Befuddled Young Americans

Thus when I headed south of the border again in early 1946, I did so not to seek romance or to immerse myself in learning about the country, but mainly because it was unconnected with my own personal background, and it seemed to be a likely environment wherein to start getting my head straightened out. Such an aspiration, of course, has characterized befuddled young Americans for a couple of hundred years or more, and has usually involved leaving their youthful precincts behind in favor of large cities or foreign lands, where many of them eventually fall into conformity with a new set of values, others are defeated by strangeness and go back home, and a few gain enough clarity of view to carry them on through life and whatever work they have in mind.

                                                  -- John Graves, Myself and Strangers

Memory and Photography

Vietnam

But so far as the pleasure [of meeting Albertine] was concerned, I was naturally not conscious of it until some time later, when, back at the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again. Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.  -- Proust

Arabesque

Cairo floor 

These photos are from Egypt and India; text is Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. IV.


"We probably owe this splendor of ornament to the Semitic prohibition of human or animal forms in art: as if in compensation, the Moslem artist invented or adopted an overflowing abundance of non-representational forms."                                                          



"He sought an outlet first in geometrical figures -- line, angle, square, cube, polygon, cone, spiral, ellipse, circle, sphere;"

Cairo floor 2

 "He repeated these in a hundred combinations, and developed them into swirls, guilloches, reticulations, entrelacs, and stars."

Cairo floor 3

"Passing to floral forms, he designed, in many materials, wreaths, vines, or rosettes of lotus, acanthus, or palm tendrils or leaves."

Taj Mahal detail

In the tenth century he merged all these in the arabesque; and to them all, as a unique and major ornament, he added Arabic script.

Mohamed Ali mosque, Cairo

Desert Rain

One day there will be a crackling, clean, creosote smell in the air and the ground will be charged and the hair on your arm will stand on end and then BOOM, you are thrillingly drenched. All the desert toads crawl out of their burrows, swell out their throats, and scream for sex while puddles last. The ocotillos leaf out before your eyes, like a nature show on fast forward. There is so little time before the water sizzles back to thin air again. So little time to live a whole life in the desert. This is elemental mortality, the root of all passion.

          -- Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson

Life and Travels of the Osage Orange Tree

Plants are fine strategists. They use roots, stems, branches, bark, flowers, fruit and seed to make the most of local resources; they creatively compete against other species for those resources; they defend against worms and bugs and parasites whose thousand tiny bites might do them in. And when that is not enough, they find ways to move to new fields by making themselves nutritious or tasty enough to hitch a ride for their seed on the fuzz of a bee or in the gut of goat or jay, or else they make themselves beautiful or utilitarian enough to persuade mobile humans to carry them along on their wide journeys.

So it poses something of a puzzle when a homely, thorny tree with inedible fruit and unsuitable lumber spreads itself far and wide, well beyond its early natural home. Such mysteries are bound to conceal a good story, and so it is for an American tree native to a small strip of East Texas called the Osage Orange. This is the story of its remarkable life and travels.

Why go to Big Bend?

Not many people go to Big Bend, for which I suppose I should be grateful. It’s too hard to get to – hundreds of miles from anything “interesting.” It’s not on the way to anywhere, and even upon arriving at one of the gateway cities Marfa or Alpine you still have a long drive to the park. And alas, for many who endure that long trek, there is, well, nothing there. We drove two days for this? When do we eat?