Posted on: July 31, 2012
Red Branch. A Novel, by Morgan Llywelyn. 1989
Am nearly finished with a wonderful novel, Morgan Llywelyn’s Red Branch. It tells the tale of Cuchulain, the great Irish hero of the Ulster Cycle. Ms. Llywelyn paints an earthy, rugged and raw portrait of Ireland in ancient times, and imagines a passionate life for Cuchulain, along with his wife Emer, Deirdre of the Sorrows, King Conor Mac Nessa, Fergus Mac Roy and Maeve, queen of Connaught.
She does a remarkable job of staying very close to the original source material, though she deviates slightly at times for dramatic effect. And she is very good setting up and foreshadowing pivotal moments in the story. If one already knows the myths, this enriches the telling, because you see new strings in place, new binding chains of fate.…
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Posted on: July 30, 2012
The River. Photo by Douglas Pinson. 2012
The river is real and metaphorical at the same time. Or, perhaps, a shade or two off the instant. It is real only before and after the phởtograph. When I look through the lens, I’m already behind the times and separate from my river. When I look at the phởtograph, I am further removed in time and space — there and not there. Being as if. Not being as one.
Such musings are more or less obvious. But what is not so obvious is that the river terrorizes me and makes me laugh with joy and fate as well. Or, perhaps, a shade or two this side of terror and omen. I laugh thinking about all the other people through time who have looked at rivers and seen things like that.…
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Posted on: July 23, 2012
Night Lot. Photo by Douglas Pinson. 2012
I was walking the other night and fell in love with shadows. The play of shadows on the street, in the lamplight. Thinking, as I walked, what it might look like in a photo, I framed a scene here and there. I abstracted part of reality and placed it inside a box, a rectangle, removing it from its natural place in the scheme of things.
This was wrong, in a nagging, somewhat ambiguous way, and it was perfectly, naturally right all the same. Wrong because it meant I was isolating things and removing them from their relationships to one another, discriminating, splitting up what is whole. Right because this is quite nearly the only way to make art …
Though my Zen studies have been put on hold for the last few months, I still think about what I’ve learned so far and what I need to learn, and this followed me as I walked and wondered:
– making art without severance, without ripping things out of their relationships, is still a foreign country I want to visit and absorb.…
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