Tom Russell / Patricia Hardin: Beneath Canyon Walls (Bert Loper )
Archbishop James Usher
(1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654,
which suggested that
Heaven and Earth were
created in 4004 B.C.
One of his aides
took the calculation further,
and was able to
announce triumphantly
that the Earth was created
on Sunday the 21st of October,
4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M.,
because God liked
to get work done early
in the morning
while he was feeling fresh.
This too was incorrect.
By almost a quarter of an hour.
The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons
was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.
This proves two things:
Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, [ie., everybody.] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
Secondly, the Earth is a Libra.
--Terry Pratchett Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau---an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas.
(The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent.
--Kevin Fedarko The Emerald Mile
I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good.
I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose.
No good to nobody.
No good for nothing.
Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all.
But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.
--Woody Guthrie
HORN RAPID WITH TOWER OF SET
TOWER OF SET WITH TRINITY CANYON
ISIS TEMPLE / SHIVA TEMPLE / BUDDHA TEMPLE
WOTANS THRONE
ABOVE NINETY-ONE MILE CANYON UNMITIGATED ADMIRATION
And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.
--Hermann Hesse Siddhartha
HOPI POINT FROM OUTSIDE BOUCHER CANYON
COLORADO RIVER NEAR COTTONWOOD CANYON WITH ISIS TEMPLE
GRANITE RAPID AND DANA BUTTE
Through The Elaboration Of The Original Vague Idea
Amazing Rhythm Aces: The End is Not in Sight
I must continue to follow
the path I take now.
If I do nothing,
if I study nothing,
if I cease searching,
then, woe is me, I am lost.
That is how I look at it
— keep going,
keep going come what may.
But what is your final goal,
you may ask.
That goal will become clearer,
will emerge slowly but surely,
much as the rough draft
turns into a sketch,
and the sketch into a painting
through the serious work done on it,
through the elaboration
of the original vague idea
and through the consolidation
of the first fleeting and passing thought.
--Vincent van Gogh
TOWER OF RA, ISIS, SHIVA AND BUDDHA TEMPLES
NOMAD ENCAMPMENT OUTSIDE CREMATION CANYON
COLORADO RIVER FROM MINERAL CANYON
ELVIS SIGHTING WITH CHEOPS PYRAMID
Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.
I think you’re crazy,
was the way Clevinger
had responded
to Dunbar’s discovery. Who wants to know?
Dunbar answered. I mean it,
Clevinger insisted. Who cares?
Dunbar answered. I really do.
I’ll even go as far
as to concede that life
seems longer i—
—is longer i—
—is longer—IS longer?
All right, is longer
if it’s filled with periods
of boredom and discomfort, b—
Guess how fast?
Dunbar said suddenly. Huh? They go, Dunbar explained. Who? Years. Years? Years, said Dunbar. Years, years, years. Do you know how long
a year takes
when it’s going away?
Dunbar asked Clevinger. This long.
He snapped his fingers. A second ago you were
stepping into college
with your lungs full of fresh air.
Today you’re an old man. Old? asked Clevinger
with surprise. What are you talking about? Old. I’m not old. You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?
Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. Well, maybe it is true, Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one? I do, Dunbar told him. Why? Clevinger asked. What else is there?
I can no longer
hear my voices,
so I am
a little lost.
My suspicion is
they would know
far better
how to tell
this story.
At least they
would have
opinions
and suggestions
and definite ideas
as to what
should go first
and what
should go last
and what
should go
in the middle.
They would
inform me
when to add detail,
when to omit
extraneous information,
what was important
and what was trivial.
After so much time
slipping past,
I am not
particularly good
at remembering
these things myself
and could certainly
use their help.
A great many events
took place,
and it is hard
for me to know
precisely where
to put what.
And sometimes
I'm unsure
that incidents
I clearly remember
actually did happen.
A memory that
seems one instant
to be as solid
as stone,
the next seems
as vaporous
as a mist
above the river.
That's one of
the major problems
with being crazy:
you're just
naturally uncertain
about things.
Today
a young man
on acid
realized that
all matter
is merely energy
condensed
to a slow vibration,
that we are all
one consciousness
experiencing itself
subjectively,
there is no such thing
as death,
life is only a dream,
and we are
the imagination
of ourselves.
Here's Tom
with the Weather.
--Bill Hicks
Through Chance,
we are each
a ghost
to all the others,
and our only reality;
through Chance,
the huge hinge
of the world,
and a grain of dust;
the stone that
starts an avalanche,
the pebble whose
concentric circles
widen across the seas.
Carlos Saragosa
left his home
in Casas Grandes
when the moon was full
he had no money
in his pocket
just a locket of his sister
framed in gold
he headed for El Sueco
stole a rooster
named Gallo del Cielo
then he crossed
the Rio Grande
with that fighter
nestled deep
beneath his arm
Gallo del Cielo
was a warrior
born in heaven
so the legends say
his wings
they had been broken
he had one eye
rolling crazy in his head
he'd fought a hundred fights
and the legends say that
one night near El Sueco
they fought Cielo seven times
and seven times
he left brave roosters dead
hola my Teresa
i'm thinking of you now
in San Antonio
i have 27 dollars
and the good luck of
your picture framed in gold
tonight i'll put it all
on the fighting spurs
of Gallo del Cielo
then i'll return
to buy the land
Pancho Villa stole
from father long ago
outside of San Diego
in the onion fields
of Paco Monteverde
the Pride of San Diego
lay sleeping
on a fancy bed of silk
and they laughed
when Saragosa pulled
the one-eyed del Cielo
from beneath his coat
but they cried
when Saragosa walked away
with a thousand dollar bill
hola my Teresa
i'm thinking of you now
in Santa Barbara
i have 1500 dollars
and the good luck of
your picture framed in gold
tonight i'll put it all
on the fighting spurs
of Gallo del Cielo
then i'll return
to buy the land
Pancho Villa stole
from father long ago
now the moon
has gone to hiding
and the lantern light
spills shadows
on the fighting sand
a wicked black named Zorro
faces del Cielo in the night
and Carlos Saragosa
fears the tiny crack
that runs across
his rooster's beak
and he fears
that he has lost
the 50,000 dollars
riding on the fight
hola my Teresa
i'm thinking of you now
in Santa Clara
the money's on the table
i'm holding now
your good luck framed in gold
everything we dream of
is riding on
the spurs of del Cielo
i'll return to buy the land
that Villa stole
from father long ago
the signal it was given
and the roosters rose together
far above the sand
Gallo del Cielo sunk a gaff
into Zorro's shiny breast
they were separated quickly
but they rose
and fought each other
time and time again
and the legends all agreed
Gallo del Cielo fought the best
then the screams of Saragosa
filled the night outside
the town of Santa Clara
as the beak of del Cielo
lay broken like a shell
within his hand
and they say that Saragosa
screamed a curse upon
the bones of Pancho Villa
as Zorro rose up one more time
and drove del Cielo in the sand
hola my Teresa
i'm thinking of you now
in San Francisco
i have no money in my pocket
i no longer have
your locket framed in gold
i buried it last evening
with the bones
of my beloved del Cielo
i will not return
to buy the land that
Villa stole long ago
do the rivers
still run muddy
outside of my
beloved Casas Grandes?
does the scar upon
my brother's face
turn red when he hears
mention of my name?
do the people of El Sueco
still curse the theft
of Gallo del Cielo?
tell my family not to worry
i will not return
to cause them shame
