Ice Jellyfish

I met this ice jellyfish on the last day of the year. Does a person meet a jellyfish? Like meeting up with  destiny or with a human body - a flowing, changeable thing in a temporarily solid state. Impermeable form the utter opposite of water: water frozen in a picture: water tensing every muscle: water doing winter yoga. In Finland, in summer, in sting, in cold forgetting.

Sweet Tumbling Dissonance

Ever hear a song that you must hear again? An a cappella group at my daughter's high school sang Paul Brandvik's arrangement of "In Dulci Jubilo" ("In Sweet Rejoicing") at their holiday concert. I know the tune well - "Good Christian Men Rejoice" - but have never heard it filled with such beguiling, pressing sounds. I could scry this song if I could see it. . .

 

Guidonian Hand

 

"I didn't write in order to escape. . . "

                                                   Photo by Sigi Zang
Leslie Feinberg
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For millenia, art rendered on every continent has explored themes that are described in today's English-language terms as same-sex love, transsexuality, intersexuality and gender variance—in narratives spoken, rhymed, signed, sung, chanted, acted, danced, smelted, sculpted, drawn, painted, carved, etched, cast and written. In the long, long history of our cooperative human past, story tellers/teachers/hirstorians played a social role, passing on communal knowledge harvested by group labor.

Today in the U.S., an English-language writing career is portrayed like the matchbook-cover offers of my girlhood for bright futures in drawing—the glittering promise of a lottery, a brass ring, fortune and fame, a ticket out. I didn't write in order to escape the working class. I write for those who have little time to read, for whom reading is difficult, and who don't expect to find themselves on pages. I write for those behind bars and barbed wire. For those fighting to narrate their own liberation.
 

- Leslie Feinberg, excerpt from Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award Acceptance Speech

"Bright Green Olivine"

These are grains of sand from a beach in Hawaii at 110x magnification. I find this hard to believe but want to, and now I long to see every plant, mineral, and household object - or sliver of it - under a microscope. There are small worlds inside of the large world, composing it, making it up.

Image and post title credit: Gary Greenberg (photos) and Lizzie Buchen (text), "Each Grain of Sand a Tiny Work of Art." Discover Magazine, 5/1/08.

page 427

 

James Baldwin

He heard the water running, and, beneath it, the sound of the rain. He ate a pork chop, greedily, with a piece of bread, and drank a glass of milk; for he was trembling, it had to be because of hunger. Otherwise, for the moment, he felt nothing. The coffee pot, now beginning to growl, was real, and the blue fire beneath it and the pork chops in the pan, and the milk which seemed to be turning sour in his belly. The coffee cups, as he thoughtfully washed them, were real, and water which ran into them, over his heavy, long hands. Sugar and milk were real, and he set them on the table, another reality, and cigarettes were real, and he lit one. Smoke poured from his nostrils and a detail that he needed for his novel, which he had been searching for for months, fell, neatly and vividly like the tumblers of a lock, into place in his mind. It seemed impossible that he should not have thought of it before: it illuminated, justified, clarified everything. He would work on it later tonight; he thought that perhaps he should make a note of it now; he started toward his work table.

- James Baldwin, Another Country - 

Image credit: Alan Warren, 1969

Pieces of Interstate Bridge

Aging human-built structures are reclaimed just like our bodies and fallen branches, though metal takes a while to go. Decay is strangely beautiful at the Interstate Bridge Fishing Pier in Duluth, Minnesota, as the saved part lasts and changes.