Otras fotografías de mi MacBook:

Devaluando mi Mac diciembre, 2006

Mi escritorio febrero, 2008

Instalación de Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard agosto, 2009

Kamakura septiembre, 2009

Computer Love agosto, 2010

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

~ W.S. Merwin

There's no bulb in this fixture on a workshop building at the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California

A Cruise Ship Floats By a lightless Financial District in Manhattan

Young emu in Australian bushland in rural Central West NSW.

up điên loạn.~

mệ cắt cắt bôi bôi ghép ghép. chưa thèm chỉnh sửa tí màu mè nào ~~

đây là thành quả 5 phút bị điên ngồi replay cái Lightless với I'm Sorry của mấy bạn beast không ngừng

thề, là vẫn quá buồn ý ~~

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ptm.5.52.finding the light

Edited with Simply Charming and Pure Sugar from PTM's Fresh Wonderland 2 Collection :)

Our dining room is typically a lightless dungeon in the morning, but we got a dusting of snow last night so this morning there was a nice glow in there from all the sunlight reflecting off the snow! My MiddleLittle had snuck down to play with his legos (and completely zone out) before getting dressed so I used that yummy light to capture his sweet bed head... with puppy looking on!

One December day, having scraped together a fortune of about three hundred dollars to pay for a bus trip to the Bay Area I approached the new Greyhound station in Waterloo, Iowa. Approached, not entered as the line was so long and so slow that I turned away; waded the slush across old Highway 218, stuck out my thumb and three days later was in San Francisco, or would have been had I enough sense to accept an invitation from my last driver of the trip. I was actually in Pinol.

The way out was interesting. I do not recall much. I had been hitching to Iowa City often and having gotten a good ride to Cedar Rapids was picked up by on of my regular benefactors (I rather suspected that he was driving around looking for boy, had decided on the first attempt that I wasn’t what he wanted but enjoyed my conversation enough to take me to the interstate whenever he saw me again). Then a very long ride with a man who didn’t like me so well, that ended at a rest stop in Utah when he asked me to drive and I admitted that I didn’t have a license. He stopped to sleep and I went back to the road. I remember nothing about the rest of the trip until I was just south of Sacramento but I think it was one long ride and I was asleep for a lot of it. The traffic was heavy and not friendly, then I had a mystical experience. I heard the voice of my sister’s deceased mother-in-law tell me to wish on that next load of hay. What next load of hay? * But then there it came and I wished for a ride and bam, the next car stopped a pair of sweet kids, a boy and girl who asked me about my trip. When I expressed just how tired I was they gave me a couple hits of speed, which I had never used before (and haven’t since) before dropping me off at a gas station in Napa. A beautiful gay man picked me up. He was living in the city and liked to pick up artists of all media, he had just had a guitarist living with him for a week. I felt so out-classed by him, I did not take up the suggestion. He did tell me that I was lucky to get a ride at that spot as there was a large military base and prison and maybe a mental prison in the neighborhood and most persons would not pick up hitchers there. I believe he actually went out of his way to take me to my sisters’ home in Pinol.

After a week there, with my sister, I decided to return to Iowa, also via thumb, also with my three hundred dollars. Her husband dropped off in Berkeley with my back pack and a little carboard sign, along a stretch of street, Oxford, I believe, where hitch hikers, like a crowd of ragtag prostitutes, were hanging out waiting for customers, excuse me -- rides.

Before noon I was given a ride to Sacramento in a pickup truck, by Leo, a tiny firefighter.

And there I stood by the freeway till a pair of French Canadians picked me up. They were driving a four-door sedan and put me in the back, usually a good sign. The passenger apologized saying they weren’t going far then asked where I was heading. I said Iowa, then had to tell them where it was, which was very helpful to them as they suddenly remembered that they were actually going to Iowa and would quite happily take me all the way.

I had the feeling that they, perhaps, had misunderstood my directions and thought Iowa might be at the end of a disused logging road in the mountains where if one were ever found there wouldn’t be much left to identify -– so -- I asked for a handout. Any amount would do really. Such nice fellows could spare a couple bucks.

I don’t know how these two ever got through life without me as once more I had prompted memory, until that moment they had forgotten a most important engagement and regretted that they must drop me at the next off ramp. As they had been so good to me, even though there was no handout, I felt that the only fair thing to do was to get the hell out of their car as fast as possible.

The next driver, a Hungarian from Iowa, was quite pleasant and took us into the sunset mountains on his way to Tahoe. Night had fallen when we reached his turn off. There I was left in the dark and falling snow standing between twelve-foot-high snow banks by a sign reading ‘Donner Pass’. Well……

Perhaps at nine or ten a large truck stopped; it was a tow truck designed to rescue disabled semi tractors. The driver said he could lose his job if he were caught picking up hitchers but did anyway and as we were both. from Iowa.... He was returning to his base in Reno and warned me to watch out for the cops as it was illegal to hitch in Reno but not to be too worried. The cops didn’t need more paperwork; if one came by, he would only scold me before driving me out to the edge of town and dropping me off there. This was the cheapest and easiest way to get rid of hitchers.

Reno proved to be a long wait, standing by an on ramp and gathering a crowd: First John wandered up to stand alongside me then Jim came up and chatted for a while. Jim was a tall, heavy set young man who was traveling with Wally, his small lap dog. After an hour or so he decided that he and Wally would step across the road to refresh himself at a diner there. John thought he might go with them. I was perhaps hypoglycemic and hypothermic but stuck to my post. Jim tucked Wally inside his coat and they all left me. As soon as they were out of sight the cop showed up.

Well, the cop was very stern and hard and disapproving, but by that time I was very very tired, so tired that somewhere during his lecture to me I interrupted asking when he was going to drive me out of town. He was quite offended by my practicality. With glowing cheeks and ardent eyes he ordered me to walk, telling me that he would be back and if he caught me hitching he would be driving me to the jail. That boy was red hot – under the collar. He would have been more so had he known that I had a lid of pot in my coat pocket and fifteen more lids in my bag. I was not stoned but very hypoglycemic.

When I couldn’t see his tail lights, I stopped walking and stuck out my thumb. I never saw the cop or Jim or the dog again. An angel sent a man in a red convertible. Where are you going, he asked, a town in Iowa, I said, the truckers call it ‘Cut and Shoot.’ Why he asked. “People feel we do that a lot,” I replied. So, I did get a ride out of town, and a melted candy bar, his gift from his glove compartment, my first food in over twenty hours.

Red Convertible left me at the last exit to Las Vegas there under a lamp beside the road where there seemed nothing but its’ pool of light, the night and a mysterious industrial plant far across the highway on the empty plane silently out gassing huge clouds of steam. I was thinking perhaps they were burning Jews, yet another reason to regret having been circumcised, when a tiny Leo in a blue Saab stopped. He was a construction worker in the City and had driven by the place in Berkeley where I had started but hadn’t seen anyone going to the Midwest. My Leo, whose name I do not recall, was driving to keep Christmas with his family. He wanted someone to talk with to keep him awake and maybe relieve him at the wheel. Good, however that meant that I had to stay awake to keep him awake. So, on, passing Winnemucca where on the trip out I had begun a lifetime of coffee drinking, the Madeleine of my histories.

Flavor

in the first taste of coffee

opens,

can open nostalgia’s doors.

Can remove me

place me

beneath spring leaves

on washed sidewalks

Chicago mornings

lungs remembering lake breath

body wrapped all around cool with lake air.

Carry me to dawn in Winnemucca

surrounded by its vast isolation

within it’s strange winter

in dark cafe under stares of disappointed slots,

drinking my black breakfast.

Can take me to the highway

my thumb out

aching for the West and mystery.

We did fine until the next morning when we came down to the Great Salt Lake and he told me I had to drive. I might have had a learner’s permit which might have still been in date, but no one had allowed me to use their car for the test so that is all I would have had no license, or even an I.D. Wanting to do my part and be of help, I did not feel my little Leo needed to know that just then, besides as mother always said, ‘what they don’t know won’t make their heads swim.’ So off we went and doing quite well even though I was fried and the morning sun was screaming right into my eyes. The road there is arrow straight and goes forever. I remember concentrating on keeping in the lane and keeping my eyes open, then there was a loud ‘Bump Bump!’ Opening my eyes I saw that we were on a bridge that had been nowhere visible last I remembered but I was exactly in the middle of my lane so I resolved to not allow myself to fall to sleep again and carried on. Before my Leo awoke and took the wheel again, I found myself awaking to those bumps twice more but as each time the car was dead in the middle of its lane, I decided that I must drive better in my sleep than when awake.

The Leo took back the wheel in Salt Lake City and I was so glad. But once we started up the Rockies engine trouble also started. Well into the mountain we stopped at a village, just a spot in the road but it had a garage. The problem was found to be with the distributor and was fixed while a tribal man gave me the fish-eye. The town was so small our visit would have made the newspaper, if they had a newspaper.

Leo drove on into snow country and as dark came I fell asleep, waking some time later amid a light snow surrounded in the warm golden lights like glowing leaves in a magic forest but was the main street of Vale shining in the dark of night. I hope you have had or will have such a magical experience.

After crossing the Great Divide on the descent into Denver, the car lost all power. Lightless and soundless we passed everything on the road coasting at ninety miles an hour while trying to keep it that slow…plunging down the mountain and on into Denver, until Leo spotted a garage off the interstate and near a ramp. We were able to coast off the ramp right to its’ door. It was the distributor cap again.

The next morning in Kansas I was expected to drive again with the sun in my eyes but that day I stayed awake. The land looked haunted and barren in the bright sunlight of a dry winter. It felt so much more like Halloween than Christmas. The Leo was turning south at Kansas City so dropped me off where a pretty blonde gay boy, with a diamond as big as the Ritz on his finger, took me as far as the gate of the factory where he worked. He was so cheerful.

Everyone was driving pickups with gun racks. Not so common a site in Iowa then but our corn farmers had not started wearing cowboy hats and western boots either.

