Age

"Ah Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in
Are you aware the shape I'm in
My hands they shake my head it spins
Ah Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in

Dumbed down and numbed by time and age

Your dreams to catch the world, the cage

The highway sets the traveler's stage

All exits look the same."

from I And Love And You

Avett Brother lyrics

watching hockey, reading poetry, listening to youtube videos.

"I used to like being young, and I still do,

Because I think I still am. There are physical

Objections to that thought"

from A Private Singularity

by John Koethe

"Midway this way of life we're bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

Ay me! How hard to speak of it that rude

And rough and stubborn forest! The mere breath

Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;

Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey

The tale, I'll write what else I found therewith."

Dark wood - Maundy Thursday Night

Dante The Inferno Canto I Lines 1-9 

Dorothy Sayers Translation

"Which of the horses

we passed yesterday whinnied

all night in my dreams?

I want that one."

from Stories from Kansas

by William Stafford

"Animals that knew the way to Heaven

wagged at the back doors of every house

when I was young, and horses told fences

the story of Black Beauty, and smelled of the good manger."

from When I Was Young

by William Stafford

     

"She never tired of the mornings and the evenings here,

the soft lights, the changing colours of sunlight and cloud

upon the hills, the stirring of wind in the grass. Out

here there was no escaping the sky or the plains, and

Evie, knew that until she came west she had never 

really known distance."

from Conagher

by Louis L'amour

"The world had passed something in space

and was alone again. Sunset came on.

People lay down, and the birds forgot

as they sleepily clucked and slept, close

on boughs, as well hidden as could be

in the air again clear, sharp, and cold."

from Space Country

by William Stafford

" I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? "

from M Train

by Patti Smith

Friday before we left to visit our friend's farm by Drumheller Alberta I finished Patti Smith's M Train, a wonderfully atmospheric and evocative memoir. It was illustrated with Smith's stark b&w photos of objects, Hesse's typewriter, Frida Kahlo's crutches, cafes she visited etc.,which reminded me of the photos in the works of W.G. Sebald, especially in The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz (which Smith mentions ).  Indeed Smith's work shares many of the same features as Sebald's, part memoir, part history, part dreamscape, part pilgrimage, haunting the reader with a life of small unimportant moments and soul shattering events. All the things that make up a life. The photographs also reminded me of Jonathan Carroll's story, A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings in which the main character attempts to deal with his upcoming blindness through photography. So I decided to try my hand at capturing some moments of our trip in b&w photos.

" Until he died, blind or not, he would share the feelings and adventures of the part of him that was universal and curious. The part that was travelling, experiencing, knowing the lives of things. Things like wheels, like swings. One more bustling soul out there looking for what to do next."

from A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings

by Jonathan Carroll