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Showing posts from 2010

December 7

The temperatures now plummeting well below zero & the snow consistent, with solstice approaching & the low-slung arc of light that passes for day painting the mountains in alpenglow. I think of rosy-fingered dawn when I, long awake, see that roseate hue bathe the sloping angles. & the closer to solstice, the less that light changes, such that the day entire (all five hours of it) is appareled in that same coloration. & then one’s days seem like a wandering about in a dreamscape the magnitude of which only further confounds it—the only thing calling you back to its fundamental, mineral reality the cold. I’ll be bound here for the holidays after all, & won’t be seeing the flatlands & the cornfields & the palpable heft of the Midwestern grey sky spread thick above the prairies. Instead, it will be the quiet Alaskan winter, the dogs, the trails, & the plunging mercury. It’s hard to describe how winter here makes you feel, physically, mentally—how the darknes

Ken

http://badrecordingcompany.com/ken/ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Project-Ken/111434965593279 Ken.

November 20

A weekend spent outdoors, mushing two days from the yard on Stampede & then skiing a seven-mile loop from my front door in the Village. & in the meantime, playing music with good friends, cooking some fine meals, & generally finding myself fulfilled from one moment to the next. I’ll be brief in saying so, but given the pending holiday & my pending trip down to Texas for a week, I’ll say only that I am unspeakably grateful to be alive & to inhabit this life among all the others I could have lived. Happy Thanksgiving, friends & family alike. Whether or not I ever find time to articulate it, those that I love are a constant company to my thinking & living & being. Also, a few new flickr pictures & the mushing blog goes forward too.

November 7

I am looking at this curious photograph of a 94-year old great-grandmother holding an eleven pound premature baby who spent the first four months of his life in the hospital & who still requires quarantine due to the fragility of his lungs. & though I know the child’s parents, he is a stranger to me, as is the frail old woman. & her eyes regard the child with a tenderness that seems to speak in years, while his own fawn over distances making shapes & conjuring the world into the familiar. What life will he lead? & then, towards its end, palsied, fragile all over again, what child will he hold in his shaking hands? & where, I wonder, always, where does that living go, that meaning that seems to call from us with such blazing intensity? All of these days fugitive & irretrievable, & then as we age our fingers seem to clutch tighter those things that intimate our own mortality. A child’s eye full of vitality. The wild countenance of a threatened moose buckin

October 29

& now the snow, falling in a frenzy through the night & dissipating into slow, meandering flakes now, turning in the discernible breeze against the languid grey of the sky. Enough that it clusters & holds in odd patterns about the burls in the birches, or tendrils out along the spruce-boughs to where they cluster in cone. & that smell it brings, a kind of metallic, airy cleanliness borne aloft in the fine gusts. & now we watch it & gauge its accumulation & look at the dogs & beyond at the gaping miles of wild untended & we wait for it to hurry along. I’ve decided to document this first year of trying to learn how to mush. It seems too singular an enthusiasm to disperse among the rest, or maybe too dominant a one to let determine the general hue of things. I have this for you, my four beloved readers: www.amushingeducation.wordpress.com Or I have it for myself, in any case. There is little there just yet, but over time, I hope it proves one of the ins

October 14

Winter like a fledgling, the first tenuous flakes of snow sheening us here, the first intimations of real chill. & already, those last vestiges of autumn covered over, subsumed in the gloaming. Winterlight. Winterdusk. Winterdawn. They are their own things entire, & inexplicably, profoundly beautiful up here. & an odd time for me personally, stepping into the season that so drastically came to alter me last year. I feel the visceral memory in me yet, the quiet, the patience. & then look up to see my heart content this time around, joyful, present. All of those months last year when in the yawning silence it was only my own feeble whisper I could hear. & startled, then, at the sound of it, the little, fragile thing. A bird’s tiny bone. I think on what endures, on what is yet extant from that long season, & suppose what remains somehow sacred & central. From that beehive that murmured once & then fell resoundingly quiet, the small flame at the center batti

October 2

There was a run I did last year along the rim of three lakes during which a golden eagle flew directly over my head the entire time. He never forged ahead or lagged behind, & when I would stop to regard him he would perch on the bough of a spruce & regard me back & then wing along when I would run again. & last winter it happened several times that along my runs in the snow I’d properly packed I would stop short twenty feet from a wolf, & we would stand there for a moment & look at one another, eye to yellow eye, & then we would continue along, the wolf into the copse of willow, & I along my path. One of those winter runs I heard a plaintive bleating from across the way & looked in time to see three wolves bringing down a young caribou. I saw their dark forms silhouetted there against the pale snow in the hushed light of the morning, just inside the tree line, writhing in a violent torsion. & I have come upon grizzlies that were magnanimous or ap

