Snow

 

'All my life,' she said, 'I've been so busy running from Beethoven to Bach to Brahms, I never noticed I was twenty-nine. Next time I looked up I was forty. Yesterday, seventy-one. Oh, there were men; but they'd given up singing at ten and given up flying when they were twelve. I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn't stand most men shuffling along with all the iron in the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their black business suits, you could hear them roll by like funeral wagons.'

'So you flew away?'

'Just in my mind, Mr Terle. It's taken sixty years to make the final break. All that time I grabbed on to piccolos and flutes and violins because they make streams in the air, you know, like streams and rivers on the ground. I rode every tributary and tried every fresh-water wind from Handel on down to a whole slew of Strausses. It's been the far way around that's brought me here.'

from The Day it Rained Forever by Ray Bradbury

Today

 

"The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of such castaways, — wailing, stupid, comatose creatures, — lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death."

from Illusions - Ralph Waldo Emerson  

Old photos new quote

 Paula Gunn Allen

"We are the land… that is the fundamental idea embedded in Native American life… the Earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth. The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies… It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is our self… It is not a matter of being 'close to nature'… The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as our self (or selves)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210420-mental-health-healing-the-trauma-of-climate-change

Drumheller - Books - Reading

"He had long wanted some neutral time, in which he could let go of the fixations of a liner life story story and rediscover the infinite potential of simply being. "

from Shrike
by Quentin S. Crisp

Atomic Sleep

 

“a series of luminous tracks that betray invisible electrons startled from atomic sleep,”

D. G. Jones

https://thewalrus.ca/startled-from-atomic-sleep/

Perhaps

"Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance  

for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere 

but a ticket, a vista, a diary page away."

from This Moment of Storm

by Roger Zelazny

Farm the Original House

"This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory. As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidarity that it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things lie in the past,"

from Memory-Hold-the-Door
by John Buchan

To keep everyone safe it does not look like we will visit the farm or cabin anytime soon

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.”
― Henry Beston (Northern Farm)

If your looking for a book to read I recommend Beston's
The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

And stay safe.

Walk about

  “It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.” 

Jonathan Carroll

Thoughts upon reading Matt Cardin's, The Stars Shine Without Me

"And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces. "

from Dolor
by Theodore Roethke

Reading Thinking

"Everything he wrote, Berger says, was written “during the period of the Wall.… Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere, from crop cultivation to health care…. The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/john-berger-joshua-sperling-biography-review/

Books, Reading, Beauty, Summer Bird, Great Crested Flycatcher

“I try to write,” says Rachel Blau Duplessis in The Blue Studio, “so that if a single shard were rescued in the aftermath of some historical disaster, that one shard would be so touching and lucid as to give the future an idea of who we were.”

Where I found it, in this beautiful year end essay on books by Shawna Lemay's at Transaction with Beauty.

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/bibliobalm

Sounds

"What a long journey that will be! You'll need some nourishment." she cried handing Milo a small brown package, neatly wrapped and tied with a string. "Now remember; they're not for eating, but for listening, because you'll often be hungry for sounds as well as food. Here are street noises at night, train whistles a long way off, dry leaves burning, busy department stores, crunching toast, creaking bedsprings, and, of course, all kinds of laughter. There's a little of each, and in far-off lonely places I think you'll be glad to have them." (164)

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The old house

"And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God’s presence?"

Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf 

For the libraries they cannot touch.

A photo taken this morning of one of the many 

free libraries in our neighbourhood.

"One summer night several months later, a violent thunderstorm swept through the city, scaring all the dogs and burning up the sky in what looked like almost continuous threads of mad lightning. Her father used to call such storms real rock and rollers, and this one certainly was. The phrase and the memory of her father saying it was the last thing she thought of before falling asleep while the storm rocked and rolled the night world outside her window."

from Played Your Eyes
by Jonathan Carroll

full story here

https://www.tor.com/2018/04/04/played-your-eyes-jonathan-carroll/#more-351052

Snow gone, blue skies melding to grey

"Half the walk is but retracing our steps."

Thoreau

W. S. Merwin and Weird Tales; an unlikely combination

It is spring here, at least until the election, when the winter of my discontent will I suspect, begin rather than, being made glorious summer by this son of pork. Moving on, my cataract surgery went very well and I am looking forward to taking some photos at the cabin this summer. I recently got some pulp magazines on dvd and thought I would share this illustration by Virgil Finlay for "The Red God Laughed". Which appeared in Weird Tales, for April 1939. The story in brief, concerns the visit to Earth by Thvall the Seeker, a kind of squishy, soft bodied alien who is visiting 21st Century Nu Yok. But while the incredible city, with four thousand foot high towers still stands, it seems Asia and America have unleashed poison gas rockets, yes they started it, and destroyed almost all life on earth, except deep sea fishes, worms and plants. So Thrall, who is looking for a world with water for his dying planet, wiggles around casting aspersions on the likelihood of a race with rigid skeletons developing intelligence. Until that is he fiddles with an unexploded canister and well, Merwin's poem sort of sums it up.

"Merwin’s great single-line poem—not the greatest short poem, but perhaps the shortest great poem, ever written—is about the converse problem, that of outliving. This is the poem in its entirety:"

"Who would I show it to"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-final-prophecy-of-w-s-merwin

The Patron Saint of Undisturbed Reading Time

"and somebody would come and knock 

on this air long 

after I have gone 

and there in front of me a life 

would open"

from A Door

by W.S. Merwin

I think our trip to Venice was the greatest vacation we ever took, the Galapagos may be close. But for visual memory, the Venice trip is still fresh enough, that the photos that can be found on the Venezia blog brings it all back.

As a man with an absurd number of books the photo below struck a real chord.

http://veneziablog.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-patron-saint-of-undisturbed-reading_15.html

Books

"The stories you remember feel like mirrors,

And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,

As though the years were pages."

from A Private Singularity

by John Koethe