Early morning thoughts while pictures beam in from France


This morning I am in a happy place. It is an intersection. A listening post.

The Tour de France is on TV, and that is a thrill itself. Getting up early on a long weekend Monday to watch the colours of the peloton's men and machines stream and curve through the countryside is time in front of the monitor well spent. I enjoy parades, and bicycles, and TV in the sun.

With a mug of coffee, and a book and a sharpened pencil as the broadcast flows in.


This morning, the book is Trickster Makes The World by Lewis Hyde. The open pages resemble a gravesite I saw embedded into the earth at the Hillcrest cemetery. The shaft of sunlight stares across the printed words. They are worth standing in front of and staring at.
Structures always arise from exclusion. Think, for example, of how one might go about designing a flag. This world has endless color; the palette of greens in field and forest is boundless, as is that of water under changing skies. To make a flag, we select only two or three of the colors available and from the infinite ways we might arrange them we settle on a single one. Only by such narrowing can the flag acquire identity. Then it means something. Then we can recognize it, salute it, be its heroes, keep it out of the dirt. 
A flag, Hyde says, is a particularity struck from the vastness. So is a gravesite, I believe.

A flag against the sky, a grave marker against the earth, words against the page, a bicycle rider inscribed on the fields of Moselle, these are all particularities and vastnesses that can be read together, wonderfully.







Comments

  1. Honeybug22 October 2017 at 07:01

    Hi Glenn,
    I have just discovered your blog amid my continued Edmonton research... My partner, ten year old daughter and I live in Adelaide, Australia but are flying to Edmonton on December 30. We will be living there for all of 2018 as I am on a teaching exchange. Super excited to experience the world of Edmonton around the other side of the globe just as we move slowly towards Summer here.
    We are cycling fans too. We live in a hilly area of Adelaide making cycling not so easy for ourselves so we are looking forward to picking it up again in flatter Edmonton. We too become nocturnal in July for Le Tour as there is full coverage here. I sit with knitting and usually last until the end at around 1am. It is a magical time of the year along with Wimbledon and sometimes the Ashes Test Cricket as well.
    I wonder what time of the night Le Tour appears on Edmonton screens - my head doesn't quite reach around that one at the moment. 16 and a half hours backwards is hard enough.
    Anyway, just thought I would say hello and I look forward to reading more of your posts.
    Cheers,
    Pam

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughed ab
Read more

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve
Read more

On the way to and from Coffee Outside

Image
I have wondered about the the flight to artifice when natural beauty is encountered. Standing in front of a mountain vista, I will routinely offer some version of, wow, it looks like a painting! Or like a postcard. Or that is just out of a movie! This morning as I pedalled in the MacKinnon Ravine the April snow felt etched onto the limbs of the trees. I have often felt dissatisfied with this transposing of the beauty out there into the key of human making.  But, maybe, painting and photography and engraving and the rest of the human arts are as natural to us, as lovely, as nature itself. Or, maybe, so entwined that it is hard to tell nature and art apart. My bicycle has certainly transported me to feelings of freedom I would not have achieved were it not a piece of technology.  Who are we, really?                                                                           At the turn at the bottom of the ravine, a plastic orange fence encircles a soggy sink
Read more