“. . . morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”

For a couple of years when I was a student at Bryan College, I stayed up all night virtually every Tuesday. I was copy editor for our weekly newspaper, The Triangle, and Tuesday nights we did layout because our proofs had to be to the printing press first thing Wednesday. 2 or 3 A.M. we might still be developing black and white photographs in the darkroom. I can still recall the particular texture–sound, smell, tactility–of applying tiny dots of wax with a roller. Affixing print photographs.

I remember the Macintosh. Working with text and sizing articles using Adobe PageMaker. Rituals such as eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Making a run to the Frontier House for a double patty burger with cheese, fries, and a slice of onion half an inch thick. The white styrofoam container. Truck stop fare. A break from our office space. Our tiny editorial staff. Laughing away the late night/early morning. Delivering the proofs in my Volkswagen Rabbit. Producing a fragment of creative output–the student paper–newsprint delivered around campus every Wednesday afternoon.

It was routine irregularity, layout night, a strange sliver of schedule mixed in with the sorts of haphazard sleeping and waking and studying and writing and hiking and working and walking and reading that characterized my college experience.

All of this comes to mind now as a confluence of several thoughts and experiences. Yesterday and today we have driven early to Schweitzer, today catching beautiful 8 o’clock light above Lake Pend Oreille.

I like leaving the house in complete dark (at this time of year and at this latitude, still to be had at 6:45) and transitioning into grey and golden light on the road. Yesterday morning and this, driving Highway 95, somewhere in the valley between the Selkirk and Cabinet mountains, we listened to “Myth” by Beach House. And HÆLOS. And I thought of that early morning scene in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

They are at the country house. Richard, Tartt’s first-person narrator, wakes early. Henry is already awake, sitting on the porch, drinking an espresso, smoking a cigarette, translating Paradise Lost into Latin. It’s a scene about insomniacs, and I have thought of it many times over the years, as something in the language, some captured moment, or look, or recognition, or observation, or reflection, resonates with me. It evoked a familiar early morning feeling when I first found the book in 2002 after reading Therese Eiben’s interview with Tartt in Poets and Writer’s Magazine.

Here is part of the text, part of the story.

“‘I sleep better out there than I usually do,’ said Henry, adjusting his glasses and bending back over the lexicon. There was a subtle evidence of fatigue, and strain, in the slope of his shoulders which I, a veteran of many sleepless nights, recognized immediately. Suddenly I realized that this unprofitable task of his was probably nothing more than a method of whiling away the early morning hours, much as other insomniacs do crossword puzzles.

‘Are you always up this early?’ I asked him.

‘Almost always,’ he said without looking up. ‘It’s beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said, and I did. About the only time of day I had been able to stand in Plano was the very early morning, almost dawn, when the streets were empty and the light was golden and kind on the dry grass, the chain-link fences, the solitary scrub-oaks.”

And I think of what the Matador Records HÆLOS website says of the album Full Circle: “Every generation has their own version of the blues, music that captures a sense of melancholia and provides a sonic reflecting pool for young lovers, old souls, and the eternally heartbroken. . . . The London trio’s version of a night out is a million miles away from mirror balls and sweaty bodies, their rippling electronic pop conjuring the exhilarating privacy of a cavernous club’s dark pockets and the introspective comedowns that accompany rainy 5 a.m. cab rides.”

A couple of Sundays ago I 5-A.M. napped by Lake Coeur d’Alene, waking to hike in the dawn light around Tubbs Hill.

Below, the lights of the Coeur d’Alene Resort shone on the docks and boardwalks and boats and boat launch. I saw two statues at the edge of McUen Park that celebrate the miners, construction laborers, and farmers of the past. There are so many named and unnamed, known and unknown, whom we could honor through statuary and story and dance and song. Who are they?

I tried not to bother a man sleeping beneath a green tarp on the sidewalk near the boat ramp. I looked across the lake. I thought of all the people that make up everywhere or anywhere. Their personal histories. Our shared geographies.

In that morning’s quiet, and in this one’s, I get an inkling of the currents that flow around us and connect us, the ones we do and do not see. The conversations we hear. The ones we don’t. And I feel the gaps both marked and subtle too.

