THE MOON
[In the Order of Appearance]
a mountain sacred: Mt. Tamalpais is in Marin Co., CA, just north of San Francisco.
memory: J. Dawson, “’A Moon Without Metaphors’: Memory, Wilderness, and the Nocturnal in the Poetry of Don McKay.” Journal of Ecocriticism Vol. 1 No.2, 2009.
it matters: R. Kelly From "(Moonshot)."Selene: The Moon Goddess was a Greek Titan who evolved into the Roman Luna. "At Luna we cross...the great frontier...from aether to air, from 'heaven' to 'nature,' from the realm of gods (or angels) to that of daemons, from the realm of necessity to that of contingence, from the incorruptible to the corruptible." C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image. Cambridge UK, 1964.
silver: "Transmutation to silver means cleansing and purifying which at the same time means becoming more essential and durable. These qualitative changes refer especially to the shining forth or bringing to light of the moon character of the soul." J. Hillman, "Silver and the White Earth (Part One)". Spring 1980. Dallas TX.
Even when I was a boy: W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore. London, UK, 1902.
If you expected: Dated, June 1797. Quoted by M. Moorman, Editor, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Oxford, UK, 1971.
The moon shone: D. Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal, 31 October, 1800.
fine white lines: N. Mailer, Of a Fine on the Moon. Boston, MA, 1970.Ko'ko: Great Horned Owl (Ojibwe-Odawa): The "Watcher of the Dark" awakens to the nightmare of a dry riverbed.
hermits: See, B. Porter, Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China. Berkeley, 2008.
a rock with no dimensions:"The rocks themselves were full of unexpected variation. Some were as ordinary as cinders in an ash dump, others, seen in the spectroscopic photographs are without dimension.
One does not know if it is a photograph of a three-inch fold of rock or the full study of a ledge and a cave." N. Mailer, Of a Fine on the Moon. Boston, MA, 1970.Joseph Campbell: (1904-1987) Distinguished comparative mythographer.
of prime significance: E. Neumann, “On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness.” In, P. Berry, Editor, Fathers and Mothers. Dallas, 1990.
portal: "When one thinks of portals, one is mindful of an implied barrier. The distinction between inside and outside bears a number of connotations cross-culturally: known/unknown, safety/danger, sacred/profane. As Victor Turner states (In, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY, 1974), portals define thresholds and liminality presenting new possibilities for being." G.F. MacDonald, et. al., "Mirrors, Portals, and Multiple Realities." Zygon, March 1989.
a house: In Pacific Grove, CA., the house was rented by the poet William Witherup. Besides myself, there were two other visiting poets: Beverly Dahlen and Michael Hannon.
the ocean's: The Apollo II astronauts' reentry module splashed into the Pacific Ocean on July 24th, 1969.practicing on Everest: "For most climbers, if there’s something to be conquered, it’s not so much the summit as some aspect of themselves. Fear and physical pain are the things to be overcome; routes and ascents are proxies for challenging oneself, not the terrain. In this game, the true opponent is usually not the mountain, but one’s own personal limitations." P. Sagar, "Rules of Ascent." https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-mountaineers-choose-the-hardest-routes-to-the-top
Landed: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon's Sea of Tranquility on July 21, 1969. while Michael Collins circled the moon in the mother ship.
a luna peak: Mons Huygens, in the Montes Apenninis mountain range, is 35,387 ft. high, over 6,000 ft. higher than Everest.
Emails from Emptiness: M. Derby. Letter to David Chadwick, August 5, 2008. http://www.cuke.com/people/wisberg-marian.htm
a new vision: "Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves." Carl Sagan's comment on a last picture of Earth taken by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990 from about 4 billion miles away, as it left this solar system. See, C. Sagan, Pale Blue Dot. New York, 1997.
Sun Face Moon Face: "In the Scripture of Buddha Names it says that Sun Face Buddha lives for eighteen hundred years, while Moon Face Buddha enters extinction after a day and a night. But what about your own Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha? Is it something long or short? How do you understand it? Set your eyes on the absolutely inextricable within yourself." Tenkei Denson (1648-1735). In, T. Cleary, Editor, Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record. Boston, MA, 2002.
untamed beings: "The tree of life is a twisted, tangled, pulsing entity with roots and branches meeting underground and in midair to form eccentric new fruits and hybrids." L. Margulis, Symbiotic Planet. Amherst, MA, 1998.If an Aivilik Eskimo: S. Giedion, “Space Conception in Prehistoric Art.” In, E. Carpenter and M. McLuhan, Editors, Explorations in Communication. Boston, MA, 1960.
