Sun Standing Still

Pastor Jón: Sometimes I feel it's too early to use words until the world has been created.
Embi: Hasn't the world been created, then?
Pastor Jón: I thought the Creation was still going on. Have you heard that it’s been completed?
    —Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier

Sun-Standing-Still. Pausing, the stitch of the journey north.

Stitch the netting!

Sol-stice, we pause, with the rising, an infinite solar-divine

enfolding the measure of Earth-time.

Reminder-time!

Rimrock petroglyphs, High Lakes, SE Oregon

NOTE
Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier, 1968 (Icelandic, translated 1972) Laxness, born in Iceland in 1902, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. He died in Iceland in 1998.

Parable // Parallel

Parable of the King

The great king looking ahead

saw not fate but simply

dawn glittering over

the unknown island: as a king

he thought in the imperative - best

not to reconsider direction, best

to keep going forward

over the radiant water. Anyway,

what is fate but a strategy for ignoring

history, with its moral

dilemmas, a way of regarding

the present, where decisions

are made, as the necessary

link between the past (images of the king

as a young prince) and the glorious future (images

of slave girls). Whatever

it was ahead, why did it have to be

so blinding? Who could have known

that wasn’t the usual sun

but flames rising over a world

about to become extinct?

—Louise Glück

POEM: Louise Glück’s Parable of the King, published in 1996 in her collection Meadowlands, becoming ever visionary. Here, 25 years later, 2021, peering ahead into a near and unknown stark and blazing future, the words elegy, dirge, requiem enfold the senses. Glück’s crystalline clarity: Whatever / it was ahead, why did it have to be / so blinding?

PHOTO: Rockshelter: A river canyon, June 2021, northeastern California, Modoc country, conjuring one of the Ten Thousand appearances, before and beneath language. Twelve red dots. Mineral-blue wall. Eared/horned spirit constellating pattern. Then! Carbon-black ceil: seeing the no thing, the night behind the night.

CODA

We go forth, we imagine in parallels; all truing, all contradicting. The material reality, the artifact, the evidence, the love.  A glimmering lattice ensnaring us in belief, in dark hope, with vague prayers and winsome longing.

Obsidian/Cutting Blade/Lassen Creek/Modoc/Pit River/Northern Paiute Country

Note1. Louise Glück is the 2020 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Note2.  I discover: Coronach:  A dirge, lamentation, used for funeral songs in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland; from the Gaelic.

Note3.  The phrase “the night behind the night” inspired by a statement made in the 1930s by Joe Green, Northern Paiute Shaman, Pyramid Lake, Nevada, recorded by Willard Parks.

Center Of The Earth 2

Circle in Owyhee country

The traditional lands of the Northern Paiute and Shoshone peoples

Note:  Update of this blog’s March 28 2021 post 

From Protect Thacker Pass, June 1 2021: 

Daranda Hinkey, Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone tribal member and secretary of a group formed by Fort McDermitt tribal members to stop the mine, Atsa Koodakuh wyh Nuwu (People of Red Mountain), states: “From an indigenous perspective, removing burial sites or anything of that sort is bad medicine. Our tribe believes we risk sickness if we remove or take those things. We simply do not want any burial sites in Thacker Pass or anywhere in the surrounding area to be taken. The ones who passed on were prayed for and therefore should stay in their place, no matter what. We need to respect these places. The people at Lithium Nevada wouldn’t go and dig up their family gravesite because they found lithium there, so why are they trying to do that to ours?”

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/03/center-of-earth.html

Photo above: Douglas Beauchamp