bleak and bright

Strange dreams and scratching noises, the back screen door slamming, hoping that the engine revving outside my window isn't my car being driven off, wondering what that noise is in the stairwell, waking up to find a kitchen knife in the middle of the floor, I need to get out of here, and despite sea changes not so rich and strange, I am reminded of the love that I am surrounded by and that I'm not as stuck as I sometimes feel, that there are ways to survive and still live.

So I got introverted in the woods, taking paths arbitrarily based on bodies of water and groves of pine and birch.



The sun was fading ever so slowly and the golden light filtered down into the valley.



My mom used to take us here when we were kids to go hiking, and then me and one of the guy friends came up here late one night to climb the stairs of the overlook and it was so dark we could barely see each other and the forest was alive in ways that reminded me of childhood fairy tales.





I felt euphoric in the solitude, fragments of verse and hymn echoing, that though the wrong is oft so strong God is the ruler yet.



I never used to care that much about getting out to the woods, in part not having transportation for so long but I crave it now. Maybe it's living in a place of concrete and rust, needing green, needing the canopy of trees, and the inverse reflecting of the waters, a place that still feels primeval even with the roads on each side and the light pollution that obscures the stars. There is beauty even in the trees stripped of leaves, the peeling bark, the eroding cliffs adorned with ferns, the marshy lowlands. Here it is easier to get alone, to feel small in a way that's not crushing and strangely beautiful.

unbalanced pieces

Awakening on a couch more comfortable than my bed to the cats running, it's cold outside, and maybe it's the artificial sweetener accidentally ingested making my head feel foggy, wondering how the brain processes all these things, the physical, the mental, the spiritual because sometimes the little clarity I have is blurred and I mumble and grumble incoherently to God as I sit up and realize the sun's already risen but it's not all that late.

I tried to play guitar last night, between the ringing of the phone, couldn't find it in me to be social to do anything functional as the Paper From Hell's day of reckoning gets closer, someone knocked on the door and scared me last night but it was just the kid across the street. I felt bad, but I didn't want to open the door either.

But the sun is out, and I will go in pursuit of coffee and relating and being, wondering how I let a little Lanegan/Patton jam pass me by the first time around.

the wood between the worlds

As an English major who spent more time reading the works of dead crackers than doing anything resembling creative writing both out of shyness and disdain for those who wanted to be the next Bret Easton Ellis or Thomas De Quincey, I got a decent dosage of medievals and Romantics that I alternated adored and was infuriated by.

Wordsworth might have said he wandered lonely as a cloud and found some daffodils, but his sister was most definitely along for the ride, as their diaries show, but she was conveniently written out of the picture to maintain the image of the loner among nature.

I've been rediscovering Annie Dillard after a long time of not maybe understanding, maybe not getting out into the almost-wilderness enough, obsessed with crumbling concrete dying from neglect rather than the world outside continually dying and reborn.

“Concerning trees and leaves... there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.”



“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”



So Saturday I was introverted, and I know these days are getting shorter and colder and more brutish, so I went out to the woods where we played as kids. Our parents would walk along the concrete path and we would run along the side, scampering over huge trees fallen across the creek, making our way across stones to the island in the middle of the creek as runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad or Robin Hood's merry band or the kids in Narnia, so immersed in this world of water and trees and imagination even with the suburbs on the top of the hill and the road running along the other side. It's still as beautiful as I remember it.



The summer I graduated, me and one of my friends used to come here, because it was so close by, and me and him would sit by the water and ponder, or lay on the picnic tables and stare up at the pine trees soaring so tall and straight over us. It felt like time was fluid, an endless eternal tap when it was already beginning to drain away.



This was so good for my soul, so when I got out of church, I did it again, driving out to Medina and wondering why every road now has the name of some poor kid who died in the army, stopping at Worden's Homestead, knowing that the ledges had to be nearby.



I'd only been there once, probably fifteen years ago, when we walked from my parents' friends house through some back yards and back woods to end up in a quiet place in the middle of a forest strewn with hanging Jungle Book vines in a place with carvings not quite Olmec, but ancient seeming enough for a part of the country where the ancients did not see it fit to build. The path behind the farmhouse is not well-marked, but I followed the couple in front of me in, and made my way across.







I wonder what the carver of these stones thought when he came upon them for the first time, and shaped and incised these rocks with sweat and fervor. The deformed Sphinx remains cryptic, the faces unidentified, the symbology of cross and schooner arcane.







I return up the path to the back of the property, where assorted playhouse-sized outbuildings disintegrate and a crucified effigy is sprawled on the ground, awkwardly formed, with a bulky torso and a crown of rusty nails. Attempts at getting a good shot were made but ultimately unsuccessful.



And from there I went to the much more populated Whipps Ledges, which was crawling with children, dogs and rock climbers. I walked the periphery and the then along the top, knowing I'd be unable to capture the grandeur completely.



“After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”





“What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.”



And now I'm back at the daily routine, and I wonder why I didn't do this more, because of the euphoria of atmosphere, movement, and the created order at its most beautiful.



“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time-- or even knew selflessness or courage or literature-- but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”

as the wind blows a dead leaf

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.



What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose



Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.



There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.



So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.



Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.



Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.




For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.




In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

into the grey

Another week is winding down, and the blur of time is finally starting to lead to a sense of clarity. I lost a great-uncle this week, someone who seemed larger than life, with stories handed down, and there's sundry other little dramas with no need to be spread about the Internet, but last night I took some much needed chill time to get annoyed with my history textbook's YAYCOMMUNISM slant (sure, Stalin killed people but the ones that didn't died were freed from their superstitions so yay Stalin and artistic propaganda posters were keeping it real).

The Randian kid on the other side of the room is absurd to the point of being way too amusing, the know-it-all wasn't there today, and all I can think of is Traktoristy. , the soundtrack to the Hoxha/Uncle Joe Bromance. Get a room comrades, in the name of Winged Eros.

My interest in history is decidedly more ephemeral. I like the weird tendrils that come off of the name and date generica. I'm also convinced that while our book talks about how it was so awesome for women in the Soviet Union as opposed to the Evil Capitalist West, it probably sucked all around everywhere especially for people like me with a big mouth.

But anyways, external drama and dadaesque classroom absurdity aside, I'm heading down to Killumbus to hopefully get a second dose of sweet and heavy tuneage. It's not every day I get to slay my eardrums in good company with the shoegazing metallurgy of Alcest and VikingVikeness like a good little berzerker. Pictures and epic tales hopefully shall follow.