Yes Siddhartha, he said. Is this what you mean:
that the river is in
all places at once,
at its source and
where it flows
into the sea,
at the waterfall,
at the ferry,
at the rapids,
in the ocean,
in the mountains,
everywhere at once,
so for the river there is
only the present moment
and not the shadow
of the future?
It is, Siddhartha said. And once I learned this
I considered my life,
and it too was a river,
and the boy Siddhartha
was separated from
the man Siddhartha
and the graybeard Siddhartha
only by shadows,
not by real things.
Nothing was, nothing will be;
everything is,
everything has being
and presence.
--Hermann Hesse
COTTONWOOD CANYON
CHEYAVA FALLS GCNP : ROARING SPRINGS
ROYAL ARCH CREEK
LOWER RIBBON FALLS
ELVES CHASM
i wanna tell you
about texas radio
and the big beat
it comes out of
the virginia swamps
cool and slow
with a back beat
narrow and
hard to master
some call it heavenly
in it's brilliance
others, mean and rueful
of the western dream
i love the friends
i have gathered together
on this thin raft
we have constructed
pyramids in honor
of our escaping
for this is the land
where the pharaoh died
children, the river
contains specimens
the voices of
singing women
call us from
the far shore
and they are saying
"forget the night
live with us
in forests of azure"
meagre food for
souls forgot
i tell you this:
no eternal reward
will forgive us now
for wasting the dawn
and one morning
you awoke to
a strange sun
and opening your door....
---------------------------------------------------------------
Tower of Ra and Shiva Temple
outside Palisade Canyon Doors: "Texas Radio and the Big Beat" "Love Me Two Times"
Dana Butte from Utah Flats
Hermit Canyon
A man was running running for his life, across and up a naked dome of golden sandstone. Far off in silhouette against an evening sky, dark figure running across a field of gold, a flash of gashed vermillion, the flaring fanned-out rays of setting sun peering for one final moment, under a reef of purple clouds, into the slickrock desert, over the rippled sea of golden, lifeless petrified dunes of sand... He ran, ran to live, up the rising skyline curve of rock, across the huge plasmic crimson bulge of sun, black running human animal caught forever, in perpetual motion, eternal in his fear, upon the red sun and background of the yellow sky. A stocky man in boots, jeans, no shirt, big hat, puffing like an engine, hoarse and gasping in despair, laboring at ever-slower pace up the barren and unsheltering incline of monolithic stone.
He ran because he was pursued. Fifty yards to his rear and gaining rapidly came a snorting ramping bellowing machine, the diesel-powered forty-ton dirt scooper, product of Caterpillar Inc., bouncing after its prey on rubber-tired wheels each taller than a tall man. The operator's cab projected forward above the front wheels; the windows of the cab, covered with dust, spattered with mud, obscured the nature of whatever it was, if anything, that guided and propelled and animated the machine. Reaching the upward slope, the machine redoubled its efforts, bounding ahead. Puffs of black smoke jetted from the upright exhaust stack, floating like little balls of dirty cotton up and backward on the pure golden backdrop of the sky. Hopeless flight, implacable pursuit. The running man stopped running, stopped climbing, stopped and turned to face the iron black joggling goblin that approached him, closer, closer, with spinning wheels and howling motor, towering above him, about to run him down, crush him like an insect, leave him smeared in a paste of hair, calcium, protoplasm and blood across the gritty surface of the rock.
The man drew a small object from his belt, something not much bigger than his fist, dark against the sunset light, impossible to immediately identify. The man raised this object and pointed it toward the blunt flat advancing snout of the machine. His finger twitched. A red flame leaped from the tip of the object in the man's hand. Leaped and disappeared, followed presently by the report of a small compact explosion. The man froze, waiting. The machine slowed, stopped as if surprised, and jiggled for a moment, up and down, on heavy springs, twelve feet short of its victim. An arc of cooling liquid spurted like blood from the creature's nose, spouting under pressure into the air then looping down to spatter on the stone. Hurt, baffled, astonished, the machine remained at a standstill, one dark and solid silhouette of steel, rubber, glass and iron upon the forlorn red flare of dying sun, a complicated outline of angles, joints, hoses, couplings, wheels and linkage rods flat black against the horizon. As the light faded the engine died, the coolant drooped in a smaller arc and petered out, the surrounding sea of desert silence closed in complete upon machine and man. Silence. Stasis. Creeping darkness. The man replaced the object in his belt. He turned away from the stricken machine--dead tech--and walked upward on the ridgeline, descended the farther slope and vanished into a dense violet twilight.
We heard him singing. Singing, that is, as a wolf sings, a proud prolonged profound Promethean howl of triumph and joy, a hymn that dwindled after a time to the faintest vulpine vibration on the air but never died, never died completely. New moon. New moon and evening star. The new moon, signal of hope, glowed in the western sky. Quite near, almost within the moon's embrace, hung Venus planet of love, rare as radium pure as platinum more precious than gold.
