dfgfh

sdfgvbfy

Franz Kafka: Absent-minded Window-gazing (Three Meditations)

.

Untitled: Miroslav Tichý, n.d. (Foundation Tichý Ocean)

Absent-minded Window-gazing (Zerstreutes Hinausschaun)

What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement.

The sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her.

And then the man has passed by and the little girl's face is quite bright.

Untitled: Miroslav Tichý, n.d. (Foundation Tichý Ocean)

Rejection (Die Abweisung)

When I meet a pretty girl and beg her: 'Be so good as to come with me,' and she walks past without a word, this is what she means to say:

'You are no Duke with a famous name, no broad American with a Red Indian figure, level, brooding eyes and a skin tempered by the air of the prairies and the rivers that flow through them, you have never journeyed to the seven seas and voyaged on them wherever they may be, I don't know where. So why, pray, should a pretty girl like myself go with you?'

'You forget that no automobile swings you through the street in long thrusts; I see no gentlemen escorting you in a close half-circle, pressing on your skirts from behind and murmuring blessings on your head; your breasts are well laced into your bodice, but your thighs and hips make up for that restraint; you are wearing a taffeta dress with a pleated skirt such as delighted all of us last autumn, and yet you smile - inviting mortal danger - from time to time.'

'Yes, we're both in the right, and to keep us from being irrevocably aware of it, hadn't we better just go our separate ways home?'

Untitled: Miroslav Tichý, n.d. (Foundation Tichý Ocean)

The Street Window (Das Gassenfenster)

Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then wants to attach himself somewhere, whoever, according to changes in the time of day, the weather, the state of his business, and the like, suddenly wishes to see any arm at all to which he might cling -- he will not be able to manage for long without a window looking on to the street. And if he is in the mood of not desiring anything and only goes to his window sill a tired man, with eyes turning from his public to heaven and back again, not wanting to look out and having thrown his head up a little, even then the horses below will draw him down into their train of wagons and tumult, and so at last into the human harmony.

Untitled: Miroslav Tichý, n.d. (Foundation Tichý Ocean)

Franz Kafka: three short tales, written between 1904 and 1912, from Betrachtung (Meditation), 1913, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir in The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, 1948

Franz Kafka b. 3 July 1883, Prague; d. 3 June 1924, Vienna
Miroslav Tichý b. 20 November 1926, Netcice, part of the town of Kyjov, Czechoslovakia; d. 12 April 2011, Kyjov, Czech Republic

Striped Skunk and Steam Plant (A Night-Wandering Tale)

.

Striped Skunk (Mephitis mephitis), California: photo by randomtruth, 11 August 2011

On most nights the only sign of human presence on the sprawling university campus during the deep nocturnal hours is that of roving police cruisers, maintaining a constant vigilance lest scattered elements of the common urban riffraff -- that ever-growing army without standards, the hungry and homeless -- be found seeking, on a muddy creek bank or beneath a rat-infested bush, a place to lay down, for a few hours, that heavy, heavy thing, a weary head.

A small sharp wind was kicking up, blowing dead plant matter about, after the manner described by the poet Shelley, who wrote in his Ode to the West Wind of leaves fleeing as before an enchanter.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes

Heat is generated in the campus buildings by steam power. A massive building houses the steam plant. Through the terrorist-proof grated windows one can make out the enormous steam pipes, as impressive as the monster machinery at the Ford River Rouge Plant once venerated in the reverent mechanical-utopian images of Charles Sheeler.

Steam puffs issuing from subterranean vents waft forth constantly upon the air currents, blown this way and that, like ghosts with sheets disheveled, from an enchanter fleeing, their sheets flapping behind them.

Last night, the spiky little breeze was bringing forth great white billows of steam from the huge steamship-funnel-size vents of the steam plant. Passing through these clouds it was possible to view the world as a Gustave Doré illustration from Dante.

It took a moment to notice a small scrabbling sound from the drift of dead leaves littering the margin of the concrete path.

A skunk sifting through the vegetal rubble for something to eat. And indeed a very handsome Striped Skunk, Mephitis mephitis, a much maligned yet entirely innocuous and splendidly attired creature.

From six feet away, we exchanged glances. The following conversation ensued.

"Hello, Skunk."

"???"

Back to the sifting, impassively ignoring the intruder's untoward presence.