In the day-to-day, in the mad tumble of competing demands, the mayhem and cacophony, our increasingly fragmented and liquid culture, I find it both necessary and luxurious to slow. There is much in the world that is “vulgar.” I am too. Angry at times. Frustrated and baffled by my own and others’ apathy and disconnectedness. By recalcitrance and disjointed contexts. But slowing, in that transition from night to day, there is tolerance, and more. There’s the gift of another day. To drive the pre-dawn road. To hear the music. To listen to it. Ambient rhythms and arpeggios. Golden light between the high cloud cover and the grey lake, blue and white mountains in between.

These are older contexts–rhythms of storm and current and tide. Wave frequencies. Harmonies. Disharmonies. Music and winter. Ice. Freeze and thaw. Gravity and fire. Exposure. Wind. These soften and erode and destroy our arrogances and ignorances. I look across the mountain peaks and contemplate the massive lobes of ice that once filled these valleys. Ice extended from far, far to the north.

What did dawn look like above those glaciers? How did the light play on the surfaces of those ancient, fractured, frozen rivers, flowing eventually to the grey-green ocean? How did solar eclipses shadow the crevasses and nunataks? And what echoes, what seismic tremors, what hints remain for us to brush against or register, on this, and/or any other morning?

Delaware. Vermont Studio Center. James and the Giant Peach.

We just crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge from New Jersey into Delaware. From the bridge’s elevation, I have views upstream, toward Wilmington, and downstream, toward the Atlantic. Traffic slows. Other passengers take advantage of the gorgeous July light to take photographs. On the Jersey bank, a complex of industry. What? I don’t know. White, grey, and blue buildings. Tower cranes. Repair projects. Pipes. A tugboat plows the brown river toward the bridge. The Delaware bank thick with reeds or cattails, some sort of marsh vegetation. Fuel tanks in the distance. Shipyards or docks. The equipment or apparatus, the machinery, that loads and unloads ships.

My mind flashes back to a childhood next to the South China Sea. I remember oil tankers. Ships bound to and from Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, and more. I remember standing at Likas Bay, looking to the sea. Or Tanjung Aru. Or Karambunai Beach. Pulau Sapi. Pulau Manukan. And I remember, the other direction, Mt. Kinabalu rising into the clouds for over 4,000 meters.

Now, I search Maps for the Delaware Memorial Bridge. That’s Rittenhouse Industrial Park in the nearground, past a rust colored mud bank and some several hundred acres of impossible green. That’s Deepwater Canal. Cherry Island Pond. Whooping John Creek. What are all those buildings? Rail lines? Who lives in that neighborhood near Lambson Ln, Delaware side? That farm off Shell Rd, U.S. Highway 130, Jersey side?

Look left. The steel cables and structures of the bridge frame the view. Marvel at the massive bolts. The heft. The diameter of the cables suspending us. At the engineering. Try to imagine the people who built this bridge. Try to picture their lives.

I had this thought in the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, staring at the ceiling, at the pipes and electrical systems, all the construction, all the infrastructure: someone built this. Someone labored here. Many people. And they maintain. The checking for wear. The replacement of parts. The grid that is the city, visible, invisible, was made by human minds. Human hands.

I think of the flow of history and consider how briefly we’ve been crossing this bridge in 54 passenger buses. How temporal our toll booths and cities and industries are. What did this river look like a hundred years ago? Two hundred? Five hundred? A millennia? Beyond? And it’s the same in the river valley where I live in Idaho. Ancient currents and recent trends.

We slide by in our vehicles, intent on destinations. Or just passing the time. Distracted. Where are we heading? What are leaving behind? How accustomed are we to running? To forgetting and overlooking the imaginative ventures, the creative minds, the multiplied effort, the work of all of this—soaring cloverleaf, hulking industrial complex, tiled tunnel, gleaming tower? To forgetting and overlooking all of this in the context of natural history? Water cycle. Germination. Freeze. Thaw. To forgetting and overlooking and neglecting and ignoring and shutting out the stories all around us? The personal histories? How accustomed are we to failing to listen?

Our bus dives into another tunnel. “Welcome to Maryland.”

We’re in our own worlds, nearing our destinations. On the left, a building of The Baltimore Sun. A passenger ship. Cruise Maryland. In the distance, some sort of ship of commerce. I don’t have time to snap a photo. The Gould Street Power Plant. On the right, M & T Bank Stadium.

We still have some miles to go. There’s still some time for this road’s reflections. To see. To write. To hear. To consider. Consider the Journey. Consider the stories.

