“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
We’ll go walkin’ to Tietze Park
—- The O’s, We’ll Go Walking
The O’s, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas
But then Pointsman laughs the well-known laugh that’s done him yeoman service in a profession where too often it’s hedge or hang. “I’m always being told to take animals.” He means that years ago a colleague – gone now – told him he’d be more human, warmer, if he kept a dog of his own, outside the lab. Pointsman tried – God knows he did – it was a springer spaniel named Gloucester, pleasant enough animal, he supposed, but the try lasted less than a month. What finally irritated him out of all tolerance was that the dog didn’t know how to reverse its behavior. It could open doors to the rain and the spring insects, but not close them … knock over garbage, vomit on the floor, but not clean it up – how could anyone live with such a creature?
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Isaak as a puppy, when we first picked him a year ago.
Isaak in the pond at NorthBark Park, Dallas, Texas
My son’s dog, Champ
We have had Isaak, our dog, our rescue, for a year now. We don’t know exactly how old he is, but he was a young puppy when he came to us, so he is a bit over a year old. He’s pretty much as big as he’s going to get, but still has a lot of puppy spirit, for good and bad, in him. Other than excitement over tennis balls and the squirrels in our backyard trees that taunt him – he’s a well behaved and relatively calm dog.
We also have my son’s black lab with us – he and Isaak get along great. It isn’t unusual for us to have other people’s dogs too – kept as a favor for friends while they are on vacation or foster dogs (especially ones that need some socializing) or people pay us to watch their pooches.
The other day, we had another black lab mix staying, a little smaller than my son’s dog. So we had three… if not big, then good-sized dogs at the house.
I was having some trouble sleeping, and it was work the next day, so I was laying in bed, awake, trying to relax and get some rest before having to go back into the breach the next morning. A little after midnight… the guest dog wasn’t too comfortable with the doggie door, so Candy got up and let the three of them out the back door.
I’m not sure why she did this, but as the dogs ran by she reached out and flipped on the light switch for the back yard (I mean… the dogs can pee in the dark, can’t they?) and there, right in the middle of the yard, illuminated by a circle of spotlights, sat a rabbit.
The dogs went nuts – all three bolted for the bunny – and the rabbit made a mistake. The rabbit ran to the east side of the house, where the fence runs along the wall, a few feet away, until it ends near the front. The rabbit hit that dead end and had nowhere to go but to turn around. The three dogs were on him.
Our dog, Isaak, like most dogs rescued from the Dallas pound, is a pit bull mix. He doesn’t really look like a pit (he has long legs and a long snout) but is, according to his DNA scan, one quarter American Staffordshire Terrier – which is a polite term for Pit Bull. The poor rabbit didn’t have a chance. He was dead in a few seconds.
Candy, of course, went crazy. You see, to her the dogs are like people. They live in the house, most of the time, eat the food you give them, and chase tennis balls around. But right under that domesticated surface is a wild animal… and seeing a big fat rabbit standing there right in the middle of their territory, the back yard, is enough to bring that wild animal boiling out in a split second.
I jumped out of bed, chased the dogs back inside and, with more than a little trepidation walked around to the side of the house (at this time, I didn’t know what had happened); I only knew that the dogs had run down something. There was the rabbit, a big one, freshly dead with a big hunk missing from its side.
Isaak was walking around, coughing.
“We need to take him to the emergency room,” Candy said.
“Naw, he’ll be alright, though you’d better keep an eye on him, he’ll probably yakk up a big ball of rabbit fur any minute,” I said.
So it fell to me to go out and pick up the poor dead rabbit and throw him over the fence. We live on a creek lot so I went around and took the body down by the water, so the coyotes will have a snack sometime later that night.
I feel bad about the bunny, but not too bad. There are hundreds of rabbits along that creek after all. I wonder why the rabbit ventured into our yard. Surely they have some survival instincts and our yard smells of dog as much as any – it’s like the rabbit tried to sneak into a kennel.
I didn’t get much sleep – Candy and my son’s dog were freaked out by the whole thing. Isaak was just excited.
He’s a city domesticated pit bull mix – this was probably the high point of his entire life.
But something’s different… something’s … been changed … don’t mean to bitch, folks, but, well for instance he could almost swear he’s being followed, or watched anyway. Some of the tails are pretty slick, but others he can spot, all right. Xmas shopping yesterday at that Woolworth’s, he caught a certain pair of beady eyes in the toy section, past a heap of balsa-wood fighter planes and little-kid-size En-fields. A hint of constancy to what shows up in the rearview mirror of his Humber, no color or model he can pin down but something always present inside the tiny frame, has led him to start checking out other cars when he goes off on a morning’s work.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Downtown Dallas, Texas
This is how they meet. One night Slothrop is out raiding a vegetable
garden in the park. Thousands of people living in the open. He skirts
their fires, stealthy. All he wants is a handful of greens here, a carrot
or mangel-wurzel there, just to keep him going. When they see him they
throw rocks, lumber, once not long ago an old hand-grenade that didn’t
go off but made him shit where he stood.—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas
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.
Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white
Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe
And he keeps it, ah, out of sight
Ya know when that shark bites with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves, oh, wears old MacHeath, babe
So there’s never, never a trace of red—-Mac the Knife
Mural, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Once he sat all day staring at a single white dodo’s egg in a grass hummock. The place was too remote for any foraging pig to’ve found. He waited for scratching, a first crack reaching to net the chalk surface: an emergence. Hemp gripped in the teeth of the steel snake, ready to be lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea, and destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness, within its first minute of amazed vision, of wet down stirred cool by these southeast trades…. Each hour he sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever, he might have seen how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth’s own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world’s light. There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only the sun moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of mountains to Indian ocean, to tarry night.
The egg, without a quiver, still unhatched.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Sculpture, Energy Square, Dallas, Texas
Sculpture, Energy Square, Dallas, Texas
Sculpture, Energy Square, Dallas, Texas
One of my favorite sculptures in Dallas is in the Energy Square development, right next to the Lover’s Lane DART station. I took some photos of it years ago, but was in the area this weekend with a different camera and thought I’d grab a shot or two. The area is under (re)development and the sculpture is looking a bit more ragged than it did six years ago. I hope somebody cares enough to fix things up.
I have not been able to find any information about this sculpture – though I’ve misplaced my reference book on Dallas sculptures – it might be in there. I’ll update the post if I find anything out.
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
“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 