Two River Litanies

Via the wonderful Matt Frito:

  John Ashberry reads "Into the Dusk Charged Air" by zwallace

  Townes Van Zandt plays "Texas River Song" by zwallace

the people and the stones

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

--through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

-William Carlos Williams

Language of Landscape of Language

Visiting friends ask the difference between a butte and a mesa, a bluff and a rim, a wash and a creek, a dune and a blowout, a canyon, a gulch, a coulee and a draw - the vernacular that braids people and places.  Thinking about the reciprocity between landscape and language brings some favorite quotations to mind:

Gretel Ehrlich: “The poet Seamus Heaney said that landscape is sacramental, to be read as text.  Earth is instinct: perfect, irrational, semiotic.”

Robert Smithson: "All language is an alphabet of sites."

White mountain site

"Birthing stone" at the White Mountain petroglyph site in the Red Desert region of Wyoming.

Deep time

“He burst the boundaries of time, thereby establishing geology’s most distinctive and transforming contribution to human thought – Deep Time.”

- Stephen Jay Gould, on James Hutton, father of geology

Gifts of circumstance

From the 1977 essay "Healing" by Wendell Berry, from the collection "What are People For?", via Sally Oviatt:

           

IV

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health.  It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hand of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

V

And by it we enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

Only discord can come of the attempt to share solitude.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.

One’s inner voices become audible.  One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.  The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance.

VI

And there is no escaping that return.

From the order of nature we return to the order – and the disorder – of humanity.

From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it.

One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human.

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness.  For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.

In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.

In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

Alone with

"One can only be lonely in relation to people. And being alone in the desert is to be alone with this expanse of wildness and wilderness, or rock and sky, stone and thorn. In loneliness, I feel closed in on myself, cut off. But in the desert alone, it is as if I were expanding to join this vastness. Instead of being cut off, I was becoming a part of it."

-Lesley Hazleton, Where Mountains Roar

Mystery tree

Geologic time

"The rhythm of the animal kingdom is that of everyday existence. The rhythm of the vegetable kingdom is that of the year. The rhythm of the mineral kingdom is that of the ages of life calculated in millennia. As soon as we contemplate the thousands of years of existence for metals, cosmic dreams come to us."

- Gaston Bachelard, in J.B. Jackson's Discovering the Vernacular Landscape

Two wishes to be a stone

 Jim Harrison:

Homesick for a dark, for clear black space
free of objects; to feel locked as wood
within a tree, a rock deep enough
in earth never to see the surface.

John Haines:

To do nothing, to be nothing: that would be a good life. Be still, like a stone in the sun.

Wildernesses

Origin is from "Wild Deor" (wild deer) in old English, meaning land inhabited only by wild animals.

First thought is The Wilderness Act of 1964, allowing for the preservation of parcels of wild nature with lines on maps and sets of rules.

But I think also of other wildernesses. Places untrodden, unknown or challenging. Places entered only temporarily, where foreign logics prevail: wildernesses of land, mind, body, death, culture, and cosmos.

Hear My Call - The Staple Singers by zwallace