I look at the diverse range of humanity around me on this bus. A little boy chatters to his father in the seat behind me in a language I don’t know. He sings. His mother enjoys a few moments of quiet. A family traveling from somewhere to somewhere.

It won’t be long before we are at Union Station. Washington, D.C. The nation’s capital city. The Capitol. A center of power to some. A place of history and museums and monuments to others. A “swamp” to some. A cesspool. To some, a place to “be drained.” Home to others. A place of mythic power. Another place simply to exist. It’s the same everywhere, even as it’s not. We live out our lives amid the political and cultural and social and economic and biological and historical forces.

I remember feeling the city’s contrasts and currents when I was here in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We came here for the World Tuberous Sclerosis Conference in 2014. And last year I was so happy to be here, to visit a friend I had not seen in a long, long time. So happy to make new friends. To attend the Asian American Literature Festival. To listen to the music. The poetry. The Warehouse Descendants at the Seven Corners Pub. Poetry Slam and Literaoke in the Dupont Underground. Gowri Koneswaran. Ed Lin. Andrew Lam. Louis Tan Vitale.

I think of all the stories and music behind each face. Our collective and disparate geographies. What we choose to tell and reveal. What we obscure and how we mythologize. I think of friends and acquaintances battling cancer. Working through aging. Recovering from the death of a former student. A death by suicide. Of other losses. Friends working through the questions and doubts of parenting. Job changes. Opportunities. Lay offs. Insomnia.

I think of how listening to others and playing a little music at places like the open mic at Moogs Place can open conversations. How riding a ferry across a lake in Canada brings a few minutes of joy. How a day of alpine rock climbing restores perspective.

Last week I visited the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. I was there for a poetry reading given by visiting writer Ocean Vuong. I was a few minutes early. Parked on the street. Walked up the steps of the Lowe Lecture Hall. The door was locked. I headed back toward my borrowed vehicle to escape the rain. A woman called to me from the sidewalk, “Are you here for the reading?” That moment’s pause introduced me to Ashley, and then George, who was also early, and then conversations about art, music, radio, and the ephemeral nature of media. We talked about photographs and records and slides, ways of recording the world, and which we misplace and lose. Libraries.

In the quiet space, Ocean read a few poems from Night Sky With Exit Wounds as well as some of his newer work. This, from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”:

“Don’t be afraid, the gunfire / is only the sound of people / trying to live a little longer / & failing. Ocean. Ocean— / get up. The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed. & remember, / loneliness is still time spent / with the world.”

And after the reading, we shared tiny fragments of our stories. A few common friends. A common birth land. Children of the Vietnamese Diaspora. Viet bodies inhabiting space in North America in 2018. The United States of America in 2018. An acknowledgement of the Work. Of our Practice. Of Teaching. Of Writing. Of Hybridity. Of Trying. Of Inhabiting No-Where. Of how we are Survivors. We are a people who are learning to survive. We find each other. We are learning to find each other.

There’s more to say of about all of this. Yesterday on Amtrak–meeting Willie and Patty. Jack. Molly. Feeling the interconnectedness of our paths. Vermont. Idaho. Wyoming. Libraries. Indigenous culture. The Chăm. Adoption. Towers by the Sea. And then, last night I watched my nephew perform in the musical James and the Giant Peach at the beautiful Northern Stage in White River Junction, Vermont. I had been wait listed and was happy just to get in, even more so to have a seat right on the floor next to the stage. Immersive Art. At one point the shark puppets and the actors holding them swooped by, and I felt the wind from them.

After the show, I climbed up the steps into the upper seats and took a photo of the last scene’s set. It’s just a snapshot, but I love it. The feel of the dark theater and the glowing stage, the glowing set, the Peach. It’s how I felt—about stories (how even this bus I am riding in is named after the favorite children’s book of the founder), and music, and connection, and distance, and how we set out on journeys, adrift in the ocean, on the Journey.

And we look for each other.

We look for each other.

What will we find next?

Boston South Station. Quinebaug River. Sumac. Thruway.

I am listening to “Aurora Borealis” by John H. Clarke, riding the Peter Pan Express 1113 from Boston to New York and transferring to Washington, D.C. It’s Sunday morning, and as I listen to how Clarke interprets the Northern Lights as notes and chords, rhythms played on a nylon string guitar, I watch the forests and cities slide by. I am not far from Charlton. I-84 has just begun. A cell tower points to the sky; we cross the Quinebaug River. Thickets of hardwoods and Eastern White Pine dominate the roadside, punctuated by blue, green, white, and yellow highway signs. “Sturbridge.” “Weigh Station 1 Mile.” “Holland MA.” “Union CT.” “Out of State Firewood Restricted Permit Required.”

