But There Was Only The Darkness And The Stars

Ramblin' Jack Elliott: South Coast

That night they camped in a swale at the edge of the lake and shared the last of the provisions she'd brought. When he asked her would she not have been afraid to ride through this country by herself at night she said that there was no remedy for it and that one must put oneself in the care of God.
He asked if God always looked after her and she studied the heart of the fire for a long time where the coals breathed bright and dull and bright again in the wind from the lake. At last she said that God looked after everything and that one could no more evade his care than evade his judgement. She said that even the wicked could not escape his love. He watched her. He said that he himself had no such idea of God and that he'd pretty much given up praying to Him and she nodded without taking her eyes from the fire and said that she knew that.

She took her blanket and went off down by the lake. He watched her go and then shucked off his boots and rolled his serape about him and fell into a troubled sleep. He woke sometime in the night or in the early morning and turned and looked at the fire to see how long he'd slept but the fire was all but cold on the ground. He looked to the east to see if there were any trace of dawn graying over the country but there was only the darkness and the stars. He prodded the ashes with a stick. The few red coals that turned up in the fire's black heart seemed secret and improbable. Like the eyes of things disturbed that had best been left alone. He rose and walked down to the lake with the serape about his shoulders and he looked at the stars in the lake. The wind had died and the water lay black and still. It lay like a hole in that high desert world down into which the stars were drowning. Something had woke him and he thought perhaps he'd heard riders on the road and that they'd seen his fire but there was no fire to see and then he thought perhaps the girl had risen and come to the fire and stood over him where he slept and he remembered tasting rain on his face but there was no rain nor had there been and then he remembered his dream.

In the dream he was in another country that was not this country and the girl who knelt by him was not this girl. They knelt in the rain in a darkened city and he held his dying brother in his arms but he could not see his face and he could not say his name. Somewhere among the black and dripping streets a dog howled. That was all. He looked out at the lake where there was no wind but only the dark stillness and the stars and yet he felt a cold wind pass. He crouched in the sedge by the lake and he knew he feared the world to come for in it were already written certainties no man would wish for. He saw pass as in a slow tapestry unrolled images of things seen and unseen. He saw the shewolf dead in the mountains and the hawk's blood on the stone and he saw a glass hearse with black drapes pass in a street carried on poles by mozos. He saw the castaway bow floating on the cold waters of the Bavispe like a dead serpent and the solitary sexton in the ruins of the town where the terremoto had passed and the hermit in the broken transept of the church at Caborca. He saw rainwater dripping from a lightbulb screwed into the sheetiron wall of a warehouse. He saw a goat with golden horns tethered in a field of mud.

Lastly he saw his brother standing in a place where he could not reach him, windowed away in some world where he could never go. When he saw him there he knew that he had seen him so in dreams before and he knew that his brother would smile at him and he waited for him to do so, a smile which he had evoked and to which he could find no meaning to ascribe and he wondered if what at last he had come to was that he could no longer tell that which had passed from all that was but a seeming. He must have knelt there a long time because the sky in the east did grow gray with dawn and the stars sank at last to ash in the paling lake and birds began to call from the far shore and the world to appear again once more.

--Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing

Seeing A Far Light On The Horizon

Tony Rice: John Wilkes Booth

The end of the war
was like the beginning,
with the army marching
down the open road
under the spring sky,
seeing a far light
on the horizon.
Many lights had died
in the windy dark
but far down the road
there was always a gleam,
and it was as if
a legend had been created
to express some obscure truth
that could not
otherwise be stated.
Everything had changed,
the war and the men
and the land they fought for,
but the road ahead had not changed.
It went on through the trees and past the little towns and over the hills, and there was no getting to the end of it. The goal was a going-towards rather than an arriving, and from the top of the next rise there was always a new vista. The march toward it led through wonder and terror and deep shadows, and the sunlight touched the flags at the head of the column.
--Bruce Catton
A Stillness at Appomattox

A Keg Of Beer And An Accordion

Brahms: Hungarian Dance No. 1

No. 4

I asked the professors
who teach the meaning of life
to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives
who boss the work
of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads
and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon
I wandered out along
the Desplaines River and
I saw a crowd of Hungarians
under the trees with
their women and children
and a keg of beer
and an accordion.
--Carl Sandburg

No. 5

The Whole World Becomes That Much Richer

FOUR FROM HAVASUPAI PT.

