eyeless—something—
something lost in the map fold
a place, a name, some critical
information marred
there—a blue despair
a move forever blemished
a life map unusual
piquant in its obscurity
What I’m Reading:
“… like many long-distance walkers he was a depressive, pursued from a young age by what he referred to as ‘the Horrors’. Walking became a means of out-striding his sadness.”
— Robert MacFarlane / The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
The smoke trees blared their summer green. There was deliberation in her fibrillation. Her heart fluttered like an insensate butterfly—heliotropic, yet abjured to the sun. The world is my pistil, she said—a fluttering cavorting beastie—a moment of proboscis licking nectar drinking. She was forever cofounded by synecdoche and metonymy; and what was metric or metronomic. To the regular clatter of unceasing chatter, the voices in her head crescendoed into a din of metal machine music—and in a mere 23 hours she was home in the northern city again, apparently having brought the southern clime with her. Days of 90-degree weather gerrymandered her senses into discrete ultra-heterodox salamander shapes. Her olfactory was a red eft. Her haptic a hell-bender. No one was offended and no one complained. She would get to the decompression over the coming days. For now there was only exhaustion and an empty psychic tank to refill—and an unstable budgie to contend with.
What I’m Reading:
“Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.”
— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch
“But the faster we travel, the more intensely we feel our lack of relationship with the land we traverse.”
— Robert Moor / On Trails: An Exploration
“Walking on a path is an adventure. No step is ever the same as another. One never knows what might be waiting around the next bend. The terrain varies, the ground cover varies, and the body must exert itself in a number of ways. As exercise, walking on paths is the best. I’ve heard stories about people who have walked their way out of spinal prolapses and depression after doctors and psychologists have tried for years to help them.”
— Torbjørn Ekelund / In Praise of Paths
“It occurs to me that we live in an era of extinction, and perhaps what will also be extinguished—for some of us, the brave ones, which I don’t think I am—will be our sense of self, the ego, the false and comfortable dreams we’ve constructed of ourselves.”
— Deborah Willis / “How Writing About Climate Change Can Become a Form of Escapism”
“For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It is as though…nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into separate individuals.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche / The Birth of Tragedy
“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”
— Flannery O’Connor / Mystery and Manners
“In tears are sorrow. In tears are grief, in tears are anger. In tears are rage. In tears swallowed are cancer, hypertension, respiratory ailments. In tears swallowed is dis-ease. In tears shed is sometimes no relief on the other side.”
— Elizabeth Alexander / The Trayvon Generation
“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
— Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in The West
What I’m Listening To:
“Where’s the best place to sit if this all goes wrong?
Maybe the middle
Maybe the back
Well, what if I can’t get out?”
— Squid / “Greenlight”
What I’m Reading:
“But having braked all the way to the floor of the valley
it dawned on us the slope we’d have to climb
and it was night, you on the back of my bike…
…so you said let’s go home, but look
the hill we came down is as steep as the hill ahead of us”
— Jana Prikryl / “A Banquet”
fall into rhythm
pilgrimage gains momentum
cross-hatched sunlight path
revelations—step by step
connect nothing with nothing
What I’m Reading:
“It’s never been my experience that things get more complicated when I walk. On the contrary, everything becomes simpler and clearer.”
— Torbjørn Ekelund / In Praise of Paths
A thick orange sky—
Particles falling like ash.
The wrath of Vulcan unhinged—
Scours and scourges the country.
We—the gods of destruction.
What I’m Reading:
“… this particulate matter, 20 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, can be particularly harmful to our lungs and is being carried down into the state along with the smoke from the Canadian wildfires.”
— Dr. Jeremy Weinberger, Tufts Medical Center / The Boston Globe
There’s the day forming from the dark
Great gray plumes of vapor rising
No horizon line / no distinction
Between sea and sky
A punch-drunk compass
Two fathoms deep
Nowhere to go
Gray / dismal / lost
Unyielding •
What I’m Reading:
“In the end, we are all existential pathfinders: We select among the paths life affords, and then, when those paths no longer work for us, we edit them and innovate as necessary. The tricky part is that while we are editing our trails, our trails are also editing us.”
— Robert Moor / On Trails: An Exploration
the morality of it doesn’t enter in to any of this
we can hold two mutually contradictory ideas
in mind at the same time
fritillary
herbaceous
& compromised as a corpus callosum
that no longer holds
a mind together
cross-wired and twisted beyond reproach
a mother shakes her baby ‘til it passes
out
by proxy
in the flesh
or via smite of gilgamesh
we may as well drown
in the euphrates
tomorrow or 5000 years ago
we all make our way into shadows
What I’m Listening To:
“The wires in the stream
From rubble to my dream
I worry in my sleep”
— Squid / “Swing (In A Dream)”
i cavil and caw
i eat yams in a yashmak
you cough wrath unmasked
you backhand a cedilla
the diacritical—we
What I’m Reading:
“Sometimes, when I catch myself emptying a bucket of my own shit, butchering a deer, shifting manure in the pissing rain, or doing any of the thousand other small things which make up my life—things that, at other times, would have seemed hare-brained, unethical, absurd—a feeling of ‘how the hell did I get here?’ comes over me. This was never part of the programme. Like everyone, I had dreams of success and the good life, but somewhere along the track, a place I can’t quite put my finger on, the definition of those words began to change, and my life with it.”
— Mark Boyle / Long Way Home: Tales from a life without technology
“The first cop that handcuffed me / [was my father] / left me bound / till my fingers blued.”
— Torrin A. Greathouse / “On Confinement”
“What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
— Henry David Thoreau / “Walking”
“Reflecting here, I think I understand something more of why Henry journaled, and why there is so much good writing in it, so little lazy writing, so many elaborate metaphors and full sentences. Writing is willing permanence.”
— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
“Draw an imaginary map.
Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go.
Go walking on an actual street according to your map.
If there is no street where it should be according to the map, make one by putting the obstacles aside.
When you reach the goal, ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet.
The map must be followed exactly, or the event has to be dropped all together.
Ask your friends to write maps.
Give your friends maps.”
— Yoko Ono / Map Piece
“… In 2021, full-time, year-round working women typically earned 84 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts … CAP analysis also shows that if the gender wage gap continues to shrink at the rate it has between the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and 2021, median full-time, year-round working women will not achieve pay parity with men until 2056… Women and their families cannot afford another 30 years of suffering the negative economic consequences of the wage gap, and even this rate of progress is not necessarily guaranteed—particularly without any structural change.”
— Rose Khattar & Sara Estep / “What To Know About the Gender Wage Gap as the Equal Pay Act Turns 60” / Center For American Progress
“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didnt. I dont blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”
— Cormac McCarthy / No Country for Old Men
“When human beings look at other human beings in their midst and instead of seeing other human beings see a threat, see something monstrous, or don’t see at all, our very humanity is at stake.”
— Elizabeth Alexander / The Trayvon Generation
What I’m Listening To:
“I wonder where I am
I wonder if the water is swallowing the land
I wonder if an image is realer than the thing”
— Swans / “The Parasite”
thee istsfor manity reader 