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

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