which his fingers had pressed the indelible imprimatur of his longings. She often sought in these same pages the person she might have loved, the man she imagined that existed before she was born. Reinscribing the burning arcs of his vision over the beloved words, and through the traces of perspiration and oil that his fingers had left upon the pages of the heavy tomes, she daily redeemed him.

He father, however, beheld his growing daughter through an impenetrable mist of alcohol and would never know of her unceasing search for him in the forgotten books nor about her peculiar gift. His eyes would never linger upon her delicate hands, freckled arms, and shoulders, her white skin, to see himself reflected in the brilliant organization of her cells--he was afraid that he would encounter her mother in those eyes, and that the demons of her death would call forth with unflinching cinematic honesty the shattered bone, the blood.

3.

2010-11-22T23:01:00.005-06:00

There is an hour when the sun hovers on the horizon and the light is filtered by the dusty atmosphere of dusk. Looking out over the expanse of fields that stretched unto eternity in every direction, the wind often whipped an anguished sound from a farmhouse miles away. Maybe a pig slaughter, though she couldn't be sure. Grace knew that cruelties were dealt out in equal measure with the vast spaces the way you cut cold butter into flour to make biscuits, that in the end one could not tease out the pain. Her body is poised tautly in listening. She can hear the whispering stories of wheat and grass, the story of a ghost of a girl standing at the edge of the Farm-to-Market road, where the cattle trucks fly past leaving a wake of hard, bitter wind. The rust colored seed-heads of prairie bluestem and the violet tips of aristidas and grama grasses shimmer, heavy laden with the weight of light and the memory of a young woman running across the road and into the fallow field that slept at the edge of the stripped-bare fields of cotton, a field that erupted in the sudden iridescence of grasshopper wings.

Grace has watched her countless times, young Lizzie, darting between the veils of time like a lithe deer through the grass. She seems half animal, each cell cocked to bolt away and disappear at the cracking of a twig. Lizzie approaches an old screen door hanging by a single hinge, the wind slapping it in spasms against the doorframe. This moment of apprehension is imprinted in the metal of the doorknob: catching her reflection in the warped glass of the kitchen door, Lizzie gasped. Her entire life was articulated in the clotting thunderheads rising out of the north, but Lizzie could not decipher the tragedies to come. How could she? She had never learned to read the future in the summer clouds. Had she been born in this desolate landscape, had she drunk since birth from wells dug deep down into the heart of the limestone channel where prehistoric water coursed beneath the surface of the prairie for millennia, she might have developed, among other things, a certain proclivity for reading the future in clouds, or for sensing tornadoes coming miles away. Hours before the sky turned greenish lavender and the birds ceased to sing, the local women would feel the hairs on their arms and necks keening toward the sky, and they would begin moving things down to the deep cool of the storm cellars.

Grace’s father is waiting for her there at the kitchen table bent over a tattered volume of Emerson’s sermons, his skin flushed and reddened by the wind and sun. He was unaware of the chaotic slapping of the screen door, or of the hour kept by a clock that once ticked over the mantel of the fireplace in another unthought-of room; he is unaware even of the irregular rhythm of his own heart. The click of the door stops time.

She stands there before him, nervously shifting from foot to foot on the musty kitchen linoleum beneath the naked bulb, shivering though it is still summer. The blood had abandoned her veins. Lizzie struck him as a bird that might suddenly start beating its wings against the ceiling and windows. When he pulls her close to him, enfolding her in his warmth, her heart hammers against his rib cage, and his heart reverberates in her throat. Before long the beating is synchronized through the miracle of the secret language of cells that recognize each other and are reorganized in this recognition across the vast distance of muscle and skin.

What followed always appears before her both as story and memory, seen from above, what the cobwebs would have seen, or what was reflected in the cut glass of the tiny, crystal shades on the light bulbs over her father's bed. She wonders if this is love, this luminous fluid circulating through their bodies. Lizzie was a squiggle of liquid light, her body trembling, like a moth emerging, unfolding, at seventeen, an image overexposed on a pale sheet, glistening in an angle of desire. Watching from the ceiling or the sky, Grace waited for the right moment to pour herself into them, hovering there so long, disembodied, not feeling or hearing or smelling, but yearning to experience the weight of flesh, the confinement of skin, the delirious sensation of taste and touch and sound. Lizzie’s eyes were pressed closed like the new petals of a rose, so peaceful, as they wrapped their pale wings around one another, unaware that their spirits bled in and out of one another’s bodies and the air like a vapor. Grace clearly remembers the moment when little pearls of her father were held inside her mother, and then she slipped like a gasp into the opalescent drops of fluid and it was done.

The Penetrable Air

2010-11-20T09:15:00.007-06:00

…alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space
we dissolve into, taste of us then?
--Rainer Maria Rilke, The Second Elegy

1.
She had witnessed it all, what had happened long ago, the shot that reverberated in the air, hovering somewhere in the fragile space between light and air and the accumulating density of her unborn flesh. For a moment she had seeped through flesh into sky. She was suspended in some bodiless place from which she beheld the old chopping block in the kitchen, the porcelain sink, the curtains, the tiles. Her father was standing at the sink chopping greens, his mind carried deep into the veins of the leaves. The sudden sound of the shot stopped time, trapping the particles of light that traveled through the kitchen window, through the corpuscles of the green leaves and her father’s body. The shot arrested and imprinted the sparse tidiness of the kitchen indelibly on the objects in the room as if imprinted on a silver bromide plate.

Hearing the shot, her father ran out into the fading light,the old screen door slamming behind him. Crows erupted from the corn. He flung himself toward the collapsed figure in the field of yellow grass. At first he did not comprehend what fluid soaked the thick roots of bluestem in a bath of vivid hues: ochre and crimson in stark relief against the pale yellow of her dress, the whiteness of her legs. He fell to his knees beside her. His fingers fumbled for the delicate blue veins of her throat. There was an astonishing stillness. Her right hand still tightly gripped the gun. He wrenched it away, flinging it far across the field. He could not look at her face. At first he buried his head in his hands, but then suddenly looked up, ashen and emotionless. He ran back to the house, the screen door slamming again behind him, but it was only a moment before he emerged like a wild man running with the knife he had just been wielding at the chopping block. He again dropped to his knees, covered her face with a dishtowel, and reached toward her smooth belly. He knew what he had to do. He ripped open her thin dress and with an animal sound of anguish, he carefully carved away the flesh. The tiny form was bundled tightly there, wrinkled like new cabbage within the milky film of the caul.

2.
It was perhaps because of the extraordinary circumstances of her birth that Grace was born with a peculiar gift. Her touch evoked eruptions of images and sounds and smells from whatever object her mother had once touched. She saw through them into the past the same way one might focus one’s vision on the sky reflected in a pool of water, or upon the depths beyond the surface membrane of a pond. In the fields beyond the farmhouse, the past was dispersed in the vast space and wind, just rippling over the tips of heavy seedheads. But inside the house, each object that Grace held in her hand would call her to its secret places.

She was six years old before she realized that what she saw was different from what others saw. There was a world of playgrounds and streets and storefronts, mutually agreed upon as far as she could tell; and there was another world—one than hovered between the cells of this one. There were certain places that she was particularly drawn to, but nowhere more than the place in the field that sang out with her mother's blood, the very spot on the earth where her mother had ended her life. In this place Grace inhaled the familiar smell of soil--the nitrogen, the faint, far-off scent of lightning, the acrid, metallic particulate of burned gunpowder that even now seemed to hover in the astonished air.

In this place she bowed beneath the burden of gravity that had pressed her mother down and the delicious unburdening she had experienced in one shocking flash. Lying on her belly in the tall grass in late summer, she often served as patient midwife to innumerable damp-winged cicadas emerging from their stiff brown shells, and she somehow understood the shotgun in such terms, as midwife to a birth witnessed by the tall grass metamorphosed from her blood.

you had me at 'good-bye'

2010-11-08T00:33:00.005-06:00

"There is a pessimism about land," wrote John Graves, that "after it has been with you a while it becomes merely factual."

So we become addicted to that which cannot be with us for a long time. We tend to imagine ourselves as perpetual, as continuing through time, although we clearly are not. Yet the beauty of the ephemeral is daily masked in the facade of the perpetual.

Other things bear the weight forever of things lost, and thus are elevated to exceeding beauty. John Graves' traveling down the Brazos (those arms of God) lamenting the dam that would forever arrest a thing of ever-changing life and beauty, and those arrested moments of my life spun out like fine lacemaking on the dammed river that was my Possum Kingdom Lake. The haunting interruption of mortality--of life, always abbreviated.

I drove back through the lake area years ago in mid-summer. A freakish front rolled in and we could not stand outside a minute or two before shivering uncontrollably. It was like a veil of icy air kept me from accessing the past. So it will always be, some imagined moments in time that set the pace for happiness, and happiness will always be compared with a sunfish in a bucket awaiting release, and fueling up the Chriscraft at a gas station/hamburger joint on the water, and later the big band sound of Glen Miller will sweep across a linoleum floor where hours later it will be dark, and everyone will be sleeping the deep sleep of belonging, to one another, to the house precipitously cantilevered off a steep cliff, and to one another. My great-grand mother will be there with her wild red hair and we will all sleep the sleep of tightly nested families,knowing no good-byes and no Army Corps of Engineers come to change the world to something better and more hospitable--something that will erase, in its utter beauty of engineering, our perfect, transient, world.

rather than words...

2010-08-28T15:11:00.004-06:00

crab claw, puget sound

There are three bowls--one of wire, one of wood, one of enameled tin--that contain a history embedded in things collected over the years. Three turtle shells resurrected from a cave beneath the Pedernales River, a snake skin, a deer jaw, a possum's pelvic bone...

a set of bird cards, a hand-made book, a bit of moss from a giant sequoia;
a downy owl feather, a butterfly wing, an old photo, a stone crab claw;
a clam shell, purple mollusk, and pine cone, a stone.

These are the stories I will want to remember, those coded in the language of the land, and of found things that were evidence of a secret path only I knew.

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
--Philip Larkin

Butorides virescens

2010-05-10T19:37:00.004-06:00

Adventures with a Texas Naturalist begins with a story about a nurse in a home for the elderly who contacted Bedichek to assist one of the residents. The man had not slept in weeks. Bedi obliged and showed up one day and the man, who had suffered a stroke, struggled to imitate the call of a bird he had been hearing but could not identify. He finally scrawled on a piece of paper, to come back tomorrow, "if quiet and still." And it was, and Bedi returned and sat for a while and listened. Before long it came. He wrote down on the paper, "Inca dove." And the man sat back and relaxed and soon fell asleep.

So it was that I found myself equally perplexed, and Bedi gone. I heard the bird one morning as I sat out on the back deck with the morning coffee, watching the wind stir the trees. It came from the boughs of a large hackberry, and I stood beneath and listened, but only caught a glimpse of the bird, somewhat smaller than a hawk, taking flight to the south.

The next day I heard it again, this time in the neighbor's magnolia. There was a responding call a street or so away, and I was vexed. All I could associate with this new call was possibly hearing it near the water. We live about a half a mile as the crow flies from Barton Creek, but I'd never seen wetland species this far. It's odd that the sound of an unfamiliar bird can feel so unsettling. I remember when I first moved to Austin, hearing the screech owls at night and imagining it must be some type of a loon. Birds resist and elude our imaginations.

Mother's Day I sat down at the computer and went through Cornell's Ornithology site and listened to the sounds of dozens of birds. When I arrived at the call, the world seemed to align itself. I felt like the man in Bedichek's story, slumping into the restful peace of having placed a sound, a leaf, a creature of any kind alongside its name.

on fire

2010-04-05T17:17:00.003-06:00

The last time I had a fever I was reading Legacy of Luna by Julia Butterfly Hill. I had reached the point in the book where a storm is battering Luna, and Hill is hanging on for dear life, when she is calmed by what she perceives to be the tree itself. As the storm whipped the branches of the tree, my head was wracked by pain and my body seared by fever. I set the book down and never returned to it. It changed the course of my life nonetheless.

This fire began on the Colorado River, sitting in a chair by the rippling water, watching a Great Blue Heron fish patiently where the surface of the water broke over a series of rocks that spanned the 100-ft width of the river. I felt that he (or she) was as aware of me as I was of it. We watched one another quietly until I was joined by a more gregarious friend and the bird soon spread its six-foot span of graceful wings and drifted further downriver. There was so much activity I worried that there would be little opportunity for such future encounters.

That night I lay beside my seven-year old in the tent and read to her the poetic mysteries of sedimentation from A Land, by Jacquetta Hawkes, a book loaned to me recently by a friend. Ms Hawkes was an archaeologist in the mid century and the daughter of a Nobel laureate in biochemistry: The last of the great mountain-building storms was the Alpine that raised what is at present the greatest upward irregularity of the surface of the planet...

I read until we both fell asleep, but I awoke that night drenched in sweat, although it was not more than thirty degrees outside. I went outside under the stars and thought that morning must be coming soon because a strong blue light was already washing away the stars in the east. It must have been the moon, however, because the night went on and on while I flipped from one side to another in my sleeping bag.

Fevers are a strange phenomenon. Unlike the virus itself, the fever presumably is being instigated by our own bodies as a mechanism to burn away the offending organisms. Why then chase them away with fever reducers? During the day I certainly felt better when I could mitigate the aches, but at night I was almost content swimming in the half-waking delirium of the fever. I wondered also if other offending things might be burned away, such as toxic thoughts and fears? What if a good strong fever could burn away a portal to a new way of being in the world? Charlotte Joko Beck uses a similar analogy when referring to meditation. She says something like, the zendo is not a place to go and hang out and be quiet, the zendo is a furnace room for burning away impurities.

Welcome furnace room.

Winter grass (Stipa leucotricha)

2010-03-29T13:22:00.006-06:00

"The scenery along the river is agreeable, with a pleasant alteration of gently sloping prairies and wooded creek bottoms," wrote Frederick Law Olmstead about Austin on his travels though Texas in the early 1850s. Traveling through the same region today one would be hard-pressed to make the same comment, save for a few parcels of land spared from the advance of development.

The yard guys showed up today, and my frustration at attempting to explain to them my almost futile attempts at restoration….actually, to even explain the difference between a particular grass that belongs to a specific plant community as opposed to one that does not. Armed with weed eaters and leaf blowers, they see any vegetation peering beyond the straightedge of the city's curb as violating a fundamental precept of landscape.

I do suspect, however, that in their own places of origin, their own human communities, many of them hold a similar, vague blueprint of the species belonging to their indigenous plant communities. The fourth graders at a local eastside elementary were similarly confused. We talked about words like habitat and ecosystem, yet these concepts were frozen in structural blocks, such as rocks, water, plants, air—the things that animals need to survive. Perhaps the idea of specific communities of plants and animals is beyond the fourth grade (although I don't think it should be), but they all seemed to readily associate the word ecosystem with the rainforest, and yet seemed confused that there were several invasive species located in a nearby riparian area that were detrimental to this ecosystem, even though they did not cause a rash when touched. It calls to mind something I read when studying for the certified arborist exam, that the primary reason for pruning trees are human reasons.

Over the last three years I have steadily removed the crabgrass, St Augustine, and annual grasses to allow the Stipa, the winter grass, to flourish. I suspect that it was this grass, not the buffalo grass that goes by the name "Mesquite grass" that Olmsted was referring to when he wrote, "The grass of the Eastern prairies is course and sedgy, like that of rank, moist, outlying spots in New England… Our animals showed no disposition to eat it." With only the slightest nod toward care, it flourished in my yard, and soon exceeded in beauty the Lindheimer muhly that I had paid real money for at a local native nursery. But today it is mowed to the ground like any weed around town that happened to sprout near the edge of a curb or walkway.

Restoration seems to be less of a straightforward business than one would think. After all, the world itself is engaged perpetually in process. We are forever reminded of this, and it is sometimes hard to justify the position that anything truly is indigenous to any particular place. I am not so naïve a purist, however, I appreciate an ever increasing (even if only my own) awareness of the relationships between the land and its vegetation, its communities plant and otherwise, and this great variable of climate. How do you explain, anyway, to a classroom of children, most of them immigrants from Mexico or South and Central America, that it is important to eradicate those species that have come from someplace else; that these species are so successful at outcompeting the ones that are indigenous to this region that the locals can no longer compete? Trying to explain why invasive species are bad for the nearby preserve made me feel a bit like a more educated version of Rush Limbaugh.

I have a particular, perhaps genetic, love of the prairie grass communities, for the post oak and the cottonwood, which not only sound like water when the wind blows through their leaves, but serve, like the sycamore, as indicator species for underground springs and water sources. Maybe in each of us there is a place where a vast expanse of undulating grass, periodically interrupted by wildflowers, corresponds. It is hard to get at this, here in a country where newly installed subdivisions come equipped with angular plots of grass appointed with a requisite number of shrubs and trees, all connected to an irrigation system as a hospital patient to an IV drip. The idea of the home has ceased to integrate with the idea of land, and certainly the word landscape, as Dean Fritz Steiner pointed out in his book Human Ecology, has been reduced to the most pedestrian terms. I think we need to rethink ecology. We need to introduce the idea of ecology as a question rather than a formula, an investigation for students, rather than a prescription.

But then what are we left with in the end? What was it that inspired Olmsted, after all? Certainly not the ecology, but the experience of landscape. The encounter with the sublime, with the formality of the geological and vegetative oeuvre, formed from the palette of his vast perception of these natural occurrences of species prior to the interfering hand of man. In the end perhaps we are all formalists, just slaves to differing ideals of form, some aesthetic, and some "scientific" but still operating our heads the same way our hands might wield leaf blowers.

arrow carriers

2010-02-13T20:43:00.005-06:00

I remember this story today and suddenly see some sad irony in it that I had not seen before:

I was in Montana on the Cattaraugus Reservation visiting with a friend, an artist, who had studied at the Fine Arts School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was twenty six years old, and we were having tea. She was explaining that because she had gone overseas with the Peace Corps, she had returned an honorary warrior in the tribe, more specifically, She Who Carries Arrows. Going to another continent entitled one to warrior status, which apparently trumped gender status, and she returned an arrow carrier.

Her brother suddenly burst in the house telling us that there had been a shoot-out in the nearby town of Hardin. Two men had attempted to rob the bank, and the female sheriff, a mother of two young toddlers, had attempted to stop them. She was hit by a bullet, but not badly, it seemed. The ambulance drivers loaded her up, chatting with her politely. She died en route to the hospital. Apparently the bullet had silently entered her pelvic region and ricocheted amply among her pelvic bones. She hardly felt a thing as she bled to death.

The ambulance drivers were devastated and psychological support teams were called in. I don't know what became of the toddlers or the husband of this warrior, but the room and the tea, with our children playing on the floor around us as this all happened still haunts me. Who are we, we women, we mothers and warriors? Who?

holy days

2009-12-24T09:28:00.002-06:00

The seed is deep and dark and quiet. It whispers its longings, which are vague imprints from a possibly unfolding future, nothing graspable, nothing sure. It may be a marked failing that I come to this place every winter, where I pull myself back down to the seed. It contradicts the lights and music, the wrapping paper and revelry. I am as dark and unmoving as a stone, but a stone that is unfurling in microscopic leaps.

When I start writing these words I have to consider my story. Is it a story any longer, or just sporadic thoughts flung out beneath the canopy of a title, Redemption Shoes. I want to believe that the narrative, utterly complex, cannot become clear until the very last manifestation of its form expresses itself fully and is realized. Maybe its form has stages like a moth or a butterfly?

I was in Brooklyn a few weeks ago, where Redemption Shoes was born. I didn’t think of it at all, until I walked with my daughter down Washington Avenue. She is now my age when the story began, wearing boots with wooden heels that strike the flagstones with the same magical sound. I asked her if she had ever noticed this, how the sounds change on the walkways as the stone alters, history ringing out of them like ripples on the water. She has not, and maybe she has never dreamed of the Brooklyn Ferry or suddenly arrived at a strange intersection she feels distinctly she has known before.

