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
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.
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.
