Puget Sound at sunset, near Golden Gardens

It's hard to imagine a better light.

Courtyard in the rain

I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: "I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths." Almost instantly, I understood: `the garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel; the phrase `the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses simultaneously-all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is the explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts'ui Pen, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of de­parture for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. 

Jorge Luis Borges - Garden of Forking Paths

Down by the Salley Gardens
W.B.Yeats

DOWN by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Signs

Flower shadow - at least there are tulips for me. Throughout his life Robert Graves issued a number of editions of his collected poems; weeding out anything he considered unworthy, including only what he thought best. This is one that didn't make it. The rest of us can only marvel at his craft and be grateful for the tulips. 

Double Red Daisies By Robert Graves

Double red daisies, they’re my flowers,

Which nobody else may grow. 

In a big quarrelsome house like ours 

They try it sometimes—but no, 

I root them up because they’re my flowers,

Which nobody else may grow.

Claire has a tea-rose, but she didn’t plant it; 

Ben has an iris, but I don’t want it. 

Daisies, double red daisies for me, 

The beautifulest flowers in the garden.

Double red daisy, that’s my mark: 

I paint it in all my books! 

It’s carved high up on the beech-tree bark, 

How neat and lovely it looks! 

So don’t forget that it’s my trade mark;

Don’t copy it in your books.

Claire has a tea-rose, but she didn’t plant it; 

Ben has an iris, but I don’t want it. 

Daisies, double red daisies for me, 

The beautifulest flowers in the garden.

Christmas tree

Jacaranda and Baobab seed pods

Someone else's deity

Mannequin heads - hard to look at - a poem I find hard to read.

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.  
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for  
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes  
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Poppies in October by Sylvia Plath

Islands

Look, stranger, on this island now

The leaping light for your delight discovers,

Stand stable here

And silent be,

That through the channels of the ear

May wander like a river

The swaying sound of the sea.

From On This Island by W.H.Auden 

Bamboo - all look black, but all are actually green.

From the Plumed Serpent - D.H. Lawrence


Huitzilopochtli gives the black blade of death.
Take it bravely.
Take death bravely.
Go bravely across the border, admitting your mistake.

Determine to go on and on, till you enter the Morning Star.
Quetzalcoatl will show you the way.
Malintzi of the green dress will open the door.

In the fountain you will lie down.
If you reach the fountain, and lie down
And the fountain covers your face, forever,
You will have departed forever from your mistake.

And the man that is more than a man in you
Will wake at last from the clean forgetting
And stand up, and look about him,
Ready again for the business of being a man.

But Huitzilopochtli touched the hand of Quetzalcoatl
And one green leaf sprang among the black.
The green leaf of Malintzi
Who pardons once, and no more.

Black plastic alive with figures

Flower fragments

Photographer Bridget

This is for the 19th...

Bridget

By Bridget - shades of Mary Poppins

Grooming, nails, ears

The "ears" are a good clue, you need four legs not two. These four seem to spend most of their time either in the window (as you see them) or lying on the couch.

Photograph by Bridget

The Zambezi

Photographer, unknown, though the guy with the hat is my wife's father. You wouldn't get me in that water, crocodiles, hippos bilharzia, snakes galore.

Italian garden

Bridget

Basketball sunset

Photograph by Ben Schultz - what a wonderful shot, taken with a cell-phone apparently.

Lion in Italy

This is a week of other people's photographs - Photographer - Bridget

Seattle winter scene - it has its compensations.

Seasonal sentiments perhaps:

Over the mountains

And over the waves,

Under the fountains

And under the graves;

Under floods that are deepest,

Which Neptune obey,

Over rocks that are steepest,

Love will find out the way.

Anonymous 

Sisters

Under water

Tudor choir - a picture of fellowship. Seems appropriate for the time of year.

The person who's face you can't see is the directory Doug Fullington. Happy Christmas Doug and thanks for all the music.

You may recalling hearing of the "Great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo river all set about with fever trees" where the elephant got his trunk. Well this is it, or at least Beitbridge going over it.

My mother in the front, my sister in the back, I believe it was a Peugeot. I think I still have the trunk that's on the top of the car (either that or one exactly like it). I just noticed, that's me looking rather disgruntled in the back. Hence, no doubt, the smug look on my sister's face.

Image on a dancer

Self-portrait

Hop, skip

Who's that?

Golden birds

Originally posted from my iPhone. But really, Apple and Google just don't see eye-to-eye. I look forward to the day when they either join the revolution or both find themselves up against the wall.

High school band again

What fun. Whole crowd of them this time.

It's definitely feeling a  little nippy even here in Florida. Here's a nippy image.

 And something personal for a personal sort of day, "Between" - a rather chilly poem:

Between the edge and the abyss,

Between the air and the sky,

Between the picture and the frame,

The beginning and the end,

The thought and the word,

The anguish and the cry

There is nothing.

Between the ground and the weight,

The sight and the vision,

The loss and the sorrow,

The closing and the shut,

The humiliation and the idea,

The ice and the cold,

The second and the hour

There is nothing other than ourselves.

Between word and consolation,

Between love and response...

Fractal landscape 

A fractal object is one where the structure of the object remains the same no matter what scale you look at. The coastline is a good example, it's jagged and the relative jaggedness remains the same whether you look at it from a few feet away or a few miles. The scale of the image is hard to determine, it could be a group of islands, or just a muddy puddle.

