Historic
Lincoln District, New Mexico, USA
Happy Birthday, Russ!
I celebrated SA4QE 2 on Sunday 2nd, the only day I had available to get
outside for a photo shoot. My idea for this year was to invert the
process slightly, and pair appropriate quotations with specimens of the
scenery here in Lincoln County. The pictures are my birthday gift. A powerful
windstorm came about and caused me to alter my locations, but I did find
places that I felt illuminated the quotations in some way.
All the best for this solar return...
The first drop took place in a
dingy back room of the Old Courthouse Museum in Lincoln. A bare bulb shines
down on the life-size poster of Billy the Kid, an image copied from a tintype
taken in 1878. Behind the board on which this is pasted is the wooden grave
marker of his mother, Catherine McCarty Antrim. Here is the quote --
from The Raven
(a
short story from The Moment
One says "a black time" but actually the black of things is all kinds of colors. Sometimes it's the gray rainlight in an empty room; sometimes it's the sound of one's own footsteps under yellow streetlamps; sometimes it's an unaccompanied cello from a long time ago. It was difficult to understand the reality of my days, that this was now my life that would last until my death, that I had closed a door and gone, that there was no going back, that no-one was there any more. No-one was there because you don't just leave people, you leave a time. And the time wasn't there any more.
The second drop is thrust under the threshold of an ancient adobe building in Lincoln County. You can see the bricks beginning to melt, the sills starting to spring away from the structure. Here is the quote --
from PILGERMANN
Jesus said, "I am the energy that will not be still. I am a movement and a rest, but at the same time I am all movement and no rest and you will have no rest but in the constant motion of me. Do you believe?"
"I believe," I said.
"Why do you believe?" said Jesus.
"No belief is necessary," I said. "It manifests itself."
By the time of my third drop, the wind was becoming seriously gusty, so I had to fold the paper and stick it in the wire loop that held the barbed strands to the old fence post. That is Sierra Blanca in the background, sacred to the Mescalero Apaches upon whose reservation the mountain exists. Here is the quote -
from
PILGERMANN
Even a small mountain is always a surprise, it is always so much itself.
I did not photograph my final drop, but it was true to certain
traditions. The fourth sheet of yellow paper went into an open freezer in the
meats section of the WalMart in Ruidoso, and it says --
Move in behind the flickering to the moment under the moment.
- from My Night With Leonie
(a short story from The Moment under The Moment)
~ ~ ~ ~
Sea
turtle tracks, early morning on the Space Coast of Florida, 2001.
Biting
the wheel is not enough.
-
from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ
Dear
Russ,
I thought about where I might leave a piece of paper with your apothegm. I'm only a few hours distant from Roswell, you know. I could have taken it to the UFO Museum. But in the end I decided to commit my yellow paper to the ghost town of White Oaks. Virtually nothing is left of this Victorian gold mining town, which began to die when it lost the chance to become a railroad stop. There is nothing but a tiny wooden saloon of casual construction that serves as the epicenter for a treeless warren of dirt roads sparsely studded with trailers. A steer skull hangs crookedly over the entrance. The scene always makes me think of "The Man With the Dagger". I drove to White Oaks as furtively as one can when one raises a dust cloud, but I was seen. The mission failed.
So
then I hit on the idea of placing my yellow paper in the virtual world: hence
this photo. I took the picture during the summer of 2001, the morning after
sea turtles had come up to deposit their clutches, on the Atlantic coast of
Florida near Cape Canaveral. Last week I re-entered the picture in virtual
mode, and left my A4.
Some
statements are so succinct but at the same time blipful that, like black
holes, they suck into themselves any attempt to explain them. I've already
told the epiphanic story, over on the Head of Orpheus web site, of how I
discovered that wheel-biting lion deep in the narrow corridors of the Assyrian
exhibit at the British Museum. I am awestruck at how that lion unleashed such
creative profundity in you. I took a version of that lion away with me that
day... or perhaps, as lions will do, he chose me. He was, and continues to be,
a privelege to witness, a necessity to witness.
Happy
Birthday, Russ, and may you have as many more as you can stand.
With
warmest wishes,
Asteroid Lil
formerly in the Green Swamp -- now in the land of Billy the Kid