This is Unknown geography. Unknown Geology. Each rock cut reveals the underlayment. Strata. Rocks now tawny and copper colored. A few miles ago grey streaked with white, or white streaked with grey. I see a marsh. A little later, a lake. I look horizontally through the canopy of trees. I think of all this greenery, this verdure. I have traveled to the eastern U.S. a few times in the last few years, but after inhabiting the West for a couple of decades, this deciduous world overwhelms me–a profusion of leaves!

A short section of graffitied concrete wall peeks out from a sumac thicket. We shift to the HOV lane. The interstate is relatively uncrowded, and this 8:00 A.M. bus is basically unoccupied. Five or six of us in transit between these cities at this time–early Sunday morning.

Overpass overhead. Dunkin’ Donuts. Holiday Inn Express. South Windsor. Manchester. The names recall England. Red, white, and blue birdhouses dot a wooden wall. I feel the signs and emblems and markings of our human passage. A turnpike sign. A tire store. The JCPenney Logistics Center. Still, underneath it all lies an ancient geology. Through it flows a beleagured river. Several. Above it, a patterned sky. A vine, a twisted trunk, a species of tree that I recognize but do not remember. Trees and trees over miles and miles. Millions and millions of trees. Compete with our interlacing and merging lanes, our terminable and interminable walls, our human edifices, our storage units, our capitals and capitols, our universities. Longhorn Steakhouse. Shop Rite. Walmart. Home Depot. Compete with Exit 23. Hartford Technologies. Dollar Tree.

I see a sign for Dinosaur State Park. Another wonder on this Highway Of Wonders.

And I think of all the nuances and details and shades of stories and people and places and nature and art and spirit. The interlacings and interweavings. Roots. Branches. Fruits. Seeds. Drupes. Rhizomes. Panicles. Flowers.

I think of the layers of complication and beauty and pain and loss and rejection and frustration that are as ubiquitous as the leaves on the forest floor. Of loneliness and laughter and poetry and war and family. Of sadness and guilt and singing and dancing. Of silence and hesitation. Of doors and stages and microphones. Glaciers, split granite, columnar basalt, sea stacks. Tarns and talus. Language. Disease. Of what we can and cannot heal and do and cure and conquer and save and redeem. Of journeys and habitation. Of all this: all this Living.

And I wonder: what will be next?

Carolina, or Anywhere, In My Mind, Part One.

In the summer of 1992 I rode the Greyhound bus from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a distance of about 2,500 miles. I don’t think it’s even something you can do anymore, because I recently looked into catching the Greyhound in Coeur d’Alene with no luck.

That must have been powerful Journey to me, because I still have vivid memories a couple of decades later. Art of Seeing. Noticing. Texture. Dimension. Stories. Susan Zwinger and Diane Ackerman and Rebecca Solnit sort of stuff.

I had a grey cotton knapsack in those days, a bag I had owned in Sabah, Malaysia when I was a kid. I remember it having a drawstring top and uncomfortable shoulder straps. It wasn’t made for walking or hiking, but it worked fine for riding the old grey dog. I had that and a jean jacket and a mini duffle with my hammock and some clothes for a couple of weeks in Idaho. My grandfather had passed away a few weeks before, and I was traveling. Traveling for loss. Traveling for love. Traveling to let the miles and stories and musics and silences of Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho work things out.

I had a no-name cassette player with auto-reverse then, a luxury that my older and broken Sony Walkman didn’t have. I missed the Sony’s sleek aluminum aesthetic, but it didn’t work, so I had the bulky player from K-Mart or Roses. In the end, there is a pragmatism, yes? Okay. I had a handful of cassettes for the 75-hour ride–Enya’s Shepherd Moons, Roxette’s Look Sharp!, A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low, and Nanci Griffith’s Late Night Grande Hotel, among a few others. James Taylor’s Greatest Hits, which bothered one of my friends. He disdains the “Greatest Hits” motif. These are dim memories, dim issues, as we now employ Spotify and Pandora and Apple Music. (I am so “old school” with a couple of mp3 players and an iPod!)