Time is not simple. We will pass through these holy days moving through minutes and hours, or we will pass through these holy days overwhelmed by the many layers of this world drifting out like a tide and coming back and washing over us with some faraway longing to be, or never to be, realized.

where you are

2009-07-13T15:41:00.001-06:00

brunch

2009-04-18T17:46:00.003-06:00

Sitting on the back deck in silence at dusk, I am watched warily by the wrens who have come back again this year to build their nest above the ceiling fan. They hover nearby, but when I lower my eyes they dash furtively to the nest and out again. If I stay long enough, or lie down and close my eyes, they will begin to ignore me, but right now they are still suspicious.

Male and female wrens work together in nest building They sing different parts of the same song, usually interweaving their songs such that they sound like a single bird singing.

“The concept of maternity,” writes Bedichek. “thus daily enriched, sinks in and becomes a part of the developing child and affects his thoughts and emotions deeply for all time. Bergson comments with a striking figure of speech on the significance of maternal love. He conceives of all life as motion which possesses the consciousness most convincing as the operation of maternal love is observed in nature. ‘It shows each generation,’ he says, ‘leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement that is transmitted.’”

There was champagne, and brioche, and then the discussion of the sons, and then the invitation to the sons (sent via cell phone) to join us at brunch. They arrived, they ate little, and we asked the questions that had to be asked and expressed our concern. Who were we to them at that moment, I do not know. As strange of beings as they are now to us, impossible to hold, we must seem to them, something antiquated, something outdated, like so many Routes 66. The living being, as Bergson says, is, after all, but a thoroughfare. I was a road through which he travelled to ultimately arrive where he will arrive. Where that is, I cannot know.

fallow

2009-04-17T21:21:00.006-06:00

Giambattista Nolli, Interactive Nolli Map

(p)(b)
you are back, sort of, and I have missed you and your images & syllables.

I will tell you about a time when I was very ill. Later they would say it was meningitis, but at the time I only knew it as hell. I fell ill while reading the story of Julia "Butterfly" Hill and how she staked herself out in a very tall tree, called Luna, which was to be cut down by a logging company. During the time that the tree was wracked by a storm, I pitched in the sheets with a fever and hallucinated for days over the drama of the woman in the tree.

When I recovered I was changed and am changed and have since found myself in somewhat perpetual grieving over the accretive effects of civilization and the erosion of nature. I am in that shuddering tree every day, afflicted with some madness of urban discontent.

Your thoughts on Italy stirred me. There has been for so long in me a profound affection for civilization, at least in terms of Michaelangelo and Leonardo. The Nolli map of Rome has been a cherished icon, the spaces carved out by human desire, the slow wearing down of stone beneath flesh.

But the struggling vegetation stirs me now. The wildflowers, mentioned by Bedichek, which he noticed springing up after the bombing of London, where no flower had been for a hundred years.

That the seeds had lain fallow for so long. So silent, not stirring, yet erupting at the mere suggestion of uninhabited (by human) space.

Yesterday we stopped for a moment by the overburdens to look at the cottonwood trees that had sprung up from the sand. The trees were growing vigorously with little rain in these forsaken piles of earth. I thought of Robert Frost:

How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,

The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

magical small places

2009-03-26T13:52:00.007-06:00

Ryan Coover, watercolor

Hi Shannon,

It¹s funny that you ask to be most specific about my paintings. I can an will be now and it should shed some further light in why I am always referring to my childhood.

Ultimately I have always loved discovering new spaces and as children at play we are doing it all the time. I would cruz the beach and then find myself digging in the sand looking at each grain of sand while discovering how the crabs inhabit the sand with making holes and then how they would run to the water and dig themselves into the sand to escape danger. Then it was all the swimming and walking on the reef out front of the house again seeing a very large ocean and then zooming in and seeing how the fish eat off the reef and others animals make their home.

Then it was traveling through the miles of endless acres of sugarcane only to come across a large sand dune which resulted from when they cleared the land for planting. I would climb to the top where my views opened 360 from the closed off walk through the cane fields. This type of ³transitional² spaces are the reason I like so much action and dynamics in my work of architecture.

Now lets turn to TV since I watched more than I ever read. Two very powerful and favorites of mine and this is again due to the fact that you see the Whole then Discover more in the Mirco. (this is reflected in my art work as it pertains to my pencil work that you only notice when you get closer to the paintings)

1. The Twiddlebugs : Tina, Thomas, Teddy, and Tessie are the cute and innovative Twiddlebug family that lives in Ernie¹s flower box. They use tiny found objects for their furniture and toys.

http://www.sesamestreet.org/onair/characters/twiddlebugs

2. Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! Very simple tale of the elephant with a big heart and big ears -- Horton can hear the tiny inhabitants of Whoville, whose miniature world is in peril -- the story is quite innocent and child-friendly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_Hears_a_Who!

Both of these again influence my thoughts about space. SO I would have to say that even though you can tie my works to Nature, it¹s not where I always go for my beginnings. It¹s these magical small places found in the larger place I like to paint about.

This might get us on the right track What do you think about all this it is worth explaining? Will the reader think I am on drugs even thought I have never smoked pot or had a drink of alcohol? Maybe I should just say I am a drug free painter that loved his childhood. It¹s short and to the point. ;)

no feature of angels...

2009-03-16T15:03:00.003-06:00

image by Teju Cole

This extraordinary series of passages from the Cassandra Pages with stunning photos by Teju Cole arrives to me at an interesting time. Wings are at work...

No feature of angels annoyed me more than their wings: impractical, unlikely wings, from a biological point of view entirely false. I always thought of the points of attachment and articulation, and reasoned that for a man to fly with wings on his back, he would need enormous back muscles. Angels, in most depictions through the ages, looked like men with white toy wings tacked on. They were an infantile fantasy, made to bear a spiritual burden that they were, to my eyes at least, remarkably ill-suited for. Angels were just about as relevant to my life as the preprocessed sentiment of Hallmark cards or top-forty love songs: in other words, irrelevant.

overburden ii

2008-12-15T21:41:00.005-06:00

An arctic front assails Platt Rd today. I am awed by the farmer out cutting his hay in the freezing cold. The hawks are still mating and their screetching is audible through the thin glass when the wind is not howling. The sky is gray, and the fields yawn beneath the swollen bellies of low-flying jets.

What is is that so mesmerizes me about the lunar landscapes of the overburdens? Yesterday I stopped the car to take a few photos, knowing that I would have to be blessed with my grandfather's litigious patience or at least his flawless German equipment to capture anything as evocative as what catches my heart in my throat when I pass these awkward heaps of earth.

I think about what it would be like to live out here and document precisely, through the moments and days and years, the almost imperceptible alterations in soil and sky, animal and vegetable. Such thoughts bring me back to Annie Dillard, and I wonder if it is possible, any more, to craft a life out of fleeting perceptions of the natural world, and words.

"...the very root meaning of the word 'geography'" writes Trevor Barnes and James Duncan, "is literally 'earth writing' (from the Greek geo, meaning 'earth' and graphien, meaning, 'to write.'"

The conflicting urges of image and word--or action and contemplation--perplex me. Maybe this is what my grandfather felt, after all, that he belonged in a world of dry creek and sage, of twisted juniper branches and dark rooms filled with chemical smells where the eidetic imprints of his soul were wrought forth in emulsion and paper. When I leaf through his negatives I cannot know.

Would he have stopped here on this empty road to behold a heap of sand eroding as slowly as his life unraveled? Would he have found in this landscape or burdens the same ineffable beauty?

overburden

2008-11-27T09:11:00.004-06:00

A year or so ago they ploughed a toll road through the thick, waxy soil that is the farmland that rolls over the once-expansive plain of the Blackland Prairie. You can see the serpentine spine rise up to the east as you drive south out FM 973. Platt Road is just an afterthought, a sign that leaps up off the farm road and disappears off to the West beneath mountains of dirt, (called overburdens) heaped up by the gravel pit operations. Cottonwood and Rooselvelt weed lurch up out of the newly formed landscape. I have been watching these man-made heaps of burden, watching the kestrels and hawks swoop down into the trees erupting there, and as I hear news of the now-two-lane road being expanded into five, as I see the subdivisions gathering at the edge of this almost forsaken landscape like hostile troops, I begin to grieve the loss of this unlikely beauty. How do we unpack the complexity of intentions here? A pile of refuse soil that once was topsoil, a pile of topsoil (farmer's gold) considered a burden to the mining of aggregate as "cheap as dirt."

I don't know. Such thoughts as these weave through as I drive out the quiet road, considering the particular focus that has been my life these past couple of years, and the heaps of friendships abandoned (at least neglected) in the pursuit of what seems at this moment a truckload of gravel.

I hesitate to reach for a tidy metaphor--I do not hesitate to see the miner in myself, misguided oftentimes in priorities, but at heart immensely filled with gratitude for the people in my life who are to me (yes, still), the farmer's gold.

where i have been

2008-09-06T22:22:00.004-06:00

maybe there is no answer, and there are certainly no images. sometimes you cast yourself out on some fragile gust and there you go. i wish i could say i had gained something from this time, but i am afraid i have just lost a lot of blood.

i want to believe that there are some things worth looking at, worth really seeing, but right now i am not sure this is true. there is a place down on the creek, though, a tree that arcs out over the water and is rooted firmly, even though the creek crises and recedes, it remains, letting the soil wash its roots clean like plumbing, smooth and solid. nothing else matters but the holding on

but beautiful

2008-06-10T21:05:00.009-06:00

y.

It is dark here, but the wind is blowing.

Thank you, for the reminder that beauty is an ephemeral, simple, illusive thing--unless you are really paying attention, really seeing, it will slip through your fingers like dust...things are falling through my fingers as I write this, but that you are out there with your vigilant lens and lovely voice....

thank you for seeing, thank you.

beautiful

broken

2008-06-07T14:38:00.003-06:00

a hard wind

2008-06-02T17:35:00.005-06:00

The wind started to blow in the morning, and by noon it was a dust storm. We laughed about running track in that dust, the grit between our teeth when we woke, and the fine silt that collected in mounds beneath the garage door. I couldn't help but look out over what seemed so desolate and dry, and see so much beauty, and wonder what it was in me that called to such a forlorn landscape.

I remember things, though, like driving behind trucks overfilled with giant sugar beets, new corn shooting up through the orange earth, and cotton spread out over the fields like snow. I used to believe there were still buffalo, though no one recalls any but the ragged pets they kept in a pen out near Palo Duro Canyon.

Her funeral was held in the church where I was baptized, and it looked exactly the same, the cross hanging there without Jesus, the fake wood paneling (something the Catholics would never allow). Afterwards we drove out to the cemetery where the hard wind howled and ladies in high heels picked there way over great clods of red earth. Summer wheat flanked the cemetery on all sides, and the cottonwoods spilt seed over the dry grass.

She told me a story once, about how her father, before the Depression, would buy crates of geese from Holland. When they arrived on the train, the whole town would gather to watch them released into the corn to eat the grasshoppers. Everyone that hears that story always asks, "Did they fly away? Did they come back?" And to me that seems to be missing the point, the point that I believe she was conveying to me when she told that story, in the magic of her translucent skin, the far-off shimmer of those pale, pale eyes: the magic of those big white birds, their massive, white wings erupting over the corn in a single clap of light.

a poet with the spirit of the wind

2008-05-18T14:27:00.004-06:00

“If I were a poet I would write a poem beginning, ‘I am the spirit of the wind,’ and in it I would sweep the globe. I would tell how silently I move over the lonesome and limitless prairies, such as those vast stretches around Childress, how I blow as gently upon the reptiles and creeping things in the grass of that great area, as I kiss the cheeks of the fairest maid in Southland as she sits with her lover behind the honeysuckle vines. I would sing of my stealthy and wayward march across the prairies and begin to sigh only when the cedars are reached in the breaks of the Edwards Plateau. How my sighing rises to a perfect plaint when I am among the stately pines of East Texas. I would exult and my song would rise to new heights as I swept off the land and took to the open sea, freeing myself soon of the stench of all the lands and sucking up the keen salt spray and leaping in joy of one wave-top to another. A great and glorious song would I sing of the open sea, and I would imagine more things in the depths below than Grecian mythology ever dreamed of. I would pass quickly over a thin line in northern France where the stench of human corpses would be very offensive to me, and where the roar of guns interrupts my quiet song among the trees, and I would hurry on to the wastes of Siberia, a section much to my liking, and so on and so on—I would wrap the brown earth in my glowing song—if I were a poet with the spirit of the wind.” [Bedichek to Dan Williams, 13 March, 1918]

The Letters of Roy Bedichek, William Owens, ed.University of Texas Press, 1985.

new applications of light

2008-05-14T04:35:00.004-06:00

barton creek, early morning

In one of his letters, Bedichek mentions a book by Alfred Russell Wallace entitled The Wonderful Century. In the chapter on photography called “New Applications of Light” he writes,” The improvements of the mode of production of light for common use …are sufficiently new and remarkable to distinguish this century from all the ages that preceded it, but they sink into insignificance when compared with the discoveries that have been made regarding the nature of light itself.” So much is changing at the turn of the century, and time itself is being compacted like the soil beneath any of dozens of heavy pieces of machinery moving the earth about to follow the contours of man’s desires. Already, in 1951, Bedichek bemoans the passing of an era, the loss of the honey bee and man’s sense of wonder with the natural world. I am just a descendant in the lineage of the grieving.

"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make a emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization; the minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that." -Thoreau, "Walking"

what is etched in veins: wild with all regret

2008-04-22T18:18:00.007-06:00

"In wildness is the preservation of the world." --Thoreau

"In the song of the Mockingbird, Walt Whitman hears love-sickness, wild with all regret, and he greets the bird as 'my darling demon.'" --Bedichek

"Every year the tempo of leaf-gumming accelerated furiously toward Tu bi-Shevat, the fifteenth of the month of Shevat: the New Year for the Trees...All we knew was that to create a Jewish forest was to go back to the beginning of our place in the world..." --Shama

"Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun even, but I can’t think about them. I live with the trees. There are creatures that live under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit…they abide." --Annie Dillard

And so I walk away, tender with that same old ache of longing. What have we talked about: nothing of any importance. In my hand I hold a smattering of words, dry leaves rattling over the red earth, but I covet them, skeletons all, for the veins etched like a treasure map into what once was an open palm, what once was flesh.

spiegel

2008-04-09T21:57:00.010-06:00

for y.
lately it has been all about images reflected, in eyes, in glass, in water. a tiny book inscribed with words that erupted like birds in the heart, a landscape reflected in an alternate, foreign landscape, a landscape carving its way into another landscape.

I would speak of this in terms of veins on arms that I love, or in pulsing leaves at dawn when the stars are already fading, or in the quiet breathing of a child. i am unsure, uncertain, hesitant, hungry.

i am mapping all this somewhere, in memory, or in topography--terrains unspoken, but possibly coded in a single resonant note on the guitar, or a trumpet in a cafe where I stood in the parking lot listening.

does no one love any more? does no one stop for the the trumpet or the shudder of grass, or the flashing, disembodied light on the surface of a graffitied subway train

when you wrote Milosz's words, our house is always open, I thought it was written:

our house is always open
there are no keys in the doors
and invisible forests come in and out

not guests, but forests, landscapes, moving in us, moving through us

zeus under glass

2008-04-03T16:01:00.004-06:00

Zeus was tended by gentle nymphs and was nursed by the fairy goat Amaltheia...

Years ago I would take the kids down to the creek behind the Elisabet Ney museum to search for treasure. Specifically, it was (and is) a severed, limestone hand, whose I don't now, akin perhaps to Camille Claudel's exquisite sculpted foot that first enamored Rodin.

I am not clear about my deep connection to this place, except for certain evocative fragments, beside the veined hand: that she kept her husband, a philosopher, in the turret, that she lived a life chiseled out of clean, hard passion (her own), and that once, or twice, I enticed someone to scale the walls and share a bottle of wine on the second-floor balcony (not an easy accomplishment, and not sure one I could accomplish again--who am I kidding, of course I could, and would)

In my twenties I was walking the deserted pre-dawn streets of Hyde Park and caught a glimpse of an elderly woman taking her tea in a wing-backed wicker chair-- How odd, I thought, to have dragged that chair to the West patio of the Ney before dawn to take tea.

One fall I took a figure sculpting class at the museum, and I clearly recall the exhilaration of feeling like God himself as my fingers slid over the smooth surface of the clay, crafting a woman not so unlike the one that held remarkably still for over an hour as we struggled to see her with our hands. By the end of the six weeks, I knew her contours better than my own. So different, though, I imagine the process of slowly chipping away the sinuous form from cold stone, trying to see through the inanimate mineral into flesh.

tendon slides over bone

2008-03-20T18:04:00.008-06:00

self portrait on tuesday

(for azn)

In the Greek narratives that precede Judaism, renewal tempers dissolution. Roses bloom when Persephone rejoins Demeter ever Summer. The lilt of Orpheus's lyre calls back Eurydice. But the Old Testament refuses Lot's wife the luxury of nostalgia. Obliterated for a backward glance, she is permitted neither reprieve nor the solace of sorrow. Like Ovid's tales, her story involves metamorphosis, but here there is nothing transformative. In lines of verse that stretch over every story the way tendon slides over bone, Ovid shapes the perversly half-human into beautiful form. Extinction translates into alchemy, as bones blur into water and the shine of blonde hair dapples in quaking Aspen leaves.

The destruction of Lot's wife, for obvious reasons, involves no such sensuality. Homesickness for a distempered place destroys her, and then God annihilates her memory.

--Michael Katz, "Soulful Modernism" Southwest Review 93 (1) 2008

the spell

2008-03-13T11:03:00.006-06:00

Today we are driving west, far beyond the edge of this frenetic town and into the wide, rolling hills of tallgrass and mesquite, to hang the memory of a kiss that never happened out to flap like laundry strung for miles on the rising wind. Times like these I long to be more landscape than flesh. The shudder and swell of earth, rent and split in heaves of granite, documents such urgent, immemorial longings--whereas mine, the longings of the “intricate spirited tissues” is fragile and ephemeral in comparison. A whisper.

I am adjusting to a different time here at the lake, a time measured in the progress of a swallowtail butterfly grazing its way over henbane toward my awaiting lens. Walking along the water’s edge, I cup in one hand Sophie’s expanding collection: an iridescent snail shell, a smooth piece of glass, the leg of a large grasshopper, two red and white bobbers. The bobbers tug at my heart. My sweetest childhood memories are saturated with the sounds of water lapping beneath the dock, the smells of thick cedar and the boat engine sputtering. I like to think they are all there now, the ghosts of my past, playing a scratchy Glen Miller recording on the turntable and a game of gin, my grandfather with his binoculars patiently, silently waiting, watching for hours out on the deck. This would be my heaven, the whole family gathering after life out at the lake unto eternity.

A pair of pelicans stretches into flight beneath layers of seagulls, buzzards, and hawks gliding on thermals. Our shadows are cast long out into the lake, into the depths of the water threaded with light, and I realize that no lens could capture all of this beauty at once. Is it possible that the depth of beauty is just a factor of depth of field, or is it that truly deep and breathtaking beauty, resides in the momentary, in the unrecordable? Maybe unrecordable on film, or in words, but somehow I am sure that every traveler passing this same way we have come to the edge of this water, where the wind stirs and the stars are just beginning to appear, lingers unwittingly a moment on the frayed edge of that unfulfilled kiss, still whipping in a spring gust, almost freed from the spell of a mesquite thorn.

cargo

2008-03-12T07:39:00.005-06:00

Toilets outside Jo's Coffee on S. Congress for SXWX

A few weeks ago, I was walking through the golf course before yoga. It was cold, and my breath hovered before my face a few minutes before dissipating into the leaves. It made me acutely aware of our shared transpiration, me, the trees, all of us breathing in and out each other's biological gases. There is little separation, after all.

Last week I took the No. 3 into school, and suddenly this shared transpiration was repulsive--the exquisite weft of humanity that I had written about earlier was suddenly transformed before my eyes into a Fellini-esque scene. Every single living soul seemed to be scratching some part of his or herself, or snorting and swallowing mucus. I had to look away, put on my headphones. The woman with Downs Syndrome was there, and when a drunk homeless man sat next to her, she put both hands over her face and gave him a look of horror. Twice the boy in the seat behind me fell asleep and the bus driver got up to wake him, "You're going to miss your stop, man!" The boy's eyes rolled about disorientedly, then he fell back against the window in a slump. He could not be older than my 15-yr old son. Clearly he didn't care where he got off. Was he homeless? Abused? I suddenly felt the urge to take him home and care for him.