September 20

Several days now successive of bluebird skies & sharp light & the underbreath of winter through the scattering yellow leaves. That auratic sense that only autumn can provide, of the soil smell, & the swaths of crimson, & the cranes flocking south & everywhere, everywhere, the crisp sun. Season of mist & mellow fruitfulness, for Keats. & for me always that attending sense of crepuscular gratitude, if that quite makes sense. How full its fleeting moments, simply because so urgently fleeting, & into & out of such a rich kind of beauty. Maybe it’s how time seems to lay itself bare for autumn, & how the heart clamors across that landscape. Or maybe I’m doing some temporal accounting anyway. But I feel my childhood bodily come autumn, feel its fugitive joys & its small ruptures in all of their original tenderness. & I feel the scraping wind, & the sunlight settling over the plains, cut in crooked, palsied shapes by the boughs of the oaks &a

September 3

Here the autumn sweeps in again in its dappled vermilions & russets & blazing golds, & the crisp light sieving the world in fine shadow. The frosts beginning in the morning, temperatures hovering around freezing & rising only slow & languid through the waning daylight. & autumn here absurdly beautiful. I walk slack-jawed & awed by it. Yesterday, we walked towards Carlo Ridge, forgetting moose hunting season began on the first. The trail splays out, ten feet wide, rutted with horseshoe prints indented where the mud gives & pulls their legs down. We turned & headed back to what may be the most plentiful patch of blueberries I’ve found. The dogs, after observing us picking, have taken to berry eating, & slowly, methodically, plod bush to bush nibbling carefully to avoid the dun leaves. Willa’s paws show streaks of stained purple. Moose, I think, may well have swiftly developed a keen addiction, given his particular vigor & voracity among the ber

August 14

That trip to the glacier a kind of repositioning for me. You feel subtle shifts, time to time, or tremors, or intimations of something in the throes of change. & then there are precise instances wherein you seem reaffirmed significantly, or redefined, or something akin to either. How you are, & how you are in relation to the world—how much a part of it. How the novelty of going into an untrailed wilderness for the first time in any extended capacity seemed to dissolve into an utter familiarity, a kinship almost. & how in so doing, these details that confound the intentions of our days fall from us, absolutely unable to find purchase or sympathetic ear. Which I sort of love, really—that transformation of daily pressures from their gathered urgency into not only a kind of circumstantial impotence, but a complete inability to mean, fundamentally. & in their dissolution, as rehearsed as it may sound, I find myself closer to myself, living without context. & I think I so

July 23

Wordsworth noted how recollection is always a form of reanimation—a breathing-into that conjures into dance the ghosts of the past. The idea was to direct one’s contemplative focus in an effort to recreate whatever circumstances seemed redolent with meaning, & to conjoin the present mind with the newly animate whilom feeling in a coeval creative effort. & so a childhood excursion across a meadow of tall grass, a leaf’s spine stuck in the sedge of the Thames, or a visit to France, or the death of a friend years ago, or the faintly lingering acrid sweetness of a flower pedal long since turned under in the loam & soil. & it would seem that he earnestly believed that the two could come together without compromise, or without enough distortion to merit fundamental suspicion. & maybe as a matter of forging a poem, forging his poems, that can make sense—if that particular faith in the sameness of what is past was what lent his better work its spark, it’s a trifle to dissec

July 17

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It’s a fine point, the prior comment. There was roughly a year of my childhood during which time I was so thoroughly convinced that I was in fact a dog that I abstained from speaking the king’s English & opted instead for barks, grunts & whines. & my food in a bowl. & as I understand it, much to my parents’ credit, they did little to discourage the delusion. Certainly, my brothers would have done everything in their power to foster my canine sensibilities. What spurred my transfiguration back into the human fold I do not know—only that I sort of resent it. Dogs achieve a kind of perfection, utterly given to phenomena, utterly incapable of dissemblance. A dog’s joy dwarves the moderated human’s. Maybe in childhood or in moments of unparalleled exultation in which the will folds in upon itself & ipseity gives out completely. Otherwise, we are bridled, reined in, filtered even when we perhaps ought to let an emotion unfurl in us to its fullest conceivable degree. The r

July 11

There is something to it. Even raindense, or wrested behind some window or heavy door, that light filtering through the marled cloud. The seagreen tufts of wet needle clustered under the boughs of spruce, or the windblown white of the one we named dogflower , or just the sound of the rain over the corrugated roof, the felt curtain blown just so. Or in the sun, dappled willow, the sibilance of the aspens. & I can do nothing & find its grace—ask nothing of it, expect nothing, & still, its gift. You grow up thinking on other lives like books unread on a shelf. & suddenly you are living some old tale, some familiar trope that has been your steady carriage the years through. & your imaginings are such brittle things, & the wind is very real. The x-ray & the light. What you regarded once in some other’s telling & colored in hues presently unavailable. Which is to say, I think, inhabiting a dream from childhood clothes you again in childhood’s robes. Or that ch

July 4

After the family leaves, the sudden cognizance of distances, of miles untended. & the house’s new quiet, tempered by the having-been. The floorboards I didn’t hear in their creaking, the wind in its rustling, Willa sighing & looking towards the door. My remoteness less a conceptual thing now, more tangible in me. The lines on the map sinews stretched taut, arteries ushering blood from me & sending it away, away, some gift unbidden. & with that, the textured memory of how I came to be where I am. Something about seeing my family conjures my life entire & seems to flush my heart with some longing after irrecuperable years. I think on childhood in no particular way, am ghosted by remembering & feel that fell, that odd confluence of loss & warmth & sentiment that demarcates for me the passage of time, causes a swelling in my breast, underquiets each word. As if some rend in the familiar continuum through which that wake must run, from which the mind & he

