Language Masonry

Something about who we are in language struck me last night at Hawrelak Park.

We were at the Interstellar Rodeo. It's a new festival. Our friend Murray, who can swim in the words deep end, describes it as the folk festival for the one percent, because it's built around a concept of pairing the musical acts on stage with a wine. And, so, it's not just Texas roots-punk-rocker Alejandro Escovedo, it's the underground-and-always-threatening-to-be-pulled-into-the-mainstream Alejandro Escovedo and a glass of De Angelis Rosso Piceno with which he shares a commitment to quality and an ambivalence to commercial success.

But that's not the item.

What is the item was the young boy, Mason, who was sitting alone with his family in front of us on the hill who, at turns, crushed plastic cup, broke tree twigs, and opened and closed and open and closed (repeat) his mother's umbrella.

"It's a peacock," he told me, as he held the umbrella behind him and triggered it open into what he invited us to consider to be a fan. "You know, like a peacock's tail."

Mason didn't know that he was dealing in metaphor. This is that. This very different travels across some  sort of invisible border and becomes that. And, mysteriously, we understand it. And make a connection, in this case, across about four decades.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

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

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 laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more