Wouldn't it be interesting if life was like that, you could live it at any scale and the experience would be thee same. Borges tells a story of a man who lived a whole year between the moment the firing squad fired and the moment he actually died. When we dream, the experience of time is different in the same way.

Who do you struggle with?

The dark figure was reckoned to be one of the best jujitsu practitioners in the Seattle area. He seems more focused on himself than on his opponent.

Singing

Not entirely sure what. Some Dylan Thomas (as the singer was named, in part, for Welsh poet - I say "in part" as there were numerous other Thomases)

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Elgar in bronze would no doubt look something like this. Pomp and Circumstance personified, Land of Hope and Glory.

We're still in Vancouver, B.C., along with the stone image of yesterday. In the Northwest, you must be specific when mentioning Vancouver as there are two of them, Vancouver, British Columbia and Vancouver, Washington (an altogether inferior place). No Elgar bronzes. What a strange world. But he did also write the Enigma Variations, I can't help but feel a certain affection and respect for him in the context of his own time. Look at him conducting Hope and Glory in 1931, even the absurd Vancouver bronze seems right somehow. 

Another image in stone.

It evokes all kinds of antimonies for me. The harsh, polished surface of the stone versus the relaxed pose of the figure, at another level, the deliberately "cool" pose of the figure has a harshness to it that contrasts with the soft blend of the image rendered by the stone. It seems to resonate almost endlessly in my mind. Maybe, in the end, they're just the same thing.

Zombie cat

Never fear, it's just Roger in his inside cat days, looking for a way out.

Greenlake sunset. For those of you unfamiliar with Seattle; it's a very domesticated body of water on the north side of the city. Good for walking, jogging, swimming (if you don't mind the ducks) and sunsets.

It really looked like that, the camera has not exaggerated the colors.

A Chinese gentleman and a delightful few lines from Li Po ending in a wonderful non sequitur:

We both are exalted to distant thought,

Aspiring to the sky and the bright moon.

But since water still flows, though we cut it with our swords,

And sorrows return,though we drown them with wine,

Since the world can in no way answer our craving,

I will loosen my hair tomorrow and take to a fishing-boat. 

Farewell to Secretary Shu-yun at the Hsieh Tiao Villa in Hsuan-Chou

Bamboo shadows:

Almost appropriate, in any event an occasion for quoting the father of my favorite Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. - this from "The Iron Gate" a poem he read on the occasion of his 70th birthday breakfast, given in his honor by the Atlantic Monthly, December 3rd 1879:

So when the iron portal shuts behind us,

And life forgets us in its noise and whirl,

Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us,

And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl.

I believe things are getting a little chilly in Seattle, they do have ways of warming themselves up.

Here we have some Seattleites, lounging around the alter in St. Mark's Cathedral, participating in one of Seattle's more endearing institutions, the Sunday Compline Service, which was conducted for over 50 years by a gentleman called Peter Hallock. Peter just retired. Compline goes on, hopefully for another 50 years at least. If you ever find yourself in Seattle on a Sunday evening it's well worth attending; the atmosphere is really quite remarkable.

Hills from the sea

"She has followed the years that are gone," he said;

"The spirits the words of the witch fulfill;

For I saw the ghost of my father dead,

By the moon's dim light on the misty hill.

He shook the plumes on his withered head,

And the wind through his pale form whistled shrill.

And a low, sad voice on the hill I heard.

Like the mournful wail of a widowed bird."

Then lo, as he looked from his lodge afar,

He saw the glow of the Evening-star;

"And yonder," he said, "is Wiwâstè's face;

She looks from her lodge on our fading race.

Devoured by famine, and fraud, and war,

And chased and hounded from woe to woe,

As the white wolves follow the buffalo."

And he named the planet the Virgin Star.

from Legends of the Northwest - Hanford Lennox Gordon

Clouds at sea - you may recall, if you click on the picture it will show a much larger version.

I have been looking at an artifact called the nltk (natural language toolkit). It has all sort of wonderful tools for analyzing texts. This is a dispersion plot for some words in Vol I of Ruskin's Modern Painters. I think it speaks for itself (I'll have to read it again one of these days and see why there is so much seeing, but no light a third of the way into the book). 

Autumn in the arboretum

Autumn lovers scattered like leaves

Hopeless in solitude all their lives

They rise up singing and follow her tune

Knowing she’ll leave to dance with the moon

Leave them abandoned to the dark of the night

Returned to their beds and the dwindling light

Forest at sea

It is a picture of contradictions - some Dylan Thomas in the same vein (though maybe you have to be slightly unhinged to really appreciate it). Am I alone in seeing the pathos in both the image and the verse?

Down, down, down, under the ground,

Under the floating villages,

Turns the moon-chained and water-wound

Metropolis of fishes,

There is nothing left of the sea but its sound,

Under the earth the loud sea walks,

In deathbeds of orchards the boat dies down

And the bait is drowned among hayricks,

Land, land, land, nothing remains

Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech,

And into its talkative seven tombs

The anchor dives through the floors of a church.

Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,

To the fisherman lost on the land.

He stands alone in the door of his home,

With his long-legged heart in his hand.

An urban landscape - downtown Tacoma - piece of the jungle

I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.

Jorge Luis Borges

Fire in St. James

This is the center piece of a side chapel in St. James Cathedral, Seattle. The astonishing complexity of it is in some ways more evident in the shadows it casts than in the thing itself. An apt metaphor for the cathedral that contains it. This is another, perhaps more conventional, view of it.

Trees on a beach

There's very little water in the picture, but the image feels to me like a shoreline, a boundary between one element and another.

Two people.