June 12

That’s the thing of it there. My brother just wrote about how we err in historicizing, either by reanimating some epochal trait in some sort of grotesque charade that can only draw caricatures where portraits would hang, or by letting temporal gaps close up like scars over old cuts so we regard the mark & forget its cause. Either way, seems to me, there is a kind of valuation that goes forth, advertently or no. That act of separation, of differentiating either by the guffawing condescension of the present or, well, by its graver counterpart performing the same exact function. In any case, the past is set apart, fetishized, exposed ostensibly as a wake of obsolescence falling out behind us like the coma of a comet. The present gets privileged, in all the wrong ways. & the difficulty here is not that the past is passed; invariably, in the mere act of being, our recollections will perforce enact those reanimations & set those ghosts to dancing. Maybe the problem is that in thi

May 30

Note to self: sleep more.

May 14

But then that, too, a kind of sounding, an architectonics all its own. A sort of script. A preface. & there’s the thing of it—how we surrender ourselves to experience but cannot let go the thought of the thing, the conscious presentiment, that dim intimation of structure. & so a moment in which we feel ourselves perfectly conjoined with phenomena holds its rusted anchor yet, & the wave washes it over, & still are we tethered, bank-chained, rooted in that grey-blue alluvion that we allow ourselves to consider at rest & ample for the root-room. Bed down, then, silt & shifting pebble. Bed down & begin a constellation. Which is to say that there are no daemons but in our faiths, no rubric of order but we would draft its design in the first. No news here. & this, too, an echo. There is in Keats’s odes a gradual unclenching of the fists, a slow & ponderous relinquishment that seems to me always somehow relevant. It is how thought works on the world, I thin

May 1

This morning a fine, almost particulate snow, a spring snow, a dust feathering the air against the blue-white whorls of cloud & sky, & the sun meantime casting the falling flakes against its rays. These kinds of mornings. The peaks of the mountains enshrouded in newfallen snow, falling still, while down at elevation the ground breathes & swells just above freezing. & where the snow has receded, the colors seem to shock even in their tired, faded hues. The vermillion at the willow’s stem. That first pallid green. The puzzled landscape. The last few days I’ve felt a kind of tremoring incredulity at the simplest things. Words falling into line, the hand reaching from plate to mouth, the slow whir of the truck’s engine. In the minutiae this strange & bewildering ontic fact reflected: I don’t understand being at all. The heart in us, the yearning, that indefatigable longing. I don’t understand the beauty around me or my want to embrace it. I don’t understand the passage

April 23

& now come spring, & absent of exigencies. The same calm breath, the light lingering to wane later & later, & the dawn daily more impatient to rise. & I still seem to myself a part of some ebbing current, almost other, almost witness to the passage of this own slow time. It’s not from distrusting happiness so much as participating in its inchoate shaping. Maybe it’s that the idea of contentment seems enervating, ultimately—some means of acquiescing to a feeling rather than finding its harmony in you. Contentment makes an assumption about time that I’d rather not make. It is enough, for now, to merely be. & in a day, maybe it’s the falling feather from the owl in the white spruce, or the opening brown-black gap of a puddle, the gentle wheeze of the pass, the scurrying tap of the magpies alighting on the corrugated roof. The eye makes its appeals in a language beyond our own, beyond the gymnastics of our thinking. Which seems the riddle. Odd to think that time ant

April 13

I am thinking about how cleanly divergent thought & feeling can be—two ghosts with no cognizance of one another, haunting the same tired house. & how powerlessness can sting me so, crop up from some long-dormant regret to stab & swiftly withdraw. how in thinking about the irrecuperable past it is our nature to rhapsodize over conditionals, over conjectures of what could have been, when in any case here we are, our palms upturned, our hearts in some heavy wake, or some spirited discovery, or lulled instead by the soft, plain music of the ordinary. that none of it effectively matters. & that it could not matter more. maybe, maybe those twinned ghosts can have names, & one of them can be the nihilist & the other the solipsist. & both can drag their spectral forms through the relief of shadow thirsting after some bright light that will never come, & both can feel the blue-black umbra of the moon, the color of a raven’s wing catching a silver arc of refracted

March 27

A year now since we severed, since I compassed north & let the floor fall from beneath me, diving headlong into something entirely unfathomable, some gift given purely in the phenomena of the daily. & how momentous that swift rupture. How our hearts clamored against it & knew it for its necessity at once, somewhere limning resolve & unspeakable remorse, the white fingers clutching the steering wheel & the body borne along while the mind wondered & that heft of grief enwreathed the heart. Laid bare, this new way of being, this new way of carving out a day. Some faith in uncertainty, some awareness that under the foundational intricacies of any given plan, a chasm of yawning, quiet chaos tendrils & vines its way slow about the footholds. What we would hold. & so the border crossing, the surreal stays in yellowed hotel beds, the soot-grey snow mounting in walls lining the highway, the recognizable signs of human life dwindling as I found myself further &