Chronicles

Listening to Eric Clapton's stunning Chronicles, I realize what a great title this would be for a philosophic-al book. The title itself would solicit a hybrid form of writing - between philosophy and literature. Examples: Calvino, Borges, but also essayists like Montaigne. These would be aporetic performances of quizzical temporality.

"Why I stay in the provinces"

This is the title of an essay by Heidegger, declining the call to Berlin. Rural life at least here in TN is a strange mix. For families who have roots here, the past meant poverty, hunger, uncertain times. Despite Heidegger's promotion of peasant life, it cannot always have been possible to delight in the world they inhabited with disease, infant mortality, and hunger around the corner. But imagine that life without the anxiety! I'm getting closer.

Cabin Fever, Restablizing Horses

Today Randall started leveling the site for the new stables. Giant grey rocks sleep beneath the turf and are disturbed after thousands of years by the Giant Clunking BullDozer Machine. Later he will level a site for Cabin II in the top field, which will be wholly self-contained. Solar plus. Rohan sent this pinhole picture of me next to Cabin I.

Peripatetic Sunday

Going walkabout it is tempting to follow habit and walk accustomed paths. Today I broke with tradition and returned to some old ways. Up to the spring, where the pipe needs mending. Now the electrical connection to the pump needs attention. And the lid, which has rusted through. Lots of downed branches from storms etc. The impulse to tidy is real, if only to bring out lines. Is the picturesque a bad thing? I imagine a series of red painted installations to complement various mossy sites and their velvet green, especially damp 'waterfalls'. Need work parties to clear broken wood etc., and more benches to punctuate walks; benches could host sentences! (See Word Farm). (The Word Farm project could start on Vanderbilt's campus as a temporary exhibition.) YB the Gesamtkunstwerk needs some attention. The Airstream needs moving. Need to construct a focal end to L'Avenue de L'Avenir. The Lookout Hill site needs a small shelter - perhaps a good place for the rotating hut - using a truck axle/wheel, because of the changing wind direction. Then there is the red bridge on the right going up the hill from the house ... I was reading Gary Snyder yesterday, some essays from Back on the Fire (?). He spoke of the need for (in poetry and in life?) this and that, AND wit. Perhaps wit opens up a broader category I do care about - by which e.g. the picturesque could be interrupted. Bridges that lead nowhere? Unfinished sentences? New ruins (playing with Clough Williams-Ellis), architect of Portmeirion, who also built ruins in fields, gates to nothing. This is another kind of dynamism to that wrought by participatory activity, inviting people to engage, interact with an installation. Building in wit, or incompleteness allows the object to begin that movement itself, frustrating expectations etc. But then there are delightful and merely annoying forms of frustration. CWE was an interesting guy, wrote for the National Trust, lamented the loss of a former age, probably a Conservative in many senses: he wrote "I think that Beauty, The Strange Necessity - as Rebecca West once called it - is something that matters profoundly to humanity, and that unless the race of man perishes from the earth, it will increasingly value that Grace, will seek it, and will ultimately attain it." Perhaps we need the picturesque as a lure to what will enjoyably confound it. What if the Greek temple (not) at the end of the Avenue were a two dimensional facade? Can I use mirrors in the landscape? But perhaps all this talk of interruption is premature. First one needs to master, somewhat, the classical rules of form etc. This seems especially true of landscape.

A new ART PROJECT:: Wordscape (see YB webpage)

Poetic PereGRINation

Words in landscape.
Not signs, just words.
Like flowers or leaves.
Strung,
stuck on sticks,
strewn across the turf,
sprouting from the ground.
English words
Spanish words,
French words,
German words,
Indian words
words from imaginary Borgesian languages,
words that might have delighted Joyce or Lear.

A cornucopia of word-smithery.
Word-birds that alight on your shoulder.

Slow down for a word
set under an Osage Orange tree*
Let images gather.

Wander freely
from word to word
with no map.
A poem may happen.

Plant a word.
Plough the Word Farm.
Walk the Woodbury Wordscape.

___________

* Aka
Horse apple,
Hedge apple,
Hedge Ball,
Bois D'Arc
Bodark,
Bodock
Osage Apple,
Mock Orange
Yellow Wood,
Palo de Arco, Ayac [Indian],
Maclura pomifera [Latin])

Soft Time:Heliotrope III

We installed this piece at the Arts Center of Cannon County just last week. Lots of people have seen and like it and Evan and Donald are printing up some flyers. It will give me some sort of art presence in the community, which will be fun.

New Year, New Goats, Dog News

On January 1st, two new goats arrived. In the snow. Bad timing? They shivered, they were licked, they were left, they suckled. So far they have survived. The coyotes are reported to be having pups. How are they to be fed?
Wonderful Zip disappeared a couple of weeks ago. My heart fell. I cannot seem to keep a dog. The food was left uneaten. But a few days later he reappeared with another dog. It felt like a Chinese 'good luck' story, in which every event changes its valency with the subsequent event. I assumed he had been sowing his wild oats. His new friend was him/herself the product of some wild oating - mostly Great Pyrenees but some St Bernard, or something else in his bigger head. They seemed good friends - but were they boy and girl - it wasn't clear. But the new dog seemed perfectly happy barking at me (nicely) with the goats behind him, defending them alongside Zip. These two dogs, however, are sometimes there, sometimes not. But the new dog is making Zip a little less stand-offish.
Today I went to see Bob and Carol, to give them their New Year's banana bread. It turns out that my new dog is their Rex, that Rex has been 'breeding' Zip, (that Zip is a girl), and that the two of them are being fed at many of the places on their daily round, including Estelle Reed's where there are two more dogs. And that Zip kills ducks. My picture of my severe Kantian duty-bound Zip is well and truly shattered. Actually she is a party girl who likes life on the town, and does goat-protection as image-enhancing charity work. Still I love her.