Paralleling

I don't want to tell you the truth. I want to tell you the right thing. —Traci Brimhall

Our thoughts have a life of their own, independent of our will. —Emerson

To paint a still life, a painter and an apple must confront and adjust to each other. ―Albert Camus

Duration crinkles space to place
Gazing through infinite parallels —
Without wishful convergence,
No dangling divergence,
Absent fake vanishing point.
 

In this finding at zero point, a single still point,
Symbiotic star bodies called walls stream by
signaling eternal animation — 
Pinballed abstracts on the move.

Relativity as such.
Surprise!

The artful universe an unbending all-strikes alleyway!

NOTES
— Traci Brimhall, from the poem Light in the Basement, in the collection Rookery (2010, Crab Orchard Review)
— Emerson, from the Journals, 1865

― Albert Camus, Create Dangerously, a lecture on December 14 1957

(PDF of the Lecture, given four days after awarded the Nobel in Literature)

― Image below: detail of Mosaic by Russell Ziolkowski in Springfield City Hall

 

The artist chooses his object as much as he is chosen by it. Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world.
― Albert Camus, in Create Dangerously

VEXICON: Uncomfort Zones

Will you tell us stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?
    — Ada Limón

ONLY ONLY (Stop when red sky flashes)

 NO CAMP

 Insurance to protect what ...

 THIS Is Kalapuya Land (Eugene Skinner “founder” of Eugene)

 leave.

We can all ... 

 (Rosa at LTD bus station)

 Security by SONITROL (Flaming Ukraine)

(Signaling Box: Territorial Imperative)

 (Lightning and Detritus: Things Go Better With Coke)

(Grounding the Ghost) 

 PERSERVANCE (Japanese-American art memorial detail)

 GOD BLESS *USA* (Territorial Imperative II)

 I’ve Offered Everything … Still ...

I (Heart) MY GF

NOTES
— Ada Limón from the poem The contract says: we'd like the conversation to be bilingual. In her collection The Carrying (2018)
— William T. Vollmann, from Four Men: Keeping company with outdoor people. Harper’s Magazine, November 2023.

I would rather not be sorry about something when I am not going to do anything about it.
        We do not speak of this among ourselves, but I believe that most inside people aspire to the same righteous peace for which I reached in the previous sentence. — William T. Vollmann

END (Really?!)
Signs! Words! (Command.Ask.Plea.) Shaping way-finding in public places. Does anyone look. Yes, this maker of sign, that writer of words, briefly. How can these signalings matter as we move along the street, saunter sidewalk, slide in underpass, or over. View the news. New as old. The comfort, the complicit. Walls. Porous borders... How?
(ONLY ONLY to begin again)

Days Of The Dead

The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In this core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness. … The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.
— John Berger

To understand living we imagine those who once lived.  We see things, grasp feelings, search language for words, titles.  Ghost.  Spirit.  Spectre.  Apparition.  Soul.
We search, we dream, we wonder if they search for us. We, the imagined living.  We conjure, invite or bury for good. Light candles. Enter a procession.  
We may watch the cemetery closely, place flowers, listen for cautionary whispers, blame or thanks. Graves forgotten, watch the bones slide into the river. Escape in flame as atmosphere. Breath. Dust.

We paint.

 

 NOTES
— John Berger, from Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead (1994) collected in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007) With gratitude for his deep insight and caring.

— To understand living (above), a cycle by DB, with gratitude to the ancestors, wherever they may be.

—  Photos:  Street Art, Eugene, DB. With gratitude to the artists for enlivening public places. (Click to enlarge)
— Traci Brimhall, The New World from her collection Our Lady of The Ruins (2012) With gratitude for her lucid vision.

 

The New World

We see mountains first. the earth in conflict
with itself. Land of juggernauts, of mummies held
timeless in honey. We make circles around the clouds'

shadows on the ground, careless as wildflowers, reciting
minor revelations and the names of trees we've never seen.
A man builds a theater of snow and ruins it with salt.

