Mama Tried

 

Rock painting on an outcrop uphill from a reservoir lake along a bumpy road. Surprised and mystified. A friend recalled Mama Tried as the name of a song. Turns out, number one in the country charts by Merle Haggard in 1968. Semi-auto-biographical. Song with its own entry in Wikipedia. 

Why here a few miles miles east of Eugene and Pleasant Hill? Perhaps because it was sung over 300 times in concert by the Grateful Dead. And covered by uncountable others. Touches something deep in the psyche of family.  

Merle Haggard's parents were Oklahoma dust bowlers who came to the Bakersfield area in the south San Joaquin Valley. As did my parents — 1930s dust bowl refugees from Oklahoma and North Texas. Think Woody Guthrie.  Appreciation to all mamas who tried, most successfully, thank goodness. Look for lyrics or check youtube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_Tried_(song)

Truth Be Told

Truth is always someone else's privilege.

—Luljeta Lleshanaku

Confronting virtual worlds and the fleeting apparitions of AI, the Signs of the Streets beckon. Hard copy analogues position Truth Fact Belief Hope as ready-made visualities. Events, communities, attitudes frame and mirror the Zeitgeist.  Streetside photos late 2025/early 2026   

CODA

To achieve the long view, one steps further and further back from lives as they are lived to that more tranquil position from which one sees only the crowd. From that perspective human beings become a species, worth preserving. But take another step back and it is no longer necessary to preserve the species. There will be another following us, after all. Until the view lengthens to such an extent that the world disappears and one is left with only the cold reaches of space, in a private pas de deux with God. Was it possible to accommodate the contradiction between action and being, to incorporate both long view and short view in one’s attitude to life, to be both reflective and active, detached and involved?

—Robyn Davidson, from Desert Places (1996)

WORD on the Street

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future, 
the first syllable already belongs to the past. 

When I pronounce the word Silence, 
I destroy it. 

When I pronounce the word Nothing, 
I make something no non-being can hold.
—Wislawa Szymborska

Why write? Why do anything? Why not write? It's the same as the impulse to make a handprint in wet concrete or trace your finger in the mist on a window. What you wrote, as a kid, on a window was the simplest version of the vision. Why not unburden yourself of the vision? (But why that vision? Why that vision, and why you?) —Elisa Gabbart

 

NOTES
—WORD on the Street continues the ongoing VEXICON sequence spellbinding in syllables and exclamations, longings and foretellings, the lost wisdom of the Marker-Makers of the realm. PHOTOS appearing during the faltering weeks of 2025, as in-drift the Eugene street scene.
—Top, Wislawa Szymborska (Polish, 1923–2012), 1996 Nobel in Literature.

—Above, Elisa Gabbart, in Any Person Is the Only Self (2024) 
—Below, Pirouette, a poem by Federico García Lorca (Spanish, 1898-1936)

CODA
If the alphabet should die
then everything would die.
Whose words are wings.

The whole of life
dependent on
four letters.