On Secrets, in Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, Mary Ruefle.
...and when I listened carefully I could hear that they were speaking about speaking, and when I listened carefully to them speaking about speaking I could hear they were singing about listening. And that has been a long journey for me, of listening. I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, "I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say"; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.
On Secrets, in Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, Mary Ruefle. I want you to imagine for a moment something that is actually impossible to imagine – the unborn child in the womb perceiving through sound an outside world it has absolutely no experience of, no concept of, and no perception of except through sound.
On Secrets, in Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, Mary Ruefle. Photo taken in Hood River, Oregon Update, February 9, 2016
Leaving the world of turtles for now, via a journey into the world of Mary Ruefle. Contemplating fiddling with some of her words feels like a promise to find the physical, as if an actual fiddling. So many of my photos propose themselves as possibility, it's almost overwhelming. I'm ready. Scuba divers descend to the bottom of the great central tank at Boston's Aquarium. They enter the water several times a day to hand-feed the fish and small sharks. At the end of each session, they drift to the floor of the tank and await the great sea turtles. The turtles settle down before the divers, often touching their noses to the divers' faceplates. The divers put out their arms in a wide embrace; the turtles extend their front flippers and lay them on the humans' shoulders. They lie like this for several minutes.
Postscript, Luis Alberto Urrea, in A World of Turtles: A Literary Celebration, edited by Gregory McNamee and Luis Alberto Urrea The chief, seeing that the turtle was very smart and showed great wisdom in his talk, took a great fancy to him, and whenever any puzzling subject came up before the chief, he generally sent for Turtle to help him decide.
The Wonderful Turtle, Chippewa folktale, in A World of Turtles, edited by Gregory McNamee and Luis Alberto Urrea |
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