Seasonal Warnings

The Great Spreadwing and water know: fall is coming.

Little Gizzard Creek

Wind, Water, Stone

by OctavioPaz

translated by Eliot Weinberger

for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,

wind scatters water,

stone stops the wind.

Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,

stone's a cup of water,

water escapes and is wind.

Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,

water murmurs going by,

unmoving stone keeps still.

Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:

crossing and vanishing

through their empty names:

water, stone, wind.

On Noise Pollution

1.
In Denver, I endured three days of torture when I wrote my comps for the Ph.D., not because of the exam, but because I was confined to a small space with four gum chewers, smacking and cracking.

2.
In New Orleans, where I lived for more than two decades, ambient noise scrambled my brain. Someone else's music or conversation always assaulted me whether I was riding the streetcar, sitting in my own backyard, reading at the library, or even walking in the park at first light.

3.
In childhood, I remember silence before 24-hour-365-day-a-week television, muzak, cell phones, and utter disregard for others' personal space. Because no person nattered on and on, I could hear the natural sounds of the woods behind the house -- singing and chirping, whirring and slapping, buzzing and thumping.

4.
Walking today, I listened to my breath, my steps, my camera lens, rain snapping leaves, and the creek, a small fall pooling and plashing, and returned to complete silence at home.

5.
Some people ask Why would you want to live alone? How do I explain that I would be mad were it not for protection from other people's noise pollution?

Water Music

Light and water and shadow: music for eyes and ears.

Tricks of Light

And then there is this about light: 

stand in one place, look at one creek, and alchemy results: everything -- water, silt, stone, water strider -- all instantly become yellow gold;

stand in another place, look at one creek, and what might have been gold at another hour or minute or instant hardens into steel, only fall's leaves burning.

On Dappling

Gerard Manley Hopkins praised "dappled things" in his famous poem "Pied Beauty."

Glory be to God for dappled things --
   For skies of couple-color as brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
   Landscape plotted and pierced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
      And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle; dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                         Praise him.

About Him, I am not so sure.

About "pied beauty," I am certain: dappled light turns creek water and stone, algae and leaf, even ice into objects of strange beauty.

Oh dappling: You, I praise.

Accidental Impressionism

When taking photographs, I worry that I'm not experiencing a moment because I'm so focused on snapping it. Then later, when I get home and look at the pictures, a great image sometimes surfaces, both on the screen and I know it's what I saw.

That's what happened with this photograph.

I took about fifteen snaps of the stream and the snow and the reflections, each from a slightly different spot. When I snapped this one, the water shimmered like marbleized paper. I'm pleased that's what the camera saw, too.

As a girl, I was fascinated by the creek at home. As an adult, I am still fascinated. I could take photographs of streams like this one all day long. I'd be happy, both in the taking and the looking later.