I remember a man on the bus, a stubbled man in denim who was leaving Jacksonsville, North Carolina. He was heading for Livingston, Montana. A buddy’s couch (before “couch surfing” was hip). His last few bucks. A second or third or fourth chance at something, right? Some work. The Crazy Mountains. The Absarokas. The Big Sky. These were resonances for me then, and they are now. And this man–his story and journey and music–he and I are still connected today.

Yesterday morning, on the way to the 24th Street and Mission BART station here in San Francisco, I stopped for a cappuccino and raspberry tart at a bustling Italian bakery on Mission, a place of contradictions and tensions and texture–gentrification, hipster locations, a cultural center, El Salvadoran street food, taquerias, etc., etc. America–maybe the World?–compressed into a few neighborhoods. The ice cream. The coffee. The produce on the streets. Cesar Chavez. Murals. Music.

As I headed for the stairwell of the BART station I remembered that there was no food or drink allowed on the train. I paused to eat. To drink. To watch the sun rise above all of these human currents, the conflict and community. And music floated up from below. Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” recorded in 1971 by King and also by James Taylor. I am more familiar with Taylor’s version, and I heard echoes of it in the music rising above the tiles and escalators of the BART. A voice tinged with morning melancholy and happiness.

I thought of Stories and Music–their connective, associative, evocative power. And there’s more to say here, more to write, about the man in the BART station with the Spanish guitar. About how he was surprised that his voice carried to the space above. About long hair. About how it was just that sort of day. About music on Fisherman’s Wharf. About Art. About structure and focus. And galleries and writing. And coffee and beets and sandwiches and chocolate and parks and granite and grocery marts and tofu and skeletons. About generative conversations. About beginning, middle, and end. About how we revise, re-vision.

But for now, there’s just this: in that moment, standing in the morning’s light, I heard music–The Music–and I recalled how the man on the bus asked me if he could listen to the James Taylor song “Carolina In My Mind.” And as he slipped the cheap headphones over his head and ears, and the sounds were unfaithfully reproduced in low-fi, and as he pressed the rewind button again and again, listening to that song again and again–before you could put a song on “repeat,” set it as the single soundtrack, a single track of emotion and homesickness and longing–as all of this unfolded there on the bus, somewhere in the expanses of eastern Montana, somewhere in all of that, somewhere at the corner of 24th and Mission, at Fisherman’s Wharf, at the Pearl Theater in Bonners Ferry, at the Crosstime Saloon, in a million other places . . . I know that the Music connects us. I want to hear it. I want to play it. To sing it. To listen.

Caldera

I remember first encountering the word caldera in seventh grade science class. We were studying volcanoes and tectonic plates. We lived in the Philippines. It was relevant and local. Then, the “Project Work” entailed buying potassium permanganate at the National Bookstore in Manila to replicate the lava and the eruption. It meant playing with this strange fire. It involved mixing plaster, and crafting the cone. It meant an explanatory poster of terms. It meant labels and process and summary. We may have learned the term “lahars” then, but I’m not sure. Sometime that term layered itself into my language, and about twenty years ago I thought of all this–of cinders and lava and magma and ash and pumice and plumes–standing on the summit of Mt. Rainier. Looking at Mt. Adams. Glacier-covered volcanoes emblems of the Pacific Northwest, but so much more ancient. Cascadia. And Beyond. Myth Time.

The seventh grade project was more than just the textbook and 3-D model building. It comprised one component of a lengthy unit that was linked to an outdoor education week that included camping on Taal Volcano and Taal Lake. We hiked lava floes, traversed the volcanic peaks, and studied the constellations. These were tangible, meaningful, indelible experiences. The terms that we name, the concepts, are meant to come to life. What does it mean to move beyond the glossary, to be moved by the immensity of the peaks above and below? What happens when we encounter the raw, elemental power of geologic forces and geologic time?

These fragments come to mind when I see the sign “Caldera” above a walking tunnel near the base of Red Mountain Resort in Canada. I am on a morning walk. The transition from pre-dawn dark to wan, pastel light illuminates the sign, an advertisement for a housing development. I am listening to Re:sound #246 The Mirrored Show, about mirrors, reflections, and our imagined and re-imagined selves. About fears and ironies and social norms. Thoughts (dis)appear. Impressions linger. The fog rises from the Columbia River, from Trail and Rossland, B.C., from the valley below. Light arrives, not by increments or sudden illuminating beam, but like water spreading on the surface of ice, or frost across glass, a thing that grows.