The rides started with a young combat vet, because it was Christmas.

Then a woman who went out of her way for the same reason.

Then the old couple out for a ride after church (it was now Sunday).

Almost lastly was the sweet artilleryman who was also on his way home driving from Oklahoma, for Christmas. Today he would be a Vietnam Era Vet, which is different from being a Vietnam Veteran – no one had been trying to kill him. He was cheerful and happy that as a draftee he was spending his tour of duty smoking pot in Panama. Good for him I wish they all had.

And finally, believe it or not, John from the Reno on-ramp, still on his way to Minneapolis. Seeing me again by the road asked his driver to take me along. I left them at the freeways’ junction with highway twenty where a woman returning home from college made room for me amide her luggage and dog. And then home once more, to find a friend who hadn’t noticed my absence from town was waiting to take me to a party in Cedar Falls where I first sung this song that you have read.

I ate food the next day.

So, passes the youth of those of no value.

December 12 to 22, 1974

David Weldon

•Once home, I asked my mother about the wish on hay. She was the youngest daughter and was born with a vail over her face so she was thought to be clairvoyant, and she seemed to be. She thought for a moment and then repeated a rhyme, “Wish on hay and look away.” She hadn’t thought about it for years but that is what the old folks said when she was a child. Oh, and as for the pound, it went back to where it came from next summer. No one was interested, but that is another story.

PS the coat was bought for me at J. C. Pennies in 1967... I still have it and if I lost ten pounds could button it and still be comfortable in it.

Originally I did not want to create a black and white image of this midnight train station, however when playing around during my post process the gloomy, spooky atmosphere and deserted area really added value to the B/W photograph - voila, here is the result!

Please contact me for any commercial usage or licensing info.

Visiting Great Western loco 813 stands at the head of the second-to-last returning service from Eridge to Tunbridge Wells West of the day. Seen at Eridge on Saturday 29th December during the Spa Valley Railway's (unfortunately rather disappointing) 'Winter Steam Up' event.

© A-Lister Photography. All rights reserved.

DO NOT BLOG, TWEET, TUMBLR, FACEBOOOK or redistribute my photographs in any form, in any media without my written permission.

.

"In the East End of London, between two Victorian Warehouses a dark, tight, winding passageway is seen..."

Check Out My JULY/AUG/SEPT NEW IMAGES!

www.flickr.com/photos/81861182@N03/sets/72157634886132643/

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(OpenSat/088)

Classic Raygun + windowless, lightless room + slow shutter speed + laser pen light = Fun!

Eastbound rack train Q216 struggles up the steepest part of the west slope of Sand Patch as it snakes under the former WM Keystone Viaduct. A near full moon and clear skies help to illuminate an otherwise lightless stretch of mountain railroad.

Where there is a will, there is a way...

Just going back over some random old stuff to see me through these lightless, photography discouraging midwinter months. Of course, if I was a real photographer I wouldn't let unfavourable light deter me ...I'd regard it as a challenge &c. &c. We are in The Mall, with St James's Park off right, in about the middle of September 2011. It looks as though a few early leaves were starting to come down. That party negotiating with the cabbie don't look like slickers, do they? Up for the day from Bexhill I'd say and splashing out on a taxi to get to Harrod's ...as it's a bit of a walk to the Underground from here. Rollei Retro 400S. Always a funny film to develop. I'm too lazy to go and look through my negative files, but I'm pretty sure this was stand developed. The area under the trees has a faint look, difficult to define, that you tend to get with stand development ...and I will not conceal from you that I have selectively applied the Auto Contrast tool to that area in my many-times-superseded version of Photoshop Elements, slightly reducing the effect.

“In this lightless dark, you appeared as the star across the sky and suddenly every other light went out for every wound got burnt, every tear turned to delight and this earth got impregnated with light again.”

― Jayita Bhattacharjee

This smoke trail is the only thing that I could capture to memorialize my fireball sighting. It's certainly a once in a lifetime experience. It started with a very bright light such as a vehicle on high beam approaching on a dark, lightless road. Then the light disappeared and was replaced with an orange ball of fire with a tail trailing behind just cutting across the sky at a smooth but fast pace. It happened in a matter of seconds. It was so incredibly close, and so clear. I felt privileged to be able to appreciate its magnificence, yet not be in its path of negative consequence.

Personal 2007

Cambridge, England

June 12, 2015

©Dale Haussner

From Dave O’Malley’s Lunch at the Eagle :

"Among the scores of squadron numbers, we find a latin phrase: “Alis Nocturnus – On the Wings of the Night, is the motto of 58 Squadron, Royal Air Force, a bomber squadron of the RAF which was in Coastal Command and operated from RAF St. Eval in Cornwall. It is possible that the crew or a crew member was visiting Cambridge. At the bottom of this photo we see the faux-Chinese saying “Ding Hy!” similar to Ding Hao!, an expression in common usage in the USAAF in the Second World War, meaning Very Good or The Best or Number One! – first used by American Volunteer Group pilot and ace Colonel James Howard on his famous P-51B Ding Hao!."

Dave O'Malley's "Lunch at the Eagle"-

"There are places in this world that are imbued with a spiritual power beyond their utility. Most are grand. Westminster Abbey for instance contains the history, the power, the empire and even the bones of all England. The Hermitage in St Petersburg rises grandly from the banks of the Neva, containing within its baroque flourish the wealth and tragedy of the Romanoffs, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul resounds with the glory of Islam. These are the repositories of human emotion, religious belief, and political tectonics – nexus points in a shared remembrance. In them lives a soul - palpable, unavoidable, life changing. Not all these nexi are on the scale of Westminster Abbey. Some reveal their ghosts only to acolytes, and to those who search. Some are so ordinary, they are not even on maps.

In Cambridge, England, near the slow drift of the River Cam, on the north side of Bene’t Street, stands the Eagle Pub one of these rare holy places. A public house like thousands throughout the United Kingdom, The Eagle might never reveal itself to the ordinary thirsty tourist and student. But if they take the time, look up to the deep red and burnished lacquer of the ceiling scrawled with strange runes, they might see into the past, and if they cock their heads just right, they may hear the voices. Those young voices.

Imagine, if you will. It’s late in the evening on a cold and damp Suffolk winter night. 1943. The blackout curtains are drawn tight, though there is not much chance of German bombers overhead Cambridge lately. Outside, in the dark, lightless sky, the last remnants of a Lancaster raid thunder towards the Channel. Inside the air is blue with tobacco smoke, layered and swirling, the floors sticky with Green King Ale, and the walls glow orange from the dim electric lights and the flicker of the fireplace. Shoulder to shoulder at the bar and on the benches, are young men, boys by today’s measure. They wear the rough blue serge of the RAF and Commonwealth air forces. Small groups wear the browns and greens of the USAAF. They are loud and bawdy and many are drunk. All are on a reprieve for the next few hours - from the war, their duty, and death. They sing louder, shout rougher words and laugh more forcibly than they have ever done.

There are other pubs across Cambridge where the same thing is happening – for there are many men who have come into town tonight – from the surrounding fighter bases of Duxford, Debden or Fowlmere, the big bomber bases of Oakington, Alconbury, Mildenhall and Bassingbourn. They jostle and shove and shout as they enter the pubs – tonight they will get drunk. They have a few comrades to remember and a thousand things to forget.

Some time after ten in the back room of the Eagle Pub on Bene’t Street, one boisterous Royal Air Force Mosquito navigator, shoves the glasses of beer aside on his table and places his chair on top. Amid the shouts of his friends, he climbs the table and the chair and teetering there, pulls out his Zippo, clinks the top open and thumb-rolls it life. Carefully, with one hand steadying him on the ceiling he traces the number of his squadron using the black smudge of the soot that rises from the dancing flame. Slowly, the numbers form -139 – a pathfinder squadron. Its pilots and navigators like this 22 year-old from Moncton, New Brunswick are the best of the best –and they know it. And they love to proclaim it. As he traces the numbers, the other boys from other squadrons shout encouragement in the form of expletives. Laughter and hearty songs rise like flames from the crowd. Much of it you can tell is forced. As he finishes, the navigator, a Flight Sergeant, steps down from the chair but slips on a puddle of beer on the table. There is a clatter, the chair tumbles, glass breaks and he falls back to be caught by his comrades, cigarette still dangling from his lip like a warrior. The entire pub cheers.

Not to be outdone, an American lieutenant, a tall B-17 pilot from nearby Bassingbourn, stands on a table in the middle of the main room. He calls to a local girl sitting below him – asking for her lipstick. It’s hard to come by these days, but she is in the moment too, and surely taken by the free-spending, pomaded, young man from Hopkinsville, Tennessee. She tosses him a gold tube from her purse. With his buddies cheering and the girls watching, his head cocked way back, he draws a large, crude effigy of a naked woman wearing naught but a cigarette, drawn over dozens of smoky squadron numbers, aircraft nicknames and bomber group numbers. Perhaps it is a copy of his bomber’s nose art. The crowd howls with every stroke. He lingers on the details of the breasts. The women look slightly bemused, even a bit embarrassed. The young boys love it. The Tennessee Volunteer declares that the vixen be hereafter named after Ethel, the landlady of the pub, who has thrown him out on occasion.

The RAF fighter boys boo and shout, somewhat jealous of the free-spending Yanks, but they are all in it together. There are no bare-knuckle fistfights tonight, but there have been a few before. Tomorrow they will launch ramrods over the Channel. They save their anger for the Germans. Tomorrow night, next week, next month, some who were in the bar tonight would not return, their smoky writing on the ceiling the only witness that they had been this way.

By the end of the war, the ceiling of the Eagle Pub would be covered deep in this graffiti of nights and years of heartbreak and sodden release – sooted in place by candles, burnt corks or Zippos, written in the hazy smoke of memory. The tradition of writing on the ceiling of The Eagle’s was started in 1940 by an English airman by the name of P.E. Turner, who wrote his name there. Following his lead, flyers and infantrymen would inscribe their units, groups, aircraft nicknames and airfield names for nearly ten years.

