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A magazine of sound and fury Dana Wilde |
The Mind Errant |
All writings on this website Copyright 2008-2009 by Dana Wilde and Jack Wilde. Images Copyright Dana Wilde unless otherwise attributed. You may use what you find here for any noncommercial purpose as long as you give full credit to the authors, photographers and the website. For any purpose which involves the exchange of money, including postings to websites which host any kind of financial transactions, please contact us. |
Amateur Naturalist Short forays into nature Fires of the Sun Longer forays into outer space Critica Forays in Reading Fictions Nature Notes by Jack Wilde |
"In the dreaming man's dream, the dreamed man awoke." -Jorge Luis Borges |
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Other writings in other places: China Daze: American life there, 2000-2002 How Ancient China Came to America: The I Ching as Bible An Old-Fashioned American Revival: Henry Miller, the Beats, Philip K. Dick and M.C. Dalley Ride the Highway West, Baby: The Doors and the latte literati Nine Qazals of Mazun: Translations of a Sufi poet |
Maine: An Essay (1990) Observations on the difficulties of saying anything meaningful about observations on the difficulties of living here. Contraband: A Recollection (1996) Portland had a poetry and arts scene in the 1970s, before the fall. Awakening: Rimbaud (long ago now) Of adolescence and poetry. |
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Turning the Wheel by Bruce Holsapple The weather shifts, fog, mud lots of rabbits about, need to watch in the early dark, they scootch beside the road tend to dart out, make the stupidest moves twist, maneuver, melt, avoiding a straight path a coyote might get fooled but trucks don't predict-you can't turn the wheel fast enough, so that the road's spotted by carcasses- recall small deer, mornings in West Texas, those big trucks, the headlights at night, plowing thru them you can't slow fast enough vultures, pink ugly heads, gathered awkward flapping off next morning just as the day heats & one deer tangled in a barbed fence between Sanderson & Marathon sensed it watch as I drove past otherwise I'd never have noticed- tan haired in the sand & brown bushes Got out, looked over & the herd 20 or so, were looking back at us managed to get the leg free & she hopped off Hot, Jesus, those border towns me with no air conditioning driving around like in an tin oven lightning flash, hail, wind, fog meanwhile in Iraq, the radio says Weapons of Mass Destruction but that's already taken place in fact a done deal A cow sees grass A thief, opportunities Vox Audio/udio-poetry/ |
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Responsibility & the News If you leave the reporting of the news to the internet people, you will never have any accurate idea of what is actually happening. |
Beyond the Bounds of Eye and Ear Listening for spirits. Deviant theory Contrary to popular belief, money does not make the world go round. A Talk with a Monk West meets East. |
October In October comes a quality of light here that is practically supernatural. The sun has bent down toward the southern horizon since June so it's throwing rays through the air at the same angle as in late February. But fall is a convergence of seasons, and winter is a months-long end, all bare trees and snow. October light is different. October sunlight filters through leaves and crystal-clear air. In any given field there's a birch, maple or sumac that practically refracts light, like a tree hologram, or like a live crystal with facets bending yellow, orange and red radiances inside the tree and over every ghostly remnant of milkweed, grass and goldenrod. Everything owes itself to the air in October and November. Not only conditions of light, but squalling blue jays and hop-flocking juncos, and Canada geese. Where the dignity and nobility of the great geese originate, I don't know. But when you hear 20 or 30 voices honking and cheering overhead, and see the streaming chevron headed south in slow, powerful wingbeats, then - at least to me - a chill comes made partly of cool air and partly of cool grace. They summer from here north, sometimes to the edge of topmost Canada, where they mate for life and nest on the ground, often islands, and on muskrat and beaver domes. Their little families stay together for the year, until the next brood. They migrate south as far as 600 miles and the Caribbean and tend to make the same rest stops. In October they're flapping and racing on ahead of the snow and cold, which is already settling over Canada and not long for Maine. As long as there's brown meadow grass or stubble fields for forage, they stay. I've seen flocks resting in desolated corn fields in December before the snow and wind bullied them out and they headed off south. They've got the wings to go. The geese's wings in autumn. The waning sunlight stuns them, or rather, the light angling in from southwest and bouncing off their