Now, several days later, with school/work/busyness/routine/recreation in the interim, all the multifaceted distraction that life can constitute, I struggle to recall everything that word–Caldera–conjured up during that morning’s walk. Thoughts and feelings. Memories and questions. Ruminations. Geologies. Geographies. Simmerings. Ironies. Juxtapositions. Imaginations.

Something in the delicate frost; something in the thin, pale light; something in the name of the path–The Centennial Trail; something in the encounter with the older gentleman and his dog (a moment’s conversation, the giving and receiving of directions, a touch of wet muzzle to the hand); something in the industrial clank of the Red Chair lift; something in the rise and bend of the road, an awareness of topography and rock cuts and veins of ore, of shafts of mine below the surface, obscured now by lodges and condominiums and rental cabins; something in the forest; something in the snow, that fragile, temporal, seasonal skin–something in all of this whispers of mountains, rivers, and seas. Of The Mountain. The Tower. The River. The Sea.

The day before: I am riding the chairlift through the fog. Our ascent takes us toward the light, toward the sun. A hundred meters or so below the summit of Red Mountain we break out of what a ski patroller tells me they call the Kootenay Sea. It’s a temperature inversion akin to what we experience regularly in the Kootenai Valley of Boundary County and above Lake Pend Oreille at Schweitzer. It’s at once familiar and fresh. The shift from feeling trapped beneath the mass of grey. The emergence into blue sky and white snow. The brilliance of Winter Sun. I’ve ridden lifts into it many times. And more, I’ve had the privilege to make the slow human-powered climb too. The slide of skis forward through the snow. The squeak of it. The pressured heel. Ski touring upward, upward. Solo, or quietly, with a few friends.

I look at the distant peaks across the Kootenay Sea. Somewhere out there is Mt. Gimli and its striking arête. Gimli of the Valhalla Range, a place explored in person and in writing/reflection a few years ago (Labyrinths). Somewhere among the mountains to the north are the glaciers and moraines that have played significant roles in shaping my perspectives and consciousness.

I have been working in earnest on a project (sometimes called “The Project” or “Project Work”) now for several months. In reality, it’s something that has been developing, been growing, for years. Perhaps my whole life. (Where does one project end–one essay or class or reading or poem or climb or journey or story–and another begin?)

Specifically, I have two upcoming important dates and deadlines. One is a hybridity project/presentation at a local arts venue. One is a discussion panel at a scholarly conference. I am looking forward to both but am also feeling the pressure and focus of their imminence. I’m thrilled by the interconnectedness of it all, of all our various creative ventures, our Project Work, of community, even as the work feels discontinuous–fragments and images and questions blowing around like so much spindrift. This is (in)coherence and (abs)traction. A thing that acts as a bridge and which sinks out of sight into the dark of a cold green river.

This is life, here in this valley, this caldera of sorts. A void. A displacement. A place of imagination and conjuring and fleeting and passing and revelation and disappearing. The Kootenay Sea. The riverside smelter. The mine’s tailing. The muscular river. Here, I am surfacing. Submerged. Immersed. Illuminated. Floating above. Floundering below. Hunched. Huddling. Sailing. Sliding. Singing. Climbing above to survey distant ranges. Towers rising above the Inversion. Ringing the ancient Caldera. Towers surrounding the Sea.

Kodaslide

More to come later on the Kodaslide Pocket Viewer.

For now, there’s this:

http://maryoron.ecrater.com/p/17001560/vintage-kodak-kodaslide-pocket-viewer-for

Something to think about.

Leprosarium, Part Two

Near the Happy Haven Leprosarium

I have been looking through my mom’s slides. I could load them up in the Rollei carousel or in the Sears ______________ projector, but instead I’ve been using the Kodaslide Pocket Viewer. It’s convenient and easy, and if I break it, I can order a vintage one from eBay for about $8.

There’s something mysterious too, about imagining my mom behind the lens, so to speak, looking through a tiny viewfinder, seeing something similar. Taking a photograph. Shaping a story. A small representation of a person. We are ever representing and misrepresenting, yes? Interpreting and misinterpreting. Who was she, my mom, as she wandered Vietnam? I know and I don’t know. I appreciate and underrate. I question and discover.

