“I shivered in those
solitudes
when I heard
the voice
of
the salt
in the desert.”
― Pablo Neruda
Dry Fountain, Dallas Arboretum
The Voice Of the Salt
Category Archives: Photography
The Soul Of Man Is Audible
The soul of man is audible, not visible. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain, invisible to man!”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion
Galatyn Fountain, Richardson, Texas
Signs No One Has Ever Read
“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Decatur, Texas
Poor Receptacles For Dreams
“I thought climbing the Devil’s Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
Arts District, Dallas, Texas – PATHS by Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir at HALL Arts
One Hundred Three And One Half
It was in April, but for a second or two as he was coming awake in the strange room and the racket of big and little cousins’ feet down the stairs, he thought of winter, because so often he’d been wakened like this, at this hour of sleep, by Pop, or Hogan, bundled outside still blinking through an overlay of dream into the cold to watch the Northern Lights.
They scared the shit out of him.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Downtown Waxahachie, Texas
Such Recognitions Are Not Reversible
At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening, the unmistakable smell of gas came to Pirate from a dark street lamp, and out of the fog ahead materialized a giant, organlike form. Carefully, black-shod step by step, Pirate approached the thing. It began to slide forward to meet him, over the cobblestones slow as a snail, leaving behind some slime brightness of street-wake that could not have been from fog. In the space between them was a crossover point, which Pirate, being a bit faster, reached first. He reeled back, in horror, back past the point – but such recognitions are not reversible. It was a giant Adenoid. At least as big as St. Paul’s, and growing hour by hour. London, perhaps all England, was in mortal peril!
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Bank of America Plaza, Dallas, Texas
I moved across the cold, wet, foggy city after work. Tired, yet glad the workday was done and I had someplace to go, even if it was only a weekly bookstore discussion of the giant, confusing tome, Gravity’s Rainbow. As I walked from train to streetcar at the midpoint of my journey I looked up at the fog-shrouded tower and thanked the moment of beauty.
Burnished Sword At the Ready
Oh yes once you know, he did believe in a Minotaur waiting for him:
used to dream himself rushing into the last room, burnished sword at the
ready, screaming like a Commando, letting it all out at last – some true
marvelous peaking of life inside him for the first and last time, as the face
turned his way, ancient, weary, seeing none of Pointsman’s humanity,
ready only to assume him in another long-routinized nudge of horn, flip
of hoof (but this time there would be struggle, Minotaur blood the
fucking beast, cries from far inside himself whose manliness and violence
surprise him)…. This was the dream.—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Dallas Museum of Art
A Smell Of Ozone Blows Up
A smell of ozone blows up from the Dodgem cars out of the gray steel girderwork along the promenade, along with smells of shellfish on the barrows, and of salt sea. The pebbled beach is crowded with families: shoeless fathers in lounge suits and high white collars, mothers in blouses and skirts startled out of war-long camphor sleep, kids running all over in sunsuits, nappies, rompers, short pants, knee socks, Eton hats. There are ice cream, sweets, Cokes, cockles, oysters and shrimps with salt and sauce. The pinball machines writhe under the handling of fanatical servicemen and their girls, throwing body-english, cursing, groaning as the bright balls drum down the wood obstacle courses through ka-chungs, flashing lights, thudding flippers. The donkeys hee-haw and shit, the children walk in it and their parents scream. Men sag in striped canvas chairs talking business, sports, sex, but most usually politics.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Crystal Beach, Texas
Your Equation Only For Angels
“Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can’t we do
something, down here? Couldn’t there be an equation for us too,
something to help us find a safer place?”
“Why am I surrounded,” his usual understanding self today, “by
statistical illiterates? There’s no way, love, not as long as the mean
density of strikes is constant.”
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Angel, Fort Worth, Texas
The Senility Of Obsolescence
“Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don’t they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don’t have to — they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It’s despair to accept the senility of obsolescence…”
― Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast
Like seeing a dinosaur on the street.
Bill Chance 