Approaching campus, I stood by the driver and asked about the kid, where he needed to get off, because he had fallen back to sleep. "I don't know--he just looks like a school kid. It's a long route. Eventually he'll get back to where he started. We can't take care of people, we're not even supposed to."

I knew this was true. The scratching, sniffling, stinking lot of us are on our own, in the end I guess. I stepped off into the bright cold light and walked toward campus, the bus driving off with its cargo of the damned toward wherever. I thought of the boy many times during the day. I think of him today, a week later, somewhere out there in the city.

Seedlings in Stone: Working Like Annie Dillard

2008-03-07T20:20:00.000-06:00

Seedlings in Stone: Working Like Annie Dillard

a liturgy of extravagant gesture

2008-03-07T12:18:00.010-06:00

…alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space
we dissolve into, taste of us then?
--Rainer Maria Rilke, The Second Elegy

"how...do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning? How to set yourself spinning? Where is an edge— a dangerous edge— and where is the trail to the edge and the strength to climb it?"

Not sure exactly where this is going, I only reserve trust in the vague inkling that it leads somewhere out of the desolation of late. Encountering some phrases in Tinker Creek, not just phrases, but passages that tickle a far-off memory of an idea that had held me in its sway many years ago. I was writing a paper about a dramatic work by friend and utter-literary and musical genius, Jo Carol Pierce’s Bad Girls Upset by the Truth striving to place it within the context of an intuitive feminist theology. If you don’t know the play, many reviews reveal the basic plot, but its real power is in the language and Pierce’s hypnotic West Texas voice reciting such perplexingly provocative lines as emerge in the song Loose Diamonds (which is what he was singing in the play when I fell in love with his voice). I happened upon a book that served up the academic main course of the argument, Extravagant Affection: A Feminist Sacramental Theology, by Susan Ross, but the rest was fleshed out in numinous urges toward other work that had impressed me, perhaps none more pointedly than the film Breaking the Waves, for which it was hard to locate a willing viewing partner. I was completely in its thrall. That the protagonist had entered into some sort of self-annihilating bargain with the creator to save her husband is hauntingly portrayed.

I am against the rehearsed approach to [g]od. I am wholeheartedly for the fumbling, oblique, heart-wrenching one, or the irreverent, profane, and honest one. But perhaps more interesting than our hacking away at the body of evidence or lack of for or against a greater meaning, is the simple awe for the ultimate extravagant gesture, creation.

The point about being, as I know it here and see it, is that, as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae….Van Gogh, as you remember, called the world a study that didn’t come off. Whether it “came off” is a difficult question. The chloroplasts do stream in the leaf as if propelled by a mighty, invisible breath; but on the other hand, a certain sorrow arises, welling up in Shadow Creek, and from those lonely banks it appears that all our intricate fringes, however beautiful, are really the striations of a universal and undeserved flaying. But, Van Gogh, a study it is not. This is the truth of the pervading intricacy of the world’s detail: the creation is not a study, a roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine.
--Dillard, PaTC (134)

gestures flung out

2008-03-05T06:10:00.005-06:00

part 1.

Relentless snow. In the yard, wrought iron chairs buried under mounding pillows; arching rose canes; circled peony rings, their thin blue shadows.

Type etches a white screen, a page. Notes race over keys, under fingers -- courante, rondeau, capriccio -- drawing lines, circles, bodies; dancing out of the room.

part 2.

part 3.
Once, not too long ago, I was doing an assessment in a dementia unit. Several elderly men and women were sitting in a living room having random, and from the sound of it, fairly meaningless conversations. I could hear phrases now and again. One person said "What day is it?" Another voice rather thoughtfully said "I don't know". After a pause I heard "Where are we?" and again a thoughtful response "I don't know". There seemed to be a collective sigh of wondering before someone chimed in "I don't know either but I am just going to try to be happy".

part 4.
I miss you, [too]. I miss you Shannon. Things are busy and scattered, but good.

I have been bad with communication--save for these
tiny videographic gestures flung out into the world.

News, soon.

grief songs

2008-03-03T20:08:00.009-06:00

for b.
Editing The Penetrable Air is not a painless affair. The oblique approach of speaking about the past in mythological terms does not deliver us from evil, nor displace the pain. I have severed some part of myself that localized the exquisite memories of that house and its horrors (I say “horrors” although on the spectrum they are subtle, subtle horrors) and yet continually try to find that place that I buried the severed thing, like the dream of the cat stowed away in the box, or the very real rubber alligator purloined form the TG&Y many, many years ago. Time has so contorted the events in my mind that I am no longer certain that I lived there in that old hotel. Today was my “father’s” birthday--ironically he has assisted graciously with the minutiae that I could not call forth on my own--the seasons of planting corn and winter wheat--the lineage of the hotel. And yet he is portrayed in a less than flattering light, as are my mother and grandmother, who I hope never will read what I’ve written. That through many iterations the novel was titled “Medea” gives some indication.

Interestingly, I realized that a strange counter-phenomenon was at work in both Redemption Shoes and Penetrable Air (God, I sound like Ayn Rand writing her own introduction to The Fountainhead!)--in Air, a work of fiction, I had named each female character and offered up lengthy backstory, whereas in Shoes, non-fiction, only the paternal ancestors were explored. It begged the question of whether the female stories could be conveyed in any but mythological terms (consider Housekeeping and Gilead, for instance). It also called to mind Susan Brind-Morrow and her mention of the desire to one day catalog the ephemeral grief songs of the women of the Red Sea, the unrecorded liturgies of sorrow--the grief songs.

Right now my life feels like a grief song. Inconsonant and out of tune with some barely audible scale--if you know the Crowded House song, Fall at Your Feet, Google the tabs and play the chords. These chords seem nowhere in the range of the melody--either brilliance or madness, or something is terribly out of whack. I rest my case. There are a lot of covers of this song on YouTube, but this one brought tears to my eyes--it's so fucking honest. (She's still playing different chords--just try it yourself...)

self portrait on Thursday

2008-03-01T14:47:00.005-06:00

Thursday I thought I was the luckiest person in the world. It was a cool morning and an hour before yoga and I had my camera. Roaming the alleyways of Hyde Park I marveled at what lengths homeowners have gone to in tidying up the alleys. There is some sadness in over-tidiness, and I mourn the lack of respect for the accretive histories of dust (recall Sebald's artist in the studio?). I guess I romanticize dust. God knows there is plenty of it at my house--the ancient leather of my grandfathers cameras decays and flakes away, becomes part of what we breathe, the heaviness of the air we swim through.

Yoga was particularly good, and we ended with Om-ing that always leaves my head humming in another space, and all that immensity of love just swells--I feel a drought of outlets for it. I spill it and slosh it everywhere, but the bucket is forever being refilled from some unending source, watering little.

Lying in the sun during sivasana, I watched the tiny particles of dust waft into the angle of light that split the shadows of the room. It was as if they only existed for that singular moment that they were caught the slant of light, burning with intense fiery existence, and then emptied out into the other side of nothingness. Burning is the metaphor this week, a searing intensity of emotion flaming through--I know that emptiness awaits on the other side where the shadow lingers, but the knowledge doesn't temper the heat.

prayer trees

2008-02-23T20:08:00.006-06:00

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with the trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and, in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air...They abide. --Annie Dillard

tallgrass prairie

2008-02-21T21:31:00.010-06:00

Today a pleasant breakfast with a friend. We are speaking of Andrew Wyeth and he asks me where I am from, and suddenly the entirity of that landscape fills me. I can hear and smell the wind, and want to be there badly, urgently. Life is dense here, and the mind grows heavy with so much complexity. Things are (have always been) so much simpler there, and crueler. Last time I visited my grandmother I stood out behind her house and looked out over the expanse of cottonfields. The wind whipped an anguished sound from a farmhouse a half a mile or so away. Probably a pig slaughter, though I couldn't be sure. The cruelties are dealt out in equal measure with the vast spaces, the way you cut cold butter into flour to make biscuits.

(excerpt from The Penetrable Air)
As she made her way along the furrows, big clods of dirt broke under the soles of her sneakers. Finally she reached the spot where a rusty old thresher lay beside an irrigation ditch that bubbled like a spring. There was a stock tank, and bull rushes grew all around it. Here she was shielded from view, hidden in the tall grass with the crickets and frogs and bull snakes. And she listened. She just sat still and listened to the wind, trying to identify the call of a kingbird, or meadowlark, or a prairie hawk. If she sat there long enough, the whistling breeze in her ears would begin to seem like syllables of the language of clouds, and the spaces between her own cells and the sun and the sky and the wind would disappear, until all that remained was an awareness of vast space stretching out in all directions, occasionally interrupted by a lizard or nuthatch, lighting upon her.

Sometimes she imagined that she heard her mother's voice singing songs in a language she couldn't quite understand, but she knew that the song was about how time wraps itself around and bores into things, around hearts and tongues, and children. And how, if you open your mouth you can trade your own voice for the wind, until your tongue dries out and sand fills your eyesockets and you are blind.

After a while of sitting in that wide field, singing into the wind until her voice was hoarse, the harmonic of their dual howling would begin to sound like a train tunneling through her chest, into her heart, cracking her open and splitting her wide like a watermelon. The whole sky would swoosh in and fill her, stretch her wider and wider like a balloon until her cells were diluted by air and she would rise on a current of her own sound, and the sky would become a little speck inside of her.

Hours would pass. The sun would travel across the sky, scorching her skin and the field and all creation beneath its mean heat. And the clouds would flap out in the high winds like laundry, then disappear like all the things she loved most. She thinks about her horse and the last time she had seen him being loaded up in a trailer headed for some unknown and probably tragic destination. It was her fault if he had been led in terror through the concrete canals of the slaughterhouse. And her mother and Billy, whose blood was also on her hands. Lizzie looked up at the wide sky. The geese will soon begin to gather into their ragged Vs and fly north. Would they even want her if she suddenly sprouted wings? Would anyone, ever?

The crickets started chirping then, just as the sun dipped into the mirage of water at the edge of the field. Lizzie gathered herself back into what she thought was a human presence, though she was becoming less and less sure that she was human at all. She walked slowly back toward Mama Whitlow’s house. There was a combine in the far field in a cloud of dust. Swallows were swirling in arcs around the insects it churned in its path. Lizzie could see Mama Whitlow out in the garden with a dishtowel slung over her shoulder, picking tomatoes. She walked toward this one image, of a woman she knew but did not love, involved in an activity both mindful and meaningless, and knowing that she was walking toward the one fragile understanding of what it meant to live among men. Everything Lizzie understood was in this field, or in a house miles away that had long been shut away in darkness like a dream.

As she recognized the absurdity of her life, how she belonged nowhere, she began to leap the furrows in clownish steps, trying not to step on the peaks, bounding across the lumpy, dry field. It seemed like she leaped higher and higher, as if she weighed nothing—like she was walking on the moon that had just begun to rise over the summer corn. She felt the strange sensation of blood exiting her body in little gasps, and imagined that if the red drops fell into the field, a tree might grow there, and she would guard the sapling growth from all tractors, all men, until it was tall enough for her to climb into the sky and fly away.

invisible wor[l]ds in the glass

2008-02-19T18:47:00.007-06:00

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
-from The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver

I came home early today. The achy augurs of a virus or the flu gave cause to take the afternoon and rest. I boarded the No. 3 west of campus and it was afire with its singular cross-section of humanity--every range of income and disability--including the older woman with Down’s syndrome whom I would really like to get to know some day--she seems so affable and reminds me of my great aunt. She scrunches her face and re-arranges her large glasses, and will lean far out in to the aisle to get a better look at someone. Today it was me, sitting in the very back of the bus, thinking of her, but not looking, and she contorted her small frame until she struck an almost impossible angle over the aisle to adjust and readjust at me, her eyes growing alternately huge and normal with each nudge of the frames.

Across from her sat an enormous African-American man in his mid-twenties, who I have often seen on the bus. He usually has headphones on and gesticulates wildly, I have assumed, to the music. Once I sat in a row in front and to the right of his seat where he flung his long arms with such force and vigor that my hair was repeatedly tossed in the wind of his motion. It was an odd tenderness of restraint. He could have knocked my head right off the shoulders with so much force, but he came just so close, and I relaxed and wondered at what whirled in his wild mind, and felt sad that I would never know.

Then there was the man in the wheel chair. He was a middle-aged Latino and every once in a while lifted his black-gloved hand with the fingers cut off to trace letters and invisible words on the glass and ghostlike geometric shapes. What wacky, private worlds we are all confined within. It would be in authentic to say I love humanity, because at times, maybe most times, I sorely resent it. But it would be dishonest to deny that sometimes my heart surges with inexpressible love for my certain fellow humans. Inexpressible is problematic--there is no reason why I could not express what I feel, or do something that would offer some solace or comfort. Rather, and I don’t know why, I hold them close, the way you would a fragile, powdery moth.

salt and light ii

2008-02-16T13:41:00.006-06:00

sunday february 16th, almost spring

Every story is, according to Michel de Certeau, a travel story, a spatial practice. Narrative structures, such as our li[ves] are spatial structures. Their network contains the vertiginous epoch of space: ‘we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.’
--Exhibit Program, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: Spatial Emotion in Contemporary Art and Architecture

After posting D.’s The Rapture the other day (and viewing her other images of that scene, some which even more eerily evoked a sense of just such a thing having happened) I felt strangely disconcerted all day. Perhaps it was intense prayer that shed some light--not prayer in the mantric way we are taught as children, but the mumbled urgent outpouring into the unknown, toward the unknown, perhaps impossibly bent ear, perhaps toward a gaping void. But that relief should visit us after such an outpouring--is that evidence enough of Existence? I don’t know.

I have often considered whether some unsuspecting web surfers might happen upon the title of this blog and immediately dismiss it as some conservative Christian diabtribe on hellfire and brimstone--redemption is such a powerful word, and carries such heavy baggage. For me it has always carried more literal luggage, that of the Latin redimere, to buy back, to ransom, to rescue, release, or set free. However, from the perspective of de Certeau, the word is always in movement, always a passage, as in Newton’s powerful explication of place-flight-border-beyond, “Text mimes travel; terrain awaits its inscription in cartography.”

The Rapture (photo) made connections that were all the while being inscribed, but nevertheless had not registered consciously. That Redemption Shoes was a project about seeking the grandfather through light (and I avoid some obvious interpretations here) had always seemed a fully secular undertaking. But now I am being tugged by these deeper questions, and these brought more fulsomely to the fore through literature, especially Annie Dillard (lately) and Marilynne Robinson.

Margaret Lowen Reimer (1982) wrote in “The Dialectical Vision of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” When Pilgrim at Tinker Creek appeared in 1974, reviewers agreed that it was a highly unusual treatise on nature. The work obviously exerted a peculiar power, for reviewers were either rhapsodic in their praise or passionate in their indigination. Neither side, however, was quite sure in what tradition or genre the book belonged…Why? Perhaps the book falls between several categories of disciplines--the scientists relegate the work to the religious; the religious view the book as an aberration of scientific investigation. Indeed, the subtitle, “A mystical excursion into the natural world,” hints at the paradox and incongruity which characterizes the book. [PaTC] appears to be a scientific study overlaid with spiritual contemplation, an examination of natural phenomena, which leads the author to an encounter with the Divine. This fervent observer is an unusual empiricist and a still more unusual mystic (182).

Which is to say what exactly? Salt and light. Looking at the last few blog headings of lines derived from Dillard, it occurs to me that looking for him (my grandfather) through light may well have been the central fugitive narrative for him as well, struggling with a life unbalanced on the tipping fulcrum between the sacred and the profane, seeking to strike a harmony between these essentially contradictory forces of mass and light on the graphic plane of the photographic image. The image as redemption.

The resolution of the urgently mumbled prayer was not, however, this realization, but the realization that my equally fervent, mumbled attempts to seek and carve out sacred, undefiled or quasi-undefiled nature in my own life were essential to me--that mystical excursions in to the natural world are required in this seeminlgy unnatural one, top heavy with the profane.

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame…The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. (35)

rapture

2008-02-14T07:28:00.001-06:00

and redemption shoes

thoughts on love

2008-02-13T17:05:00.008-06:00

After all, it would have ended anyway. I've never seen a sunset or felt a wind that didn't. The levitating saints came down at last, and their two feet bore real weight. No, the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain, inexplicable moments, to know it. --Annie Dillard (who else?)

A day gone backwards. It ended here, at this sign:

Lab ended and I rushed for the bus, and earlier in that day a child at Sophie's school had said, "You have a really skinny neck. Sophie does, too." And I realized I love my neck. It is hard to say that about many parts of one's body, so herewith, photo-ode to my neck:

and for the lovely light, filtering through the windows of the girl's bathroom in Sutton Hall...

and for my friend, Melissa, who is a brilliant anthropologist and wonderful mother of three gorgeous girls and one fiercely-blonde son, who has made me laugh till my sides ache and speaks incredibly beautiful, fluent Castellano...

and the delicious mung dahl filled with love purchased at a sidewalk vendor on the way to try to find "the dress of desire" for the ballet on Friday...

and for the wild, secret path behind the castle that we walk each morning on the way to school, and the sculptress that once lived there, carving her passion into stone. Our lives (my life) is shockingly abundant and filled with love, and that I still long, that I still wish to levitate like the saints, how can I but love that longing also?

Tinker Creek of the mind

2008-02-11T17:25:00.000-06:00

It may be Annie Dillard week for months, for ever. Last night awake at three and sifting through the pages of an old paper (someone had requested it as a submission of student work) and suddenly our lives are upturned like an apple cart --we had cake for breakfast and the dinner table is an incomprehensible pile of books and leaves of paper, precious linguistic notions, surprising sometimes, scarily profound, trailing off no where, meaning nothing in particular.

Because I was awake half the night I bumped my head twice and felt peculiarly oppressed by a woman at work who has been reminding me, almost every day, that we are not all watching the trees for movement, or gasping in sudden apprehension of a momentary, pinkish cloud-streaked sky. That is head-banging of the worst kind, and probably the type of experience that kept Rilke flitting along the edges of productive society like an etiolated moth.

After half an hour, the last of the stragglers had vanished into the trees. I stood with difficulty, bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty, and my spread lungs roared. My eyes pricked from the effort of trying to trace a feathered dot’s passage through a weft of limbs. Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening my cells, fleet? (Dillard, PaTC, p. 40)

the week in review

2008-02-08T09:12:00.001-06:00

the nothingness between me and the light

2008-02-05T20:11:00.000-06:00

Shading the glass with a hand, I can
see how shadow has pooled in the valley. It washes up the sandstone
cliffs on Tinker Mountain and obliterates them in a deluge: freshets of
shadow leak into the sky…The shadow’s the thing. Outside shadows are
blue, I read, because they are lighted by the blue sky and not the
yellow sun. Their blueness bespeaks infinitesimal particles scattered
down inestimable distance…They give the light distance; they put it in
its place. They inform my eyes of my location here, O Israel, here in
the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade of
nothingness between me and the light. --Annie Dillard
Yes, it is Annie Dillard week. Each night before going to bed, I fall
in rhythm with her solitary explorations of Tinker Creek. Last night
she was collecting mantis eggs, reporting on the mating ritual, and the
memory of a tragic mutation of a Polyphemous moth at the hands of an
ignorant but perhaps well-meaning teacher.

Today a juvenile possum was out at midday on the balcony of Battle
Hall. Campus Safety officers were poised with long nets in what seemed
a futile attempt to capture the wary creature. People gathered, took
pictures. In class minutes later, we realized that the balcony in
question was actually the bathroom at the end of the hall, and various
students gathered to watch the pathetic drama from a better vantage
point. I returned to class intensely sad. The ripples of laughter and
jokes about how ugly possums are made me feel even more disconnected
from my so-called cohort (we were discussing cohort-component analysis
today). Many times I contrasted in my mind Dillard's silent, solitary
walks with the unhinged and un-self-conscious laugher of being almost thirty. I can never go back. Some part of me already resides in semi-retirement, among waving
prairie grasses, fussily watching over lupine seeds and the ceaseless
manufacturing of spider webs.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came
to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what
was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice
resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and
suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like
as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave
close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms,
and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were
sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion.