A gathering on a distant shore. Leprosarium.

People. Persons. The Afflicted.
Awaiting the Medicines. Awaiting the Hope. The Touch.
Of the Healers. Benefactors. Nurses.
Saviors.

I think of Rudyard Kipling and White Man’s Burden. Of White Man’s Burden. All this history. All this that we write and re-write.

Who is behind the viewfinder? Who is in the view?

I read this article a few months ago. You might read it and think of storytelling. Think of media and images and the making of memory. You might read the comments. Sort through the thoughts and questions and debates. What do we see? What do we remember? And how? What views and perspectives might others hold? What stories do we need? What histories should be told?

Lens Magazine Article: How Soldiers Saw Life in Wartime Vietnam

Comments on the article: Comments

8/15

You showed me once,

One humid Borneo night,

The blood stains in your worn

New Testament.

No sweet Jesus’s sweat at

Golgotha’s premonition.

Your index finger sawed to gleaming.

Bone.

The knife you used to slice mangoes.

Quarter the morning papaya.

Your face,

Mangosteen purple,

Mottled mosaic of

Capillary explosion.

Grim Haematoma.

I remember, now, that’s when

I learned the Greek and Latin

Precision of that word.

You clutched, then, in the noonday 

Heat

The steel –stainless–of that blade.

Grasping in those seconds–milliseconds–

The weapon stabbing, stabbing

Now for for your breast, your lungs, your heart.

You parried the offensive with your own warm blood and

Your insistent, desperate, truncated

Prayers.

As I picked guavas in seven-hundred-mile-distant

Valley Verde,

Your assailant sped

Along Likas Bay,

Rifling through your handbag

With blood-spattered, bruising, marauding hands.

You rose, heart pounding,

From your spattered bedspread.

Shocked by the moment’s nearness.

By the suddenness.

By the uncanniness.

By the thickness.

Of Fear.

Occupation

Lines 4 and 8–13, 18, 22–ask for Nghề,

Occupation.

What do we do from wake to sleep?
What Empires rule our time and times?
What’s our daily métier–vocation, profession, work, or craft?

What stories lie behind,
Behind our answers on the lines?

Perhaps we heal with hands, words, medicines, wines,
Nurses, farmers, sommeliers.
We are Poets. We are Mothers.
We are Swimmers. We are Ghosts.
We are carriers, porters.
We bear our fragments. Our pieces.
Our remembrances.
We treasure them as sourdough starters in glass jars,
Carried across the chop of the Gulf of Alaska.

We reclaim parts of piers,
Chisel instruments as art,
The curve of note, vibrating string,
Blues and jams and tunes arising from cast-off and refuse and offal.
Salvage Yard.
Luthiers. Woodworkers. Carpenters.
Furniture and cabinet makers.
We practice re-creation.

She makes a meal, her first, standing atop a stool,
Cast iron skillet heavy as the past,
Shipped across the oceans,
Memories afloat, adrift,
Revived, refreshed,
Passed like cards and letters,
Slides and stories, photographs,
The keeping of a music.
The keeping of a language.
The keeping of a history.
Her history.

He picks up a passenger, starts the meter.
Taxi driver. Husband. Father.
Toyota Corolla.
Eight-hour drive. His occupation. Profession.
Another day. Another life.
Muted.
Truncated.
Death by drone.
On the road to Cuetta.

Remember. Disremember.
What? Where? Whom? Why?
Nothing Ever Dies.
Nothing Ever Dies.

Nothing Ever Dies.

The Named and the Nameless,
On Memorial Walls and Monuments,
In Forgotten Graves and Hospitals,
In Cemeteries and Cenotaphs.

Dug into the Soil,
Dug into the Mall,
Scattered among the coral bits on islands in the sea,
Whispered above the current in a grotto below the falls,
Alive in Imagination.
Alive in Memory.

Occupation: Filmmaker
Occupation: Photographer
Occupation: Journalist
Occupation: Storyteller
Occupation: Street Vendor
Occupation: Musician
Occupation: Artist
Occupation: Nông
Occupation: Quân Nhân
Occupation: ___________________

Occupation: Occupation

How do we Occupy the Time?
Occupy This . . .
This–and Other–
Space?
What answers go upon/behind
The Line?

