{"id":3943,"date":"2020-09-22T11:04:22","date_gmt":"2020-09-22T15:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3943"},"modified":"2020-09-23T07:34:44","modified_gmt":"2020-09-23T11:34:44","slug":"convivial-question-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3943","title":{"rendered":"Convivial Question"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost the first thing I saw this morning was this poem (via Amanda Palmer, who got it by email from Maria Popova):<\/p>\n

\nTHE BIG PICTURE
\nby Ellen Bass<\/p>\n

I try to look at the big picture.
\nThe sun, ardent tongue
\nlicking us like a mother besotted<\/p>\n

with her new cub, will wear itself out.
\nEverything is transitory.
\nThink of the meteor<\/p>\n

that annihilated the dinosaurs.
\nAnd before that, the volcanoes
\nof the Permian period—all those burnt ferns<\/p>\n

and reptiles, sharks and bony fish—
\nthat was extinction on a scale
\nthat makes our losses look like a bad day at the slots.<\/p>\n

And perhaps we\u2019re slated to ascend
\nto some kind of intelligence
\nthat doesn’t need bodies, or clean water, or even air.<\/p>\n

But I can’t shake my longing
\nfor the last six hundred
\nIberian lynx with their tufted ears,<\/p>\n

Brazilian guitarfish, the 4
\npercent of them still cruising
\nthe seafloor, eyes staring straight up.<\/p>\n

And all the newborn marsupials—
\nred kangaroos, joeys the size of honeybees— steelhead trout, river dolphins,
\nall we can save<\/p>\n

so many species of frogs
\nbreathing through their
\ndamp permeable membranes.<\/p>\n

Today on the bus, a woman
\nin a sweater the exact shade of cardinals,
\nand her cardinal-colored bra strap, exposed<\/p>\n

on her pale shoulder, makes me ache
\nfor those bright flashes in the snow.
\nAnd polar bears, the cream and amber<\/p>\n

of their fur, the long, hollow
\nhairs through which sun slips,
\nswallowed into their dark skin. When I get home,<\/p>\n

my son has a headache and, though he\u2019s
\nalmost grown, asks me to sing him a song.
\nWe lie together on the lumpy couch<\/p>\n

and I warble out the old show tunes, “Night and Day” . . .
\n“They Can\u2019t Take That Away from Me” . . . A cheap
\nsilver chain shimmers across his throat<\/p>\n

rising and falling with his pulse. There never was
\nanything else. Only these excruciatingly
\ninsignificant creatures we love.<\/p>\n

\n

*****<\/center><\/p>\n

\nYES, I thought, the Big Picture. Step away from the personal, from the “wee little whimpering…<\/a>” Ego, from the ephemerality of one’s own existence and Point of View… Imagine the ultimate, try to PICTURE it. Is it OUT there? Is it IN there?<\/p>\n


\nWhere does your<\/i> understanding of the Big Picture find itself?
You may experience proddings that bear somehow upon this Question
but aren’t primarily visual.
You may even be inspired to cast that understanding
into a poem or a pointer to something lately read or seen…<\/center><\/p>\n

\nBecause I’ve been so engaged with images as we prepare to hang our joint show, my own imagining arrived as a set of photographs (mostly from the last few months) which exemplify my own conceptions of the Big Picture. They await your engagement below.<\/p>\n

\n


\n\"Shubenacadie<\/a>