Walden or Life in the Woods
- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862

"the thing illuminated cannot be lighter than the illuminator"

2008-02-03T13:33:00.000-06:00

The light is diffuse and hueless, like the light of paper inside a pewter bowl. The snow looks light and the sky dark, bu in fact the sky is lighter than the snow. Obviously the thing illuminated cannot be lighter than the illuminator...The dark is overhead and the light at my feet; I am walking upside-down in the sky
--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Yesterday I went running with S., and we went farther than I am accustomed. During the night I awoke with aching muscles, drank a glass of wine and took some ibuprofen, then spent the next two hours plucking out a tune on the guitar. I can feel the tug of spring. It is music, and aching muscles, and sunburned skin--the delicious reminders of that delirious weight--of being earthly and mortal and poised for emergence into the next act of the drama.

This morning we did the grocery shopping then packed a small picnic to take down to the creek. It is still barren and grey, but this will change in a matter of weeks. I can already see the buds on the trees, tiny packages of new life waiting to burst open. It has changed so much in the twenty years since I first arrived here. There are more bicycles on the trails, and the old overgrown paths are now weary and denuded. It is seldom as quiet as it was years ago when you could sit perched on a rock and not see another soul for over an hour. This creek is the refuge for so many, and so much more fragile for that very reason.

I wonder what readers will think a generation from now, encountering Annie Dillard or Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey or Wendell Berry. Will it all seem like a dream--this once wild and untameable nature?

trusting delilah

2008-02-01T18:51:00.000-06:00

Anthonis van Dyck (1599-1641)

To carve an elephant from a rock, you simply carve away anything that does not look like an elephant…

She was there in front of the mirror with scissors, and had hoped to carve from among the wisps, a self she might recognize. Every day a snip here, a snip there. But with each lock falling away onto the cold bathroom floor, she grew less familiar, less recognizable.

Finally she made the appointment. She had two options (maybe three): acupuncture, a mammogram, a haircut. She chose the haircut.

She taps on the thick glass of the salon door early in the morning. The hairdresser is there, in the quasi-dark, dressed as if for a date, and she swishes across the floor to the door and when the door is opened, she enters the calm, fragrant world of the eternally feminine.

She explains to the hairdresser the situation, the endless days of snipping, of seeking. The hairdresser nods understandingly, more understanding than a therapist or a doctor.

“You understand,” she confides, “this is a last resort.”

The hairdresser seats her in a thick-cushioned chair from the early 1900s, and massages her tense shoulders. Her hands are so warm, so reassuring, that all the hours of the last two years fall away to the pine floor. Then the scissors flash, and the wisps fall. Some of them are gray, already betraying the New Year’s Day henna.

The whole procedure takes only a few minutes. Much too soon she must pay and walk back out into the bright morning light, the bitter winter air. But the hairdresser confides one last thing. “For me,” she says, “it is this…” and she lifts her skirt slightly to mid-calf to reveal a blazing purple iris. “I’m getting rid of it.”

Walking to work she doesn’t try to capture a fleeting reflection in the glass; she doesn’t rush to the bathroom to apply make-up or put on earrings; she just walks, noticing the levity, thankful that she has freed herself from the tyranny of the scissors. She is no longer who she thought she was an hour ago, a month ago, a year ago, and she doesn’t yet know who she might have become, but she might not, she thinks hopefully, she might not even care.

scribbled secret notebooks

2008-01-31T12:06:00.000-06:00

almost like silence (part a. and b.)

2008-01-29T19:30:00.000-06:00

breathe

2008-01-24T19:36:00.001-06:00

we bundle ourselves into the car around 7am and drive through the rainy, cold fog to the high school and then back across town to daycare. After I dropped off s., I grab my rain gear and head out into the freezing rain to walk before yoga class. I meet up with d., and launch into my whole oft-rehearsed diatribe of late about what happens when the person you have always thought that you were starts to crack like an old photo, when you start to realize that who you thought was yourself was nothing more that an impeccably maintained (or so you thought) image in your mind, that is now disintegrating before your eyes.

Are you forty-two? d. asks. That's when it begins. It'll get better.

And then we walk back to her house and I wave good-bye and march off in the direction to the window-filled stone building on top of the hill, nestled among the trees on the golf course (which lovely, unpopulated square mile of wild nature urges me to thank God for golfers every time I go there--development might have long ago consumed it otherwise!) where yoga class meets, and I am late, and tromp in with my bags of clothing and books and thermos of green tea.

i hate neck relaxation exercises anyway, and I'm glad I've missed most of it. I used to feel that way about pigeon pose, but have come to love that one so much that I don't want to get out of it and into the spinal twist. I am always surprised at how the chatter in my mind always seems to increase as a function of the quiet of the room.

Breathe, the teacher says, and he means it, his voice says it and fills the room with the involuntary impulse to yawn.

By 11:45 I am at Starbucks on campus. The mind chatter says, Why are you willing to stand in this infernally long line, it's like Starbucks is a religion, should I get a latte or an Americano, etc. The length of the line had kept me outside the glass doors, but once I have moved (and rapidly!--I am always sure they will miss or screw up my order with the volume of traffic, but they are so damnably efficient) I hear the the heartwrenchingly familiar guitar picking of James Taylor, sweetened with time and LIVE, and I am suddenly transported back to my twenties in New York. I see that young woman no less clearly than I see myself now and I am gripped by an aching yearning to go to her, to tell her to stop everything because she has no idea who she is or what she is capable of, or how long it will take to unravel all the knots she is hastily tying.

But the latte comes, and I can't stand in there forever, and the song changes to some young, hip songwriting chanteuse and am poured back out into the cold, into the present. The past evaporates like a mist. I count the days since I posted my letter to a. (although I know he will not write back), and wish that I could go back, far back, and find him before we became whoever we would, unknowingly, become.

the view from my bed

2008-01-21T13:27:00.000-06:00

artifact--1821 (artefact) "anything made by human art," from It. artefatto, from L. arte "by skill" (ablative of ars "art;" see art (n.)) + factum "thing made," from facere "to make, do" (see factitious). Archaeological application dates from 1890.

There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the condition of the historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument. --Michel Foucault

1. Last night I dreamed about A. We were in some sort of abandoned ghost town, possibly an old steamship. We were beholding the dust-covered relics. I hoped we could produce some sort of illumination from these artifacts, some narrative that would explain what had happened in this place, what had gone wrong. He was patient with my lack of understanding, for after all, how could things be any other than they were at that moment, every surface blanketed in fine haze of decay--there was nothing to find or discover, it simply did not exist in any other way. I saw the absurdity of my longing to reconstitute history.

I awake vaguely aware of the dream, that I dreamed about A. I slowly reconstitute the dream, write a brief letter to A. and do not mail it.

2. She was sitting in the seat next to me in the car. It was cold and her hands were dangerously numb. A vague light from the broken streetlight just cautiously illuminated her profile (she looked beautiful--I am not sure what specifically to attribute this to, but there was a resolved gracefulness in the lines of her face and the way her usually animated limbs fell together in an unfamiliar and quiet repose, as if the limbs and trunk and head suddenly felt comfortable together, and enjoyed one another’s company). She said, I was in the place and I knew no one and didn’t understand the language or the culture, and I just woke every day and prayed that God would guide me because I could depend on nothing else.

Maybe that it how it really always is, I said. And maybe it is. What she really missed, though, was hot water. There was never any hot water.

3. It rains and rains today. Standing in the shower I wonder why all this water does not just erode us little by little, why, if I stand beneath the hot water forever, does nothing ever get dissolved of the knots of thought and flesh.

rendered unto ash

2008-01-20T11:52:00.000-06:00

this image [was originally] a portrait of two friends, taken by colleen, and it has set me thinking lately about friendship, and redemption, which are not usually coterminous, although it seems they should be. the light on the day this photo was taken was sifting through the weight of the room--the curtains, our winter clothing, the red wine, the dust (although there seemed to be very little of that, how do we see the light in such streams withough particulate--is it dust and light after all that touches us so?) all seemed to pull the light down making it more visible, more palpable. My thought on this day and days afterward was, some things cannot be salvaged, or rather, some things will never be restored to their original state, and this is the way life is. I carry the fragments of these damaged vessels, but I am no longer sure what I hope to do with them--perhaps they are just touchstones for the past, mementos.

the world is and we are continuously created and fractured and recreated through the accretion of countless corpuscles of matter and light and laughter and sorrow, and we change and change and change like rivers which wander imperceptibly over a landscape and yet always look the same, seem the same. One cannot, as Heraclitus claimed, step in the same river twice.

but what about redemption. Are we ever redeemed by one another, or is this the sole provenance of God? there are those from whom I deeply long for forgiveness, and yet this longing itself becomes an accretion of sorts, a settlement of sorts. this is the dust we become.

He felt closer to the dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness. --WG Sebald, The Emigrants

poetry and theology

2008-01-13T11:27:00.000-06:00

recently I was opining on what sort of person is Marilynne Robinson (author of Gilead), and here are two intervew questions (and responses) excerpted from a longer interview, which can be found here.

Q: John Ames, the Congregational minister in the book, is a very theological thinker, and you have mentioned your own interest in theology. If you had to explain it to someone, what is theology and what does it mean to think theologically?

A: It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself. Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that -- popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies -- because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

Q: Is there a connection to poetry, too? John Ames is also steeped in the religious poets, and he mentions John Donne and George Herbert throughout the novel.

A: I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition -- there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry -- both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality. The assumption behind any theology that I've ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it. One of the things that is nice about these old pastors -- they were young at the time -- who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is.

footnote to civilization

2008-01-12T17:37:00.000-06:00

I know that civilization is simply something that seems important, something that lives in the mind along with infinite desires and stories that are no less sensible that the small stone between my fingers.

I am at first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude in which I am placed with my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster who, not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been left...utterly abandoned and disconsolate. Fain would I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but I cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me.

Most fortunately it happens that, since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterates all these chimaeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends, and when after three or four hours'amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any further. Here I find myself absolutely and necessarily determined to live, and act, and talk like other people in common affairs of life.
--David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature

hiding behind the lens

2008-01-10T17:56:00.000-06:00

I was reflecting on what I wrote about my grandfather in the lost ritual, that he used a camera and a highball as a foil. Lately I begin to understand this tendency in myself. I wear my glasses more often, not because I can see more clearly, but because they make the world around me more blurry. I seek refuge in the fact that everything beyond reading distance is an indistinct fuzzy mass, which further corroborates my possible misguided notion that reality is no more than a fog anyway, until you kick the tire, that is (an old philosophical riff). But the ghost, the voyeur, the observer--this was Benjamin, and Rilke, and even (I have heard) Marilynne Robinson--a veil of words is no less a lens to hide behind than a Zeiss Ikonoflex, after all.

I recall many years ago when I was living with my mother on a reservation in Eastern Montana. The day we arrived she fell ill with a sever kidney infection, and I was left alone to fend for myself among the town of Lodge Grass. I went to the store, to the gas station, wandered at will. What I noticed most pointedly was that no one spoke--or rather, spoke very little. It was uncommon to shoot the breeze. Communication was brief and purposeful. This took much getting used to. I was a philosophy major then and monologues and dialogues flowed through my brain like the rivers that cut through and flooded the very verdant valley of the Crow. One old man did saunter out to me one day, at the gas station, and nodded toward my Guatemalan wallet perched on top the gas pump. “That your medicine bag?” he asked.

But I had brought a camera. I began wandering afresh, looking at the landscape and the junk cars and old refrigerators piled up with teepee poles in overgrown meadows. The kids began to follow me, and I took many pictures of them. The words were tamed, I guess, by the images, and the camera gave me an identity among the townspeople that I had previously lacked. I became “the photographer.” I took so many pictures back then I almost thought I was one. Most gratifyingly, though, was the feeling that I ceased to exist behind the camera, that I could go almost anywhere without being noticed--the ultimate refuge behind the lens.

I imagine my grandfather seeking this same refuge. Fuzzy world beyond the glasses, vague, amorphous world beyond the bottle of bourbon, but a clear, quiet world behind the viewfinder. People rarely bother a man behind a camera.

civilization

2008-01-07T20:10:00.000-06:00

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable…We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likenesses, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, utterly vast spaces between us.
-- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

And so the magic of winter slowly fades. The time away from work and school has allowed me to wander far from the steady stream of comings and goings of human life, the urgent and not-so-urgent errands and routines which drive the species to and fro in little inscribed paths on the surface of the city. I have slowed down to an almost imperceptible breath. I could be dead, for all I know, or a ghost. But the house is populated by two children and two animals who seem to respond to my presence. I must still be among the living.

Today on the creek we are alone, and the dry leaves are flicking like sharp, tiny tongues across the surface of the whitening rocks. There is a strong smell of dead fish. I find a stone and remember a friend who used to place a pebble in his mouth to stave off thirst on long hikes, but I can’t remember who it is anymore, who among the parade of ghosts who vigorously people my memories and dreams--and I am not putting this pebble in my mouth. It has absorbed the smell of dead fish, so I rub it between my fingers as we walk, like a worry bead.

We come across a smooth, deep rivulet, from whence arises the odor of dead fish. It is cut deep into the chalky surface, and as we peer down we see hundreds of small silver fish gasping for air among the carcasses of the already dead. I look up at the sky. It is cloudy, but rain seems unlikely. I consider the farfetched idea of buckets of water hauled down from up top.

As we walk back home I pray for rain. Several times during the day I do, weighing the likelihood of an answered prayer for dying fish against the grave, urgent prayers mouthed by the suffering the world over. But in this place that I am, this remote, unpeopled quiet of the winter holidays, I know that civilization is simply something that seems important, something that lives in the mind along with infinite desires and stories that are no less sensible that the small stone between my fingers.(1)

The clouds dissipate at dusk. My prayers fell on fallow soil, or I didn’t pray sincerely enough, or there is nothing such as an answered prayer. I let all the possible worlds of this play in my mind as the first stars appear, knowing that what is sanity, what to me, is civilization, is that smooth cleft in the earth where the tragedy plays out without tears or prayers. Tomorrow I will immerse myself once again in the river of humanity, and I wonder if I will even remember that fragile, passing world.

p.s. Hours after writing this, I awoke around midnight to a light but persistent rain...

beginnings

2008-01-03T19:35:00.000-06:00

the fragments that began “redemption shoes” were perhaps never to become more than a chaotic collection of thought objects--in any case, I doubt the collection will ever be reconciled into a meaningful whole, the way a story or a novel would, which in many ways was my intention--to experiment with a formless collection of ideas. But the idea of a codex devoid of a telos runs counter to my fundamental grain. I think I have always believed that if we looked far enough and deep enough, one day the mystery would be resolved. The mystery of what? Of self, of human nature? I cannot know, but remain resolved in my belief in a unified theory of everything, an Answer. I think this is why we tell stories at all: we craft the inklings of our vestigial knowledge into sensical or quasi-sensical forms, if only to communicate to ourselves what we already know. It was that spirit that fired the passion of Schliemann, whether one believes or not that his discoveries were nothing more than a hoax, the principal remains to intrigue us with its beauty and simplicity--that all we need to know, all we can ever know, is perpetually recorded in the cryptology of story. I will not quit searching, although the fragments of the grandfather have faded.

looking back

2007-12-31T21:57:00.000-06:00

for tom

recorded in her notebook on January 2, 1990:

I do not know why
we can love so hard
and so awkwardly, why now, under the shadow of the locust trees,
the air has turned purple, and the streets--
which are simply returning from rain--
appear permanently stained,
why there is such a thing at all
as loneliness…
--Charlie Smith

New York City, Spring 1987
Let us begin again, twenty years later, because she had fallen in love with a sad lost soul, a historian (or was it literature, or art, or architecture?) dredging through the morphemes of a lost language looking for some memory of himself. He manufactured himself anew each morning, bolstered by the stiff morning light, propped up by syllables, mumbling their sounds like a mantra as he shuffled toward his stuffy office in the history department on Washington Square. She is walking down a quiet Brooklyn sidewalk. Unlike other sidewalks, it is paved with flagstones beneath which, over time, the earth has shifted, so that now, as the heel of her boot strikes the surface of the stone, a clear sound rings out. She is unaware that this sound changes the tissue of the air around her--that time cringes uneasily and recoils from its standard procession. She does not yet know that hope ripples outward upon the waves of this sound, permeating the air around her and the ancient bricks of the row-houses that line the sleeping street.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out…
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
That wants it down

He had inscribed a quote from Rilke inside the cover of The Last Temptation of Christ: “For one human being to love another--that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” He was not a dream, but a man she had dreamed years before, who had poured into her open hand several lovely stones. Twenty years later she knows the names of the stones: Merton, and Teilhard de Chardin, and Rilke, among others. Kazantzakis was the stone that introduced her to the struggle in which every man partakes: My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. She was twenty; he was almost fifty, but he often irritated her by saying he could not wait to know her when she was forty.

In 1990 she will be given a lovely, blank book by her best friend, whom she has betrayed or soon will betray, at the expense of the most tender friendship she will ever know, and will begin writing poetry. It is awful. We must endure this poetry for six or seven months before she abandons poetry for cooking. A dreadful poem about her mother is followed by a recipe for tabouli, then vegetable stroganoff, and ratatouille.

Then, somewhere in my dreams
A fog-torn place and funneled silence

By 1991, a week before her birthday, he will be dead. Shot in the heart. A self-inflicted wound, and suicide becomes the language of love, the last mumbled syllable of a man who existed out of time. In the last months of his life, even she had dismissed his lack of consonance with the world of the living. She hardly noticed the glistening stones, and they kept tumbling into her hands, passed on often by regretful emissaries.

He died on March 4th
With spring snow on the ground
Alone in his pavilion. Seated at the foot of his bed.
Holding his shoe.
His body did not burst into unforgettable fragments at his death, no.

In 1996, the recipes will temporarily cease. She will quote Meister Eckhart and Herman Melville, and make pithy evaluations about the last six years, followed shortly thereafter by an unhappy marriage and two recipes: aduki bean squash stew and Italian Riboletta, the latter being of excellent literary quality.

(She misses him. He had this way of seeing her in her faults, and shaking his head with so much love, saying, "Aw, sweetheart." And she is forty now. She knows who the woman is that he wanted to know. She would have liked to know him, too, at seventy. There were so many stones. She never thanked him for the stones.)

If nature will not tell the tale
Jehovah told to her
Can human nature not survive
Without a listener?

(quotes above are from Robert Frost, Nikos Kazanzakis, Celia Thaxter, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson)

cronos and gaia

2007-12-28T15:29:00.000-06:00

Image credit: Carlos Parada, Cronos

I passed most of the morning in bed, watching the sun, which was transformed into a milky haze by the dust of the windowpane. On days when I don’t have to be anywhere, it is almost impossible to leave the house during the hours when the sun describes its balletic arc along the southeastern perimeter of the house. Sleeping is allowed, even reading, as long as you wake or raise your eyes from the page and occasionally behold the sun--mostly, you may not leave the presence of the sun. For about two hours (say from one until three o’clock p.m.) the sun will be intercepted by a windowless section of the house and a large Arizona Ash that visits from next door. During this time you can go out.

From the front door step of our house you have two options. Going East leads to hip cafes, divy clothing shops and a used bookstores, beer, and wine and coffee--all that civilization has to offer can be found by going east. To the west lie the hills, the creek, the Spings, and the trails. This is the direction I most often find myself leaning, and even walks with an intended eastward direction usually are delayed by a westward jog. Today we head purposefully west, down to the creekbed with a thermos of green tea, an apple and a small container of milk. The sun is filtered by the overhanging vines and riparian trees, and we walk a long while before lighting upon a sunny, rocky place in the center of the creek bed, dry for weeks now. It is as if the underwater world was suddenly frozen in time--the rocks, the plants, the algae are all a milky white. Above in the blue sky, buzzards watch us.