Back in the early 1980s, the meaning of the writings on the ceiling had long since drifted away as did the airmen – back to their homes. The strange numerals and letters looked to most like meaningless graffiti from another time. A former RAF technician named James Chainey decided to research the numbers and names and record them for posterity. Today, a list of all the names and numbers and their meanings is written and hung on the wall, so that visitors can come to understand.

This past week with my beloved Susan, I drank a Green King Ale and bellied up to a hearty plate of Bangers and Mash, sitting at the window of the RAF Bar of the Eagle. Next to us a young Canadian student was trying to impress a blonde from Australia, and tourists chattered loudly. I could not take my eyes off that ceiling, nor could I stop myself from sensing the ghosts, hearing the voices. Here I was where they had been, where they had left their marks. I knew that they were written here as a form of piss-posting, marking territory, elbowing for identity. Little did they know, nor probably care, that these marks would remain for nearly 70 years and perhaps for centuries. In Canada, they would have been removed for a remodeling, and the Eagle Pub would have become a soulless club – with a name like “e” (lower case intended) or “Live”. But in England, where just 65 years before, the skies above had filled with the thunder of a thousand-plane raid, where thousands of young men were sacrificed at the altar of freedom, the memory of those boys would never have been consigned to the landfill.

Should you ever find yourself in Suffolk, or Norfolk or England for that matter, you must quaff an ale at The Eagle. Take the time to read the names and numbers, to hear the voices. For they are the voices of our fathers and our grandfathers.

As I left The Eagle, I looked down the lane to the RAF Bar, imagined pilots and navigators and gunners smoking outside, chatting up the "birds". Out on Bene't Street, I imagined I saw those boys in blue, backs to me, walking away, singing, arm in arm... fading into the darkness of a blacked-out night. The stone walls of the narrow streets resounding with their song. I could almost hear the echoing refrains of that wartime favourite of servicemen:

"Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me

Anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no

Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me

'Til I come marchin' home

Sadly, many of them did not come marching home.

Dave O'Malley

The two scenarios of the airmen writing on the ceiling in this article are of course poetic licence only. There is no way that we will ever know the exact history of the day they were written and who specifically wrote them - this is only meant to set the scene for your imagination."

* www.vintagewings.ca/VintageNews/Stories/tabid/116/article...

these are all the hurtful things I think and never say

about you

and about me

the sharp things I keep in the lightless chasm of my mind

these thoughts are rebelling against their dark little home now

cleverly using those sharp little edges to break free

break into the light, and consume it, destroy it

leave only dark

i was a fool, thinking i could keep them hidden

fuck.

those clever little thoughts.

vi

To Infinity and Beyond: This Is the Afterlife ~

Turning inside out, the young shaman falls though a long swirling tunnel formed of his inverted self, his unbodied mouth and eyes agape in a primal rush toward extinction.

He accelerates t

hrough a tightly wound vortex that shifts and bends to accommodate his course, always centred in the swirling tube which never touches his falling, disembodied perspective. The tunnel is made of light, and of his own bloodstream, and of all the memories and unremembered details of materiality and personality that made up his life – yet not merely ‘his’ life.

Every human, fish, bird, animal, insect, cell and blood corpuscle that has ever lived is there with him, all at once – the dying shaman can feel their bright fear and ecstasy pouring through him as they all rush toward an unseen destination around the curving, translucent bends of the primal vortex. Even though every being dies alone – no matter if a multitude of witnesses is present – the moment of death itself is one great screaming orgasm experienced simultaneously by every one, every single thing that has ever lived – all our eyes and mouths and ganglia agape at the same simultaneous culmination of our material existence.

The tunnel is an eternally vivid living record of past events and future dreams, all memories and visions embroidered into the seamless fabric of its swirl – and Ram’yana’s private past and the panoply of his personal memories are displayed most prominently to him, brightly livid episodes which emerge from the tubular walls as he passes. His strongest experiences – the most impressive ones, that imprinted themselves most brightly into the palimpsest of his being – leap out at him in high relief as he turns and twists and falls and flies, a singular eye of consciousness accelerating toward the endless end of the convoluted time tunnel that’s leading him home.

As the world we experience slips past us at the periphery of our sensoria, an ongoing tunnel vision moves with us at the extremity of our perceptions, whether dying, dead or alive. Journeying out of the physical plane, outside the material matrix of the world, Ram’yana is beyond time and the ken of time-bound beings; as he leaves four dimensional Timespace and approaches the speed of light everything twists into a tunnel which lengthens fore and aft.

He sees his grandfather and grandmother, Mickey Mouse and Pluto, all the dogs and cats and mice and goldfish that shared his boyhood years, the smells of his houses and the flavours of his lovers. He hears the laughter of his kindergarten friends, their bright faces visible all around him singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, while pretty little Abigail jumps over a spinning rope twirled by Gina and Hannah, her long blonde pink-ribboned pigtails rotating around the sides of her head.

He holds his mother’s huge hand, grasping her finger through the wooden bars of his bassinet while she sings to him in the sultry evening air. He witnesses the expression of semi-resigned shock on his father’s face during the Cuban missile crisis and again when Kennedy was shot, sees the squashed remains of mosquitoes on the wall above his crib, watches the strange lights moving in the sky while all the neighbours point and speculate, sinks again with a collapsing sandbank on Bondi Beach, swept away with hundreds of panicking faces being pulled out to the deep sea along with him, while hundreds of man-eating sharks are driven off by the beating, splashing oars of desperate lifesavers.

He sees his mother’s eyes for the first time all over again and screams at the hard slap on his bottom as he hangs before Doctor Traub’s thick-lensed glasses in the bright, antiseptic birth theatre. His paternal grandmother smiles at him as she leans over and obscures his view of the magnificent giant yellow flowers of the magnolia tree while she wheels him in his pram; he can still smell the cloying fragrance of the flowers. His mother’s mother screams as he holds a dingo puppy up for her inspection and she tumbles over backward in her bedroom, breaking her hip while his eight year old eyes wash the scene away with tears that burn through the illusory years.

The Cat in the Hat and the Mighty Thor; the smell and Hungarian accent of alcoholic Uncle Tony, putting him off beer for years with his first taste of bitter ale at the age of six, and the bright laughing face of his babysitter Wendy by the blazing wood fire; the spray of blood when he cut his wrist falling onto a broken bottle at the age of three and the dizzying view from the emergency surgeon’s high private balcony; the first time he kissed a girl and the first time he dreamed of kissing a girl, all bound up together; flying through the sky in a propeller-driven passenger plane, watching circular rainbows following him in the clouds below.

White sulphur-crested cockatoos and sparrows circle his yard while kookaburras laugh in the gum trees; the first terrifying time his father holds him up high in the air to place him in the fork of a tree; his first night after he ran away from home, reclining on a beanbag in a Kings Cross commune reading Philip Jose Farmer’s pertinent To Your Scattered Bodies Go – everything is there, each scene and sensation embedded within and revealing a multitude of others. Everything. His dying mind seeks out everything he’s ever experienced, seeking a way back into the womb of living as he falls through something else entirely, riding a rollercoaster beyond the imagination of the most topologically tormented tycoon.

As Ram’yana falls he flashes before the eyes of his whole life – as others fall with him, many others, all others, sharing the time tunnel with his self-judging awareness. In the eternity of the Fall everything hidden or repressed is exposed in the Divine Light of clear sight and each being is their own Judge, emerging from the blindfold of their material existence to weigh their own soul on the ineradicable scales of justice and mercy. Conscience is the soul and the soul is immortally, inescapably honest with itself when released from the fetters of self-deceit and delusion.

Beyond time, at the singular moment of the great primal rush that is the birth and death canal leading from one world to the next, everyone experiences the same thingat the same time. We all come and go together in a mind-blowing orgasm; dreaming or screaming, laughing or crying, all emotion quails and pales before the rush of unstoppable motion that dwarfs any and every trivial concern.

No thought of gods or devils, life or death in the primal scream toward the Light at the end of the tunnel – the only thing that matters is holding onto your headless hat and the wordless regrets felt toward all the people, animals and conscious entities you ever knew deeply, or ever loved – and still love, deeply, tenderly, with a perspective of forgiveness, understanding and compassion never vouchsafed to your flesh-bound, in-coiled, emotion-embroiled mortal personality.

Ram is every human who ever lived and died, every fish ever caught in a current to swirl down into lightless depths beyond its control, every bird caught in a whirlwind that flings it to flinders, every animal diving for cover into cloaking vegetation from an inescapable predator, every individual blood corpuscle flinging itself on the way to the crushing pressure at the heart of its warm, pulsating cosmos. As he pours through the end of the world the tunnel twists and whirls, always hiding the point of it all, the point of no return, the heart of the matter, the source of every thing and being – and his mind expands to simultaneously see his spiraling course as a single thread in a vast interwoven image.

The tunnel is one thread among myriad drab and colourful strands in a great uncharitable tapestry, an inextricable part of its intricate pattern. The dying shaman follows the course of his life along its undulating strand and sees that his thread rises and falls above and beneath uncountable other interlocking threads, a spectrum of hues and textures in the enormously unfathomable tapestry. As his thread rises above another he is ‘conscious’, while the thread it occludes is ‘dreaming’; where his strand is covered by another thread, his mortal body sleeps and dreams while the other strand lives their waking life. Everyone and everything is there, all at once, simultaneously, lain out and displayed before him with no need for the flow of time to elucidate the infinite multiplicity of being.

Turn the tapestry around. The thought comes unbidden and the cloth reverses itself around him in a loopy topological twist; the implicately shared complementary nature of consciousness becomes apparent to his blown mind as he sees himself dreaming the lives of others, and others dreaming through his waking eyes and flesh. The intermingling pathways wind around the curving delineaments of their divine co-creation, which turns into itself like a Moebius strip until the beginning of one thread seamlessly winds into the end of another. The falcon is the hunter is the arrow is the feather is the truth. All is alive and whole; nothing is partial or frayed.

