Jaime Royal "Robbie" Robertson[1] OC (July 5, 1943 – August 9, 2023) Sixto Diaz Rodriguez (July 10, 1942 – August 8, 2023) I felt these.

Last night in bed while listening to their music I read these words. RIP fellows.

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

I'm a martyr to a motion not my own:

what's freedom for? To know eternity.

from I Knew a Woman

Theodore Roethke

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/10/robbie-robertson-obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/10/rodriguez-obituary

 

Ivan Kenneth Eyre (15 April 1935 – 5 November 2022)

  I finished school and moved to Calgary to join Helen in the summer of 1988. We were both at the U of C that summer just in time to see Personal Mythologies/Images of the Milieu a solo show by the Canadian artist Ivan Eyre at The Nickle Gallery. One day a week admission was free (we had little money) and I was there every lunch hour. Later the library I worked in in Calgary  held Eyre's large painting Floodwood, a strange merger of still life and landscape typical of the artist. Another library and I shared my office with a print of his landscape Red Hill. Since my first viewing of his work Eyre has not just shared my personal space through his works but also my imaginative space through his oft repeated images of wheeled horse, giants shapes in the sky and hornblowers. I have collected show catalogues, books and a few works. He has influenced how I view the cityscapes and the landscapes of the prairies in which I have spent most of my life. As Helen once said after seeing his cityscapes one learns to look up at the tops of the tall buildings to catch a glimpse of the Eyre hornblowers silhouetted against the prairie sky.

Obituary

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/winnipeg-mb/ivan-eyre-11003438

Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Eyre

A lovely youtube clip of Eyre in his studio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4URm0196QjM

When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.

Ivan Eyre

Thank you Ivan.

Singer-Songwriter Nanci Griffith (1953–2021)

 

A good interview with Nanci

https://acousticguitar.com/remembering-singer-songwriter-nanci-griffith-1953-2021/

Gardners World (Nigel) and some beautiful trail camera photos. (Photo Shaun and Whateley at the cabin)

"I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief." 

Wendell Berry

Helen and I love to watch Monty Don on Gardeners' World. One of the highlights are the segments from his garden Long Meadow, which often feature his dogs Nigel, Nellie, and a new dog Pattie, a Yorkshire terrier. We were quite sad to learn that Nigel had died, a lost made more poignant with the loss of our dog Shaun in February.

"Nigel has died.

He was 12 and had a good life and his end was quick and painless and came after a very happy day when he walked and ate and played - gently - seemingly without a care. But it was a great shock and sadness.

He is now buried in the garden with many of his beloved tennis balls to accompany him on his journey."

https://www.montydon.com/tips-and-advice/may-2020

With all that is going on it seems that we will not be staying at the cabin for an extended period this summer. While this allows us to catch up on work here, we will miss the chance to watch the animals that surround the cabin, so I am providing a link to what I think is some of the best trail camera footage I have ever seen. It is also nice that most of the animals are species found around our cabin.

https://www.cbc.ca/life/hellospring/springscenes/adorable-animals-discover-spy-camera-in-quebec-wilderness-it-s-awesome-1.5566328

A trail camera photo of a moose on the lane to our cabin.

First draft/ The Poems Themselves

When the poet dies
it isn't like the end of coal
or the domestic auto industry.
The assembly lines don't pause
lake freighters aren't stilled at their docks
few jobs are lost, mortgages defaulted.

If they were old
maybe the poems ended years ago,
and their publisher has been compiling
their old essays for decades.

And after some lamentations, public
private, their world will still
save for the whispering, 
rustling of the poems themselves
as someone in need of something
alights among them
and learns of the smell of an old barn
in 1956 or the look on the faces of deer.

Guy

URSULA K. LE GUIN Passes Monday January 22, 2018 (Age 88)

"What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do each morning. waking?"

from The Lathe of Heaven

Yesterday my wife mentioned that Ursula K.Le Guin had passed away, we read and enjoyed her science fiction and many years ago took the opportunity to attend a talk she gave in Calgary. She was a thoughtful and compassionate voice within the libertarian sea infesting much of science fiction. I hope to post a discussion of my favourite of her novels, The Lathe of Heaven on my science fiction site, I will post a link when it is completed a later this week.

