America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly - Susan Sontag
I don't know what glitch in the phone made this photograph happen as it did.
But this message of identification with other Americans is foreign to our temperament now.
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly - Susan Sontag I don't know what glitch in the phone made this photograph happen as it did. Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
In Plato's Cave, Susan Sontag Starlings turned a page of the sky.
At The Gate Of All Wonder, Kevin McIlvoy *This is my last post for this project, which has been to interact deeply with Kevin McIlvoy's soul-sounding novel. The project was a joy for me, the way walking into the woods with a trusted friend is. I'm grateful for Mc's writing, and to Mc for allowing this project to happen. And if I will not imagine what I hear but will actually hear, then what comes to me are broom-sweep sounds, the wings of the nuthatches, the thrushes, bluebirds, purple finches, sparrows flying through and impossibly, impossibly, audibly plucking but not breaking the acrobat-threads of balloon spiders riding the wind, letting the threads go, extending their legs before parachuting on the air currents, and re-launching.
At the Gate of All Wonder, Kevin McIlvoy We both made the effort to hear what she heard. Something below her: skunks and rabbits moving cautiously, grubbing and chewing but twitching from fearful alertness; grasshoppers sawing at themselves, hitting more flats than sharps, and all at once going off like mines. Something beyond her and well beyond us: the woofings of a bear and of bear cubs; the hundred servile creatures giving specific, encoded sonic responses for the sake of discriminate warnings of their territories. Something all around: the throngs of terrestrial and aquatic insects attuned to the encasings they had worn, to the flowing water currents spitting them up into the reaching air that dried their new and already dying skin. When we humans have lost the last notes of this earth's singing, we will have lost all evidence of it in each other's voices. Only human saying will be possible, only human noise will exist. When nature is gone from human nature, everything sacred our hearing once experienced will be replaced by maddening deafness.
At The Gate Of All Wonder, Kevin McIlvoy |
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