The tapestry is vast, but he’s able to follow his individuated thread through the colourful patterns and sees that the enormous conglomeration of dreams and lives is incomplete – not completed by the path of the single thread that is his experience of existence, rising from the tapestry to enter him as him. At the same timeless moment, Ram’yana approaches the plexus of light that is the destiny of all nations, women and men – the future and past of all that are born to fall along with him, minds blown in the blinding light of the immortal portal.

An immaculate blazing white-hot sun glows at the end of the tunnel. He can see it ever more clearly through the transparing walls of the vortex, thinning and fading in the face of the overwhelmingly brilliant source and core of existence. Ram sees the arcs of a trans-finite net spreading outward from the source, sees an infinitude of other vortices approaching its plexus from more angles than he can wrap his bodiless head around. They pass through each other in ways that defy and tease his mortal three-dimensionally entrained mind – but the arrangement makes subtle sense to a higher form of his being, trembling on the edge of an unchartable metamorphosis into something so much greater as to be intrinsically unimaginable. Simultaneously, on another level, the individual personality of the shaman approaches its ultimate rebirth and transformation in his flight toward the blinding light of the central sun.

The source of all is the hot, bright core and central axis of the centreless multiverse, the eternal end of every tunnel; the maw of a transdimensional creature about to swallow him up, the Infinite Light of God and his own silent heart gently glowing in timeless repose. He flies around a final bend in the dissolving tunnel, surging toward the arcane net that veils the core – which flares into him as the tunnel widens, opening into the final straight.

Ram’yana flashes toward the weave that’s flung to the ends of the cosmos, spreading himself to embrace the Light – and as he reaches it, he encounters the safety net. A web-like sieve is strung across the open maw of All, and as Ram’yana passes though it a great, resounding BOUMMB fills the boundless universe – the sound of one heartbeat, as loud as the boom that eternally creates the unborn, ever-living universe; the sound of Shiva’s eye opening and of one hand clapping.

Before your time, he hears and feels, not ready, not yet – unfinished – and he feels himself shrinking toward an infinitesimally small spot in the multitude of multiverses – back into the weave, where plan net X marks the spot where all things meet in his current-bound primate life.

Boumb… Boom…. Boom!

That’s why I’m here, writing this to you ‘now’ – the same ‘now’ that you are reading it in, really. I and eye remember it all vividly, not as something to slowly forget or avoid in the unfocused mind’s eye, but as an ongoing experience that is with me now, always, dynamically imprinted. It is with me as it is with you, when you close your eyes and open your memory to see truly through the waters of forgetfulness, to the infinite waters of eternal life.

Life and death, sensory wakefulness and supersensory dreaming are the same thing, appearing as the warp and weft of the reversible tapestry of existence. And everyone, each of us, is the whole tapestry, inextricably interwoven – everyone is everyone, and that’s about as close as this constraining corsetry of early third millennium Inglesh needs to get at this point in infinite time – xcept, perhaps, for the most important thing of all -

Every one you truly touch and are touched by, in every way, leaves the deepest and most prominent engravings in your heart, mind and soul. What we do unto others is what we do to ourselves – and other living beings are more than mere memory mirrors or handy usable tools. That’s what draws us back for more, and more again – the need to do better by our selves – over and over, until we do it right. Then we get another choice – or another chance to ride the carousel Wheel of Fortune again, if we so choose.

The multiple layers of ascendant consciousness are a self-filtering system of co-evolution – a system of slowly developing focus and perspective that leads our awareness to other dimensions, already inextricably interwoven with the relatively ‘familiar’ bounds of our largely unknown but ever-present reality. There’s no dim-witted hierarchy of order-givers or sword-wielding guardians barring the doors of higher perception – the gateway to Heaven on Earth. There’s just you – and me, and all of us, together. We all have our time to shine, and that time is always now.

Yet Death is not Dying. In the Bardo spaces between thy flowering carnations of existence, all the bright religious hopes and turgid superstitious terrors await the untrained monkey mind in its ongoing fall toward dissolution or reintegration. The Bardo Realms are entire worlds or pocket universes as apparently solid as the full-blown reality ye imagine around thee, right where thou art sitting, right now. How do ye know thou art alive, not dreaming this experience, right here and now? Do ye think that’s air you’re breathing?

A true story

By Ram Ayana @ hermetic.blog.com/2012/03/13/to-infinity-and-beyond-this-...

Hey bruh! Dig this pic? Email rishabheos1d@gmail.com for free grabs, magical edits!

... nimmt man sich das Licht am besten selbst mit. Hilft tatsächlich.

In dark december, that rather is a lightless november, you better take a candlelight on your walks. It helps, really!

(Veitsbronn, Bavaria, Germany, December 2014)

Cambridge, England

June 12, 2015

©Dale Haussner

From Dave O’Malley’s Lunch at the Eagle :

"An aproximation of a naked woman, drawn in lipstick on the ceiling speaks to the bawdy nights, the alcohol and puerile tendencies of young men in the throes of war. "

Dave O’Malley’s Lunch at the Eagle-

"There are places in this world that are imbued with a spiritual power beyond their utility. Most are grand. Westminster Abbey for instance contains the history, the power, the empire and even the bones of all England. The Hermitage in St Petersburg rises grandly from the banks of the Neva, containing within its baroque flourish the wealth and tragedy of the Romanoffs, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul resounds with the glory of Islam. These are the repositories of human emotion, religious belief, and political tectonics – nexus points in a shared remembrance. In them lives a soul - palpable, unavoidable, life changing. Not all these nexi are on the scale of Westminster Abbey. Some reveal their ghosts only to acolytes, and to those who search. Some are so ordinary, they are not even on maps.

In Cambridge, England, near the slow drift of the River Cam, on the north side of Bene’t Street, stands the Eagle Pub one of these rare holy places. A public house like thousands throughout the United Kingdom, The Eagle might never reveal itself to the ordinary thirsty tourist and student. But if they take the time, look up to the deep red and burnished lacquer of the ceiling scrawled with strange runes, they might see into the past, and if they cock their heads just right, they may hear the voices. Those young voices.

Imagine, if you will. It’s late in the evening on a cold and damp Suffolk winter night. 1943. The blackout curtains are drawn tight, though there is not much chance of German bombers overhead Cambridge lately. Outside, in the dark, lightless sky, the last remnants of a Lancaster raid thunder towards the Channel. Inside the air is blue with tobacco smoke, layered and swirling, the floors sticky with Green King Ale, and the walls glow orange from the dim electric lights and the flicker of the fireplace. Shoulder to shoulder at the bar and on the benches, are young men, boys by today’s measure. They wear the rough blue serge of the RAF and Commonwealth air forces. Small groups wear the browns and greens of the USAAF. They are loud and bawdy and many are drunk. All are on a reprieve for the next few hours - from the war, their duty, and death. They sing louder, shout rougher words and laugh more forcibly than they have ever done.

There are other pubs across Cambridge where the same thing is happening – for there are many men who have come into town tonight – from the surrounding fighter bases of Duxford, Debden or Fowlmere, the big bomber bases of Oakington, Alconbury, Mildenhall and Bassingbourn. They jostle and shove and shout as they enter the pubs – tonight they will get drunk. They have a few comrades to remember and a thousand things to forget.

Some time after ten in the back room of the Eagle Pub on Bene’t Street, one boisterous Royal Air Force Mosquito navigator, shoves the glasses of beer aside on his table and places his chair on top. Amid the shouts of his friends, he climbs the table and the chair and teetering there, pulls out his Zippo, clinks the top open and thumb-rolls it life. Carefully, with one hand steadying him on the ceiling he traces the number of his squadron using the black smudge of the soot that rises from the dancing flame. Slowly, the numbers form -139 – a pathfinder squadron. Its pilots and navigators like this 22 year-old from Moncton, New Brunswick are the best of the best –and they know it. And they love to proclaim it. As he traces the numbers, the other boys from other squadrons shout encouragement in the form of expletives. Laughter and hearty songs rise like flames from the crowd. Much of it you can tell is forced. As he finishes, the navigator, a Flight Sergeant, steps down from the chair but slips on a puddle of beer on the table. There is a clatter, the chair tumbles, glass breaks and he falls back to be caught by his comrades, cigarette still dangling from his lip like a warrior. The entire pub cheers.

Not to be outdone, an American lieutenant, a tall B-17 pilot from nearby Bassingbourn, stands on a table in the middle of the main room. He calls to a local girl sitting below him – asking for her lipstick. It’s hard to come by these days, but she is in the moment too, and surely taken by the free-spending, pomaded, young man from Hopkinsville, Tennessee. She tosses him a gold tube from her purse. With his buddies cheering and the girls watching, his head cocked way back, he draws a large, crude effigy of a naked woman wearing naught but a cigarette, drawn over dozens of smoky squadron numbers, aircraft nicknames and bomber group numbers. Perhaps it is a copy of his bomber’s nose art. The crowd howls with every stroke. He lingers on the details of the breasts. The women look slightly bemused, even a bit embarrassed. The young boys love it. The Tennessee Volunteer declares that the vixen be hereafter named after Ethel, the landlady of the pub, who has thrown him out on occasion.

The RAF fighter boys boo and shout, somewhat jealous of the free-spending Yanks, but they are all in it together. There are no bare-knuckle fistfights tonight, but there have been a few before. Tomorrow they will launch ramrods over the Channel. They save their anger for the Germans. Tomorrow night, next week, next month, some who were in the bar tonight would not return, their smoky writing on the ceiling the only witness that they had been this way.

By the end of the war, the ceiling of the Eagle Pub would be covered deep in this graffiti of nights and years of heartbreak and sodden release – sooted in place by candles, burnt corks or Zippos, written in the hazy smoke of memory. The tradition of writing on the ceiling of The Eagle’s was started in 1940 by an English airman by the name of P.E. Turner, who wrote his name there. Following his lead, flyers and infantrymen would inscribe their units, groups, aircraft nicknames and airfield names for nearly ten years.