The highway arcs above like a great serpent. It’s hard not to resent its ignominious presence--even if you cannot see it, it effects a constant drone that eventually comes to resemble the wind in the cottonwoods and sycamores--and all the more despicable because of it. We find crawdad parts, some fox fur, and scattered feathers--signs that some sort of normal, natural parade of life and death continues unhindered. Yes, I realize that in saying this I betray some fundamental principal of ecology that says we are also nature, not separate from it--but lately, and as always, I doubt this and feel we are aliens consuming this world and shitting it out in our hideous wake.

Last night we read the story of Gaia and Uranus, and I am again reminded that myths hold the key to many mysteries. As we walked down the creek, searching for treasure, I wonder about the Titans and the hundred-headed monster and the cylopses Uranus tossed into the depths of the earth. What do they tell us about who we are, about where we are going, and which direction to head in the hours devoid of perfect, dancing light.

the lost ritual

2007-12-16T08:43:00.000-06:00

She would say that there had always been a voyeuristic element to her personality--and she had confessed on countless occasions to close friends that she often felt like a ghost haunting even her own skin--displaced, oddly unhinged and out of time, wandering through life as if she were looking at photographs musing on the present as if it were instead the past.

It is early and cold, and she is irritated because she forgot to buy coffee and so she must perform the ritual recollection of the particles of herself without the binding power of caffeine. It puts things right again, things that have shifted out of place during the night, pieces of herself moving just so slightly that the machinery cannot function, or worse, pieces that have drifted so far she must call them back patiently. She sometimes performs this ritual in bed, but today she does it with a cup of tea, watching the morning sun cleave the cold from the skinlike fronds of an agave across the street.

Today they will procure the Christmas tree. This is a quasi-ritual fashioned over the years for her three children intended to replace the Lost Rituals of her childhood, which they cannot know about but she is sure they suffer anyway for the loss. The quasi, replacement ritual feels unutterably lame to her, a vague and insincere gesture toward Holiday, but it is as close as she can come to the Lost Rituals.

The Lost Rituals exist in a space-time vault accessible to anyone who participated in them, and are additionally supported by photo-documentation lest any of the details grow blurred or risk being forgotten. Most of this documentation was performed by her grandfather, who was socially inept, and an in-law privy by marriage to the rituals so he was never a bona fide participant. He used the camera and a highball as a foil.

The Lost Rituals were led, and performed for numerous, happy years, by her great-grandparents. They were working class who had made it to the middle class, and they owned a large house comfortably furnished with overstuffed sofas and Victorian era relics all organized upon a vast sea of white carpet. The formal living and dining rooms were where the ritual was celebrated. There was always an enormous flocked tree. It was hand-flocked by a local nursery and delivered in a giant plastic bag. The ornaments were never eclectic--simply iridescent glass balls and fake birds, and multi-colored lights.

Those who participated in the rituals wore their finest clothes. One year, when she was five, she recalls a nondescript dress with red polka-dot stockings. She can still vividly recall those stockings, and the joy they filled her with as she looked down upon her dancing legs. Others wore fur, or silk--for all day the great -grandparents had been engaged in the preparations--baking brisket and pie, making jelly and jell-o salad, rolling out biscuits and mashing potatoes. Then there was the eating and revelry, the present opening, and singing, and the laughter that had been looked forward to by all for the entirety of the long year.

At the time of the red polka-dot stockings, her family lived on a farm in the country, about an hour from the town where the grandparents lived. Her mother had grown up with the ritual, and would never have conceived of missing it, or worse, replacing it with another family’s ritual. On Christmas Eve they piled into the Buick with all their finery and drove the deserted farm roads the hour or so to the grandparents' and reveled happily until Midnight, when the grandparents informed everyone that Santa Claus would pass the houses by if the children were not asleep in their beds, so the the parents would bundle up the little ones--it was most often snowing--into the night and ferry them homeward.

Her mother and father always seemed happy during the ritual, but on the way home they began to shake off a studied composure to be replaced with bridling resentment. He has had too much to drink, the mother bristles at the father. The children in the back seat are not listening to the fighting, nor are they noticing the slight weaving along the curving canyon roads in the snow. They are scouring the black, star-filled night sky for signs of Rudloph the red-nosed reindeer.

This memory has turned sour in her stomach as she sits by the window with her tea watching the sun dismiss the frost. She picks over the seeds of her life, and wants to reject them all, paling as they do in comparison to the perfect seed of the Lost Rituals. There came a time when the grandparents grew too frail to host the ritual. One by one the children attempted to recreate the magic, but none were able. Each in turn failed to produce anything that could have bound the disparate members together for even a single evening. There were many noble attempts. She looks back over her life and marks this loss as the end of uncontrived happiness.

And she thinks again of the snow, the long ride home on Christmas Eve and the three children huddled in the back seat, unaware of anything but the magic of Chrismas: What if?

What if he had, while the mother nagged in the seat next to him, and the stars bore down brightly upon him, and the thought of the falling price of cotton that year and the incessant desires for things he struggled to provide, and he did, after all, have quite a lot to drink-- and the sheet of ice was glassy and beautiful and reflected the night, and when the wheels hit it, the Buick went spinning off into the snow with great speed, tumbling over and over, almost with a whisper in the forlorn fields of snow, to rest, at last, in the silence of the frosted winter grass. Not a movement, not a breath.

There is a shear force of will that turns the cantankerous wheels of fate in unseen directions. There was so much will that night, maybe only the children in their joy was enough to muster a mighty cry against the Great Inhuman Will, and they rose up in their joy with a resounding NO! Time, like a mighty steam engine that slams on the breaks to avoid hitting a cow on the tracks, issued forth a terrible sound of immense friction. The world shuddered. The animals pricked their ears. And the mother nagged, and the father turned on the radio. O, Holy Night was playing, and he took her hand.

They made it home safely, a little addled, though they knew not why. As the parents carried the last warm, slumbering body to bed, they felt as if somehow their lives have been irrevocably altered. The children dreamed of ice and silence. And this would never change. That night will always be the last night. The Lost Ritual will always be the last true thing they ever knew. And they will walk through life, and live, almost as everyone lives, but there will be a feeling, a vague, uneasy feeling, of being a ghost, haunting even their own skins.

lost pengwin

2007-12-13T16:31:00.000-06:00

Maybe you do not rercall what it felt liketo traffic in essences. Children certainly do, and when you happen upon a completely uncontrived essence, courtesy of some child just being, well, childlike, it is like a breath of sweet, fresh air.

When do we lose this? Some people, I think, do not, but why? Sudoku and crosswords are not the way to hold on to that fragile connection with utter expression, unhinged from expectation.

winter reading list

2007-12-10T20:48:00.000-06:00

I am agitated.

Let me begin with yesterday. I met a Nigerian/German who could have been my favorite philosopher except my favorite philosopher, everyman, is wholly Nigerian--it was only his character who was German (mother?) and Nigerian (father?), but I took this to be a sign, nonetheless, and launched into a discussion of literature about which my new acquaintance knew nothing. He spoke perfect German, however.

But I could NOT retrieve the title of Ondaatje's Coming through the Slaughter which was where I had packaged this association along with a recommendation from "not my real name," Allan Smithee who had also recommended I read this. A woman at the party who might be this Nigerian German's wife tells me that the brain is shrinking because of Google.

But let me tell you what I will read over the break, if my brain will hold up:

Condorcet, Progress of the Human Mind or what some may know as Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit

Hugo's Notre Dames de Paris, and Thoreau and Emerson in small doses. I am still struggling with Emerson, and what seems to me to be something that today would look like a mental illness.

Meanwhile, I will work on my operatic singing. Every time I hit a high note my five-year old hugs me. She says it is because she loves it when I do that, but I wonder if it might not be simply self defense. So far the dog has not howled. I try not to think about the fact that my best arias are written for a tenor...

Most of all, do not sit around this holiday and drink beer and eat cheetohs (as was recommended by one of my classmates). Life is too short, and although I subscribe to both beer and cheetohs, have them over Condorcet of Virgil, or Hugo. We'll all watch the Big Lebowski in heaven...

notes to myself

2007-12-09T02:46:00.000-06:00

This is a link to an indescribably beautiful short film by one of my favorite philosophers. I am as yet inept regarding how best to post videos--but however you get there, it is worth the trip...

I awoke around 1 a.m., thinking about Bedichek, and Dobie, and
McMurtry and this long lineage of Texas writers, and I should include
Dorothy Scarborough, of The Wind and Katherine Ann Porter, who are the only truly noteworthy females of
Texas literature, but I always longed, don't know why, to belong to the
"boys club."

This might have something to do with my upbringing, and the
pre-kindergarten days I spent with my dad travelling from town to
unnamed town in the panhandle, stopping off at grain elevators to shoot the breeze with other farmers analyzing the market and bad-mouthing the republicans (those were the days--now the farmers in that area subscribe to a different set of politics driven by a man who wouldn't know which end of a cow to milk, but he employs a familiar vocabulary and perhaps that is where we all draw the line).

Bedichek will be much on my mind over the holidays as I embark upon a rereading of his Adventures with a Texas Naturalist

the not lost notes...

I guess I need to figure out the plot of this story. Grace is born, is raised by her father, rather uneventfully in this small Texas town, which at this point hardly figures at all into the story—should it be a larger part of the story? More characters? Anyway, she is haunted by her mother’s suicide, an incident which her father only ever describes to her in mythological terms. When she is forced to confront her abandonment after her father’s death, she decides to open the lid of the past and find out who her mother was and what was the terrible secret that she carried inside her—what eventually drove her to suicide.

She moves in to the old hotel, her mother’s childhood home, and the past comes alive. Layer after layer of history unfolds as she discovers the many secrets held in the walls of the old building. She is about to lose touch with everything, to be consumed by the past entirely, when she meets Holcomb Howell, a young cropduster. What ensues is Grace’s first love, a passionate encounter with the living such as she has never known, by her mother’s secret has now become her own, and the desperate battle is now being waged within her.

Why am I doing this? I know that right now I couldn't care less about what happens in this stupid story. So let me tell you this. How when Grace returned home she sat for a long time in the living room of the German farmhouse, feeling the emptiness of the rooms. There was a stillness in the air that oppressed her. What she felt most keenly however was the feeling that though she had lived in this house her entire life, she had never felt that she quite belonged. There was a distance between her and every object that occupied the house, as if some unseen presence had hovered over her warning, “Don’t meddle, don’t touch,” until her curiosity had finally subsided.

This house was a body vacant of spirit, and she herself felt this vacancy of spirit well. She rose from the crackling, decrepit sofa and smoothed her skirt as if she was off to the kitchen to make tea or wash vegetables. She went to her closet and took out an old suitcase of a floral print in needlepoint. She packed the few dresses and undergarments she owned. Then she searched the kitchen drawer...for a key. They had never as far as she knew, locked any of the doors. But the kitchen door through which the entered and exited exclusively did have a latch and keyhole. At some length of rifling through the drawers filled with pipe cleaners and small parts of dismantled mechanisms of various kinds, she discovered a small and heavy key on a frayed and faded green ribbon.

folded hands

2007-11-22T09:06:00.001-06:00

I've been drawing on the train. Thirteen days ago, it
was an old Hasidim who hung his head low as he read
the paper. And, when he was done, he folded and
refolded his hands, constantly switching which was on
top, so that it seemed as if they were transparent and
you could see one old wrinkly hand right through the
other. --y.o.

Last night a cold front blew in and I woke to frost on the glass. The house is quiet; the kids are away at grandparent's and it is just me in bed with coffee and the wind.

I love the idea of families all snuggled together today, sharing a meal, laughing and arguing and just, well--sharing one another's company and giving thanks for the beauty of their lives--just their lives, that is so much to be thankful for.

Being alone, I will do the sanest thing I know: First I will go for a walk on the trail. And I will pray for everything I can imagine. The things I am thankful for, the things I may take for granted, and for those who are not safely ensconced in the presence of loved ones, dysfunctional or otherwise.

Last night I heard on NPR that the police took a baby away from a Guatemalan mother who was breastfeeding her infant. They deported her, the baby (an American citizen) they kept here. I will pray that this insanity ends soon. There is so much insanity these days. Another insane commercial holiday looms---what are we thinking? Is anyone thinking? Sometimes it is almost unbearable to live in a culture whose concern is primarily "getting" and "having" more and more stuff.

I can't get the image of the man on the train, folding and refolding his hands, out of my mind. It is almost like the weaving of the fates--the perpetual folding, the neverending wringing of the hands--I imagine this is exactly what God does (metaphorically) as he/she/whatever, unnameable, watches the chaos below.

"

pseudo-random numbers

2007-11-14T22:10:00.001-06:00

for allan smithee (not his real name)

Yesterday the 338 was rerouted at Lamar and 29th because of a 'hostage situation.' (One man, fending off the authorities in a gunshop--can one hold oneself hostage?)

The wind started blowing today; we headed out to walk the dog because the leaves were doing their best impression of the Shelley poem, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, yellow and black and pale, and hectic red--a pestilence stricken multitude... possibly very poorly paraphrased, and I always confuse that poem with Shakespeare's sonnet about "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang"...pestilence stricken multitudes. See?

She asks me: Who will take care of me when you are an angel?

I respond that I am very far away from being an angel.

But tonight the wind blows and the clouds move like the dead, soooo slowly. I imagine infinite layers into space, each moving exponentially slower than the one below, and suddenly I have lived an entire life, and I wonder, have I done what I came here to do?

perhaps I have forgotten what that was...

UPS delivers about 13 million packages and documents a day. If 1/100 of a percent (.0001) are lost, thats 1300 packages a day.

And then a perennial favorite:

Jilted by Sweden, Feted by Norway, Mathematics Finally Gets Its Due

and belatedly, for beth...

2007-10-28T18:21:00.000-06:00

Correspondence with A.E.Seale. chief of the Texas Prison System at Huntsville, Texas, in regard to the prison records of Big Tree and Satanta reveals that the two chiefs were received at the institution on November 12, 1871, each with a life sentence for murder, although some authors have stated that they entered the penitentiary November 12, 1871. Big Tree and Satanta were paroled August 19, 1873, but Satanta was returned as a violator November, 1874. (1)

W.A. (Bud) Morris and Joe Bryant of Mantague County conversed with Satanta while at the penitentiary (October 1878). Satanta had a talk with Mr. Morris and inquired if he thought the government would ever release him. Mr. Morris did not give any encouragement. Satanta seemed very despondent, and next morning, perhaps feeling his case hopeless, he committed suicide by jumping from a window or front story porch (reports conflict), October 11, 1878.

“I cannot wither and die like a dog in chains.”
-Satanta

The next day, Satanta slashed several arteries. An attendant stopped the bleeding and took him to the infirmary where he was lodged on the second floor. When the attendant left him alone, Satanta jumped from the landing. The prison record states that he died “from the effect of a fall received by voluntary jumping from a second story landing of the prison hospital.” (2)

1. Ida Lasater Huckaby. Ninety-Four Years in Jack County, 1854-1948. Texian Press: 1984. Waco,TX. P. 202.

2. Thomas F. Horton. History of Jack County: Being the Accounts of Pioneer Times Excerpted from Coutny Court Records, Indian Stories, Biographical Sketches and Interesting Events. Gazette Print,:Jacksboro, Texas. P.

Two

“Maybe children wake to a love affair every other morning or so; if given any chance, they seem to like the sight and smell and feel of things so much. Falling for the world could be a thing that happens to them all the time. I hope so, I hope it is purely commonplace. I’m trying to imagine that it is, that our childhood love of things is perfectly justifiable. Think of light and how far it falls, to us. To fall we say, naming a fundamental way of going into the world—falling.”
-William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky

There is a farm, a lake whose shores still bear the imprint of your feet. There are bones of coyotes in piles along the fenceline that remember your name, and a lineage of grain that held your body when you jumped into silos, held there in the vision of sun through the opening above, shadowed hands reaching down to grasp yours and pull you up into the light again. In winter the pond froze over, and you were friends with the stinging wind, whose fingers like needles, worked their way through the red nylon weave of your jacket, the flimsy barrier between the cold and the small-bird of a heart knocking against the cage of little ribs. There was a dingey sky blanketing the yellow fields, a carbonate road winding off into the gray like a vein of crystal. It was cold, so cold the air pinched the skin between your nostrils, you who were poised in animal attention, listening. You discerned that the norther had a voice all its own, separate from the southerlies or easterlies. The North wind moans, you thought, it was a lonely sound like a ghost train culling the darkness with a single shaft of light flaying the dark skin of night, or a lonesome calf bawling for its mother. And as you thought these words you sang, Glory be to God on high…

The sleek dark bodies of Canadian geese gather on the frozen lake into a mass against the gale, clump together, for a moment blot out their own separateness, then divide in startled unison, the broad wingspans pushing steamy gusts toward your huddled shoulders. They rise clumsily off the ice, honking and flapping in awkward, jerking skyward movements, then drop gently onto the creaking, opaque sheet again, as if an unseen cartoon hand had suddenly let them go. They settle down into the inky hole of water not yet overtaken by ice. You scour the muddy shore for more rocks to throw, averting your eyes from the crucified coyotes hanging with slit throats on the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the cotton field. And on Earth peace and goodwill toward men…

Your hands were red and chapped, even shoved into the pockets of your corduroy pants they were numb, so you walked back along caliche road to the metal pole barn rising in a sharp angle to the plain, wind-formed in a perpetual leeward lean. There was a wooden enclosure, it is there still, and in one corner of the barn, you found a pushbroom set aside and forgotten against the splintered siding. You pushed it slowly as if in prayer, making patterns in the fine orange silt with the stiff bristles of the broom. We praise you…The pool of unthinking induced by the slow scratching of the bristles on the concrete floor was rippled by the clunking sound of broom head colliding with bucket. The suspect contents sloshed out onto the dirty floor, collecting into puddles of sepia mud. You peered into the bucket then turned suddenly away. Fleshy blobs floated in the blood black water. Your brain struggled to give these shapeless masses a context. They were animal, severed, unspeakable, what? You heard a snicker from the metal stairs that lead above the office where the hay was stored. It was Romero, the hired hand.

Romero makes a gesture near his groin with his hand still holding a cigarette," laughing. You looked back at the bucket, your face paling greenish and shoved your nose beneath the cold zipper of your windbreaker so you would not vomit onto the floor you had just swept.

Over the throbbing sound in your ears you heard the chatter of sparrows roosting high in the rafters of the metal barn, hollow echoes in the cold air. There was a propane heater inside Buddy’s office, but here next to the combines and the bags of sorghum, it was bone cold. Even the cats had disappeared, crawled into spaces between bales of hay. The grain dryer started up then with a whine, like a siren, ran for a deafening eternity during which you sang sotto voce the remainder of the fragment of the Creed, We thank you, we worship you and sacrifice you, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be Ah-men, then the dryer wound down, leaving the reverberations of its giant turning cylinders carving a headachey space between your ears.

The sparrows flitted down to pick over sprigs of straw, or candy wrappers or string, struggled in the fragile balance of gravity to return with the plunder to their nests near the ceiling. Sometimes it seemed the barn was a living creature, breathing with enormous lungs, and you, you were a creature inside clinging to its innards for warmth because you knew of no other shelter.

Romero finished his cigarette and walked down the metal stairs, his scuffed-up blood-stained boots slowly passed before your lowered head. You concentrated on the dust patterns on the floor. They were roads that you followed, circling spiraling roads leading up into the sky like the unseen roads the geese were supposed to follow south.

There was a road you remembered, from when you were still small enough to be slung up on your mama’s narrow hipbone. A cold day like this one, only sunny, your eyes squinched against the light that exposed the bareness of the land, the smooth arched whaleback of the earth spotted with cylindrical grain elevators. Your mother was thin, laughing, wearing a mint green dress that just touched the top of her kneecap, slender ankles cocked above high arches slipped into bone-white pumps, dressed more for an afternoon tea than to be tromping about in the dirt and tumbleweeds. Buddy drove with his wrist resting on the top of the steering wheel, raising two fingers in salute to passing pickups every once in a while, and occasionally swerving onto the shoulder of the road then jerking the pick-up back, so he could make your mama wince or gasp, and then she would laugh. He was taking you someplace special, to show you what he’d found on his hunting trip.

