E'scapes

When we go together, what is the simple form we make?
Who fits our edges snugly, composing a whole?
Whose eye searches the landscape for a focal point?
                                —Harryette Mullen

Streetscape

Darkscape

Eyescape

Roomscape

Xscape

Moonscape

Landscape

Dreamscape

Innerscape

NOscape

Sidescape

Wakescape

DEFINITION
1. A portion of territory which the eye can comprehend in a single view, including all the objects it contains.
2. A sociological aspect of a physical area.
3. A picture representing a real or imaginary scene.
4. A mode of framing, where the horizontal sides are longer than the vertical sides.
5. An oscillation of all of the above: E’scape.

NOTE
— Harryette Mullen, from the poem What Draws Us Together, in Poetry (Nov 2024)

CODA
Question and Answer in the Green Mountains

You ask me why I lived in the green mountains;
I laugh and don't answer — I’m at peace.
Peach blossoms on flowing water go into the distance.
There is another sky and earth not among men.
—Li Bai (701-762 Chinese, trans Arthur Sze)

HEAT

Does a leaf note change, sense acceleration, feel heat?
Before they fall. Aftermath?
To soak, bristle, crumble.
Homing on gravity.
Theory is easy for some.

2024: The hottest year on planet Earth in the last 125,000 years.

2024: The Universe is expanding faster than “previously” thought.
What were we thinking? The speed of light more or less?
Perhaps The Universe knows something we do not.

We the 8.2 Billion: Gesturing in an Abstract Reality.

In an hour-glass life-span how can one know?

8.2 Billion we humans, this blue-green tide-pool Earth.
Verbs run amok: Tackle, combat, battle. Nouns to fight abstract reality: Drought, Climate, Heat. Wildfire, Flood, Eruption.

Honing response to a savior edge.

Task: Image possibility within disjunction.
Between don't gaze ahead admonishment.
Among don't zero-in close astonishment.

While riding acceleration in don't look back obedience.

Task: Grasp tangentials. Occupy interstices. Qualify conclusions. Image when our wavering invention — the ancient soundings known as Words — betray.

Task: Image the global situation, temporal duration, a scale of immediate now-time. Then, how to imagine 8.2 Billion desiring humans in their each and every moment?

As gesture. As phantom. As fragment. As ambiguity. As absence. 

As leaf.

That's how.

 

A wider range of words exist to describe effects of cold than heat.

— Karen Solie from her poem Orion, London Review of Books, Dec2024

Life Is Enormous

Life is enormous, you only have
to drill a tunnel through one of the hemispheres
to discover freedom in the other.
But never forget - there's taiga all around.
    —Anzhelina Polonskaya

—Photos by DB, as encountered during walkabouts, Eugene OR 2024.  Outside of these isolated, framed moments, each person moved in their individual befores-and-afters with intent or by circumstance, with hope and longing. As did the photographer.  This "outside" ever larger than the picture.  Life is Enormous.

—Poem by Anzhelina Polonskaya, in To The Ashes (2019 trans Russian by Andrew Wachtel. Polonskaya was born near Moscow, lives in Germany, her poetry is banned in Russia.)

Taiga

The sea darkens outside

and gradually becomes the taiga,

irrational, trackless.

Having run the impassible gauntlet

you shrug your shoulders, like a prisoner,

holding your bundle to your chest with one hand,

still smiling innocently at the sun.

Life is enormous, you only have

to drill a tunnel through one of the hemispheres

to discover freedom in the other.

But never forget - there's taiga all around.

Free Xpression

All that we see could also be otherwise
All that we can describe could also be otherwise
The thing seen is the thing seen together with the whole space
—Myung Mi Kim, Commons

 

The other of Thought is precisely this altering. Then I have to act … I change, and I exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance. —Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

PHOTOS. This collection, May-October 2024, of random and evolving artworks painted on, painted over, painted again, both sides of a small free-standing FREEWALL placed two years ago in a Eugene city park south of the Riverwalk and east of the I-105 bridge. LINK for a previous post, May 7 2024: Conspiracy of Visibilities

 

CODA
The transition from the stability and absoluteness of the world's contents to their dissolution into motions and relations.
—Myung Mi Kim, Excerpt from Commons (2004). “Avant-garde” poet and professor of creative writing, Myung Mi Kim, born in Seoul, Korea, immigrated with her family at the age of nine to the US.