Analect 2.799x

25 October 2010. Difficulties and delights. Sunny morning after long day of rain. Yesterday’s dark dark afternoon—in the studio--working on small landscape with luminous trees, or was it luminous sky? Ochres, tans and off-shade whites. Cluster of paint specks becoming wind—or stars…

Today—international travels, time and space. A coffee bar in Buenos Aires, 1962. Café Brazil—a hole-in-the-wall, tucked into building façade with just enough space for one espresso machine and a small counter. Patrons stand to drink from tiny white demitasse cups—black brew, stirred sweet with equally small metal spoons. Overcoats in winter mist. No trace today, it seems--viewed from afar, at a distance of fifty years. World’s change…

So, you draw...

Analect 2.798x

21 October 2010. Pied-bill grebe, young, with fluffy feathers tucked in down at the water-line. Platten-feather back--dark and waxy--lagoon waters. The Chinese painters begin with the eye (this I read)--eons back, when the shape of the iris of the eye of a bird might contain an entire universe.

As with Ni Tsan, who gave up everything to the Mongol reign--books, music, family, friends--until he wandered, more or less alone, on the lakes and waterways of Kiangsu...

Analect 2.797x

20 October 2010. Gray morning. Gopher and vole...residents of the underground. Notes therefrom. As when Jack's head appeared suddenly from under the large white kraft-paper meditation chamber. Well, that's what he called it. Image of suburban living room, somewhere in the south bay, setting this up on the rug and crawling in. His mother's worried face--pulling the curtains... To maintain appearances...

But all of us, appearances, for short or for long. A volatile expanse of white foam core, dented and marred--puddle of india ink running this way and that, words (illegible at first) carved out along geometric lines. Anger at the universe becomes a form of liberation: I can do this.

Something positive in the act, regardless. A masked face, dark, sheathed in white. Leaves along delicate lines of feeling...

Grain...

Analect2.796x

19 October 2010. Riparian wanderings, the Consumnes Preserve. Willow and oak, high grass in late fall. Marsh wren, coot and grebe. Off Twin Cities Road, somewhere west of Galt. Mokelumne trail, near the railroad trestle--rusted iron again a backdrop of distant mountain snow. Calls of the Wrentit and Varied Thrush...

Eurasian Wigeon, Bewick's Swan...

Analect 2.795x

17 October 2010. The Great Heron and the shrike, with a walk-on appearance by James Curlew, of English descent...something about the small head, quite round, and long curve of beak... Numeneus arquata--the Eurasian variety... Or his cousin, numeneus americanus, going after those wiggly things--water-hopper, amphibean, ghost-shrimp, worm...

The heron, however, witholds herself--a form of royalty--her willowy reserve. Far-seeing wanderer, over miles of lagoon. The shallow-flooded fields, crops of winter wheat, millet and rice. A Delta blessing...


Ni Tsan...

Analect 2.793x and 2.794x

Analect 2.793x



12 October 2010. Natasha Rostov, at that moment when Prince Andrei is leaving...

A silver bowl...

Lower me down with a golden chain, oh lower me down with a golden chain... Lower me down with a golden chain. Was poor Willie that got drownded in the deep blue sea...


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Analect 2.794x



13 October 2010. The true hare. Or the untrue hare. Lines on paper... an open field...

One imagines the fur--bristly in the north of Scotland, or bursting across a weir on the "wide and lazy" Baltic shore. Peoples without kings, and without the hierarchies of kingdoms. Or even the desire for such hierarchies. Beuys. A pint of beer from local hops, or the meandering, democratic west-slavic verb. Autumn light, gathered hay, a forest clearing with mushrooms...

Grzyby, or some such...

Analect 2.792x

12 October 2010. Life of the cow. And the carer for the cow. A kind of dream--if ever there was a dream. Impossible conjunction of bones, there in the hip, onwards and upwards along the back, until, suddenly, that quick drop to the tail. Vacaville and Modesto--the town of Ceres. Walnuts and moos...

Idyllic settings, Part II. Anything with hills in the distance, open fields. A J-2 road--Alameda to the San Joaquin. Dusty margins, power lines--wind-scudded waters of a man-made stream...

Escalon...

Analect 2.791x

8 October 2010. Autumn sun, beatific.

Sweet voice of mother from Pakistan, a thank you--as she must speak with her children...

Last night: gathering of song, soda bread and Candy Man at Lothlorien. Dark shadows of Barbara Allen, with Terry's spontaneous a capella rendition--modal chords and Jean Ritchie's sinuous embellishments. Learned from her grandmother, in the mountains...or from an iPod in Berkeley. ("I've been singing it all week...") Gyspy Davie, at the outset. These stories. "...tonight I lay on the cold cold ground by the side of Black Jack David..."

Redolent...a good word to share...

Analect 2.790x

7 October 2010. Hows and corses--that's how it works out sometimes. Here in Dubovsky's Appalachia, somewhere in the back country of San Diego County--the old Pala Asistencia, Temecula Grade, or Rancho Guajome, closer in. You are what you see, perhaps--the thin-branched eucalyptus on a willowy morning, Southern California light--the ocean nearby, between coast and hills. From the Tehachapis south--that's how Carey McWilliams begins his masterful characterization--An Island on the Land--quoting A.P. Jacks, an early settler: "My first impression was such as one might receive on arriving in A City of Refuge..."

The biblical allusion lost today in a sea of shopping carts and Taco Bells...but why go there. Progress, following Marx, being inevitable, whatever we might mean by the term...

Better our songs, grounded in something that grows--like the ridgeline of the hills, or a dark dark brown acorn from high in the Sierras--or more nearby, a metate of hollowed granite--rounded from decades of pounding corn, the fine meal, each cake formed by hand...

Or the estate of Martha Breasted, somewhere in Northern Kentucky, 1970--near a place called Florence, then quite remote. A winding road in summer's dusk, warm and humid, piqued light of fireflies meandering amongst the trees...

But that's not what first returns, the banjo and overalls notwithstanding. Rather those drier hills, the coastal air...

Home...

Analect 2.789x

6 October 2010. Digger pines and mining claims, gold pan as moon...

A cabin high in the mountains, night of giant storm. Lightning on all the nearby peaks, hail and rain beating down on tin roof. Inside, feel of wood--the rounded walls, pine-wood beds--a table of varnished boards, small windows onto great trees...

Two crayfish on rocky bottom at edge of Gold Lake, jaunty hunters, slow moving, adept. A small blue claw, partly dried, in the pebbles along the bank. Later--golden bee with small black head, tucked in against side of white car...

Granite crags high above...

2.788x (Analect almost without at drawing)

October 1, 2010. Blustery and gray, a surprise.

A morning that can't quite decide--or is it the perceiver of the morning. Second cup of coffee (Brazilian Bold) from Mo across the street (7-eleven) while the crew of workmen continue their impossibly elaborate form work--2x10s stacked on edge, sloped, at angles, with rebar struts--to contain someone's vision of concrete... Design...

The work of us all--to contain someone's vision...

Lee, just now, waving from outside, A little stooped, but adamant in her gathering--the bottles, bags and cans of a neighborhood, popped into a beige Safeway shopping cart, moored just now against the linden tree...

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(mac and scanner down for a while)