Buddy turned in on the loose gravel in front of a shoebox of a building. There was a lame horse hobbling around on the hardpan, and two longhorn steers huddled butt-end to the North wind that never seemed stop blowing the acrid sorghum smell into town, either that or the stench from the feed lot. You were lifted out of the pick-up and set down on the hard ground. And she held your dimpled hand as you stepped over Dr. Pepper bottles and shot-up beer cans, making your way to the chain link fence that enclosed a single dog run.

Do you want to look? your mama asked, you serious, digging the toe of your black paten Mary Janes into the orange soil. Your tiny hands gripped the cold steel and you poked your nose through the infinite linkages and infinite spaces between linkages, tasting the cold metal with your tongue.

Buddy strode around the back of the little dog house at the rear of the pen to bang on the wall of it, try to scare what was within, out. And he flushed out a mama raccoon wild-eyed, holding one of the babies by its scruff. Your mouth was poised in a perfect gasp of surprise, your Mama smiled, singing in a high-pitched voice Oh, How precious, and that was when it happened. First she swallowed the one she had by the scruff, just choked it down. Your Mama reached her gloved hand down to shield your eyes but she jerked your soft curled head away, for you had already seen the undeniable truth of it.

She ate all five of them, a visceral image that would become imprinted in the fore of your mind, an image you understood without having it explained and didn’t want it explained and would carry in your belly as a knowing about love that you would witness re-enacted countless times in your life and would never misunderstand the possibility, the inevitability of it. A cruelty wound tight with love, and inseparable from it.

It was this experience that must have awakened your mind to the many cruelties of farm life, or rather, farm death. The singular moment when something inside your small body became blind and ceased to see with an innocent child’s eyes.
But now you were older, an older sister, and you wondered sometimes how you would explain this brutal mother love to Billy when he was not a baby anymore. Billy, just born into the family line like a vein, the heart pumping into it not blood, but the life-sustaining liquid of worldly possessions.

Romero stopped, picked up the bucket and stepped off the concrete slab into dust, absorbed by the enveloping light of cloud cover. You could hear Buddy’s voice booming on the phone in the office inside that was filled with heavy wooden furniture that belonged to his father. Furniture that would one day be Billy’s. Buddy came out slamming the plywood office door behind him. Get in the truck, he told you, and you followed him out into the absence of sun, trotted around to the passenger side of the pick-up and scrambled in. You spoke beneath your breath the quick mumbled prayers you always said for the cottontails and coyotes and stray cats who might have been unfortunate enough to be loping along the highway just as Buddy’s pick-up truck came whining along the road. How you hated to see anything get hit. And by rote your lips mouthed the words of the contract, the terms being that you must repeat the entire Lord’s prayer before the truck reached the end of the caliche road where Buddy would turn off in a spewing of gravel toward town, For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen.

dialogue II, for y.o.

2007-10-12T15:51:00.000-06:00

Remember what you wrote about connections? The uncanny coincidences that riddled your days, once in the spring?

I notice that the superintendent of the hospital was
called "Talbot."

Salt process, medical procedure.

I am uncertain about many things, but I maintain (as I am sure you know) a great well of dreams, none to immense to at least offer a concerted attempt at manifestation. Whence this faith in dreams?

(Perhaps this is not true. As I write this I can think of a few, at least, that I am not bold enough, or naïve enough to pursue.) And the days--they are the subjective consequence of the aperture of hope. Lately I am seeing the world through such a tiny opening, hardly any light striking the retina of possibility.

it keeps me up at night.
There‚s a gash in my side
from which sighs leak out
and organize at the foot of the bed.

My friend, I will be forty-two next week. But Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize in literature at what, eighty-seven? I am just beginning, no? I see her face, radiant, delighted.

Each day
is a blessing, incredible, exhausting. I take the days
one at a time. Seems to be the best way.

commentary on Plath

2007-10-09T17:31:00.000-06:00

The Bell Jar: The Journal of Vacuum Technique and Related Topics for the Amateur Investigator

Vacuum Basics: Vacuum Fundamentals, Terminology, Applications, Reading List
The Units of Pressure Measurement (this was exceeded in early October)

Refrigeration Service Vacuum Pumps-Medium Vacuum at Low Cost

Building a Thermocouple Vacuum Gauge (the retainer fee is very high for de-thermocoupling)

A Simple Medium Vacuum System
(is this too much to ask?)

The Radiometer Bob Templeman on Generating X-Rays with Receiving Tubes
Some Resources and Ideas for Plasma Experiments (this may defended with first amendment arguments in some states)

’Vacuum and Scientific Americans Amateur Scientist
Some Recollections - (the postmodern equivalent of recherches des temps perdu)

Infrasound Monitoring with a Microbarograph (the NSA is still doing this)

The Farnsworth/Hirsch Fusor (temporarily bypasses homicidal impulses in rush hour traffic)

Leaks: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Bubbles and Gel Candles

overture to part II

2007-10-07T17:48:00.001-06:00

Grace

Walter Benjamin wrote that death is the sanction of everything a storyteller can tell, “suddenly,” he said, “in his expression and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him.”

I was born with the gift of touch. My father said it is because she took me into the sky with her when she left, when she rose like Medea in her chariot of the sun, but that he brought me back from the clouds. He carved me out of her belly with a kitchen knife, while her body was still warm, and I was wearing the caul, still tethered to her heart by the umbilicus which he cut, and he breathed his own breath into my lungs. Since then I have heard the stories imprinted in objects, of stones and soil and fabric, all things singing their own history in layers of complex variations like a symphony.

There are fragments of stories I touched as a child, pieces of cloth I stitched together to form a memory of her. The stones I held in my hand as an infant described to me in detail her first steps in that wind-torn field—how the leaning grasses suddenly stilled, awaiting her breath, how the dry wheat shafts were raked by her child’s unselfconscious steps releasing (from the cocked legsprings of tiny, skeletal animals) a sudden volley of sun-refracting flight.

At night the moths told me fairy tales, like shadow plays flickering in the dust of their wings. I held my breath and watched her life unfold before me on my pillow at night like the wings of a cicada emerging from its shell. The dragonflies told me she knew the true names of all the plants and animals, that she understood the language of horses, that she had first learned from birds how to fly.

Before I went to sleep at night, I witnessed as the fields and sky and clouds wrote her stories on my tongue. And as we watched the stars through telescopes before dawn, I would tell them to my father, and he would make me promise never, ever to lift my feet from this earth, not to listen to the beckoning song of the sky, like she had done, but to stay close to the words, for they would anchor me, and this is what I have done.

A key I found in a box possessed the memory of their wedding--how she had opened the door to an old hotel where she had lived as a child, how everything was covered in dust, and there were still toys on the floor that held the imprint of her hands playing with them before the last time she ever walked out that door. The smell of the cedar closet had made her cry, the furs that hung there for so many years still steeped in perfume from a ball, and when I touched the cedar trunk I saw that here she had unfolded the lace of her own mother’s wedding dress, and moths had fluttered out of it like angels. My father had seen their wings reflected in the liquid of her eyes. It was then, he said, that he knew he would not be able to hold on to her.

She married my father in the field of yellow grass behind our house, a shotgun wedding beneath the sky, and the wind whipped around her dress and it billowed such that he thought she might be lifted into the clouds, and the wind took the words, their vows, and carried them to a place where they might never be found. I have always searched for those words. I suspect that they are kept by Aeolus in his cave too soothe the winds.

Before he died my father found the book of poetry she had stolen from his house long ago. He said he knew she had taken it, and he had loved her more for that singular act of necessary thievery than perhaps anything else. I have it now, and use it to remember the sound of the wind that blows differently now that she is gone.

And my mouth still whispers the lyrics to a song about the end, for it is always where my story begins: her tentative steps out into that familiar sun-scorched field, the wedding field, how she walked shedding hope, stepping out of the clinging undergarments of faith, standing naked and pale beneath the light of clouds, clothed only in the heavy weight of a child; how she let go at last the thread that tethered both of us to the incarnate world, that most fragile thread of silk that held her heart to the turning blade, the knife edge, of her corporeal existence, her grief. I touch the earth of the field where she last stood and inhale the familiar smell of the soil, the overabundance of nitrogen, the faint, far off scent of lightning. The metallic particulate of burned gunpowder hovering, later, in the astonished air; the casual way she shrugged off her earthly weight like removing a heavy shroud. And then she was free, fragmented, fleeting upward in a fusion of light and memory, at last unburdened by the density that had pressed her down: this earthward pull, what had brought her here, and me, all of us, longing to experience the fragile beauty of light, the smell of skin, the delirious sensation of taste and touch, and sound.

And now I tell your stories to keep you close to me, until I, too, am safe again in the weightless world, for the stories, as Benjamin said, are like “seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of pyramids”—what is germane and vital still, and born again in bread, sustains us. You were, Rilke said, “like bread on the altar before it is changed…”

I tell the stories beginning to end, middle spiraling outward, or from end to the unraveled beginning, where the sky first fell in love with you, a glinting fleck of star, fallen from the infinite heavens, for the first time perceiving within yourself the insistent longing for gravity, not knowing the weight, the sorrow, that was its bane. For the stories remind me of who you once were, and in the telling we are redeemed.

epilogue to part I

2007-09-02T07:11:00.001-06:00

It has taken me a while to process that my search for him is over. I was looking for him through light, through scattered fragments that disintegrated as I touched them, and the found that the only indelible remains were factual and cold, that I had created the past I was searching for, and its reality was as ephemeral as a dream.

We are complex creatures, and there is no tracing (at least at this moment) of our genetic material back through generations, and what if there were? It would no more belong to my grandfather or his father or mother than anyone else, in the alphabet soup that is each of our particular recipe for being. Even that is mutable, and we can raise (or lower) ourselves depending on will, and possibly faith.

When I look at the people in my life whom I admire and love, I don't care in the least from what genetic material they hail; I care about the person and how each navigates the passages of his or her life; I care about the poetry, the vision, the woundability.

From this place where I stand I wave good-bye to my grandfather-- a wave of the innocent young person I was when he had many opportunities to love me, to show some affection, which he passed up. I have continued to try to capture that affection even from beyond the grave--it will not come. But there is much here to love--there is no more time to waste seeking to reconcile what I wish might have been with what actually was.

apprehension

2007-08-15T10:02:00.001-06:00

I-84 between Lubbock and Post
Was it a betrayal to forget the girl with the magical shoes and the old photographer--to diverge for so long from the path of their unfolding, tentative connection toward the dark path of the dead? When I returned from my grandfather’s hometown, still populated by the living who had somehow drifted far from my imagination, I was faced with the unassailable fact that the living are not as we imagine them--and the dead are far from caring how they are imagined. Driving back along the long road lined with sage and wide fields of cotton and corn, only the sky continued to maintain the vast scope of the extent of my romanticizing, but it was equally ominous and beautiful, like the road on which we traveled, unending, but also fraught with countless perils and disappointments.

Which is to say that only the girl with the magical shoes held any hope. She had a future. She was still holding the world together in a fragile web of apprehension (and I know I have used that over and over again, but find no other way to describe that act of apprehending--to catch, to reach, to hold, to arrive, to understand--as way of being, if only for a moment, but moment after moment, until the world comes together in an almost seamless act of being held).

Years ago I sold everything I owned, and many of these things I had gathered from my grandfather’s cellar after he died. Among those things was a book that had figured profoundly into my young imagination, a 1950 copy of Time-Life’s The Universe. One thing that worked its way into my consciousness was an artist’s depiction of Saturn as seen from one if its moons. In my young, preliterate mind, that landscape was somewhere on this planet, California, as a matter of fact, where one could see Saturn setting, an immense ripe fruit on the horizon. Many years after this purge, I found a copy of the same book in a used book store. I opened it and it released the sweet aroma of tobacco that had infused everything in my grandfather’s room. I picked it up the other day, and started, for the first time, to read it. There was a photo of Albert Einstein, and one of his office the day he died. The only title that one can make out on his desk is “Philosophy.” But reading again through the description of the theory of relativity, I suddenly understood that one can only really “see” the world by holding still. It can’t be seen through memory, or fear, or hope, or desire, or frustration. One cannot speed through it on an expressway or an airplane without missing the most essential details. This was always the girl’s gift. She longed for nothing, she raged against nothing, she simply stepped off the G-Train and looked around her, and the world, which never failed to perform its balletic miracle for anyone still enough, goal-less enough, to perceive it. And that is where she met Sudek--in that space of apprehension, on the point of the needle. And that is precisely why I lost them both for so long.

i've been out walking...

2007-08-09T15:37:00.000-06:00

the mother road

2007-08-01T09:27:00.000-06:00

This book is dedicated to historic Route 66, the Mother Road. One day it will be gone. Pieces of it disappear as I write this line. And when it dies, among its remains will be many tales and memories of the way it never was, and that’s all right; for the road is mythic, and myths tend to swell with each telling. From now on, let every tall story begin: Once upon a time there was a great highway…

And that part is true…

--Carol O'Connell

Maybe there is no longer a need to exhume the ghosts of the past. The dust is so thick, and memory solidifies into untrustworthy forms. You might realize, rifling through a stack of parched papers, insistently engraved in your grandfather's hand, that there are many stories, but not enough love to sustain them. What use is it to dredge up what is lost, what was lost long before the breath moved out beyond the atmosphere. You might say that these stories, were, after all, always your own, your desperate attempt at redeeming what can never be redeemed. Then so be it. Let the dust settle as it was meant to do, to cover by patient accretion the no-longer-living.

There was a road that once was vital and well-travelled, and music and dancing and camping flitted along its expanse beneath the neon lights from Chicago to L.A. The road is gone, and though you might keep driving, you will never reach the destination.

the molecular composition of air

2007-07-24T09:04:00.000-06:00

from Wisconsin Death Trip, by Michael Lesy 1973

june and boo, 1948

2007-07-09T14:04:00.000-06:00

In one of his letters, Bedichek mentions a book by Alfred Russell Wallace entitled The Wonderful Century. In the chapter on photography called “New Applications of Light” he writes,” The improvements of the mode of production of light for common use …are sufficiently new and remarkable to distinguish this century from all the ages that preceded it, but they sink into insignificance when compared with the discoveries that have been made regarding the nature of light itself.” So much is changing at the turn of the century, and time itself is being compacted like the soil beneath any of dozens of heavy pieces of machinery moving the earth about to follow the contours of man’s desires.* Already, in 1951, Bedichek bemoans the passing of an era, the loss of the honey bee and man’s sense of wonder with the natural world. I am just a descendent in the lineage of the grieving.

Tricky thing, time--if you begin to move backward in it, like swimming against the current of some roiling river, it gapes and opens into an ocean, and what once was just a barely audible, far-off call of a vaguely recognizable bird is suddenly a roar so loud you cannot bear to hear it without clapping your hands over your ears. Do you, then, get back into your tent as God advised the Israelites?

Perhaps as we learn more, imagine more intensely, about the nature of light we will realize that nothing is lost, that it is all here in our midst, perceptible to some finely tuned instrument. Then I will quit grieving the maps and archaeological record discarded by an unappreciative librarian, or the Leica enlarger cast off as a bit of junk crowding the basement. Perhaps not. For now, I let my sighs join in a puddle with those of a fellow investigator of the past (although I know his sighs are spent with equal measure on the present, on the subtlest sound, the faintest shuddering breath).

Have we passed through the wonderful century? Are there any more poets being born?

*As Norma Evenson wrote in her 1979, Paris: A Century of Change, "And so, one hundred years is not so long. A century no longer implies a period of slow accretion." (xvi)

waiting for the bus

2007-07-09T13:54:00.001-06:00

People Waiting for the Bus. Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views of St. Louis, Missouri. (created 1865?-1890?)Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs

Between the times I wander other people’s dreams of themselves at singular points of their lives they have forgotten were solidified in emulsion or inscribed onto a page, I ride the bus. The bus traverses vast expanses of the imagination, each intersection an unfolding drama that pulls me in, each new passenger a narrative unraveling. Yesterday we sat at a round metal table in the parking lot on Congress Ave where they serve coffee and I remembered the man in the Hawaiian shirt who often takes the same bus. He stands on corners with a sign that says, “Anything helps” or “Homeless Vietnam Vet.” Once I had taken the bus downtown at dark in a foul mood, and he had called out across the coach, You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and then he pulled a crumpled zinnia out of his backpack and handed it to me. He rides with me again, he doesn’t remember, tells me I’m beautiful or asks me to marry him. He never remembers.

I toy with the idea of myself stepping onto the 338 crosstown bus and transforming into something ravishing, a bus princess, who emerges forty-five minutes later at the intersection of 45th and Duval, the intersection of this dream and real life, the same unremarkable self I was before 8:22 a.m. when the bus hissed to a stop in front of me at Manchaca and Lamar.

Why I am thinking about the bus in the parking lot on Congress Ave, I don’t know, because the parking lot is filled with people in sunglasses and dogs and the coffee is hot and my daughter is rocking forward and back in her metal chair and asking to go see the garden at the chic motel next door. Maybe it is just this sense that each one of these provocative moments, the bus, the parking lot, the girl rocking back and forth in her chair, are pressing from the inside of me, struggling to burst free to relieve the ache of this sense of passing, of missing, of losing these moments, all these moments.

spell of the silent

2007-07-01T20:51:00.000-06:00

Lately I am wondering about words, I am suspicious of them, the spaces they create and expand within the space that is filled with breath and light and the gentle shuddering of tall grass as you wait for the next breeze, or the clattering of cottonwood leaves that mimic the gurgling of a stream, as if that were some defense mechanism for a riparian tree, to sound like water, no tree here! it seems to say, only water…

In this photo my great-grandfather looks toward the site of Custer's 1868 massacre of the Cheyenne. He could have stood, though, facing any direction and faced any number of massacres. He could have stood at the threshold of his own home and witnessed the emotional slaughter of generations. But he stands, listening to the grass. There is some sound-plate in his head, some sound-sensitive paper inscribing the whisper of the grass upon his skull. You would have to hold so still to hear it, to really hear it. He was good at that, good at listening to grass and waiting for light. I am not sure he was good at listening otherwise, but maybe he was, maybe I read too much into his incapacities in measuring the shortcomings of his progeny, myself included.

Whence comes the deliberation and aplomb of out-of-doors people the world over, savage as well as civilized? The American Indian is recorded as grave, slow, measured in speech and manner. The frontier Texan figures in fiction and in factual descriptions with a “drawl” and as a man of few words. Of course, now, with a generation of urbanization, as much chatter falls from the composite mouth of Texas as from that of any other state., excluding those of disproportionate metropolitan populations. Outdoor living not only softens speech but slows its tempo, reflecting quieter nerves and mental reactions surer if somewhat slower on the trigger.

It is because Nature herself is deliberate. Ninety-nine percent of her performance is gradual. To take a single instance out of those hundreds ready at hand: what a large percentage of urbanized populations miss beginning the day under the spell of the silent, pervasive, leisurely preparations of the heavens to receive the sun!
--Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947)

hold the past lightly

2007-06-22T13:25:00.000-06:00

my grandmother, as I remember her

my friend, you write to me, do not let it hurt you...

but you know I am straining my eyes, striving mightily to see between the veils of time, and it hurts, my heart, my eyes, and the bleary way I wander reminds me of homeless people, and I wonder if they are similarly trapped between flickering images, faint eidetic ghosts of what once was.

You can do that with people, too, you know. I know you know. You can look into them and try to see who they have been and who they will be, the way I have peered into the faces of my children and imagined them, fully bloomed like flowers from seed, and I was always wrong, because we do not transform like flowers, no. We add layers and layers of oursleves inside and out, multiple superimpositions, and we touch each other from faraway parts of ourselves sometimes, corresponding layers that another standing next to us might not even see. And to see and see and see into one another, where the seeing never ends but opens up forever into more faded images hardly recognizable except for the vague sense of familiarity.

