Response to Misty Tracks
Please click here before reading on. I know it’s not usually me who devotes space here to photos, but I can’t pass Ryan’s photo by.
Mist: a concentration of water droplets hanging in the air. Obscurity, uncertainty, an opaque “whiteness” (or lack of color) through which the vision is limited to the immediate or expanded to a transformative view of a more mysterious beyond. As one moves through mist, a sense of what is immediate moves with one.
It was on of those peculiar afternoons that arrive in late October or early November in this district and are entirely dominated by one natural phenomenon alone—the phenomenon of mist. Wavering and fluctuating in its advances and retreats and only tangible to the sensitive skin by a faint impact of wetness and chilliness the mist rises, it would appear, by its own volition, or by the will of the divine water, straight out of the river and, unaffected by wind or sun, assumes, weak creature as it is, the dominant and mastering control of a whole unreturning day. This rape of the day by the weakest of her children was more significant of that spot than any other of Nature’s methods.
— Porius by John Cowper Powys
I am enamored by mist.
Tracks: the path upon which a train travels. Trains and tracks strike me much stronger than mist. I think that every writer must have some symbol that exceeds above others; train is the symbol upon which I throw my best and most fertile seeds.
The pulse of the great train resonates through her. She feels like the insides of a great bell; she is the omnipotent throbbing. Sometimes, when Valerie’s head falls back against the sticky brown upholstery, when her eyelids fall, and when her eyelids fall there is such an alliance fused between herself and the whole works that you would not believe. Valerie gets confused: Valerie thinks she is the train, that she is the one director of movement, that the vibrations coalescing, originate within her and that the train is mere assistant to discovery.
— Draft #3/4 of The Body’s Long Madness by me, Amber Ruth Paulen
I am doubly-enamored by tracks.
The combination of Mist and Tracks, well, it’s enough to spring me off my easy-chair. Bravo! Bravissimo!
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