In This The Task And Mighty Labor Lies

Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts

The gates of Hell
are open night and day;
Smooth the descent,
and easy is the way:
But to return,
and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task
and mighty labor lies.


--Virgil
The Aeneid

Thither They Return Again

PAINTINGS BY MAYNARD DIXON



Richie Havens: Indian Prayer






All the rivers

run into the sea;

yet the sea

is not full;

unto the place

from whence

the rivers come,

thither they return again.

--Ecclesiastes 1:7



photographs by Edward Curtis

We Will Not Speak But Stand Inside The Rain

Grateful Dead: Let It Grow...6/15/76

Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained…

I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by…

That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.

--Edwin Muir

The Wise Silence

The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory) — how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called unspeakable and indiscribable, the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth, Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with the occult and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . .; Melville referred to that profound silence, that only voice of God; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found more divine than yourself. And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaninglessness, for no amount of progress can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves,
like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.

In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like a waterfall that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.

--Peter Matthiesson
The Snow Leopard

Grateful Dead: 6/9/77...48 minutes

TOWER OF SET

SHIVA TEMPLE

ISIS TEMPLE

CHEOPS PYRAMID
WITH PILGRIM

The Star Charts On The Inner Walls

Grateful Dead: 6/8/77...191 minutes


Go inside a stone
That would be my way
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside at all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
On the inner walls.

--Charles Simic
Stone

Let's Have A Dream Which Isn't Under Control

Kenny Rogers: The Gambler

Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
--Alan Watts

final poker scene from Rounders

In Fields Where Roses Fade

Gordon Lightfoot: 1972

with rue my heart is laden
for golden friends i had,
for many a rose-lipt maiden
and many a lightfoot lad.

by brooks too broad for leaping
the lightfoot boys are laid;
the rose-lipt girls are sleeping
in fields where roses fade.

--a.e. housman

WATCHING THE MOON ROLL BY
TAKING TEA WITH WEIRD GODS

O Juanita I Call Your Name

The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat.

Allman Bros. w/ Jerry Garcia: Mountain Jam...NYE 1973

When the climbers in 1953
planted their flags
on the highest mountain,
they set them in snow
over the skeletons of creatures
that had lived in a warm clear ocean
that India, moving north, blanked out.
Possibly as much as 20,000 feet
below the sea floor,
the skeletal remains had turned into rock.
This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth.

If by some fiat,
I had to restrict
all this writing
to one sentence;
this is the one
I would choose:
the summit of Mount Everest
is marine limestone.


-- John McPhee
Annals of the Former World

The Evening Redness In The West

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Grateful Dead: Dark Star...2/15/73...2/26/73...3/28/73

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

--Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Grateful Dead: Dark Star...6/10/73...6/24/73...10/19/73

I Shall Append One Further Answer Anyway

Edward Abbey: The Dead Man at Grandview Point

TOWER OF SET / HAKATAI RAPID / POWELL PLATEAU

Why this cult of wilderness?
Why the surly hatred
of progress and development,
the churlish resistance
to all popular improvements?
Very well, a fair question,
but it’s been asked
and answered
a thousand times already;
enough books to drive a man
stark naked mad have dealt
in detail with the question.
There are many answers,
all good, each sufficient.
Peace is often mentioned;
beauty; spiritual refreshment,
whatever that means;
re-creation for the soul,
whatever that is;
escape; novelty, the delight
of something different;
truth and understanding and wisdom -— commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir,
the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask,
a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present -— all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as Why wilderness?
To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
--Edward Abbey
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside

Edward Abbey: Planting a Tree


TREE ABOVE HERMIT CANYON / SHINUMO AMPHITHEATER