I have been looking for someone to divine in me an image I hold of myself, of a girl, maybe just five, singing Beethoven's Ninth, trying to bring finality to the piece, and knowing that Beethoven suffered that same affliction--the music just kept going on forever. Sometimes I have seen something vast and powerful or shockingly beautiful or terrifying in another, that has not yet been, or has long since gone.

Why are you looking at me like that?

I am looking for you. I am looking for you in you.

the shrine of the muses

2007-06-20T20:11:00.000-06:00

5th century scroll which illustrates the destruction of the Serapeum by Theophilus (source: Christopher Haas: Alexandria in late antiquity, Baltimore 1997)

it begins when you are four or five. you realize that your inheritance lies in the vaults of drawers and under beds and folded between crisp sheets, what those around you have forgotten or have ceased to value. you alone recognize the importance of the singular, transient object--the I Like Ike pin, the fading photograph, the scratchy record--it is time slipping between the fingers of God, and you want to hold it, catch the sand before it disperses. these last few days you sit at tables and wait as box after box is delivered to your solitary desk where you are only allowed a pencil and stamped paper. you are looking for something specific, something definitive about place and landscape, something that may have slipped through the hands of time; but instead of sifting through the sand for gold, you are distracted by each fragment, the day is cold, windy…January, visited Eileen, warm, sunny…

it is exactly like a dream--you are wandering the cool depths of the library at Alexandria, looking for the words of the saints, and though you never find what you are looking for, you keep finding more than you are looking for. it is hot and sunny, or it is raining like hell, and still each moment of waking, normal life you are thinking about the archive, thinking about what lies in those vaults that you may never know exists…every moment of the day limned in the longing for the clean, desolate table where you wait for another box.

if you wonder at humanity (and you often do) you wonder most about this--this trait of documentation, of cataloguing, of searching for what is gone. you are not perplexed by the violent, the desirous, or the boisterous or prayerful or banal--you are perplexed by the card in front of you, the identification of a box that contains nothing but the itemized expenses of a trip to a place of no consequence.

salvation

2007-06-12T10:16:00.000-06:00

this is where you were, slowly shifting into the dust, leaning into the horizontal waves of sand that pounded the boards day after day, an exterior slowly disintigrating. and then she came, and recognized something beneath that skin, something redeemable, something recoverable.

i remember the dust here, barefoot in the dust and the fear of rusty nails, but there was no fear of loneliness, because though flanked by siblings, in this memory i have no idea where the they are, and hear only the wind, not their voices, and see only this parched, eroding earth beneath these bare feet, not their faces.

it is all vague, like this photograph, perhaps precisely because that is what remained after all--time came like some gentle mother and removed those memories, those thorns, but here are these flaking images, heaped in piles, reeking of pain.

we have scattered like leaves, and only i will return again and again to this place, searching for something i buried long ago. i dream it is a cat, i have buried her half alive and forgotten her, but I can't stop searching this earth for the almost imperceptible mewing. no, it was something purloined from the TG&Y, a small toy buried so that no one would know. no, it was something far more valuable. see it there in the yard, a shoot eruptng from the dry soil, not a rusty nail, not a carcass, but a tree with stars shooting out of its boughs like fire.

she had seen it all, my mother had. she had that skill of seeing far into things, and she had seen the house fall down around us all. i have forgiven her for everything, and still i go on gouging the hardpan with my fingernails.

caprock storm

2007-06-09T21:29:00.000-06:00

© Gene Moore

I don’t know. But for years I thought that something like this was an explanation for a recurring childhood dream of mine, of a landscape image like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, no action or people, just a suspended dreamscape of a vermillion canyon wall under a cobalt sky, with white clouds hanging like cotton balls…In high school I decided I must have seen, when very young, a dramatic postcard or a National Geographic photograph that had made a strangely profound impression. Later, in college, I resolved on the more metaphysical explanation that the dream was a genetic memory and anticipated the rush of recognition in my wandering through the West.
-Dan Flores, Caprock Canyonlands

We dream of landscapes, and grieve and regret them. Sometimes a landscape becomes embodied in the form of a man, and you fall in love with him, possibly have his child, and spend years trying to dream that drum of prairie rain, that relentless thunderstorm out of your head and heart. This one had inscribed the horizon with a needle on the copperplate of his soul, and inked it and rolled you through the press with God knows how many pounds of pressure until every scratch was like your own memory, was engraved in your blood. Now I imagine him, that same landscape he etched in me reflected in his eyes, with cold precision--five hundred miles away for a few days, and I can breathe, and I know I will always miss him.

I don’t know if he saw the landscape in himself, if he looked toward his own cavernous depths with the same mix of longing and fear that I did, if he saw at the same time the beauty and tragedy--like the stories that littered the Caprock, rough-edged myths you could sharpen a blade on, only more heartbreaking. But there comes a time when you long to never be another Iphiginea, or Cassandra, or Andromache, or Clytemnestra--when you just want something that is simple, painless, perhaps, even (possibly) comedic.

But in the wetter years, the high drama of summer on the Llanos takes place in the afternoon skies…All along the front of the Caprock the canyons act like moisture tunnels, pipelines that funnel this warm, moist air into beachheads of dry air meteorologist call “drylines” atop the plain, spawning massive weather cells. Most are ordinary thunderstorms, but if the cell begins to rotate and sucks moisture up, the canyon wind tunnels at ever faster rates, at some level of critical mass the entire cell will go spinning off to the northeast, trailing tornado funnels behind it. -Dan Flores

what would I be looking for when I did not find...

2007-06-07T20:30:00.001-06:00

interpreting life through the tea leaves of fragments, it forms odd composites. Tonight I am thinking of Sudek and the war, furious at this war and that war and the wars we wage among ourselves, and the fear that war is as much who we are as love, and a part of me nods and knows that is true and I am not afraid but just resigned to the dark side of life that takes away what you most love when you least expect it, and you are looking for that thing the rest of your life, like some condemnation to hell, while others shop in malls or online and watch the fashionable TV shows, you reside in the black shadows of a pain so exquisite you would release yourself from it, but cannot because what you love might be out there, might be found.

I had to search. Far outside the city, toward dawn, in the fields bathed by the morning dew, I finally found the place. But my arm wasn’t there--only the poor peasant farmhouse was still standing in its place. They had brought me into it that day I was shot in the right arm. They could never put it together again…(josef sudek)

From Sudek's sketchy account of his crisis in 1926, we get a picture of a restless and troubled man accepting a casual invitation that leads him near the very spot where years before his hope for a normal life had been shattered. Leaving his friends, in mid-concert he wanders somnabulent until near dawn he comes to the exact place where, nearly ten years before, his life was forever changed. Unable to abandon hope of recovering his lost arm, he stays two months in that place, cut off from his friends and his world in Prague. Finally, his mourning complete, reconciled, but permanently estranged, he returns to Prague, where he immerses himself in his art. (charles sawyer)

41

2007-06-04T20:06:00.001-06:00

But maybe I have a solution--why others find sex in my work and I do not: It came from an artist who called on me recently…he said, in effect, that I had seen natural forms with such intensity, with such direct honesty, that a tremendous force, like sex, which enters into it, permeates all nature, could not but be revealed.
--Edward Weston

walking at forty-one you are aware of light. you wait to go out until the sun has hidden behind the edge of the hills so that the boughs of trees are illuminated in great swaths of gold, and the birds skip among the branches, light striking their wings like fire. You are aware that you are not the person you thought you would be, you are certain you will know less and less as the days go by about who you really are, because the questions come faster than the answers, each one tugging at the threads of the self you have painstakingly stitched over the years. It’s okay, because there is more outside to notice, you are less concerned with the unfamiliar face staring back at you in the mirror than with the light, and the dreams that might emerge shyly once you learn to sleep again.

At thirty-eight you had written: begin with this image: spirits laundering the shrouds of the soon-to-be dead (p. 46) unknown vol. I came here to name the things that disappear--the grasslands and coyote that populate the landscape inside my right eye--here you could sink the blade deep, the earth would gasp with the memory of rough hands that caressed the rump of an old roan, a horse you loved. In my left eye lives longing and desire, syllables cast upon the ground like sticks and gathered up again for kindling. The left eye would start a prairie fire and watch it burn, sacrificing everything it loves to the skin beneath those hands.

writing at forty-one, there is no more shouting, only whispering. It is time to learn to listen.

maybe

archaeology v: looking for Larry McMurtry

2007-06-03T14:58:00.001-06:00

mom at the lake, 1970

the air conditioner has gone out, and we sleep restlessly with the windows open in the hope of a breeze with crickets chirping all night outside. We go swimming and wear our swimsuits the rest of the day inside, still damp and smelling faintly of chlorine. Our shoulders and cheeks are burned. We take long, languid naps with the blinds drawn. I am filled with longing, with overwhelming nostalgia for those lazy summer days at the lakehouse at Possum Kingdom.

If there is a time in our childhood around which we form like pearls, these lakehouse days were mine. I was almost born there, because my mother refused to go to the hospital. Eventually she must have relented, but I think her longing to be near the elemental fecundity of the lake slipped through her veins and into me. How many times had I sat on the edge of the dock examining schools of minnows that shimmered beneath the surface. The smell of the boat house got under our skin, and we carried that smell back up the steep steps to the house, and into our dreams. In the narrow hall between the bedrooms, seated before a small bookshelf, I first realized that words were a code that had to be cracked, and I sat for hours as if before the Rosetta Stone, trying to find the patterns. I knew that if I were to be given one word, I might be able to learn all the secrets hidden there.

Years ago, after reading Horseman, Pass By, I embarked upon a mission to find Larry McMurtry. His book town, Archer City, was not far from Mineral Wells and the Crazy Water Hotel and the lake where I spent my childhood. We drove into Archer City crushing hundreds of the thousands of tarantulas which flooded the two-lane highway. We slept in a (also un-air conditioned) bedroom in a Bed and Breakfast, and wandered bookshop after abandoned bookshop. The townspeople at the Dairy Queen eyed us suspiciously, pegged us rightly perhaps as drawn http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifto their prodigal son, to whom it seemed they had a rather contentious relationship. In the end I found him at the desk when I went up to pay for my copy of The Black Prince. I struggled to recall who Iris Murdock had been married to, and he informed me it was John Bayley.* I didn’t have the guts to say any more about my mission, about wanting to connect to this eccentric Texas writer who expressed yearnings so similar to those I felt, who grew up saturated perhaps by the smell of the lake not far away, by the crazy water that coursed beneath the land. I just drove off with unrequited longing, down the quiet road where with the solitary street light on a cable swinging in the breeze, a cinematic moment from The Last Picture Show.

On the way back to Austin I passed through Possum. I tried in vain to find the lakehouse, but everything had changed. The lake of my imagination was gone. We stopped along the shore just to look at the vast expanse of water. I felt nothing. A sudden cold front blew in, and it began to rain, pelting us with hail. The temperature dropped from over a hundred down to the forties in a matter of minutes. I drove home, made it the four hours back to Austin, but I was utterly lost.

*thank you for keeping me on my toes...

falling

2007-05-29T20:59:00.000-06:00

HCP, the palisades, 1949

Maybe children wake to a love affair every other morning or so; if given any chance, they seem to like the sight and smell and feel of things so much. Falling for the world could be a thing that happens to them all the time. I hope so, I hope it is purely commonplace. I’m trying to imagine that it is, that our childhood love of things is perfectly justifiable. Think of light and how far it falls, to us. To fall we say, naming a fundamental way of going into the world—falling.
-William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky

Maybe the exact lack of verticality makes us flatlanders more susceptible, but I fall, every day. Lately dreaming of falling, on days I forget to fall, days where I am fundamentally oriented toward the everyday world. But I am hardwired, I think, to fall.

I think Sudek was falling, all the time, falling in love with light, and perpetually seeking that moment when light fell magically between the cracks and illuminated the forgotten spaces of the ordinary, rendering them extraordinary, if only for a moment. Tonight that happened. A large palm-like fern with sturdy fronds bursting forth from its center (so much rain--the streets become rivers, we paddle between dreams) had attracted my attention. I got the camera, focused with the light fading in the west, just as a lizard darted from the fronds, startled by my interest.

By day I had forgotten him, but at night he haunted my dreams, he waited. I remember the girl, and her approach, at twenty-one, with no fear, declaring, I am dreaming you. But at forty-one you wait for what you long for, though it dreams other dreams halfway around the world, in some Nordic light, you wait.

archaeology iv: cryptography

2007-05-28T03:04:00.001-06:00

My job was to walk and look. We were looking for remnants of whatever had once been alive in this desert, reduced to a polished trace of what it had been: an edge of an old mud wall, flakes of bones that had risen to the air after three or four thousand years and made a shining scatter on the surface of the sand like snow.
--Susan Brind Morrow, The Names of Things

I had mentioned the burdens. And so I arrived to claim mine from the most baffling of American traditions, the storage unit--a sea of anonymous cubes in which god-only-knows what mysterious items are secreted away into blind oblivion that we either have no room for, or are ashamed to keep in our homes, or are simply the by-products of the thing disease. It would be an interesting investigation to one day order them all to be opened, and the contents catalogued, and an entire exhibit opened for the world to see.

The contents of mine were as follows (* indicates these were childhood belongings):

one doll house*
one metal rickshaw*
one box of several old lamps
one wicker basket of stuffed animals*
a trunk-sized Rubbermade tub of ancient recordings (including Glenn Miller, Uncle Remus, and and Aunt Pat's RCA record-your-own entitled Christmas 1947 and various piano sonatas)
one leather and cherrywood coffee table with brass feet
one pie safe, green, without doors, painted over with white acrylic paint
several plastic bags of stuffed animals
one child-sized teepee
two end tables (one pillar shaped one where my grandmother hid her erotic novels)
Christmas decorations
one musty suitcase
one large chair with a high back and blue floral upholstery
a 1939 Royal typewriter

The typewriter was the first thing I saw. It bears the label “Kemper Military School--Booneville Missouri” and is blood red metal in a musty black case. The keys are still luminous, like small lacquered stones. It was, of course, my grandfather’s, and it evokes memories of his furious typing away the hours in his room on Lipscomb street. He had an obsession with writing implements, and I remember the first electric typewriter he bought for my sister, and the lengthy hours of explanation for its use. Every Christmas he would buy her a lovely set of Cross pen and pencil. He wanted writing to be hers, the way it was his.

What was he typing? My grandmother did not clean out his room for many years after he died, and so I slept there when visiting, so I could look through everything. His pipe collection, his reams of paper in the closet and drawers and stuffed under the bed. They were mainly legal briefs. He might have been tinged with a slight case of graphomania, I do not know, but he seemed to always be tapping away as if life depended on it.

As I sit here awake at 3AM, I somehow know the familiar comfort of just laying down word after word, the letters falling in like little pebbles from your hand in some possibly vain hope of forming something beyond a mere scattering of syllables. Or maybe for the sole reason of the tapping on the keys, the looking for some polished trace of what has been, or what might or never be.

where drought is the epic*

2007-05-25T15:40:00.000-06:00

H.C. Pipkin, Little Red River, 1947
*from Adrienne Rich, The Desert as Garden of Paradise

By 1970 the town was nothing more than a small oasis in a sea of dust and corn. The old Victorian courthouse in the center of town with its clock tower and pitched roof had already burned to the ground twice after being struck by lightning. It had been replaced in the '50s with an industrial-looking concrete structure with bare slab walls whose sole decoration was a series of large black and white photographs of the Dustbowl--entire farms being consumed by a cloud of thick sand as high as a thunderhead. She would often stand for hours in the dimly-lit halls of the courthouse--it had no windows--staring in wonder at the images behind the glass. The new courthouse stood in the shadow of the tall grain elevators blocks away on the edge of town, and was flanked on all sides by the drugstore, the Post Office, and the T.G. and Y. The bank and grocery store were less than a block away. By fall of 1970, the population was just reaching two thousand.

The site for the town had been surveyed in 1848 by Clovis Handstock, a twenty-one year old Virginia native who, to his credit, sensed an unusual vibration when he stood alone on the prairie near Old Salt Creek. As he slept at night beneath an intricate web of stars, his dreams tended toward the mythological--he dreamed history in reverse, a future unraveled before his eyes like a sweater. He dreamed of the Dustbowl and a Kiowa war chief and a solitary girl dreaming of him, somewhere far off, in a house where she waited her whole life for a man with wings.

Soon afterwards the first settlers began to arrive, mostly immigrants of German descent with a strong reverence for God and nature, who did not anticipate the capricious nature of the wind, nor had they yet encountered the particularly deadly breed of tornado indigenous to the Panhandle. For generations to come they would battle dust and wind, and they would drink from wells dug deep down into the heart of the limestone channel where prehistoric water had coursed beneath the surface of the prairie for millenia. It would be many generations before they realized that the source they plundered to irrigate their crops and feed their livestock and wash their automobiles and flush their toilets, was an irreplaceable vein, rare and pure, and possessing of strange properties. By 1970, travelers driving north or south on the new highways which cut across the flat earth like surgical incisions, could not but admire the tenacious and resourceful farmers whose arcs of shimmering water spouted from monolithic, mobile sprinklers beneath the unforgiving midday sun.
(from The Penetrable Air)

water

“it is no place of seed, or of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates”
-Numbers 20:5

you would come to understand that
though you stood at the river for a long time
you could not drink.
there was a language of such vessels
devised in vain hope to stave off thirst:
cistern, well, jar, broken cup
each syllable falling hollow on the throat
of a dying bird
others would simply adapt to lack--wretched species
wanting after every drop
but never hiding from the wind, or dreaming of rivers
but of cottonwood and white seed that covered the blanket of a sleeping child,
high in the mountains…

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
(-T.S.Eliot “The Wasteland”)

…only
thirst.

beasts of burden

2007-05-22T06:02:00.001-06:00

Thus the life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History, its division. History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it--and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, what destroys it for the sake of my own history (impossible for me to believe in “witnesses”; impossible, at least, to be one.
--Barthes, Camera Lucida

I choose this photograph for its burdens. My mother is the tallest child, flanked by her cousins. But what interests me here is not the human life, but the furniture. I grew up with the small marble table behind her, and I vividly recall the way the rough edge of the metal bites into your hands when you try to pick it up. I recognize every piece of furniture in that room, by a leg, or a surface--like distant relatives. These are the things we carry, our burdens of the past, what we are afraid to let go of. I know it’s not about the value of the furniture, but about some other ineffable quality. And it is a disease. My mother has two households of furniture in storage for she suffers from this disease, the collector, the archaeologist, the unwitting beast of burden of the past.

When I moved a few days ago, I sorely felt the weight of all these artifacts, yet could not let go. Why? Perhaps this is why we have museums, because we would rather let go of nothing, but eventually we must, so we select what will be remembered and maintained in climate and humidity-controlled environments, and we create hypermediated access to the past through its artifacts. A museum is a just big storage room of the past. Every new home I create feels like a museum to me, whose collection serves to remind me that I will never be free.

Lineage reveals an identity stronger, more interesting than legal status--more reassuring as well, for the thought of origins soothes us, whereas that of the future disturbs us, agonizes us…but this discovery disappoints us because even while it asserts a permanence…it bares the mysterious difference of beings issuing from one another and the same family…
(Camera Lucida)

suspended

2007-05-17T18:59:00.000-06:00

Perpetual Motion
New York Public Library Digital Collection

New York, 1987
It was November and cold when they left the city. The police had shot someone on Washington Avenue, point blank from the car window of the patrol car, and the body had lain in the street for hours covered by a coat. Whose coat? Someone had come with a coat and laid it over the victim, and she did not know who he was, or how old, or why. There was no ambulance, no siren, and children skipped rope and kicked balls across the street near the park where the body lay, mutely witnessing everything, mutely witnessing nothing. Or had she dreamed this? Staring out the back window of the car watching the city shrink, she no longer knew what was real and what was imagined. There was the baby, and her needs were distinct and direct and the rest of the world was like that granite skyline, disappearing below the horizon. She had no idea what existed beyond the perimeter of the life she had abandoned, of what her exodus promised or threatened. She was a particle suspended in time, displaced even from her self.