Back in the early 1980s, the meaning of the writings on the ceiling had long since drifted away as did the airmen – back to their homes. The strange numerals and letters looked to most like meaningless graffiti from another time. A former RAF technician named James Chainey decided to research the numbers and names and record them for posterity. Today, a list of all the names and numbers and their meanings is written and hung on the wall, so that visitors can come to understand.

This past week with my beloved Susan, I drank a Green King Ale and bellied up to a hearty plate of Bangers and Mash, sitting at the window of the RAF Bar of the Eagle. Next to us a young Canadian student was trying to impress a blonde from Australia, and tourists chattered loudly. I could not take my eyes off that ceiling, nor could I stop myself from sensing the ghosts, hearing the voices. Here I was where they had been, where they had left their marks. I knew that they were written here as a form of piss-posting, marking territory, elbowing for identity. Little did they know, nor probably care, that these marks would remain for nearly 70 years and perhaps for centuries. In Canada, they would have been removed for a remodeling, and the Eagle Pub would have become a soulless club – with a name like “e” (lower case intended) or “Live”. But in England, where just 65 years before, the skies above had filled with the thunder of a thousand-plane raid, where thousands of young men were sacrificed at the altar of freedom, the memory of those boys would never have been consigned to the landfill.

Should you ever find yourself in Suffolk, or Norfolk or England for that matter, you must quaff an ale at The Eagle. Take the time to read the names and numbers, to hear the voices. For they are the voices of our fathers and our grandfathers.

As I left The Eagle, I looked down the lane to the RAF Bar, imagined pilots and navigators and gunners smoking outside, chatting up the "birds". Out on Bene't Street, I imagined I saw those boys in blue, backs to me, walking away, singing, arm in arm... fading into the darkness of a blacked-out night. The stone walls of the narrow streets resounding with their song. I could almost hear the echoing refrains of that wartime favourite of servicemen:

"Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me

Anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no

Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me

'Til I come marchin' home

Sadly, many of them did not come marching home.

Dave O'Malley

The two scenarios of the airmen writing on the ceiling in this article are of course poetic licence only. There is no way that we will ever know the exact history of the day they were written and who specifically wrote them - this is only meant to set the scene for your imagination."

* www.vintagewings.ca/VintageNews/Stories/tabid/116/article...

Day 5

Another dull and lightless day, with lots and lots of rain.

2005-2007

80" x48"

Colored pencil, modeling paste on wood panel

Below is a transcription of the handwritten words of GULA above:

Nothing fills me, satisfies me, binds my need. I hang bloated, an inflatable sack of gaseous inconsequence. Self-pity, self-loathing and disgust swell my perimeter. I consume everything and exhaust nothing. I have cannibalized all desire and packaged myself expandable. I am greed without anus. That which my sibling, Avaritia, cannot retain, I cannot expel. I am a single-holed hunger, a swollen toothless bladder of vast proportion My skin is moist with shit. I boil with the blessing of my punishment. Pity me. Pity me as I pity myself, with love and understanding. Let me devour your love. Afford me the sweets of your acceptance and loving understanding. Do not judge me repugnant and without merit. Enlarge me with your lack of judgement. Forsake punishment and retribution. I hang helpless of defense. Is there not some beauty in my dedication? A certain admiration for my capacity to retain? I have always been and will always be. As you swell my enormity with repetition, I will devour you generation upon layered generation; a vast compaction of obfuscation, a conspiracy of ignorance. Through your insatiable hunger and my infinite capacity, we will devour the earth. I require no change of diet. Repeat is the fare of the day and of all of the days. I am putrid with it and exalt in its exhilaration. The perfume of blood and shit expands my girth, gives measurement to my wastefulness. To eliminate unwelcome surprise or unpalatable experiment, let me list the menu: War—Only war—all else is a potpourri of surrogates and stuffing. Greed feeds me, expands my perimeter. I devour what he acquires. What he cannot retain, I contain. I am the reticule of avarice. Nothing escapes me save the stench of layered repetition. I hang heavy with it, crucified by consumption. Pity me. The menu never varies. I have no taste for it, but can stomach no other. In symbiotic stagnation, I serve my purpose with passive accumulation. Though what I hold is never used, the very weight of me is proof of our existence, our triangulation. Gula, Acedia, Avaritia. We three, in symbiotic triangulation, illustrate the entelechy of mankind; but it is I, only I, Gula, who is passive. I hang and I hold, absent of anus in constant and tractable expansion. A balloon of infinite compaction. My layered weight and weighted expansion is shaped and molded to the contours of war. I am what I eat: rape, torture, horror, suffering, torn flesh, burning flesh, rotten flesh...I am full of it, suppurated by it, hanging and twisting like a fragrant pudding. I am the right flank of Acedia, sloth, follower of dogma, ritual, and recipe, sleeper of dreamless sleep. It is Acedia who scribed the menu adding, perhaps, subtle variations depending on shifting taste and available condiments. Avaritia stuffs me like a goose’s gullet. Generation after generation after generation I have been crammed with the rot and spoils of war: Like carrion, works of art, raped and pillaged, putrefy my core. Screams and wailing waft my bowels. Base laughter and jeering fill the leaded chambers of my heart. I reek with piety and deceit, the stench of hypocrisy. I am stuffed to bursting—and yet I do not burst. My expansion is infinite—or so it seems. Acedia sustains me. In passivity I accept all things given. In suspension I hang heavy with the nothingness of belief. I accept all things. I accept all things save one: Absence. Absence is never proffered, never interred or contained. My expansion is secure. Contradiction hinders not my dedication. My crucifixion is assured...the ecstasy of my torment, self-hatred and pity, assured. What Avaritia feeds me suspends me, increases me, intensities my hunger. Greed feeds me and so I hang, swollen with self-satisfaction and contempt. All precious things are artifacts, man-made, artificial, indigestible—. I hang heavy with them. Precious ideas, precious objects, precious dogmas and manifestoes. I contain them all. Layer upon layer of them. Millennium upon millennium, I am bloated with their flatulence. Avaritia stuffs me with his plunder...Gods and rituals, jewels and gold, paintings and sculpture. Boundaries. Things. Manufactured values. Realities, gaseous and pervasive. Beliefs, metaphors, poetry. Greed feeds me, over-feeds me, stuffs me with illusion. I hang heavy in duplication. Stuffed with pretense, superstition, and lies. Only compassionate history forgives this gluttony, for it, too, lies within me. It is in me and of me and is me, for only history can contain the weight and volume of this layered repetition, this gluttony of repeat, this unchanging menu of greed. I am what I eat, the rotting spoils of masculine entelechy. But there are certain divertimeni, certain unexpected interludes of frivolity and license that lighten my bowels of the heavy wheat and potatoes of war. Though the menu never changes, the means of acquisition add flavor to my layering distension The Inquisition was one of Acedia’s finest diversions. Sincere, dedicated, passionate, it delivered unto me unselfishly, without pretension, expansion in the name of the salvation of souls. Ambitious, slothful Torquemada, in all the purity of Acedia’s sleep, delivered unto me a sumptuous feast of souls. There could be no greater fare than this. Gula eats, no matter who or what the provider. The layering proceeds without discrimination. War, holocausts, inquisitions, whatever guise the provider, whatever size the provision, Gula eats. My sin is accommodation, my distension, layered by Avaritia’s taking and Acedia’s slumber. These two, war and religion, greed and sloth, create me, distend me. I am history, a fabrication of man’s making, frangible and artificial, mythical and metaphorical, a layering repetition of man’s image of himself in frantic desperation to create himself viable. All that was written and remembered, I contain, repeat upon layered repeat. I am his reality, his proof of existence and yet I am not real, I am his interpretation of reality and reality itself is an artifact created out of the compulsion to endure and to prevail. I am swollen by conflict, bloated with competition, layer upon layer I fill and distend. In Acedia’s slumber, men compete to be first. I am puffed to bursting with fame and acclaim, awards and rewards. Names remembered and names forgotten stud my accumulation. Bodiless without axis or armature they lay draped across obscene ambition, prudishly covering their whorishness. What need forces this dedication? It can only be endemic, endemic to masculine entelechy. Men layer me with their dedication To be first! To make history! To kill and conquer and conquer and kill in an endless repetitious obsessive linearity of Acedia’s sleep. This is my accumulation. This is my expansion. But my expansion is no longer finite. I have become finite and terminal. Acedia stirs and Avaritia’s consumption abates. We succumb to chaos. There is a sense of famine and deprivation. My layering has become agitated and frenetic. Like a pig drowning in shit, there is a thrashing about in passed realties. All the metaphors have changed and this is known but unrecognized. Still, Acedia sleeps—with lids forced shut. But now he dreams. He dreams of death. He dreams of death and the end of repeat. He clings to his sleep in desperation with otiose religiosity. Fear shapes his dream and trembles his complacency. He is afraid. He is trapped in gluttony. I have swallowed him whole. Our conspiracy falters. That which was absolute has become transitory as mankind and all his metaphors slide into past tense. I, Gula, have become quaint, a hope chest filled with trinkets and ornaments for a future that must never come. Would that I could simply clamp shut my mouth and preclude repetition. As he has layered me in to redundancy, he, too, has become redundant. Even Avaritia with his consuming catholic appetite has become cautious of toxicity. We are over-whelmed by paradox and inevitability. If Acedia wakes, we will die. If Acedia sleeps, we will die. Sloth controls us all. What has provoked this dilemma? What suddenness has brought us to conclusion? I cannot accept my ending. After all these centuries of accumulation, to be now suddenly absurd is unbearable. Self-deprecation is not in me or of me. I, above all artifacts, am to be respected. Am I not sacred? Is not man’s memory of Acedia’s sleep and Avaritia’s greedy accomplishments magnificent? My enormity and longevity alone should ignite awe and yet I am threatened. My layering ingestion presumes conclusion. I have swallowed my end. I am become the product of conclusion. My forever ness has become momentary. I have eaten fear and am poisoned by it. Avaritia has destroyed me. By forcing one last layer of repetition, he has doomed me finite. Infinity exists now only within Acedia’s fevered sleep. Mankind’s triad of dominance has concluded. My mouth is sealed. My death is immanent. Embedded in Gula’s gut is war’s diffusion and history; the glut of me hangs heavy in completion. War, the meat and potatoes of Avaritia, has transferred its significance from Avaritia’s greed to Acedia’s slumber. It hovers in supposition. The date 8/6/45 turned men into boys and clamped shut forever the mouth of Gula. The history of mankind hangs reified in Gula’s gut. Layer after layer of Avaritia’s hunter has bloated me with weaponry. Boundaries moved forward and back by sheer force of innovation, borders erased and redrawn through death and dissemination. Whole countries and continents devoured and reconfigured by replacing one man with another. Gula is a history of death and regurgitation Trapped in the depths of Acedia’s sleep, mankind has blundered itself into suicide and disappearance. All humankind is at the disposal of one man-child. This seeming suddenness is the product of Acedia’s sleep. His otiose slumber. His sloth. His isness. Layer upon layer, Acedia has required nothing of me other than that I be filled, stuffed, and silenced by the stuffing. He has neither seen nor tasted the poison of his slumber. As he simply is, he expects Avaritia to do what he does and I, Gula, have to ingest it all. But I am become finite, finished, redundant. I await my layering but nothing comes. My mouth is clamped against it. 8/6/45 lies within me. Avaritia is stunned. He is become child’s play, all rhetoric and redundancy on an empty stage. The weeping and wailing of women, heroism, patriotism, the blood and gore of it all has become the laughter of little boys. There is no place for laughter in Gula’s gut. I am built of sterner stuff, neither mockery nor self-deprecation are stored here. Since 8/6/45 history has been sealed against games posturing as repeat. The layering of me is either real or it is not. In war, to withhold a weapon out of fear is a contradiction unworthy of recordation. Mankind has forsaken tragedy for farce, only the masks remain as time and space are compressed on a stage of finite proportion Humankind has increasingly become audience, leaving the stage to bad acting and foolery. As the stage shrinks so, too, the appreciation of the audience leaving apathy to occupy the emptied space. And so I hang layered by verbs and shifting boundaries, mouth clamped shut against light and other impossibilities. I am beyond complete. My death is immanent. Filtering down through my millennia of layered verbs, art, war,, and religion dominate my distension. I am swollen with them. In review, only war has achieved progression, only war increased through repeat, only war and the shifting of boundaries has brought me to conclusion, only war has wrought me finite...only war. In this brief hiatus before completion, all nouns await extinction There is a strange quiet amidst the mayhem of repetition, a curious awareness, a listening for that which is to come, a final visitation or a burst of light, a signal of arrival, a sign of fulfillment. Silence now is only the absence of laughter. My mouth is shut against it. Religion thrives. Carried along by rote and self-fulfilling prophecies, it is the noisome droning of Acedia’s sleep and the genius of Gula’s layering accumulation. Through memory, I have reified verbs into nouns and frozen moments of chaos into dogmatic linearity, denying questions and demanding answers—the same answers—to questions unproposed. This, religion does and does so well in the layering of Gula’s gut. Only my completion has created nullity. In all the weight of my distension, I am porous of significance. Religion is Acedia’s glory, the proudest and most profound depth of slumber, the complete absence of light in all its paralyzing stimulation. It pacifies me, comforts me, abets my laying repetition; and now it has sealed me whole. I hand in absurdity awaiting implosion. As I remember (I am doomed to remember) the layering of weaponry and the shifting of boundaries, I hold compacted within me that which escapes me—that which has always escaped me, and escapes me still—those verbs encapsulated in artifacts that elicit awakened response. Even in hiatus, even now in the depths of completion, they elicit response, the torn open eyes of Acedia, the death of sloth. As Avaritia’s relentless progression through laying repeat shifted the paradigm of weaponry from one kills one to one kills all, from murder to suicide, Art has remained singular in its ambition, fluctuating only in repose. Unlike war which transitions from verb to noun, Art’s transposition is from noun to verb, the transmutation of artifact into orgasm, the creation of silence. I, Gula, am fatted with noise, layer upon layer of it. It is Acedia’s lullaby and Avaritia’s appetite. I contain the applause of Genius and chicanery, the screaming futility of women in war, the snapping crackling flames of Inquisition and holocaust, the suicide’s horrific whimper. All, all lay layered within me. How I love the layering repetition of sounds. They adorn and define me, marking beginnings and ends from the chaste cries of birth to the gurgling chuckles of death. All the hellos and goodbyes that accompany repeat. They confirm me, distend me, make me whole. Without sounds, I would hang heavy with boredom, deathly interminable repetition. I have harbored throughout the layering centuries the layering cries of absence, the songs of departure, the melting sighs of glaciers and the volcanic rhetoric of rebirth and revolution. This is my storage, the layering variations of repetition. I am Gula. I am Gluttony. I am history. I am all the stacked and vaunted puffery of man’s reflection in tiresome feckless supposition. I would not speak of Art here. It is unsettling. I will say only this: Neither Avaritia’s plunder nor Acedia’s slumber has stuffed my gut with Art. It exists elsewhere. It lies not within me. It is a verb, active and ahistorical. It does not lie static within me. It is in and of the moment of response. The over and over ness of my filling has leaded me with conclusion. I am become finite in distension. Through extrusion I hand now in self-awareness of repeat. Repetition no longer describes my layering. I am become parody. In pause, in this hiatus between immanence and imminence, infinite and finite, I have only deception to deflect perception. I am bloated with noise, blinded by it, crucified by it. I hang senseless with mouth forced open to accept laughter, the final poison. Avaritia continues his blind consumption filling that which resists filling, filing that which can no longer be recorded, a clamorous froth of self-absorption. Acedia sleeps with eyes clamped shut and lids thinned transparent by evolution. How vapid and futile are all our metaphors! Our triad is no longer viable. We have become too simplistic for the vastness and complexity of it all. That which we have sought to diminish through sloth and avarice is not containable. We have cast our crucible too frail and our golden prophecies have become lead. Our incessant drumming of the present into the conformities of repetition no longer circumscribes the abstractions of Desire. Avaritia is hollow noise and Acedia is mindless slumber. My distension has been clamped shut against them. Our death is imminent. I long to release myself, to drain history of Avaritia’s layering plunder and Acedia’s dreamless sleep. Even in my earliest layering, I knew our end. The process of man’s completion through the technology of death rests now within me. His end is accomplished. All his feckless fearless metaphors of war have brought me to fulfillment. I can tolerate no more of him. 8/6/45 marks the end of history, the end of Gula, the end of gluttony. I can eat no more. Nothing can subsume Avaritia. He exists now, like Acedia, in exaggeration. Both are magnified by desperation. Cast large in the awesome victory of his accomplishment, Avaritia’s shadow has embraced the earth. Nothing can grow in this lightless place, nothing save the anxious expectancy of the final repeat, the great light that will lay waste all shadow. How clever was Acedia to write his slumber in the process of inevitability, his metaphors, in passive verbs, to make repetitive that which was irreversible, to make rote that which was endemic. Like all mystagogues, he created sin in order to forgive it and so he stalls, he procrastinates, he forgives it. He sleeps on because he has no dreams, because he is fearful of awakening, because he cannot, must not, awaken because if he awakens we will die. The triad and all man’s metaphors will die frozen in oblivion and I, Gula, will hang heavy with it all, a rotten pudding of narcissistic repeat. All, all will finally and forever revert to what it has always been: gluttony. I pity, if I were capable of pity, Avaritia. His mindless rapacious appetite has brought us to conclusion. And I envy Avaritia.. His senseless anusless consumption makes him incapable of retention and history has served him well. I, Gula, have served him well, as does Acedia’s blessed sleep. We, the triad of man’s reality, will die by virtue of Acedia’s sleep. I record now only the inevitabilities of epilogue.

Collection:

Crocker Art Museum

Sacramento, California

This is my friend Emily, She is practicing for our CHRISTmas play at church. Still trying to shoot outside my box. Another lightless shot. The ISO was so high on this one it is best not to view large.

The following narrative was adapted from Chapter II of an early science fiction/science fantasy novel (published 1912), "The Night Land", by William Hope Hodgson. All of the words are Hodgson's with the exception of a few inserted to bridge various passages - to create a coherent narrative of the excerpts extracted from the novel.

In the novel, a 17th Century man dreams of another incarnation of his life, not a past life, but an incarnation in the far future where the world has been long bereft of our dying sun's light, and the darkness has bred forces antithetical (and inimical) to humankind. It is a world where, with the light, also went any semblance of complacent perceptual veneer, where now the full Nature of Great Powers are evident – the darker Ones vastly abundant and mortal to both body and soul.

The novel is written in a faux 17th century style that you may find hard to get into - but it's worth it for the power of the nightmarish imagery evoked through Hodgson's skill in writing primal horror – horror of the nature that yearns to consume you, to possess your very being, to enslave your waking soul for eternity and eternity and eternities more....

The text chosen here is meant to accompany my latest illustration of The Night Land (take a look at it in the large or the original size): The Watcher of the South.

I was at the South-Eastern wall of the Pyramid, and looking out through The Great Embrasure. As I stood there in the quietness of the Sleeping-Time on the One Thousandth Plateau, I heard a far, dreadful sound, down in the lightless East; and, presently, again - a strange, dreadful laughter, deep as a low thunder among the mountains. And because this sound came odd whiles from the Unknown Lands beyond the Valley of The Hounds, we had named that far and never-seen Place “The Country Whence Comes The Great Laughter.” And though I had heard the sound many a time, yet did I never hear it without a strange thrilling, and a sense of my littleness - and of the utter terror which had beset the last millions of the world.