wings, almost like the echo of a voice, stuns who sees it. In my memory, which is increasingly cluttered by autumn after autumn, is a moment of crystal clarity in southern England. It was October 1980, I was hitchhiking out of Poole in Dorset on a road beside a moorland field. The grass and heather were brown up the slopes; there were brittle fallen leaves everywhere, just like here but duller. There was no breath of wind and not a sound; the landscape itself was listening. Suddenly a V of geese rose out of the grass. They ascended in perfect silent unison with the silkiness of motion you imagine wraiths have. They rose and rose and then on some unknown cue started honking. I watched them out of sight over the hills. Where they were going I didn't know. They were pretty surely Canada geese, already at the southmost limit of their British range. They were brought from North America to Britain in the 17th century for sport and decoration and afterward invented their own migration routes. It didn't matter that their destination was unknown. In their ascent and the low morning light the autumns of England and New England converged, at least in my apprehension, the way certain dreams mean something impossible to state or even think. In October comes a certain slant of light and perspective that seems to rise up out of some unseen spot of time and gather itself, and head south. |
Books, bits and pieces |
Recollections and other perceptions |
Canada geese |
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September This September field is so beautiful it's transfixing. Grasses in different shades of steel and emerald and crowds of yellowing milkweed run up a small slope. Fleabanelike white asters with round bluish stars and gold centers grows in clumps, in places child-high thickets. Sprays of late goldenrod are so yellow they practically vibrate, and the rest have stiffened into gray ghosts. Here and there are violet clusters of New England asters. Queen Anne's lace folded into greenish bird's nests and their sisters the hemlock parsley grow like sparse galaxies in the uncut brown interstices at the field margin. To the right are hayrolls, sweet-smelling even in the random distance. There's not a sound. At the top of the rise, oaks and maples have a few rust and copper leaves and in another week will burst into flame. Birch leaves are turning dirt-saffron. Beyond the hayrolls green spruce spikes line the dirt road. Today, silver-gray clouds, almost globelike, roll overhead, and a great blue heron flaps soundlessly across. This beauty is so intense it's almost unendurable. It's something you only see in pictures. The angel in Leonardo da Vinci's painting Annunciation stares at Mary with exactly this force. On one knee and raising two fingers in some cosmic signal, it gazes with supernatural firmity at Mary who seems entranced. The folds of Mary's dress seem as random as the hayrolls, but like the hayrolls, they're not. They're circling her knees and midsection. The angel itself is virtually whirling. Three circles just discernible to the eye - around bended knee and shoulder, upraised arm and wings (which a later painter retouched and discopernicated), and inside that, its head - are spinning there in outline. Between the two is a dark vanishing point where the angel's force meets Mary's stunned attention. This field has stunned me. It's nature caught in the act of announcing itself. The asters and hemlock parsley are little starlike wheels. The hayrolls, yellowing milkweed and graying goldenrod are twisting into the distance before my eyes. Above them are the ballooning steel clouds. And in the extraterrestrial expanse beyond them, Jupiter will rise tonight, a little earlier than the night before, with its moons circling inside its round of the sun. Beyond the planets' orbits the stars in Cassiopeia and Pegasus will also rise and Hercules will just again be setting in the wheel of the firmament that turns overhead year after year, season after season. These wheels grind away inside another, greater circuit of the stars around the Earth's pole every 26,000 years, and they all whirl like clockworks inside yet a greater wheel they all travel around the galaxy every 250 million years. There's a story about a man who prayed to see an angel, and one revealed itself as a disk spinning three or four feet above the ground, maybe in a field like this one. Dissatisfied, he demanded to see the angel's real face. The angel told the man he shouldn't wish for such things, but the man persisted and the angel said, "Then look." The man screamed - the angel's face filled the sky, its gaze fixed unendurably on him. "Never let me see a sight like this again," the man shouted. There are angels this close to your face in this autumn field, and presumably in all fields, and everywhere else. I have no more idea what this means than the man who saw an angel in the sky. I only know this field here east of Unity has transfixed me, and this is what it is like. |
Jupiter & its moons, orbiting 9-9-09. |