Prague, 1972
In the mornings there was coffee, thick and dark, and the rousing light, erasing the charcoal of the night, the rhythmic scratch of the needle on the turntable, the vibrato of the cello restoring the world to order. He lit a fire and settled into the morning, allowing the space of the room to shift around him like a comfortable coat. And then he watched, watched the hushed particles of light suspended in the cold morning air, rising in concert with the melody, disappearing in shadow, a balletic virtuosity of dust. Time eddied and collected and dissipated, and the coffee grew cold, and loneliness settled into the empty spaces vacated by the music when it faded and the needle once again lapped at the edges of the record, and this could not be repeated until the next morning. He had tried. The re-creation of the morning was a product of the hours, a whimsy of time. Throughout the rest of the day the loneliness would settle in his bones, and he would pass the hours arranging objects and printing negatives, until the cork could be popped to deliver him again to the long, abject oblivion preceding the blessed ritual of morning.

blood and water

2007-05-15T17:32:00.000-06:00

the archaeologist

The last buffalo killed in Jack County was a tame buffalo of Dr. Cornelius, killed in 1875 by Alf and Mary Casey through mistake, out hunting in the Lost Valley. Of course they very much regretted the killing. (Ninety-four Years in Jack County)

Humans have resided in the canyon for approximately 12,000 years. Early settlers were nomadic tribes that hunted mammoth, giant bison, and other large game animals. Later, Apache Indians lived in the canyon, but were soon replaced by Comanche and Kiowa tribes who resided in the area until 1874. At that time, Col. Ranald Mackenzie was sent into the area to transport the Native Americans to Oklahoma. Col. Mackenzie and the 4th Cavalry were able to capture over 1,400 horses belonging to the tribe. After keeping some of the best horses for themselves, the remainder were taken to nearby Tule Canyon and destroyed. Cut off from their only means of transportation, the Native Americans soon surrendered.

One of the odd cominglings of blood and geography in my family--the paths we etch into the landscape with our desires, the trails of tears. I spent many childhood summers in the canyon, and its cool recesses lurk wolf-like along the perimeter of my imagination on hot summer nights. Before the roads were paved and the state park mitigated the wildness to the greatest extent to promote tourism, we wound down hairpin turns over seasonal creeks that had washed many away to their deaths during flash floods. We passed nights in an old German stone house, solid in the core, with a large hearth, louvered windows and French doors that opened onto a screened porch that completely enclosed the stone core, as wide, or wider, on each side than the diameter of the interior. This is where we slept, or tried to sleep, through the sweltering nights amid the deafening drone of crickets and the haunting whistle of trains and the mournful calls of owls. Perspiration gathered on our necks and behind our knees, and we dreamed fitful dreams of water snakes and wild indians.

My great grandfather, as amateur archaeologist, had haunted this landscape long before this, knapping flint and excavating artifacts for the Museum. But long before even that, the Kiowa and Comanche had roamed the fertile riparian paths. Satanta was among them, a great warrior for whom my grandmother's paternal great-grandparents had delivered his infant son at their mercantile outside Fredricksburgh. Later this child would mature into a young man, and her maternal great-grandfather in Jack County would sentence him to be hanged.

Theodore Specht, Fredericksburg pioneer, was born in the province of Braunschweig, Germany, on April 17, 1810. He became captain of a sailing ship in Germany, and on his last voyage his ship was destroyed and he was believed drowned. Although Specht was eventually rescued, the accident cost him his hearing and his fiancée, who, believing he was dead, married another man. Specht eventually married Maria Berger in Germany and immigrated with her to Fredericksburg, Texas, in 1846. Their first child, Christine, was born on March 14, 1846, but died of exposure in a spring storm when she was only a few days old despite being held by her mother in a feather bed. Specht and his wife had seven other children who lived to adulthood. In his home Specht opened a store that became popular with the local Indians, who traded honey, bear fat, and meat with the colonists. The Comanche chief Santa Anna* was a friend of Specht's; one winter night he rode up with one of his wives and asked for a room with a fireplace for her. She bore him a son that night, and when he returned the next morning he asked Mrs. Specht to follow him to the creek, where he broke the ice and dipped the baby in the water. He then patted a handful of water on Maria's breast, proclaimed her the mother-in-God of his son, and gave her an engraved silver disk in payment for the lodgings. Specht became the first postmaster of Fredericksburg on December 7, 1848; he operated the post office in his store and was the local agent for the Neu Braunfelser Zeitung beginning in 1852. Through the Department of Agriculture he brought into Gillespie County a variety of wheat and rye that benefited local farmers. He also collected local insects, lizards, and snakes, preserved them in alcohol and shipped them to naturalists in New York; he sent the money he received from them to his mother in Germany. Specht died on June 4, 1862, and was buried in Fredericksburg.

*This is excerpted from the Handbook of Texas online. Later research would show that this story is only partially true. The Indian chief was the Kiowa "Satanta," not Santa Anna, and Theodor Zeisig Specht entered the port at Galveston on the ship, The Louise, with eight children, the youngest being two at the time. Maria Bergert was a Catholic from Braunschweig, as verified through the meticulous German Catholic christening records. Theodor was actually from Poland, and very probably Jewish (as evidenced from various phrases and cultural habits my grandmother recalls)--he was not present at any of the christening ceremonies of his children. The shipwreck is completely unverifiable.

The record of the Texas penitentiary in regard to these two distinguished prisoners is as follows:
Name—Satanta, Kiowa Chief, Registered No. 2107, Age unknown.
Nativity—Indian Country. Time Convicted—July term, 1871.
Offense—Murder. Occupation—None. Term of Sentence—Life.
Education—None. Use tobacco—Yes. Height—Five feet nine and one half inches. Complexion—Copper. Color Eyes—Black. Color of Hair—Black. Married—Yes. Residence—Indian territory. Money—None. Received—Novembe 2, 1871. Expiration—Life.
(from Ida Lasiter Huckaby, Ninety-four Years in Jack County)

archaeology iii: fragments disembodied

2007-05-14T07:55:00.000-06:00

New York, 1985
She dreamed about time. There were places she would see when walking down a deserted downtown street, where time lifted her skirt and revealed something beneath the layers of the years. She could not explain this, how time existed in many layers at once, that when she met someone she could not tell whether she was seeing him in the present, the past, or the future. Some people she could only understand as "mythological" and others as existential imperatives. Such was her relationship to those who must be saved. They existed as eternal responsibilities, as opportunities for redemption.

He made her eggs the next morning, and they ate them wrapped in blankets on the cold wood floors of his Ft. Green apartment. He played Dizzie Gillespie on the turntable, which was vintage and scratchy, but sounded real, grabbable.

This was the state of Dewey's soul when he encountered Lizzie that day by the pond. While he was struck by the almost shell-like quality of the pain she carried around her body like a glaze, he was likewise aware of his contrary instincts to both protect and devour her. There was a variable at work here which did not exist in his other observations -- it was called desire, and he did not know the symbol he would use to represent it in any equation.

...objects are alive, they are witnesses…if you possessed the gift of touch then you might know that every single moment of time is preserved forever in the molecules of a room, or a chair, or a stone. If you possessed the gift of touch, then maybe you would become obsessed with cataloguing the stories that stretch out like long highways toward unknown places, and if you followed them, how would you ever find your way back home?
-from the journals of Grace Lightman

The human conscience balances on a fulcrum, leaning uncertainly into the past and the present, and that point, that finite but incomprehensibly elusive point of the present (which is its only true contact with anything solid) falls away beneath the mind and disappears from awareness. And yet, the physical laws governing a fulcrum exist within the context of the human consciousness, and should the mind become unhinged from this context, then the world comes unhinged from its laws.

When she returned from her wanderings, she seemed to possess a type of calm power. The hotel raised itself from the ground, its straight boards and smooth stones leveraged into place by some alchemy of her pain.

Are any events completely unrelated? How do things come together, at what points do they hinge, maybe even in the only moment they ever connect? How does CW Post relate to a girl walking alone along the Brooklyn streets at dawn, or a reclusive philosopher, obsessed with Kafka?

Math (chaos, physics, even economics—the connection between John Maynard Keynes and Einstein's relativity theory). AW Moore's article in the London Review of Books, "Millenium Problems" (July 22, 2004).

October 21, 1933
October 26, 1854
October 11, 1878

rain

2007-05-08T16:20:00.001-06:00

Shannon and Txai in Wimberley
Photo by Christopher Casselli, 1996

Today I am haunted by a memory of the wide deck of a roughly hewn shack on a rise over the meadow that sloped down to a perennial creek. A younger woman than I holds the youngest one against her as the hammock rocks in a lazy breeze beneath a young acacia tree, while bees and the occasional hummingbird hover around the sweet acacia flowers. Soon, she thinks, the meadow will have to be mowed, at least the paths, so that they can wander down to the creek through the tall grasses without fear of snakes. The sunflowers had suddenly bolted up at least a foot toward the sun, and the verbena and skullcap peeked, pink and purple, among the sea of yellow. But the flowers were not so much of concern.

But neither did the hummingbirds or bees concern her, nor the sweet aroma of the acacia which seemed to stitch the fabric of the scene together, the child, the shade of the tree, the hammock, the deck, the roughly hewn house. How long had they been there? It was a Saturday, so possibly for many hours, as the sun carved its arc across the pale summer sky. She was thinking of rain.

Just today we drove our usual circuitous path through downtown, the youngest one and I (not the one from the hammock, he is long-limbed and sullen now; he may never be held and rocked again the way he was that summer day, at least not by me), and she said, Look at those beautiful clouds! And I remembered. I remembered the day the clouds had boiled up over the edge of the ten acres like a bubbling vat of porridge. It had been a day of dragging flat limestone rocks over the land to build a path down to the creek, a day of hauling earth and cutting cedar poles. The children’s arms were scratched and bleeding, but they were happy. We were proud of what we had accomplished. And later as we swung there above the deck (the youngest one and I), the breeze picked up, and I watched the massive cumulous clouds roil and gain height, each voluminous pitch distinctly its own, completely unique. I don’t recall now how long we had gone without rain. Each morning that I switched on the well pump I feared there would be no water--other counties had already gone dry. But we had been lucky, or at least thrifty, a woman alone with two young kids.

The clouds mounted and the wind rose, and the hummingbirds surfed the sudden gusts, and finally the first stars began to appear, before they were swallowed by the storm. It never rained. There was the great gathering, the tremendous hope, the disappointment afterwards, but life went on. And now? Now we make our way through the requirements of the day, we do what needs to be done, but somewhere inside we know that there is nothing more important that will ever happen to us than what happened on that lazy Saturday, holding the youngest one against my chest, swinging lazily in the hammock beneath the acacia, watching the clouds, waiting for rain.

And then this...

Dearest Shannon,

I have a few vivid memories of that place and how lovely it was. It represented another moment in time that invoked a sense of clarity for me that I needed to be out in the country, out of the city and immersed as much as possible in nature.

Green. I seem to be swimming in green punctuated with dabs of
vivid reds, blues, yellows and stray purples. It made me think of all
the people surrounded by concrete and the possible effects from lack
of color radiation.

Twice a day I go down to the lake shore and observe the creeping rise in water. The desolation of the lake bed being overwhelmed and transformed. Large patches of Bluebonnets slowly drowning. The carp are swarming and making a splashing racket in their newly created supply of grass and the turtles seem to be constantly on the move. I regularly check the river flow data and another large slug of water should arrive in the lake later today and tomorrow. Another two to three feet of rise and the boat ramp will finally be back in business.

Love, Buck

one way street

2007-05-07T19:29:00.000-06:00

hugh ferris, 1929

This street is named
Asja Lacis Street
after her who
as an engineer
cut it through the author
--Walter Benjamin, One Way Street

Much of what I understand about cities was gleaned from wandering Manhattan island at nineteen without a map, without even the understanding that what I wandered was, in fact, an island positioned between another island and the edge of the larger continent. I was a recent transplant from a medium-sized Texas town in the Panhandle, a town delineated only from the swath of flatlands that reached out interminably in every direction, or so it seemed, by the precise incisions of highways. The streets of this town were scored off in a clean, protestant-minded grid, oriented by the cardinal directions. The sun rose somewhere beyond fourth street, and set as the streets grew higher in number, which was at the time I lived there, no higher than eighty-second street.

Wandering Manhattan, especially downtown below the Village where I attended college, it was not uncommon to head off in one direction and at some point find that you were completely turned around. Some major thoroughfares, such as Broadway, cut obliquely across other avenues, and were not to be trusted. Often one might encounter a street that opened off another, more trafficked one, which seemed tucked away, secretly historic, forgotten by time. I marked these streets in my memory, but was often unable to find them again, and later was uncertain if they existed only in my dreams. Over time I studied the maps, memorized landmarks, and continued to wander. As much as I internalized the cartographic subtleties over the course of my three years living there (the latter two years in Brooklyn), occasionally I still lost my way, or happened across some secreted passage I might never again be able to locate.

What concerns me here is the unresolved (irresolvable?) dialectic between the city of the wanderer, the flâneur (to use Walter Benjamin’s term), and the city of the planner, and the way in which the street itself, a path of (multiple, often conflicting) desires, offers itself as a site for inquiry. The term desire path “derives from a term used in town planning --a desire path being the route that people choose to take, the path worn across a green by use that bears no correlation to the concrete one provided. These unpredictable routes make a hidden pattern marking human lives on the landscape.” One of the more nuanced interpretations of this term is that “place does not exist until it is imagined and named and that all of the copses, knolls and paths that have been walked and named are the markpoints of human experience and the markstones of lives lived.” Moreover I am concerned with how such paths engage our notions of time, either in the provocative call for the wanderer to hesitate and linger, or the almost mandatory urging toward progress, and to make the most efficient slice through space, to be on time.

Framing the issue of street and city planning in terms of desire already gives some indication of what is at stake. On the one hand we have the masses, and their respective stirrings and yearnings which, if not adequately governed (by the “organizing principle of the axis” ), can lead to mayhem and revolution. Such was the rationale, in large part, of the sweeping renovations of Paris by Perrymonde c. 1840 and later Haussmann in 1859. The Texas city of my youth likewise was oriented with respect to prevailing fears of disorder: first and foremost the weather, situated unfortunately as it is on the infamous Tornado Alley, and second, human desires, which, like tornadoes, were to be curbed, if not utterly avoided at all cost.

This is more of a meandering than a program for seeking resolution of these conflicts. There is no refuting that in writing this I wear down my own path of desire, and that these ideas are imagined and named as I pass the markstones and markpoints which are my own experience.

desert

2007-05-03T19:37:00.000-06:00

Palo Duro, 1947

I argue that the quest for the general laws of love and emotion frame, in rational terms, the desire to write.
--Christie McDonald, The Proustian Fabric: Associations of Memory

How do we seize the past? How do we seize the foreign past? We read, we learn, we ask, we remember, we humble; and then a casual detail shifts everything…The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continuous use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity; scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.
--Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

The collector of the past is often satisfied with a limited inheritance of discrete, sublime moments. I distinguished this in the girl. She was finely attuned to such moments, and waited with patient apprehension for them, as if she were watching for the fleeting glimpses of tiny birds, a flash of wing, a sudden rustling of high branches. This is a trait I have noticed in many people who grew up in and around the Texas Panhandle, where the endless wash of prairie grass might suddenly, but almost imperceptibly rupture, the earth tearing away into a reddish gash of canyon. These topographical incisions vibrate with life--hawks and coyotes, Indian grass and meadowlarks and dove, the tracks of mule deer disappearing somewhere below in a glistening sliver of water.

She was accustomed to driving mile by anonymous flat mile along the berm of the railroad, itself just an unnatural rise of earth which over time had collected sage and yucca, and the seeds of strange flowers native to other lands dispersed by migratory birds stopping along the snow break. It was just enough beauty to catch in your throat if you were sensitive to it, nothing more, but it sustained, like the most pitiful morsel of bread doled out to the poor.

Sometimes I wonder if she had so disciplined her aesthetics as too be finally unresponsive to anything more than the de minimus, if this was why she loved, cautiously and apprehensively, the old professor, because he was a handful of unremarkable seeds dashed at her feet amidst the deafening roar of all that was worthy of marvel in the city, if the landscape of her imagination perceived all the magnificence before it, necessarily, as a desert, a wilderness against which he bloomed hesitantly, in the very manner she beheld to be unutterably beautiful.

the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth...

2007-05-02T08:10:00.001-06:00

Lens
Here the object is a book—-a copy of The Golden Bough that I took from my Great Aunt's house after her death. She was in my mind as I lingered outside the gated interior of Gramercy Park, looking up at the rowhouse windows to catch a glimpse of her ghostly form, at eighteen, bursting with life and creativity. We rode together, alone, in the back of a limousine on the way to the cemetery that cold November day my grandfather was buried. The trees were bare and the wind hollow but bitter. I had flown in from New York, had to choke back a backlash of tears that came hard on the tail of hysterical laughter that emerged rawly and inappropriately during the eulogy when the minister spoke of my grandfather as a family man, exacting in his ethics, a man of God first and foremost. My aunt did not seem outwardly grieved by the loss of her brother. We spoke of New York, and my writing. She asked, Why do you want to write?

It was then that she told me about Thomas Wolfe, and how when she had read those lines in Look Homeward, Angel, that she knew that all she had ever wanted to say had been said, more potently and lyrically than she could ever say it:

...she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first time, upon the inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth. O lost.

I tried to cultivate a correspondence with her. She was an accomplished playwright and composer at eighteen, who studied at Columbia University before returning home in the aftermath of a (then and even now) radical surgery—a complete hysterectomy due to cancer. I found this letter she wrote to her father, my Great Granfdather on the stationary of the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital tucked in the pages of The Golden Bough. Only now I wonder, why did she have this letter? Did she purloin it after her father's death?

all this unrest

2007-05-02T07:57:00.000-06:00

salt and light

2007-04-29T14:58:00.001-06:00

H.C.Pipkin, Burning Bush 1947

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.
-- Matthew 5:13

Is it right to raise one’s voice when other’s are being silenced? Yes…Another way of formulating the question is, Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and thereby gain a slower death…And again the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions is good and which is bad is that in a given situation, we can make only one decision…
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I viewed my grandfather from a remote corner of my soul. I don’t know at what point I recognized myself in him, but he never, as far as I know, recognized himself in me. I was the dark, saturnine child in a family of golden children, and perhaps my brother and sister served up the hope of our being a golden family. But I was evidence of the strange currents that coursed through our veins, always watching, missing nothing, remembering everything.

One of the facts about my grandfather that had always intrigued me was that at one point in his life he almost became a man of God, a preacher in the Baptist Church. This strikes me for several reasons, not least among which was that he never once, in my lifetime, attended church. My grandmother said that as a young man he preached powerfully on the Sermon on the Mount. But there was another young man within the church who also had his sights set on becoming The Man of God in the Baptist church, and the rivalry between them grew so bitter that my grandfather walked away one day and never again set foot in that edifice where he had experienced those deep yearnings.

Where did that all go? How can a man be consumed with passion for what is holy and then turn his back on that forever over an earthly quarrel? I know when I turned my back and why. It is a “humorous” family story that my mother used to tell to amuse her friends. By the time I was ten, we had become Episcopalians. I had decided that I wanted to give my life to the church, to the sick and the suffering and the poor. For Christmas, the only thing in the world I wanted was a communion set so I could begin administering to my flock as soon as possible. My mother said nothing, but she arranged an appointment with our priest. I don’t remember much of what was said in that meeting, but I remember the bitter heartbreak. It had been made clear to me during that meeting that God neither wanted nor needed me. I am still trying to forgive Him for it. But I patiently hold that fervent sense of Presence, of almost touching, and apprehend it all around, in cottonwood seed drifting down, in a dragonfly alighting on the water, in the reflections of light in the leaves of trees. I do this as if the world depends on it.

Salt prints were the earliest positive prints and were invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1840, as a direct development from his earlier photogenic drawing process. A salt print was made by soaking a sheet of paper in salt solution and then coating one side with silver nitrate. This produced light sensitive silver chloride in the paper. After drying, the paper was put directly beneath a negative, under a sheet of glass, and exposed to sunlight for up to two hours. Salt prints were made until about 1860 having been gradually replaced by the albumen print which gave a clearer image although the process was sometimes revised later.