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.ca/2018/02/what-will-creature-made-all-of-seadrift.html

Helen supplied to this link to a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Le Guin by John Freeman which appeared on The Literary Hub.

My Last Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin
// Literary Hub

"These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveller must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

from The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Road Trip Krydor to Hafford Part 1

“You may say that I am just another outdated old man 

complaining about progress and the changes of time. 

But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, 

and am prepared to submit to correction by anybody who cares 

about a community, who can show me how the world is 

improved by that community's dying.” 

from Jayber Crow

by Wendell Berry

Last year we went through the town of Krydor, we spent 

most of our time at the church, a link to those photos will

appear in Part 2. I noticed the boarded up stores then and so

we came back this summer to look around. There are signs of

life, the community hall is maintained, the church kept up,

there are recycle bins. But as you can see the main street consists

of boarded up stores and vacant lots. My brother in law pointed

out that most have metal roofs so some attempt has been made to 

maintain them. Founded in 1911 the town now has 25 residents.

As you drive through you see houses that have been abandoned

and a few with signs of life or an RV plugged in indicating some

seasonal occupation. As I said to my wife, it would be very

eerie to be a child in such as town at night, with all these dark 

overgrown homes and the vast dark prairie sky above.

Demographics can be as relentless as any tsunami. A few 

years ago the rural high school I attended closed after 112

 years in Harrow ON when the decision was made to consolidate to 

large towns. This immediately affected local businesses and the 

sale of town lots.

A link to other photos and some very interesting 

comments about the community of Krydor.

http://www.pbase.com/impalass/krydor_sk

"There was a river under First and Main, 

the salt mines honeycombed farther down. 

A wealth of sun and wind ever so strong 

converged on that home town, long gone. 

At the north edge there were the sand hills. 

I used to stare for hours at prairie dogs, 

which had their town, and folded their little paws

to stare beyond their fence where I was. "

from Prairie Town

by William Stafford

" He sighed, more exhaustedly than regretfully, I thought. That morning was the last time I saw Moreland. It was also the last time I had, with anyone, the sort of talk we used to have together. Things drawing to a close, even quite suddenly, was hardly a surprise. The look Moreland had was the one people take on when a stage has been reached quite different from just being ill.

from Temporary Kings ( A Dance to the Music of Time )

by Anthony Powell

This morning we said goodbye to our cat Max. For many years, he sat with me in the morning before the rest of the house was up. And in the evening the two of us would sit in my study to read or watch hockey while the rest of the family was in the living room. This summer he spent 3 months at the cabin with us, mostly sleeping on the screened in porch in a state of feline bliss. It was only a few months ago when his health started to fail that I came to appreciate the tremendous gap he would leave.

Max and I collaborated on this poem in April of 2012

it was a happier time. Rest in love little man.

The Cat Wishes to Use the Pen

by Max

To write doubtless, 

about the space under the rug where he keeps things and 

the spot under the coffee table where he also keeps things

including himself, dreaming of jungle, he would like to

immortalize lurking unseen.

Unless he wants a drink in which case he will write 

of the white porcelain tub where he sits demanding 

a drink from the faucet. Or yowling through the house 

until someone follows him to his dish to witness 

the wonder of a feeding cat.

He would include a triumphant inventory of the 

clawed furniture, the red leather chair, the sofa, the 

good Lazy Boy. The declawed cat broke lamps but he

is all about fabric, sweaters, wedding dresses, 

comforters and of course the good Lazy Boy.

He would surely write about laying across a warm chest 

with one paw extended purring happily. But there will be

no mention of the small white dog who sniffs his butt,

let him write his own poem.