A wild girl blunders out of the woods but returns
tearing at her dress and warbling the strange language
of foxes. Hallowed be this squandered country.

Even when we find pyrite in the streams we remain
faithful. Even when the shy wolverines come down
from the hills and carry away the paper birds,

pinned and spinning, above our beds. Still, the dark
forgives the sun its eagerness. The boy forgives the bull
that gored him. We believe because the night after

the birds were stolen, we woke up singing. We heal
whether we want to or not. Whenever we raise
our hands to the sky, they are filled with light.

Sarah Winnemucca, Northern Paiute

 

In recognition of the Northern Paiutes on Indigenous Peoples Day, October 9, 2023

Sarah Winnemucca "memorial" sign placed on US Highway 95 as it crosses the Old I.O.N. Road near Rome, Oregon.

 

Sarah Winnemucca(1844-1891) is … a controversial figure, and herein lies some of her historical interest. … Similarly, her own people, the Northern Paiute, are of mixed opinions about her.  … Neither written history nor oral tradition provides fully satisfactory answers to all aspects of Sarah Winnemucca's life. She was an extraordinary person. She was also a very complex person living in complex times and making complex decisions. She was of two worlds, and perhaps sadly, at home in neither.
— Catherine S. Fowler, from "Foreword" to Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca. U Nevada Press, 1994.  
 

Recommended:
— Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins originally published 1883.
— “ ‘An Educated Paiute woman,’ 1870”  in Oregon Indians: voices from two centuries, edited by Stephen Dow Beckham. OSU Press, 2006.  This includes a brief overview by Beckham and a letter written by Sarah Winnemucca from Camp McDermitt, Nevada, in 1870.
— All photos (click to enlarge) from road trip several years ago after a journey to Map Rock on the Snake River on a 102-degree day. (Yep, jumped in for a cooling dip.)
 

Note
Sacajawea is the most famous Native American in Oregon history. So it is a thought provoking confluence, that her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (1805-1866), who traveled with her on Lewis & Clark expedition, is buried a very few desert miles northeast of the Sarah Winnemucca memorial sign, near remote Danner, Oregon. 

Artifactual Intelligence

We live in a world that we have not yet learned to look at.
    —Marc Augé

See it this way.
    —Joan Didion

This is for your convenience. As a courtesy. We anticipate you will soon seek containment.

Your next journey will depart from Omega, travel through Memory to arrive at Alpha. Time may appear to stop for your convenience.

Sign placed for guidance and our convenience. Anticipating your comfort in boundaries. Infrequent radiation monitored by StarLink.

Space for solid waste as yet undetermined. Parameters pending review final decision following. Location for their convenience.

[Ed. note: Pine Mountain Observatory, on the peak in the blue distance, is alarmed at the prospects of Bend's trash trucked and dumped nearby, particulating the atmosphere near the array of finely-tuned, remote-controlled telescopes.]

Exit Artifactual Intelligence at any time by clicking the Runway. Stars may appear, briefly. This is not a fashion show. This is for your convenience.

NOTES
—Marc Augé, Non-pIaces: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodemity. 1992 [1995 Verso trans John Howe]
—Joan Didion, Democracy: A Novel. 1984
—Photos: Dry River country, eastern Deschutes County OR. September 2023. DB.
—Misclaimer: All conveniences appearing courtesy the County Commissioners. Rest, assured.  

Marc Augé:
Experience of the remote has taught us to de-centre our way of looking, and we should make use of the lesson. The world of supermodernity does not exactly match the one in which we believe we live, for we live in a world that we have not yet learned to look at. We have to relearn to think about space.
 

Rebecca Solnit, in Hope in the Dark:
History is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. It’s a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect. Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts.
 

SOME LAST QUESTIONS, a poem by Victoria Chang:
 

Will the clock dissolve?
Did rain enjoy falling? Did
the hands truly love me? Did
the treetops know? Was
sadness what we wanted? Were
the fireflies warning us?