--Edward Abbey
from Hayduke Lives!
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the deathbed whereon it must expire Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
--William Shakespeare Sonnet 73
And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.
Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries.
In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing.
A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad
and solitary changeling child
announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.
--Cormac McCarthy The Road
Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
--Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five
Believing the stream to be Shinumo Creek, Robert Stanton stopped at Crystal Creek on February 8, 1890, to climb Point Sublime. Here a disgruntled crewman elected to abandon the expedition. After an arduous winter trek he arrived "nearer dead than alive" at a line shack on Buckskin Mountain. Before 1966, the mild rapid at Crystal appeared "much like Boucher, long, wide and slow at first, steep and clear at the last." The rapid is scarcely mentioned in any early river accounts, although the Carnegie Institute expedition portaged the upper section in November 1937. An unusually intense storm began on December 7, 1966 and dumped fourteen inches of rain in a thirty-six hour period along the North Rim. The resulting flood in Crystal's upper drainages obliterated Pueblo sites that had escaped floods for the previous 900 years. Crystal Creek's rampaging water and mud flows pushed the debris fan 200 feet farther into the Colorado, creating an impressive, ulcer-generating spectacle called Crystal Rapid. --Kim Crumbo (from A River Runners Guide to the History of the Grand Canyon)
As If The Universe Were Quietly Turning Itself Inside Out
And all this time I was keeping my eyes open, or trying to, only they kept closing, because I wanted to go on watching the stars, where the most extraordinary things were happening. A bright satellite, a man-made star, very slowly and somehow carefully crossed the sky in a great arc, from one side to the other, a close arc, one knew it was not far away, a friendly satellite slowly going about its business round and round the globe. And then, much much farther away, stars were quietly shooting and tumbling and disappearing, silently falling and being extinguished, lost utterly silent falling stars, falling from nowhere to nowhere into an unimaginable extinction. How many of them there were, as if the heavens were crumbling at last and being dismantled.
Later I knew that I had been asleep and I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars. The moon was gone. The water lapped higher, nearer, touching the rock so lightly it was audible only as a kind of vibration. The sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars. And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable. And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold.
Peter Tosh: Fools Die (For Want of Wisdom)
Later still I awoke and it had all gone; and for a few moments I thought that I had seen all those stars only in a dream. There was a weird shocking sudden quiet, as at the cessation of a great symphony or of some immense prolonged indescribable din. Had the stars then been audible as well as visible and had I indeed heard the music of the spheres? The early dawn light hung over the rocks and over the sea, with an awful intent gripping silence, as if it had seized these faintly visible shapes and were very slowly drawing tgem out of a darkness in which they wanted to remain. Even the water was now totally silent, not a tap, not a vibration. The sky was a faintly lucid grey and the sea was a lightless grey, and the rocks were a dark fuzzy greyish brown. The sense of loneliness was far more intense than it had been under the stars. Then I had felt no fear. Now I felt fear. I discovered that I was feeling very stiff and rather cold. The rock beneath me was very hard and I felt bruised and aching. I was surprised to find my rugs and cushions were wet with dew. I got up stiffly and shook them. I looked around me. Mountainous piled-up rocks hid the house. And I saw myself as a dark figure in the midst of this empty awfully silent dawn, where light was scarcely yet light, and I was afraid of myself and quickly lay down again and settled my rug and closed my eyes, lying there stiffly and not imagining that I would sleep again.
--Iris Murdoch The Sea, the Sea
Today, suddenly,
I reached an absurd
but unerring conclusion.
In a moment of enlightenment,
I realized that I'm nobody,
absolutely nobody.
When the lightning flashed,
I saw that what
I had thought to be a city
was in fact a deserted plain
and, in the same sinister light
that revealed me to myself,
there seemed to be
no sky above it.
I was robbed
of any possibility
of having existed
before the world.
If I was ever reincarnated,
I must have done so
without myself,
without a self to reincarnate.
I am the outskirts of some nonexistent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.
I'm always thinking,
always feeling,
but my thoughts
lack all reason,
my emotions
all feeling.
I'm falling
through a trapdoor,
through infinite,
infinitous space,
in a directionless,
empty fall.
My soul is
a black maelstrom,
a great madness
spinning about a vacuum,
the swirling of
a vast ocean
around a hole
in the void,
and in the waters,
more like whirlwinds than waters,
float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world:
houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices,
all caught up in a bottomless whirlpool.
And I, I myself, am the center that exists only because
the geometry of the abyss
demands it. I am the nothing around which all this spins,
I exist so that it can spin,
I am a center that exists only because every circle has one.
I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime.
I am the center of everything surrounded by the great nothing.
And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.
If only I could think! If only I could feel!
And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
--Jack Kerouac On The Road
