Category Archives: lit

The Crystal in Tamalpais

by Joanne Kyger

 In Tamalpais is a big crystal. An acquaintance told
me the story. A Miwok was giving his grandfather’s medicine
bag to the Kroeber Museum in Berkeley. He said this man
took him over the mountain Tamalpais, at a certain time
in the year. I believe it was about the time of the
Winter Solstice, because then the tides are really low.
They stopped and gathered a certain plant on the way over
the mountain. On their way to the Bolinas Beach clam patch,
where there is a big rock way out there.

                                                                            Go out to
the rock. Take out of the medicine bag the crystal
that matches the crystal in Tamalpais. And
                                              if your heart is not true
                                              if your heart is not true
when you tap the rock in the clam patch
                                                            a little piece of it will fly off
                                                   and strike you in the heart
                          and strike you dead.

And that’s the first story I ever heard about Bolinas.

“…half sung and half spoken: “In the water, no, just look, deep, deep. It took a long time, long, so long. And you do not weep. If you knew, it’s so black and so muddy all around me. But look. A violet is growing from my mouth. It’s singing. Do you hear? Can you hear it? You might think I’d drowned. How lovely, so very lovely. Isn’t there a ditty about it? That Klara! Where is she now? Go looking for her, go look. But you’ll have to go into the water. That’ll make your skin crawl, won’t it? My skin no longer crawls. A violet. I can see the fish swimming. I am perfectly still, I no longer do anything at all. Be sweet, be kind. You look displeased. That’s where Klara is lying, right there. Do you see her, do you? I’d wanted to say something else to you, but I am content. What did I want to say? A little bell. I always knew. But don’t say so. I can’t hear anything any more. Please, please—”

–The Tanners (by Robert Walser)

Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps some day another form of life will come along. Either way, it is of no consequence. At the same time, I am still a part of life, and I am bound by this to protect myself to whatever extent I am able. And so I am here.

– Paul Bowles, Pages from Cold Point

The city is the place that shifts desire
towards purposes sought after by
the city itself, unknown as of yet to observers.

The perspicacity of a dazed
tenacity lilting towards hunger,
the body takes over.

Win a meadow.
Win a million.
Out the window staring
at a hill, in season.

Tips on how to push past raw
into the place of one hundred beaches.
Shore always at once arriving and depleting.


I have arrived at that day of the fateful meeting.
Eyes scan the horizon but no sign gleams there.
Seagulls sobbing like angels
weeping through deserted season
after deserted season diverting away
from a crystalline moment
you feel for that one-in-a-million,
picked from the ocean of fishes
to be your jewel in this realm of nothing
as if anything could fill the ever-
widening gap between possibility
and what is now real actual everyday reality.


An age for an era gone like smoke disappearing
minutes after the audience has stopped clapping
and the stage is still crowded with gear.

From Arthur Mag:

OLD MAN BURROUGHS ON PRECISION WRITING (from Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997):

“It’s a question of getting a sufficient degree of precision. If I really knew how to write, I could write something that someone would read and it would kill them.”

‘I‘ve written about love before. I’m not going to write about love again. Maybe this is selfish, maybe it is foolish. But I hope it will lead to nuance.

I’ll write about not-love-yet, maybe, about into-love. I want to write through it, to remain porous.

Or: “I’ll write about the process of becoming other: vibration, selection, recombination, recomposition” (Franco “Bifo” Berardi). Maybe then I can return to love.

…

“Possibility is content, potency is energy, and power is form”

…

“But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. ‘Love is not consolation,’ she wrote. ‘It is light.’”

…

“like planting a flag on the moon after forty countries have landed there before you, or on a moon whose sole purpose is to host flags” (Maggie Nelson, 2011).

…

“I call power the selections (and the exclusions) that are implied in the structure of the present as a prescription: power is the selection and enforcement of one possibility among many, and simultaneously it is the exclusion (and invisibilization) of many other possibilities.”

…

“Sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won’t get to take stock of until it’s too late.”

Excerpts (from https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/lips-in-the-streetlights-pop-future-pop-bops)

“what does ‘together’ signify in a socioeconomic system so efficient in producing alienation and isolation?

…

In order to be heard, Pettman remarks, and “in order to be considered a voice at all”, and therefore as “something worth heeding”, the vox mundi “must arrive intimately, or else it is experienced as noise or static” (Pettman 83). In both the projects discussed here—Saturday and Walk That Sound—the walkie-talkie provides this means of “intimate arrival”.

…

the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)

…

I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94).

…

as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative […] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)

…

Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham).

…

homelooseness

…

excerpts (from https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1581 and elsewhere)

Peradam is a word from René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue, which was the source for Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. In the book ‘Peradam’ is an object that is revealed only when someone knows they are seeking it.

“The world was like a leather bag filled with water, he once wrote, and at the bottom of the world was a puncture: time seeped out of it, drop by drop.

Time was like a whirlpool.

Time could be stopped if you stood between the sun and a sundial.

The present moment could be sometimes like the Mekong or Bangkok’s Chao Phraya: a vast river. The past and future were tributaries that sometimes overflowed their own banks, and spilled into each other.

Time was like a palace’s great hall, with partitions that could be taken away. Every instant that would ever be, or had ever been, might be seen all at once.

Sand pouring from a woman’s shoe: the most enchanting hourglass in the world.

…

Will you abide in a world in which the spirit is dead and there is only a reverence for life?