Water Is Life

Reservoir: Demolition of 20 million gallon concrete tank built in the 1930s.  Construction of seismic-resilient two water-holding tanks.  A major part of network of tanks and pipes supplying Eugene with gravity-fed water.  All photos today, August 23 2025, about mid-point of the three-year project. 

Water is Precious. And Costly.  EWEB avoids stating project costs. AI says projects of this scope cost tens of millions of dollars.  EWEB avoids saying who pays.  EWEB invests in sophisticated PR and "news" stories simply restate its media releases. But really, does any of this matter?  Water is Life.  And we will do what we need to until such a time...

This photo-essay elides certain truths and exposes others.  A sliding calculation looking closely at matter.  At particular early morning angles, drawn to color and juxtaposition. Curiosity.  The materiality of modernity.  The arbitrary slant of necessity.  

Recalling, tens of thousands cubic yards of rock and “debris” were removed in the first year, completed this spring. Now, installing underdrains, completing grading, readying for construction of the two new 7.5 million gallon tanks "built to withstand a Cascadia-level event." 

 

Wondering.... what does "gallon" as measurement of liquid volume mean?  Or, for that matter, a cubic yard?  Millions of dollars?  Cascadia-level "event"? 

Are we at war with the Earth?  Shock-and-Jaw?  Or, are we nurturing the ancient well-spring of devotion?  Trust-and-Awe?In the ebb-and-flow of tides, we, born of water, bearers of water, feel deeply: Water Is Life. 

 

CODA
Usually one gets what one expects, but very rarely in the way one expected it.
—seismologist Charles Richter (1900-1984, namesake of the Richter scale)

Transient Global Amnesia

In an eye, in a mirror—

The mastery of passion requires loneliness.
The teacher said.
    —Elisa Gonzalez

Emily Dickinson - Poem 895 

Further in Summer than the Birds -
Pathetic from the Grass -
A minor Nation celebrates
It's unobtrusive Mass.

No Ordinance be seen -
So gradual the Grace
A gentle Custom it becomes -
Enlarging Loneliness -

Antiquest felt at Noon -
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify -

Remit as yet no Grace -
No furrow on the Glow,
But a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now -

 

NOTE 

Transient global amnesia: a neurological disorder with a temporary but almost total disruption of short-term memory with a range of problems accessing older memories. With no other signs of impaired cognitive functioning, a person recalls only the last few moments of consciousness and has almost no capacity to establish new memories, but generally appears otherwise mentally alert and lucid. The degree of amnesia is profound.

Further, I imagine this disorder as viral among groups, creeds, and adherents of certain beliefs; even entire nations. Certainly the three words — Transient. Global. Amnesia. — individually and collectively evoke a familiar state of affairs.

The street art visibles presented here emerge as recognitions of this deeply abiding archetype: Transient global amnesia.

All Is As They Appear

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. —Jack Gilbert 

 

 

 

:: Found and lost vocabularies :: 

:: Spring to summer the signs change and do not. ::

 

Winging It In Spring

Someone appears
in the trackless, floating field,
a body the color of cloud,
or the gauze that's
slowly stripped away
after sleep or sex,
or genuine pain.

Continuing with Chase Twichell ‘s poem “The Billowing Lights” from her collection from Northern Spy (1981)

It is a soul
who cautiously looks down,
deciding to stay
in the changeable vapors,
small and unborn,
abstract as a crystal,
and have that be its life.

Where they are,
they are safe from fire
and the transforming cold,
safe from money.
And yet,
in certain kinds of weather,
they draw near
as if for comfort,
as people are drawn
to a snowy, foreign place
after marriage or a loss.

They press into the leaves
of trees made explicit by rain,
there in the radiant dark
like a black migration.
Or quite overtly
in a day of blindness,
they come close
to ask for something,
but all we hear
is the dry snow,
its whispering friction,
and the scraping
engines of the plows.

Perhaps it is the sexual
dream they long for,
the ways we have
of thwarting the filthy rains,
and blood and age.

They may come down
out of the sorrowful air,
lured by the billowing
lights of wars
like fish to inedible glitter,
that longing the one
force of their lives.

They peer down
into the earthly light,
the delicate towns
burning in the radium
of the future,
and the white air falling.

Little fossil ghosts,
they grow dim and quiet,
embedded in the sky.
And tonight, to keep them
from the slicing wind,
I do not want them.

NOTES
—Above: “The Billowing Lights” a poem by Chase Twichell from her collection Northern Spy (1981)
—Photos by DB: Murals and wall paintings Springfield Oregon, March 2025 the first week of Spring on Planet Earth.