Epigraphs for Wild Rides, Wildflowers

Reworking Sam's and my book a penultimate time, I'm thinking of epigraphs for the six sections. Here are some first thoughts, all from authors we have read and talked about together:

"Old men with dirt under their fingernails may be of some help. Old dogs who've paid their dues and been 'around the block,' who can look at their grandchildren and see a little ahead. I remember a senior anthropologist in Boston whose house was a couple of blocks from a five-alarm fire that broke out, interrupting his work. When he heard the sirens and bells he stepped outside, looked at the smoke and the ladders going up, wet a finger and lifted it, and then went back inside to rap on the keys of his typewriter again. He had been around the world and assessed a lot of fires, bar fights, auto crashes, divorce wrangles, tribal cultures, guerrilla wars, and had that dash of Churchillian dignity a wicked old, randy old sea dog has."
Edward Hoagland, Sex and the River Styx

"I wanted to know shadbush from elderberry, dogwood from chokecherry, bluebirds from indigo buntings, yellowthroats from yellow warblers, the French horn from an English horn. . . . It's not expensive to pay attention to the phases of the moon, to transplant lemon lilies and watch a garter snake birthing forty babies and a catbird grabbing some, or listen to the itchy-britches of the Canada geese as autumn waxes. We will be motes in the ocean again soon, leached out of the soil of some graveyard, and everlastingly rocking.
"That is my sense of an afterlife and my comfort. The hurly-burly of streambed turmoil will be our last rush-hour traffic—thocketing through boulders, past perch pools and drift logs. Enough, we will say, reaching tidewater. We saw enough."
Edward Hoagland, Sex and the River Styx

"Yet some of us have the nerve, the insolence, the brass, the gall to whine about the limitations of our earthbound fate and yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky. We are none of us good enough for the world we have and yet we dream of Heaven."
Edward Abbey, Appalachian Wilderness

"This book proceeds, much the way I do, in a disorderly, relentless fashion. It is fat with contradictions but sounds one steady note: the land. . . . Here the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land."
Charles Bowden, Blue Desert

"Giving some new source of water to a city in the American West, for example, is akin to sending a case of whisky to an alcoholic. It does not solve a problem—it simply puts it off for a spell."
Charles Bowden, Killing the Hidden Waters

"A reader may ask: What is the writer's relationship with the place and the people he writes about?"
John Berger, Pig Earth

"When time is pulse, as music makes it, eternity is in the gaps between."
John Berger, To the Wedding

"He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hand and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

"A time will come of course when walking, even walking in the heartland, will no longer be possible, or no longer effective. But then the story will be here and reenact the walking.
Peter Handke, Repetition

"He went back the way he had come, again taking his time, seeing everything now from its opposite side. It was as though he made the place dimensional and substantial by his walking both ways over it, granting it the same interest in going as he had in coming. To his mind it was old beyond knowing and yet new, timeless and yet momentary, so that watching it as once more it opened before him, old as he was, he was renewed."

Wendell Berry, “At Home”

and our faces, my heart, brief as photos

I've been thinking, as so often in the past 20 years, about the loss of my brother John. He died in his 40th year of AIDS.

Our sister Christy took these photos, the first two in the back yard of our Farmington, New Mexico home, the third at the Salt Lake Temple.

John Berger's line—and our faces, my heart, brief as photos—takes my breath away in the same way these photos leave me breathless.

The blurriness of the first two, for whatever technical reason—Christy moving too fast? Nervous? Not used to the camera?—heightens the effect of the photo for me.

Life is tenuous. Relationships are precious and often short (John's friend died one night riding his bike from Farmington to Aztec). And what we know and don't know is difficult to sort out.

Watching from behind is our youngest brother Jeff. That's for certain. (why do we say "for" certain?) What Jeff is thinking is uncertain. The hug is playful and intimate. The setting is most unlikely for such a hug between men—a strict Mormon family and their carefully ordered and oh-so-carefully financed home. It is possible, I surmise, because of the absence of parents and the presence of adoring younger siblings.

I never saw John in such an embrace and I have a sorrowful (as opposed to guilty) sense that I never "saw" John.

The third photo: years have past since the first two photos, maybe a decade. Jeff stands to the right, still not as tall as he eventually grew. Paul, who has just been married, has his back to us in the foreground. John, looking more suave than in the earlier photos, out of backwater Farmington and living in Houston (or is he in California by this time?), in the open shirt to the left, hair darker and less curly than before, holding a camera. Wearing a hat, between John and Paul in the photo, is Grandpa Hilton.

Again the setting creates some tension. John, a lapsed Mormon, would not have been allowed inside the temple for the wedding. He has waited outside until the wedding party emerged for photos.

His clothing, his hair, even, perhaps his wary face and stance (are they wary or attentive?), announce his difference.

What does Berger's line mean in this context? Aren't the photos still here, less brief than John's face?

I'm grateful for the memories the photos evoke. I'm surprised at the windows they provide into scenes I didn't witness (why didn't I come to Paul's wedding).

John's face? Each gesture brief and enigmatic. Faces change. We change. And this may be Berger's point: the photo cuts into time to record a single, brief moment. Stopping time, each photo is a reminder of a certain future and final stoppage in time's flow: memento mori.

Three Pages from Bento's Sketchbook

Just finished reading John Berger's latest book, "Bento's Sketchbook: How does the impulse to draw something begin?"

As so often with Berger, this is a series of short meditations, loosely drawn together by Berger's reading of Spinoza (Bento short for Benedict) and his sketches in a book dedicated to Spinoza.

Tyranny is the subject of two of the pages I scanned, a topic I've been thinking about while working on Handke's "Voyage by Dugout" and while reading an advance copy of Brian Evenson's novel "Immobility." "You know what word I never want to hear again," a character says in Handke's play: "neighbor. Fuck the neighbor. Death to the neighbor." Evenson's book is about forced community, a post-catastrophe world in which the authorities artificially lame an especially talented person to get him to do their bidding.

Berger writes about today's global tyranny in which differences between rich and poor are institutionalized. Handke writes about Marscorporations that use international events to forge soi disant community by vilifying some group, in this case the Serbs. All three texts echo messages of the Occupy Movement.