A gift, indeed, Stephen.
Doug
On 2011-02-14, at 11:01 PM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Valentine's Day
>
> My daughter is a therapist intern at the CA mental hospital where Carleton
> Watkins, the great 19th century photographer of the American west died insane.
> The San Francisco Earthquake (1906) burnt his studio down including all the
> glass plates from which he made and reproduced his work.
>
>
> There she treats a geriatric poet with Parkinson's Disease. In his wheelchair,
> twisted over in pain, he says the drugs are his 'Gordian knot'. Today he told
> her that her real name is "Grace."
>
>
> "Why?" she asks.
>
> "Grace means you are elegant, you have power, and you have light."
>
>
> What a lovely gift, I tell her. Before his loss, he must have been a little or a
> bunch of all those things. Beyond that I am wordless. Absolutely wordless.
>
> Stephen Vincent
>
>
>
> ...
>
Douglas Barbour
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
Walter Benjamin
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