Unknown: Citizen
Unknown: Story
Unknown: Name

Unnamed: Erased

Abandonment, Anchorites, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Early Morning Sun on Mt. Bonney, Selkirk Mountains, British Columbia.  This photograph was taken from the Sir Donald-Uto Col.  Sir Donald’s NW Arête casts a shadow on the far ridge.

The image that comes to mind is the mass of nylon slings and cord that adorned the rock on Mt. Sir Donald’s NW Arête, one of the Fifty Classic Climbs of North America.  We encountered this rappel station a few hundred feet above the Sir Donald-Uto Col, at which point we would leave the exposure of the ridge and be back on walking terrain, skipping across the talus and scree, heading back to the Illecillewaet trailhead, the Toyota, and the drive home.  How that rappel turned out for Luke, Mike, and me is another story for another day.  For now, I’m thinking of the rap slings–a tangled mess of faded, U.V. weakened trash.  We easily sliced the worst offenders, packed them out with us, added our own new sling to the strongest-looking loops, and dropped off into space.

1″ tubular webbing has a breaking strength somewhere above 4,000 pounds (anchors), and 7mm cord, commonly used in cordelettes and alpine rap anchors, is somewhere around 2,900 pounds (cordelettes).  All this strength diminishes in the elements, in exposure to weather and sun.  And perhaps that’s why I’m thinking about that anchor right now.  How often do we think of Time as the healer, the mender, forgetting that it is a destroyer too, that the Sun’s ultraviolet light slowly degrades our anchors, leaving us vulnerable to gravity’s plummet?  How readily do we mistake strength?  How easily are we misled by appearances?

I’m up against all of this today, as I’m listening to Segovia and thinking of birthdays and Christmas and gifts and gains and losses and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  I was up against it yesterday on a most beautiful Christmas Eve powder day at Schweitzer Mountain Resort.  The snow kept falling, and it was glorious, sliding through the light, cold smoke with family and friends.  Ironic too.  A gift juxtaposed with bitterness.  Beauty and poverty.  Replenishment.  Extinction.  Spirit.  Nature.  Humanity.  War.  Revolution.  Power.  Fear.  Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Peace.  Disillusionment.  Moonlight.  Silence.  Love.

There’s so much being said about The Force Awakens right now–so much about nostalgia, art, female protagonists, George Lucas, Disney, money, et cetera.  All of that is interesting to me, academically speaking, socially speaking, but it’s not my deepest impression.  Instead, I’m thinking about three brief scenes.  (Spoiler Alert!?)

Say what you want about anything else, Rey and Finn get this right.  With a moment’s exchange of dialogue, with a flash of facial expression, they express the longing, regret, loss, and restless hope of the abandoned.  And they recognize it in each other–the running, rage, resolve, and acceptance.  One truth I’m discovering: adoptees find each other.

What redeems Finn from his lie, his posturing as a member of the Resistance?  His admission that he doesn’t know his parents.  That he was abducted by the First Order, a reincarnation of Empire.  What forces Rey’s hand, sending her on the run?  The moment when Maz acknowledges, dislodges really, that deep-set anxiety, that she can wait in the junkyards of Jakku forever.  Whoever left her there is not coming back.  The past is obscured in shadow and mystery.  It’s an enigma.  It’s an iteration of the “Ghost Kingdom,” as Betty Jean Lifton terms it.

And I get it.  There’s Art for you.  Actors conveying in a glance the feelings of the foundling.  Rey’s grudging acceptance that the road ahead is all there is.  Our realization of how much the past propels us through the present and into the future.

Perhaps these are universal questions manifested differently for all of us, adopted or not.  Perhaps I happened to be in the theater on just the right day.  But yesterday, as the smiles and happiness and plastic and holiday of strangers unfolded around me, I wanted to slide into the quietness of the forest. I missed my mom, and others.  I sought, in mind if not in body, the hermitage of the anchorite or Jedi Knight, a snow-bound glade or sea-bound promontory.  A mountain, or desert, or island.  I wanted a bivouac on a high, rocky ridge. Somewhere to stand and wait.  For what, I’m not sure.  Luke Skywalker was an adoptee too.

In movies, in Art, in the so-called Real Life, the voices of the Ghost Kingdom whisper (alongside the happy chatter that I also fully embrace, alongside family, alongside gifts and toys, alongside friendship, alongside holiday festivity).  The voices disquiet, disturbing Empires, assumptions, and hegemonies.  They spur reflection,   storyhearing, and storytelling, an abseil off into the unknown.