Wagner: Entry of the Gods into Valhalla

You may not see it now,
said the Princess of Pure Reason,
looking knowingly
at Milo's puzzled face,
but whatever we learn
has a purpose
and whatever we do
affects everything
and everyone else,
if even in the tiniest way.
Why, when a housefly
flaps his wings,
a breeze goes round the world;
when a speck of dust
falls to the ground,
the entire planet
weighs a little more;
and when you stamp your foot,
the earth moves slightly
off its course.
Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in the pond;
and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy.
And it's much the same thing with knowledge,
for whenever you learn something new,
the whole world becomes that much richer.
--Norton Juster
The Phantom Tollbooth

Could Go Either Way

Bob Dylan: Clothes Line Saga

Bartlet: We meant stronger here, right?
Sam: What does it say?
Bartlet: I'm proud to report our country's stranger than it was a year ago?
Sam: That's a typo.
Bartlet: Could go either way.
--The West Wing
He Shall, from Time to Time

Cowboy Junkies: Clothes Line Saga

I Shall Be A Silent Hallucination

Actually,
I do happen
to resemble
a hallucination.
Kindly note
my silhouette
in the moonlight.
The cat climbed into
the shaft of moonlight
and wanted
to keep talking
but was asked
to be quiet.
Very well,
I shall be silent,
he replied,
I shall be
a silent hallucination.
--Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita

Grateful Dead; Eyes of the World...10/19/74

We All Come And Go Unknown

HEJIRA: a journey especially undertaken
to escape from a dangerous or undesirable situation

Joni Mitchell: Hejira

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.
There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days--burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob--a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand meters high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for 'fifty,' blooming for fifty days--the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.
There is also the ------, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat--a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen--a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as 'that which plucks the fowls.' The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, 'black wind.' The Samiel from Turkey, 'poison and wind,' used often in battle. As well as the other 'poison winds,' the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.
Other, private winds. Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the 'sea of darkness.' Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. 'Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.'
There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was 'so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.
--Michael Ondaatje

Joni Mitchell: Hejira...6/15/86

Looking Breathlessly

Laurie Anderson: Freefall
Furthermore, we have not even
to risk the adventure alone;
for the heroes of all time
have gone before us,
the labyrinth is fully known;
we have only to follow the thread
of the hero-path. And where we
had thought to find an abomination,
we shall find a god; where we
had thought to slay another,
we shall slay ourselves;
where we had thought
to travel outward,
we shall come to the center
of our own existence;
where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world.
--Joseph Campbell

For me there is only
the traveling on paths
that have heart,
on any path that may have heart,
and the only worthwhile challenge
is to traverse its full length
--and there I travel looking,
looking breathlessly.
--Carlos Castaneda

Then You Won't See Why We Go

redwall limestone
with south rim snowfall



Zoroaster Rapid



U-Roy: "Soul Rebel"




Isis Temple distant



We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It's no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go.
--George Mallory

Crazy Fingers

Grateful Dead: Crazy Fingers

Grateful Dead: Crazy Fingers 6/14/76



your rain falls
like crazy fingers
peals of fragile thunder
keeping time
recall the days
that still are to come
some sing blue


hang your heart
on a laughing willow
stray down to the water
deep sea of love
beneath the sweet
calm face of the sea
swift undertow


life may be sweeter for this
i don't know
see how it feels in the end
may Lady Lullaby
sing plainly for you
soft, strong, sweet and true


cloud hands reaching
from a rainbow
tapping at the window
touch your hair
so swift and bright
strange figures of light
float in air


who can stop
what must arrive now?
something new
is waiting to be born


dark as the night
you're still by my side
shining inside


gone are the days
we stopped to decide
where we should go
we just ride
gone are the broken eyes
we saw through in dreams
gone---both dream and lie


life may be sweeter for this
i don't know
feels like it might be alright
while Lady Lullaby
sings plainly for you
love still rings true


midnight on a carousel ride
reaching for the gold ring
down inside
never could reach
it just slips away
but i try



Mei-June Liao: Grand Canyon
Joe Arnold: Bridgers Knoll
Elizabeth Black: Deer Creek Overlook
GCNP mug shot
Yosa Buson: Landscape with Solitary Traveler
splendid woodcut by unknown artist

I Would Not Do Heaven's Work Well

Bruce Springsteen: Youngstown

The electorate collaborated
in its own disenfranchisement.
In the public’s view,
all politicians were corrupt,
all civil servants inept,
and every government
little more than a Mafia
plus an army.
Once the public
had been persuaded
to cut the state
down to size,
the real Mafias took over.

--John Feffer
Splinterlands

3/19/96