Any urban-venturing deer would have frozen warily in its tracks until the passage out of range of the trespasser in its space.

The skunk, though, as if better accustomed to the project of sorting out the dangers of the night, apparently sensed no danger.

And a very pretty skunk it was, so intent, so beautiful, so industrious, framed there as it was in the billowing white cloud blown over us both by the steam plant, there in the middle of the night of the world.

Museum director Lilly Tellefson at work in the Georgetown Power Plant Museum, Seattle: photo by Joe Mabel, 12 January 2008

But Really It's OK

.

Abandoned house, New Mexico Highway 209 north of Clovis: photo by Billy Hathorn, 11 July 2008

.someone

has gone away
in
the
.....wilderness
.for awhile,

...... and presto,
. different room, another empty
house

. in the next block
green
...... the lawn
trembling with
. your tracks

Abandoned street and home, Rowley, Alberta: photo by Kappakapa, 2008

Avenue with No Name

.

Hallway of abandoned hospital in former East Berlin: photo By S-b, June 2008

The Avenida sin Nombre, as, if you have looked about yourself, you may have already gathered, is a street that has lost its memory.

It is a street that has forgotten it is a street and thinks instead that it is a tunnel, an intermediary passageway leading the approximately living and the intermittently sentient -- those who have managed despite the depredations of the present to retain at least some dim awareness of their surroundings -- toward, it is to be supposed, a place where oblivion will at last be complete.

It is lined all along on either side by high walls covered with peeling paint and here and there, sometimes for extended stretches, by commercial hoardings decorated with strange palimpsests of obscure hieroglyphic markings, maybe they are the texts of some sacred or for that matter not so sacred creed, no one now living has ever been able to make them out in such a way as to decipher their meaning, indeed many suppose them to have no meaning at all.

No one is quite sure where this street has its provenance or its terminus.

West Lawn -- Wrong Door: photo by Justin Hayes, 18 March 2009



An urban explorer under Hobart, Tasmania, Australia: photo by JJ Harrison, 30 May 2008

Vessel

.

Ding (tripod cauldron), Late Shang Dynasty: photo by Mountain, 27 February 2006 (Shanghai Museum)

It sat there on the shoulders,
an unidentified object,
an unexpected guest.

It sat there
for a while, and then it stood
there for a while, where it was.

It was full of air
for a while, and then
for a while it was

full of nothing, and
then for a while,
blood.

Ding (tripod cauldron) with animal mask, early western Zhou: photo by Mountain, 27 February 2006 (Shanghai Museum)

Credible Threat

.

Lo-Cost Liquor, Berkeley: photo by efo, 30 July 2005

Postcolonial history reads differently for the winners, enveloped in the conceptual transparency of their own guiltlessness, their difference.

Numbly so musing when a clumsy footfall in the night startles the mother deer out of her browsing covert on the hillside of the haunted house above Southampton,

a darker shadow against the deep background obscurity, and she springs from the concealing underbrush into the path of the approaching headlights,

her two maturing offspring follow and somehow as incredible as fairytale apparitions all three shadows emerge a long moment later on the other side of the road.

To every wild creature the signal of homo sapiens approaching is always a credible threat. The incredibility of the certainty

of the universal threat posed by homo necans hangs in the wet air under the thick umbrella of fog, far away across the invisible bay from the Season Opening Opera Gala

far from the warm virtual fireside glow of cell phones bathing patrons supping upon caviar and egg mousseline, Maine lobster medallions, seared squab and Cherries Jubilee, unseen

far away across the Bay, off the freeway exit, the cool neon azure circle of the Blue Moon Saloon floats in particulate city mist

above a shapeless homo-sapiens-size figure clutching a crumpled brown paper bag,

as though the contents of a brown paper bag at the bus stop on San Pablo were the Lotus, the last chance to be honest.

Jay Vee Liquors, Berkeley: photo by efo, 30 July 2005



Performer at the San Francisco Opera Guild's Opera Ball 2011, "An Evening in the Forbidden City": photo by Hardy Wilson/San Francisco Examiner

Tip Top Liquor, Berkeley : photo by efo, 30 July 2005



Performer at the San Francisco Opera Guild's Opera Ball 2011, "An Evening in the Forbidden City": photo by Hardy Wilson/San Francisco Examiner



Statewide Liquors 2, Berkeley: photo by efo, 30 July 2005