"The thudding sound from the quarry had declined now to no more than a gentle reverberation, infinitely remote. It ceased altogether at the long drawn wail of a hooter - the distant pounding of centaurs' hoofs dying away, as the last note of their conch trumpeted out over hyperborean seas. Even the formal measure of the seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence."

from Hearing Secret Harmonies ( A Dance to the Music of Time )

by Anthony Powell

I have not blogged for some time and the winter ice and cold  has limited my 

taking photographs. A few weeks ago I came across some cards based on 

Nick Bantocks's Griffin & Sabine Trilogy. If you have not read it it is the story

 of a couple who have never meet exchanging cards and letters when they

 discover they have a "magical connection" They basically tell each other 

the story of their  lives and then begin to share the stories of their current 

travels. The stories are accompanied by postcards, letters and stamps with 

striking images. I have to admit I liked the third book the least when an 

antagonist was introduced and a more conventional plot was introduced. 

I preferred just hearing their personal histories and the narratives of their 

travels.  I had not been rereading them  long before I began to sense a 

connection, at least for me to the works of W.G. Sebald and I reread my 

copy of Austerlitz, his works largely avoid conventional plot, consisting 

instead of personal histories, chance encounters, descriptions of places seen 

while traveling or snippets from his reading and he includes B&W photos 

in the books.

Both authors dealt with personal history, art, conversation, descriptions, 

memory and I think convey a sense of what I, at least, feel in the internal 

mental dialogue we conduct with ourselves.

For my quotes I have chosen one from Sebald's Austerlitz about how the things

 that comprise our mental landscape will fade with time and the second a quote 

by the astronomer Martin Rees about how much our memories mean in the great 
scheme of things.

“...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as 

I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly 

lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as 

it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects 

which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never 

described or passed on.” 

Austerlitz

"Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans 

who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist 

will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.” 

Martin J. Rees

"He has fled like electricity down the telegraph wires into

prairies of distance where the single bird sits

small and black against the saffron sky,

and is itself"

 

from He Has Fled

            

Robert Penn Warren

 

 

 

 

" We must learn to live in the world."

 

from Loss, of Perhaps Love,

in Our World of Contingency

 

Robert Penn Warren

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"All things lean to you, and some are

Trying to tell you something, though of some

The heart is too full for speech"

 

from Trying to Tell You Something

 

Robert Penn Warren

Wendolene 1999-Oct.14, 2012

In May 2006 we wanted to adopt a couple

of adult dogs who could get along. At the Humane

Society we found Angel and Curly soon named Shaun

and Wendolene ( from Wallace and Gromit ) who had come from the

same home and had to remain together. Wendolene had a deformed

front leg with one claw and teeth so rotten you could smell her

breath across the room. She immediately jumped in Helen's

lap.

Despite this, she was indomitable, ruling not only Shaun

but all of us with a loving but iron will. Although arthritis

had slowed her down and a recent diagnosis of Cushing

Syndrome weakened her, she still could rob the spaniel

puppy Whateley that we got from Animal Services few weeks ago 

to be a companion to Shaun. I remember her proudly sitting

in the living room with her good paw on his kong. While we knew

time was limited we had hoped for more time together but

Wendlone passed away Sunday Oct. 14, 2012

Adoption Photos Above

Xmas 2009 Wendolene is slowing down but

she refuses to be pulled in the wagon which

is donated to a child. As normal Shaun is

along for the ride but Wendolene calls the

shots.

She loved treats, naps and walks.

On one of the first if not the first walk we proudly

took with our new dogs we saw two young men

walking a Weimaraner and another dog of equal size

down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road

Wendolene ( under ten pounds at the time ) immediately

slipped her new pink collar and raced across the street

to give battle while Shaun frantically struggled to join her.

Life had just gotten more interesting.

In later years many walks ended the same way.

A recent trip to the Research Park pond

You will always be remembered, 
always be missed 
always be loved.

Goodbye Little Girl

"I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door."

              by J. R. R. Tolkien

"The ghosts of dead leaves

haunt no one."

                        October Funeral

                                Linda Pastan