A strange kind of curiosity: what will i do next?

"...we don't perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We believe in God because we perform religious rituals." --Robert Pirsig, Lila (1991)

   "Totem

Mole my totem
mound builder
maze maker
tooth at the root

shaper of darkness
into ways and hollows

in grave alive
heavy handed
light blinded"

--Ursula LeGuin
[Gerald Burns's, also]

"Increasingly incandescent above the corn silk" --Charles Wright

News story about a family that was in San Francisco for the earthquake, in the Phillippines for the volcano, & in Florida for the hurricane.

"Molten pool, incandescent spilth of
deep cauldrons--and brighter nothing is--
cast and cold, your blazes extinct and
no turmoil nor peril left you,
rusty ingot, bleak paralysed blob!"

--Basil Bunting, First Book of Odes, 16.

...The Unicorn's Secret--perhaps the definitive book on the Sixties.

Still feeling alienated toward artmaking. I realized i preferred the purity of discarded objects to anything that can be made with them. Found myself wanting only to make practical objects, things i needed or needed to make (this does include magical implements & religious icons)--especially despising highly-crafted but meaningless artifacts that are nothing but end results of a career process. And i wondered how i ever could have had an "aesthetics".

"I come so to the more obscure aurora" --Rexroth

"...Presently the blind persistent moles
Crept sleek from the earth, black
In the moonlight, and devoured
The pastries lying on the ground." --ibid

   "Mantis

In South Africa, among
The Bushmen, the mantis is
A god. A predatory
And cannibalistic bug,
But one of the nicer gods."

--ibid

Left over, obsolete opinions: like old shoes you realize one day you don't wear anymore, though you can't remember wearing them for the last time...

"Silver melts to brass and brass to rain" --David Swartz

I said Russia is where America would be if we kept on voting Republican for 75 years... [1992]

I just finished a fascinating & important book Adam's Task by Vicki Hearne (1986)--ostensibly about communication with domesticated animals (mostly dogs & horses) but really addressing the fundamental nature of language. One of its contentions is that syntax is prior to naming; another (harder to summarize), that personhood is sacred & can be conferred--or destroyed...Rich with considered experience, meandering from paragraph to paragraph, & frequently indulging in obfuscatory neo-Heideggerian phraseology (the author, a poet herself, is married to a philosopher, alas), this needs to be read twice to be understood, but it's worth it.