The Heart of Truth

"And I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book and my eyes open panic-stricken in a world other than my own, because when I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it is amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I've been in the very heart of truth."

-Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud A Solitude

McGregor, Iowa

Trauma

What Cannot Be Held

"He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur.  He touched the cold and perfect teeth.  The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her.  Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from.  Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel.  He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh.  What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war.  What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can.  But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

"Consummation of Grief"

I hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and all the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines

it matters little

very little love is not so bad
or very little life

what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this

I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

-Charles Bukowski

Another Kind of Place Altogether

"The Reverend Peters makes a funny ticking noise with his tongue sometimes when he is thinking.  And he smokes cigarettes and you can smell them on his breath and I don't like this.

I said that there wasn't anything outside the universe and there wasn't another kind of place altogether.  Except that there might be if you went through a black hole, but a black hole is what is called singularity, which means it is impossible to find out what is on the other side because the gravity of the black hole is so big that even electromagnetic waves like light can't get out of it, and electromagnetic waves are how we get information about things which are far away.  And if heaven was on the other side of a black hole, dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren't or people would notice."

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 

Happiness is...

A Constitution of Iron

"All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who lived sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.  Compared to White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without strength in their grip.  White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none.  In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them.  A constitution of iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures."

Jack London, White Fang

Lake Monona, Madison, Wisconsin

The History Boys

Madame Zilensky

"The reason for the lies of Madame Zilensky was painful and plain.  All her life long Madame Zilensky had worked -- at the piano, teaching, and writing those beautiful and immense twelve symphonies.  Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else.  Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it.  If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things.  Through the lies, she lived vicariously.  The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life."

Carson McCullers, Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland

All of us

Raymond Carver

Willa

This will never stop being my favorite.

"She smiled -- though she was ashamed of it -- with the natural contempt of strength for weakness, with the sense of physical security which makes the savage merciless.  Nobody could die while he felt like that inside.  The springs there were wound so tight that it would be a long while before there was any slack in them.  The life in there was rooted deep.  She was going to have a few things before she died.  She realized that there were a great many trains dashing east and west on the face of the continent that night, and that they all carried young people who meant to have things.  But the difference was that she was going to get them!  That was all.  Let people try to stop her!  She glowered at the rows of feckless bodies that lay sprawled in the chairs.  Let them try it once!  Along with the yearning that came from some deep part of her, that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of cockiness, a determination to get ahead.  Well, there are passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed and beaten under." 

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

1937

Baya and the Thunderstorm, Wisconsin Summer, 2012

Flowery Benedictions

"The path the old man took was a fire trail that had been built by the C C C.  From the glade in which he now made his home he had to climb nearly a thousand feet to reach it, but once on the trail the walking was easy and excepting the injured shoe he would have swung along at a good pace.  It was six miles to the river where he crossed and came to the highway and the same ubiquitous crossroads store with the drunken porch, the huge and rock-battered Nehi signs, the weather-curled laths, the paintless stonecolored wood--but the old man had taken an early start.  Through the gap in the trees he could see the valley far below him where the river ran, a cauldron in the mountain's shadow where smoke and spume seethed like the old disturbance of the earth erupting once again, black mist languid in the cuts and trenches as flowing lava and the palisades of rock rising in the high-shored rim beyond the vally--and beyond the valley, circling the distant hoary cupolas now standing into morning, the sun, reaching to the slope where the old man rested, speared mist motes emblematic as snowflakes and broke them down in spangled and regimental disorder, reached the trees and banded them in light, struck weftwork in the slow uncurling ferns--the sun in its long lightfall recoined again in leafwater.

Brogan and cane and cracked pad clatter and slide on the shelly rocks and stop where a snake lies curled belly-up to the silent fold and dip of a petal-burst of butterflies fanning his flat and deadwhite underside.  Scout smells cautiously at the snake, the butterflies in slow riot over his head, flowery benedictions of their veined and harlequin wings.  With his cane the old man turns the snake, remarking the dusty carpet pattern of its dull skin, the black clot of blood where the rattles have been cut away.

They go on--steps soft now in the rank humus earth, or where carapaced with lichens the texture of old green velvet, or wet and spongy earth tenoned with roots, the lecherous ganglia of things growing--coming down, pursuing the shadowline into the smoking river valley."

Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

Wisconsin, Summer 2012