Mad Dreamer: Brent Malpin. (See University of New Mexico, Archive 456, for his letters from Asia.)
in general: P. Gravestock, “Did Imaginary Animals Exist?” In, D. Hassig, Editor, The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature. New York, 1999.
naive of montane weather: "'many meet with disaster and harm because they do not know the method for entering mountains;'" in short, 'mountains may not be entered lightly.'" Ge Hong. Quoted in, R.F. Campany, "Ingesting the Marvelous: The Practitioner's Relationship to Nature According to Go Hong." In, N.J. Girardot, et. al., Editors, Daoism and Ecology. Cambridge, MA, 2001.
the upper sky: W. von Goethe, Theory of Colors. Cambridge, MA, 1970.This is for you: V. Aleixandre. From, “The Poet.” L. Hyde, Translator.
Huni Kui: A tribe in the Amazonian jungle of western Brazil, although the borders are obscure. See, M. Córdova-Rios and F.B. Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon. New York, 1971. The name of many indigenous tribes translate into The People, implicitly meaning, the Chosen People.
the mineral life: G. Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will. Dallas, 2002.that sing through:
"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
T.S. Eliot. From, "The Waste Land."a venerated shadow:
"The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
W.B. Yeats. From, "The Second Coming."Sticks with turkey: R. Underhill, "The Salt Pilgrimage." In, D. Tedlock and B. Tedlock, Editors, Teachings From the American Earth. New York, 1975.
mysteries of in-between: "What does it mean to be between edges—more to the point, to be in-between them?" E.S. Casey, "Edges and the In-Between." https://philosophydocuments.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/6-edges-in-between.pdf
in the way that we have: J. Searle, “The Mystery of Consciousness.” The New York Review of Books, 1 September 1997.Bashō: Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) was born Matsuo Kinsaku in Ueno, Iga Province. In 1681, a pupil of his transplanted a Banana (bashō) tree by the poet's small hut.
How am I doing? D.L Barnhill, Bashō's Journey: The literary Prose of Matsuo Bashō. Albany, NY, 2005.
conversations: R. Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. New York, 2012.
moon's deathless gaze:her face—
old woman weeps alone,
moon her only companion.
Bashō. From, "An account of the Moon at Mount Obasute in Sarashina."the glow of the song: MacFarlane, Ibid. He is actually speaking "of certain Aboriginal Australian dream-runners who were exceptionally fluent in the Songlines, and whose knowledge allowed them to move across the land at great speed in the dark..." There are also Tibetan lung-gom-pa. "By that time he had nearly reached us; I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground." A. David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet. New Hyde Park, NY, 1965.
soundless: L. Eiseley, "How Flowers Changed the World." In, The Star Thrower. New York, 1978.
the hermit: Thomas Merton. See, "Rain and the Rhinoceros." In, Raids on the Unspeakable. New York, 1966.
the direction: J..D. Lewis-Williams, A Cosmos in Stone. Walnut Creek, CA., 2002employ(ed) his legs: C. Morley, Fifty-Four Essays. New York, 1925.
philosophers know: "Derrida wants architecture to stand still and be what he assumes it appropriately should be in order that philosophy can be free to move and speculate. In other words, he wants architecture to be real, to be grounded, to be solid, not to move around--that is what Jacques wants. And so when I made the first crack at the project we were doing together-—a public garden in Paris—he said things to me that filled me with horror: 'How can it be a garden without plants?' 'Where are the trees?' 'Where are the benches for people to sit on?' This is what philosophers want, they want to know where the benches are." P. Eisenman. Quoted by J. Kipnis, "Twisting the Separatrix." Assemblage #14, 1991.
a net of invisible threads: M. Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader. W.C. Beane and W.G. Doty, eds. New York, 1975.
golden daffodils:I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils...
W. Wordsworth. From, "I wandered Lonely as a Cloud."