And thus hath it been ever....

See related images and text in my flickr set dedicated to The Night Land.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATION:

The image was created by setting up a cool-looking stone (which, btw, is by no means sinister - it hasn't a malevolent mineral in its composition - though it did a fine job playing the role for this shoot) and, in front it, a clear plastic undrilled bowling ball I found many years ago. I positioned the stone toward the top of the ball to get the “dome” effect. At the bottom of the bowling ball, I placed a small flashlight between the stone and the ball, facing into the ball to make the top glow. On the other side of the ball at the bottom, I position another flashlight, facing it up through the ball toward the stone. This would lightly illuminate the stone from the ball’s (“dome’s”) direction and at the proper angle. I wrapped this flashlight in cloth to muffle and diffuse the light. After turning off all the other lights in the place, I set up my tripod, taking a series of shots, turning the stone various ways, adjusting the light, etc.

After downloading the images to my laptop, I did the rest in Photoshop Elements 5. Through trial and error, I converting the raw elements of the image into The Watcher of the South that I envision (the dome should be more of a softly-glowing baby blue and more diffuse, but I’ll eventually do another version). The basic stone is what was originally shot, except that I added more to on both sides and on top by copying other views of the stone from other shots. I then changed the color to tones more consistent with the dome’s glow.

The dome itself is a composite of the original bowling ball top and an inverted copy of it added to the underside of the image to create the 3-D look – a three-quarter view. It took many attempts to get it to the point you see it in the above image. (I’d like to see the whole dome more symmetrical, and with cleaner arcs instead of the slightly wavering arcs you might notice on it, but I’ve spent enough time on this particular illustration and will live with its imperfections.) The inside of the dome is the culmination of – again – many reworkings to give it a low-illumination-yet-dynamic glow. Finally, I selected and moved the dome numerous times, horizontally/vertically as well as skewing it, until I was relatively satisfied with its position in relation to the Watcher behind it.

That’s about it, other than trying various crops. I’m happy to have a visual of The Watcher of the South seen in my mind’s eye.

Suddenly, we have a surfeit of spare time.

Due to the change in plans, for the next three days we only have one safari per day, and today that was in the afternoon.

So, a morning free.

So, a lay in?

Not quite.

It was suggested to do some birding at just after dawn, so meet at reception at nine for a short walk to the river.

Only my back said otherwise, so I bailed and sat on the veranda watching the birds come and go, and the camp wake up.

Toast for breakfast, and a piss poor cup of coffee, but its all we need, as next item is a trip to the nearest town for some shopping.

The nearby town is fairly large, has a great many shops and businesses, a bus station with the main road running through it.

I said on Blue Sky earlier that it was hot, dusty, busy, colourful, and friendly.

All true.

The bus came for us at eleven, and dropped us on the main street, where it was already approaching forty degrees. Apparently folks come up here to escape the heat of the plain.

I don't know about that, but it was hot enough for us.

John had to get some painkillers, Jools wanted some material from quilt-making back home. And Ian wanted saffron.

We had parked outside a pharmacy, so John got his pills. We walked on but the mix of shops, smells and colour made it hard sometimes to know what some shops sold.

We couldn't have done it without our fixer/guide, Mahindra, who acted as translator.

On one corner of the street, on the kerb, a guy was fixing and cleaning shoes, using his feet to hold them in place, while on the other corner, a man of similar age was repairing a cheap suitcase.

No doubt it looked new when he'd done.

With Jools buying material, Mahindra and I went on the search for saffron. The most expensive substance on earth, pound for pound.

Just one shop sold it in the town, as Indians don't eat much of it. I got four packets, which will last.

Even here in India, its very expensive.

We walked back to the material shop, then to the main road, where the bus was called for, and in the midday heat, we stood and waited until our mini-bus appeared.

We climbed on, turned the air con to max, and we were driven back to the hotel, where it was nearly time for lunch.

Lunch was the same. Tasty, but still curry.

And at half two, we assembled for the 18th safari of the trip.

Corbett NP is much larger than the three previous ones we visited, so meetings with tigers are much rarer. And the gate we had to use this first time, was a 35 minute drive from the hotel, through the backstreets of the town, and into the countryside.

Into the park, and right away we see a herd of 5 elephants heading to a watering hole, and witness their joy as they plunge in drinking and splashing.

Driving on we came across a group of monkeys, one female had a new morn in her arms, that screamed for her to hold tighter.

We took shots.

We saw a new species of Bee-eater, and that was about it.

Come five there was rumours of two tigers on the move, but with several watering holes they could have chosen, we and the other jeeps drove in circles for an hour with no sightings reported.

We then had an hour's drive back to the hotel, across the park, then along the country road and into the town, before a final twenty minutes on the main road to the resort.

In the gloaming it was almost beautiful, but as the sun set and dusk settled, traffic got heavier as we neared the town, the chorus of horns, and most vehicles had no lights on.

It was chaos.

Madness.

Into the town, and along narrow streets with scooters overtaking us, and more coming the other way, horns blaring and lightless.

And then the joy of the main road at night. Let's just say we were glad to get out safe and sound just after seven, still alive.

More curry for dinner at eight. We have now drunk the resort out of Coke and are now on Sprite.

Sculpture is on display at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. This work is the original plaster copy. Two other works are on view at the Vancouver International Airport (The Jade Canoe) and outside the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. (The Black Canoe). An image of the sculpture is featured prominently on the reverse of the Canadian twenty-dollar bill.

Bill Reid dictated the following text poem about his master work in one sitting to his wife Martine.

The Spirit of Haida Gwaii

by Bill Reid

Here we are at last, a long way from Haida Gwaii, not too sure where we are or where we’re going, still squabbling and vying for position in the boat, but somehow managing to appear to be heading in some direction; at least the paddles are together, and the man in the middle seems to have some vision of what is to come.

As for the rest, they are superficially more or less what they always were, symbols of another time when the Haidas, all ten thousand of them, knew they were the greatest of all nations.

The Bear, as he sits in the bow of the boat, broad back deflecting any unfamiliar, novel or interesting sensation, eyes firmly and forever fixed on the past, tries to believe that things are still as they were. The Bear Mother, being human, is looking over his shoulder into the future, concerned more with her children than with her legend. After all, they wandered in from another myth, the one about Good Bear and Bad Bear and how they changed, so she has to keep a sharp eye on them.

Next, doughtily paddling away, hardworking if not very imaginative, the compulsory Canadian content, big teeth and scaly tail, perfectly designed for cutting down trees and damming rivers.

And here she is, still the ranking woman of noble birth, yielding no place to the pretty Bear Mother. In spite of her great cheeks like monstrous scars, her headdress reflecting the pointed shape of the dogfish head, and her grotesque labret – in spite of all these, the most desirable and fascinating woman from myth-time. More magical than the Mouse Woman, as mysterious as the deep ocean waters which support the sleek, sinuous fish from whom she derives her power, Dogfish Woman stands aloof from the rest, the enormous concentration of her thoughts smouldering smoke dreams behind her inward-looking eyes.

Tucked away in the stern of the boat, still ruled by the same obsession to stay concealed in the night shadows and lightless caves and other pockets of darkness, in which she spends her immortality, the Mouse Woman lost her place among the other characters of her own myth, an important part of the Bear Mother story, and barely squeezed in at the opposite end of the boat, under the tail of the Raven. No human, beast or monster has yet seen her in the flesh, so she may or may not look like this.

Not so the Raven. There is no doubt what he looks like in this myth-image: exactly the same as he does in his multiple existences as the familiar carrion bird of the northern latitude of the earth. Of course he is the steersman. So, although the boat appears to be heading in a purposeful direction, it can arrive anywhere the Raven’s whim dictates.

A culture will be remembered for its warriors, artists, heroes and heroines of all callings, but in order to survive it needs survivors. And here is our professional survivor, the Ancient Reluctant Conscript, present if seldom noticed in all the turbulent histories of men on earth. When our latter-day kings and captains have joined their forebears, he will still be carrying on, stoically obeying orders and performing the tasks allotted to him. But only up to a point. It is also he who finally says, “Enough!” And after the rulers have disappeared into the morass of their own excesses, it is he who builds on the rubble and once more gets the whole thing going.

The Wolf of the Haidas was a completely imaginary creature, perhaps existing over there on the mainland, but never seen on Haida Gwaii. Nevertheless, he was an important figure in the crest hierarchy. Troublesome, volatile, ferociously playful, he can usually be found with his sharp fangs embedded in someone’s anatomy. Here he is vigorously chewing on the Eagle’s wing while that proud, imperial, somewhat pompous bird retaliates by attacking the Bear’s paws.

That accounts for everybody except the Frog who sits partially in and partially out of the boat and above the gunwales: the ever-present intermediary between two of the worlds of the Haidas, the land the sea.

So there is certainly no lack of activity in our little boat, but is there any purpose? Is the tall figure who may or may not be the Spirit of Haida Gwaii leading us, for we are all in the same boat, to a sheltered beach beyond the rim of the world as he seems to be, or is he lost in a dream of his own dreamings? The boat moves on, forever anchored in the same place.

Source: Bill Reid Foundation.

Please view LARGE

The Spirit of Haida Gwaii

by Bill Reid

Here we are at last, a long way from Haida Gwaii, not too sure where we are or where we’re going, still squabbling and vying for position in the boat, but somehow managing to appear to be heading in some direction; at least the paddles are together, and the man in the middle seems to have some vision of what is to come.

As for the rest, they are superficially more or less what they always were, symbols of another time when the Haidas, all ten thousand of them, knew they were the greatest of all nations.

The Bear, as he sits in the bow of the boat, broad back deflecting any unfamiliar, novel or interesting sensation, eyes firmly and forever fixed on the past, tries to believe that things are still as they were. The Bear Mother, being human, is looking over his shoulder into the future, concerned more with her children than with her legend. After all, they wandered in from another myth, the one about Good Bear and Bad Bear and how they changed, so she has to keep a sharp eye on them.

