“Pick your place anywhere in the world and Great Salt Lake is a mirror reflecting a flashing light on what is coming and what is already here. Our natural touchstones of joy will deliver us to heartbreak. Each of us will face the losses of the places that brought us to life.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake” / The New York Times
“you could mistake grief for a diamond the way it shines when cut into, like fish eyes in a boat’s drain.”
— Melissa Studdard / “Philomela’s tongue says”
“… I looked at you in the photograph, coming apart into each grain of your gesture, and I wanted to know this. I wanted to know when I looked at your hand in the air of the photograph, alight but limp, almost floating, toward whose caress I cannot know, what the grain is.”
— Chad Bennett / “The Grain”
“But through the box walls, I feel their fingernails rising out of the corners of my rooms, their presence, these strangers, these spies, these unknown people who have walked through my home, have touched my private places in my home, done this abominable thing of touring
my bedroom, my sleeping place, where at night I revisit my ancestors…”
— Patricia Jabbeh Wesley / “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America”
“When my daughter’s class made a gingerbread house for the holidays, I licked the frosting and told her how good it was because emotional connection optimizes mental health. But I secretly spit it out since frosting’s nutrient profile is suboptimal.”
— Tom Ellison / “I’ve Optimized My Health To Make My Life As Long And Unpleasant As Possible”
“Should there be a new language for this off-kilter world? When mackerel, the traditional catch of West African and Spanish fishers, show up in Iceland, are they still mackerel? Are pelicans that glide over the Schuylkill River, at least five degrees north of their historical habitat, still pelicans, or must we translate them?”
— Anna Badkhen / “The Language of Catastrophe”
“I made a bouquet of bones and left them for coyotes.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake” / The New York Times
What I’m Listening To:
“I’m just a symptom of the moral decay That’s gnawing at the heart of the country”
He was filled with a horror and a hate so acute at that instant that his fist automatically clenched and his arm seemed to move autonomously driving that clenched fist to an inexorable meeting with his brother’s face…
The author’s stream of thought is broken here, and a lyric, and then a deconstructed thought impinges:
Anger is an energy. The certainty of reason is a tyranny.
Speak in aphorisms. Think in signifiers. Be the signified.
And so the author continued on another string. The nascent narrative broken…
“You fill me with inertia.”
“There, that’s more like it.”
“Like what?”
“Like what I like.”
And then unable to completely gather their wits the author’s work and discipline was irretrievably disrupted, and they were done for the day.
What I’m Reading:
“… I belonged to my mother six hours west and only left once a season for the purpose of daddy laying his belts and depression on me.”
thee istsfor manity reader 