Bursts of persistent lawn

Higher than the world

Well, I'm higher
Than the world
And I'm livin'
In my dreams
I'll make it better than it seems today

And I'm higher
Than a cloud
And I'm livin'
In a sound
I'll make it better than it seems today

Higher than the world
But my head is in a swirl
I got to give life a whirl today

Higher than the clouds
Wrapped up in a sound
I make it better all around today

Higher in my mind
I'm gonna leave these blues behind
And I'll find what I'll find today

'Cause I'm higher than the world
And I'm wrapped up in my dreams
I'll make it better than it seems today

Yes, I'm higher than the world
And I'm livin' in my mind
I got to hold on to what I find today
Just a little bit higher

From Van Morrison Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, 1983

(For Margaret)

Both sides the Tweed

What's the spring-breathing jasmine and rose?
What's the summer with all its gay train
Or the splendour of autumn to those
Who've bartered their freedom for gain?

No sweetness the senses can cheer
Which corruption and bribery bind
No brightness that gloom can e'er clear
For honour's the sum of the mind.

Let virtue distinguish the brave
Place riches in lowest degree
Think them poorest who can be a slave
Them richest who dare to be free.

Let the love of our land's sacred rights
To the love of our people succeed
Let friendship and honour unite
And flourish on both sides the Tweed.

'Both Sides the Tweed', Trad and Dick Gaughan (1981)

The Northwest Passage

He was speaking again of its smallest version, where the desire to take over the world was first the desire to be in the world, a desire driven by the conviction that one cannot truly be in the world until the alienation of each from all has been vanquished, until necessity has been banished, until the world has been changed. Trocchi was talking again about the derive - there, he said, for as long as it lasted, you were in the world as if you were changing it, and there were intimations of utopia everywhere you looked. "The difficulties of the derive are those of freedom," Debord wrote in 1956 in "Theory of the Derive." "It all rests on the belief that the future will precipitate an irreversible change in the behaviour and the decor of present-day society. One day, we will construct cities for drifting ... but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist." Even if he had been used, that was what Trocchi remembered most sweetly, so he talked about getting drunk, chasing oblivion into the black hole, the way out, the Northwest Passage.

From an interview with Alexander Trocchi in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard, 1989).

Hidden harvest moons

No moon to see yet!
Wind rustling the long grasses
Happy gathering

               *

Drinking lemon tea
Dark night and a hidden moon
But still purity!

A gap in the paling ...

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude and goes his own way, there is a fork in the road, though the travellers along the highway see only a gap in the paling.

From Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861, edited by Damion Searls (New York, 2009), entry for Oct. 18. 1855.

The town in the country: summer