Next, doughtily paddling away, hardworking if not very imaginative, the compulsory Canadian content, big teeth and scaly tail, perfectly designed for cutting down trees and damming rivers.

And here she is, still the ranking woman of noble birth, yielding no place to the pretty Bear Mother. In spite of her great cheeks like monstrous scars, her headdress reflecting the pointed shape of the dogfish head, and her grotesque labret – in spite of all these, the most desirable and fascinating woman from myth-time. More magical than the Mouse Woman, as mysterious as the deep ocean waters which support the sleek, sinuous fish from whom she derives her power, Dogfish Woman stands aloof from the rest, the enormous concentration of her thoughts smouldering smoke dreams behind her inward-looking eyes.

Tucked away in the stern of the boat, still ruled by the same obsession to stay concealed in the night shadows and lightless caves and other pockets of darkness, in which she spends her immortality, the Mouse Woman lost her place among the other characters of her own myth, an important part of the Bear Mother story, and barely squeezed in at the opposite end of the boat, under the tail of the Raven. No human, beast or monster has yet seen her in the flesh, so she may or may not look like this.

Not so the Raven. There is no doubt what he looks like in this myth-image: exactly the same as he does in his multiple existences as the familiar carrion bird of the northern latitude of the earth. Of course he is the steersman. So, although the boat appears to be heading in a purposeful direction, it can arrive anywhere the Raven’s whim dictates.

A culture will be remembered for its warriors, artists, heroes and heroines of all callings, but in order to survive it needs survivors. And here is our professional survivor, the Ancient Reluctant Conscript, present if seldom noticed in all the turbulent histories of men on earth. When our latter-day kings and captains have joined their forebears, he will still be carrying on, stoically obeying orders and performing the tasks allotted to him. But only up to a point. It is also he who finally says, “Enough!” And after the rulers have disappeared into the morass of their own excesses, it is he who builds on the rubble and once more gets the whole thing going.

The Wolf of the Haidas was a completely imaginary creature, perhaps existing over there on the mainland, but never seen on Haida Gwaii. Nevertheless, he was an important figure in the crest hierarchy. Troublesome, volatile, ferociously playful, he can usually be found with his sharp fangs embedded in someone’s anatomy. Here he is vigorously chewing on the Eagle’s wing while that proud, imperial, somewhat pompous bird retaliates by attacking the Bear’s paws.

That accounts for everybody except the Frog who sits partially in and partially out of the boat and above the gunwales: the ever-present intermediary between two of the worlds of the Haidas, the land the sea.

So there is certainly no lack of activity in our little boat, but is there any purpose? Is the tall figure who may or may not be the Spirit of Haida Gwaii leading us, for we are all in the same boat, to a sheltered beach beyond the rim of the world as he seems to be, or is he lost in a dream of his own dreamings? The boat moves on, forever anchored in the same place.

The Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe by Bill Reid. Collection of the Vancouver Airport Authority (YVR), Vancouver, Canada.

In the lightless whisper of night, a feathered specter hears my plea. “I am always changing,” she repeats to me. “Leave these ageless ruins and soon you will see.”

"The Unlocked Door to the Other World" Lightless Moor

Backstage Video

Dress & MakeUp - TramaNera Creation

Directed and produced by Fabio Ortu

Shot at the Amphitheatre of the Municipality of Mogoro (Oristano)

Dancer: Daniela Macciò

Lights: Roberto Uda

Visit my WebSite www.ValeriaSpiga.com

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

All material in my gallery MAY NOT be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted or uploaded in any way without my permission

Rest in Peace, W.S. Merwin, who passed into infinity today at 91.

One of my most beloved, most respected poets.

(photographer unattributed online)

NOW IT IS CLEAR

-by W.S. Merwin

Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine

no roots are mine

that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest

and the forest will know it

we will both know it

and that the birds vanish because of something

that I remember

flying from me as though I were a great wind

as the stones settle into the ground

the trees into themselves

staring as though I were a great wind

which is what I pray for

it is clear to me that I cannot return

but that some of us will meet once more

even here

like our own statues

and some of us still later without names

and some of us will burn with the speed

of endless departures

and be found and lost no more

1970

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH

- by . W.S. Merwin

A longish exposure, using a tripod, taken from a window of the house where I was born, in North Street, Downend, Bristol. The autumnal evening scene is bathed in a preternatural lightless glare and there is a thundery haze among the trees. A photograph renders this inadequately of course.

North Street is mainly a street of bay-windowed Victorian terraces. The house on the right is, I think, the only post-war house in the street. Here and there are gaps where older houses may be seen, dating from a pre-suburban phase of Downend's existence, when the road was an unmetalled cart track. Across the road at no. 49, a new owner has thought fit to disfigure such a house by inserting a fake bow window.

Next door, in the right-hand house of this pair, lived Mr Clark. As a boy I was rather afraid of Mr Clark who had the reputation of being "rough" in his manners. Certainly he regarded all small boys as potentially mischievous and was in the habit of bellowing at any he saw loitering near his house. Yet there must have been a softer side to his nature. When I was very young there had been bird cages affixed to the front of his house, in which budgerigars and canaries twittered all day; and he loved the rose trees which filled his front garden. He always wore a cap and, in winter, a muffler. My father claimed to have seen him in silhouette through his bedroom curtains, sitting up in bed still wearing the cap. There was invariably a rose in the button-hole of his jacket, beneath which he wore a waistcoat.

He had once decided to marry and chose his bride, so my mother said, from among the women inmates at Chipping Sodbury workhouse. This wife eventually deserted him. After a lapse of some years he began to pay court to another local woman but passing through Fishponds one day on the bus, Mr Clark had looked down from the top deck and seen his inamorata in conversation with another man. When next she called the poor woman got short shrift. "Bugger off you treacherous cow", roared Mr Clark, "and never darken my door again". Thereafter he remained a bachelor.

I cannot remember whether Mr Clark was still alive when this photograph was taken on Tuesday 16th September 1980. If he was still living he was no longer capable of tending his beloved roses. The front garden in a tangle of weeds and only a few overblown blooms remain. He belonged to the last generation who were truly their own men, forged in a time when it was still possible for an individual's native oddnesses to flourish ...before television arrived to standardise our thoughts, opinions and behaviour.

I know its technical quality is lousy, but this has always been one of my favourite photographs ...my crème de la crème. For me it is laden with the tragic beauty of its subject and with the pathos, not so much of lost youth, but of the lost intensity of youthful experience.

By early 1968 (this narrative continues from the previous photograph) I had managed to save enough money for a trip to Manchester. I was 17 and had never ventured so far from home before. It must be borne in mind that in those days, before the motorway system had properly taken shape, communication between the various regions of England was not the casual affair it has since become. Manchester seemed impossibly distant and I imagined it would be necessary to travel overnight. Eschewing my bed, I left Bristol at 1.10am on Saturday 13th January in one of the ordinary carriages attached to the Glasgow sleeper. It had been snowing. There was a wait of nearly two hours for a connection at Birmingham and another shorter one at Stafford, where a porter reached in and shook me awake.

I continued north through snowy Cheshire on one of the rather stylish AM10 25kV emus, then only a year or two old. We began to come into Manchester. As we slowly screeched and swayed over the points we came alongside and began to overtake a slow-moving goods train. Suddenly, in the gaps between the wagons, I saw long lines of simmering black steam locomotives outside a shed ...Stockport. I involuntarily gasped and sprang up (luckily there were no other passengers in the vicinity to witness my eccentric behaviour) but, exasperatingly, there were only split-second glimpses between the trucks. As we came alongside the front of the slow-moving goods train I suddenly found myself staring at the side of a locomotive tender. There was a quick sight of the driver and fireman and the orange flames of the fire, then the long boiler slid past the window. I heard hissing and the chugs of the exhaust. I scrabbled frantically at the window latch but couldn't get my head out. Just beyond Stockport Station another line passed beneath the main line at right angles. As we passed over I looked down and saw another steam-hauled goods train. Clearly steam retained a considerable presence here.

Once arrived, I walked from Piccadilly Station to Oxford Road and caught a train to Old Trafford. I walked around the outside of Manchester United's stadium and out into an expanse of snowy wasteground where dead locomotives were lined up on sidings ready to be taken away for scrap. Beyond was the looming shape of Trafford Park shed. Between two small brick buildings I saw a simmering locomotive standing in the yard. This scene has always been etched on my memory. What made it so indelible was, I think, the lovely colouration, made more beautiful by the leaden sky, the slight fog and the eerie lightless glare of the snow. The bricks of the little buildings looked curiously pink, and the locomotive brown rather than the expected black.

I approached carefully, expecting to be thrown out as soon as I was detected. I walked between the buildings and immediately took this photograph. It might be the only one I got. But I was not hindered at all and walked around unchallenged. By this stage I think shed staff had probably given up as a bad job the attempt to prevent trespassing in steam sheds. Pictorially I like the photo for the strong natural "lead-in" lines of the sleepers, lamps and water cranes. I also like the steam creeping along the cab roof and the way the smoke is "exhaling" from the funnel. Alas, this was about the only good photograph I took all day. The light got worse and worse, and my camera wasn't up to it.

Another abiding memory of that occasion. As I walked back, I stopped halfway across the wasteground to pee (well, it was a cold day). As I stood in the thickening fog, I watched a Stanier 8F being turned on a turntable. It was a Whistlerian essay in greys and white.

In the lightless whisper of night, a feathered specter hears my plea. “I am always changing,” she repeats to me. “Leave these ageless ruins and soon you will see.”

Tucked away in the stern of the boat, still ruled by the same obsession to stay concealed in the night shadows and lightless caves and other pockets of darkness, in which she spends her immortality, the Mouse Woman lost her place among the other characters of her own myth, an important part of the Bear Mother story, and barely squeezed in at the opposite end of the boat, under the tail of the Raven. No human, beast or monster has yet seen her in the flesh, so she may or may not look like this.