Always Coming Home

This Stone From the Serpentine heyimas of Telina-na; by Wordriver

by Ursula Le Guin. {Illustrated by Margaret Chodos-Irvine }

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

He went looking for a road

that doesn't lead to death.

He went looking for that road

and found it.

xxxxxxIt was a stone road.

He walked that road

that doesn't lead to death.

He walked on it awhile

before he stopped,

xxxxxhaving turned to stone.

Now he stands there on that road

that doesn't lead to death

not going anywhere.

He can't dance.

xxxxxFrom his eyes stones fall.

The rainbow people pass him

crossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,

going from the Four Houses

to the dancing in the Five Houses.

xxxxxThey pick up his tears.

This stone is a tear

from his eye, this stone

given me on the mountain

by one who died before my birth,

this stone, this stone.

via and interconnected

Maps and Territories

From An occasional blog by an amateur map lover:

Ngiyaampa country and the Darling River in New South Wales, Australia

"This is the creation story of Ngiyaampaa country, as well as the land belonging to Eaglehawk and Crow. Now long, long time ago of course, in the beginning, when there was no people, no trees, no plants whatever on this land, 'Guthi-guthi', the spirit of our ancestral being, he lived up in the sky. So he came down and he wanted to create the special land for people and animals and birds to live in. So Guthi-guthi came down and he went on creating the land for the people-after he'd set the borders in place and the sacred sights, the birthing places of all the Dreamings, where all our Dreamings were to come out of. Guthi-guthi put one foot on Gunderbooka Mountain and another one at Mount Grenfell.

And he looked out over the land and he could see that the land was bare. There was no water in sight, there was nothing growing. So Guthi-guthi knew that trapped in a mountain-Mount Minara-the water serpent, Weowie, he was trapped in the mountain. So Guthi-guthi called out to him, 'Weowie, Weowie', but because Weowie was trapped right in the middle of the mountain, he couldn't hear him.

Guthi-guthi went back up into the sky and he called out once more, 'Weowie', but once again Weowie didn't respond. So Guthi-guthi came down with a roar like thunder and banged on the mountain and the mountain split open. Weowie the water serpent came out. And where the water serpent travelled he made waterholes and streams and depressions in the land.

So once all that was finished, of course, Weowie went back into the mountain to live and that's where Weowie lives now, in Mount Minara. But then after that, they wanted another lot of water to come down from the north, throughout our country. Old Pundu, the Cod, it was his duty to drag and create the river known as the Darling River today.

So Cod came out with Mudlark, his little mate, and they set off from the north and they created the big river. Flows right down, water flows right throughout our country, right into the sea now. And of course, this country was also created, the first two tribes put in our country were Eaglehawk and Crow. And from these two tribes came many tribal people, many tribes, and we call them sub-groups today. So my people, the Ngiyaampaa people and the Barkandji further down are all sub-groups of Eaglehawk and Crow.

So what I'm telling you-the stories that were handed down to me all come from within this country. "

Where Have You Been?

Jeff Stark, hosts at the Bluestockings bookstore a monthly series on travel stories. He invites three different people to talk about their experiences and show photos.

via fecalface

Narrative Map of Tokyo

Hitotoki.org traces a narrative map of Tokyo through personal stories from curious outsiders. short narratives describing pivotal moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief - or anything in between - inseparably tied to a specific place in this sprawling city of Tokyo.

via coudal, or was it thingsmagazine?

A Sign In Space

Fish- a designger, as well as Writing Design Criticism

this is a detail from a big poster map remix of Italo Calvino’s A Sign In Space.

'A Sign In Space' was mapped onto a circular chart (which means one has to set him self up-side-down in order to read the story), with peripheral footnotes. certain symbols have been employed to differentiate the two types of notes (as show in the 2nd image)

anyhow the big poster is for download in pdf .

xxxx

which reminded me of the Hand-drawn BurningMan 2005 Map (detial) via pasta and vinegar

and greatmap who links to a the gorgeous big map

No One Belongs Here More Than You

Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. her movie, Me and You and Everyone We Know is one of the most delicious and enchanted Gems i saw in the recent years. if you loved her film don't miss this: her web site offer a surprisingly fresh new way of telling a story (it's getting better by the page!) and it is 'only' a promotional move for the real thing

via coudal

Report

Flash Fiction by Ranbir Sidhu

Not the whole foot, perhaps, but only the toes. Or perhaps not only the toes but the whole foot. Perhaps the ankle, the shins, the knees wet. Perhaps more than the whole foot dips into the water.

Not the whole body, but the chest, sometimes the arms, or if the whole body then the whole body is gone, disappeared. It is a lost body, a dark shape under cold water, the shadow of a cloud.

And if not standing, then crouching, and if not crouching, then shivering, arms wrapped around oneself, water dripping onto the sand.

And if not the sound of a motorboat, it is the sound of a helicopter; and if not the latter, then the former. Not fading, not thinning the way a motor lost to distance does, but pushing up on itself, one sound beaching on the dune of the one ahead.

Not sun, or not sun any longer; or if sun, then a sun hidden, a total eclipse; and if not sun, then night, clouds covering the stars; and if not clouds, then one's eyes do not even bother to look up as one runs.

Not your own breath, running, the sound of footfalls on the sand, on the hard gravel, on the grass, on the pavement, on the grass. The sound of footfalls behind as one runs on the grass and the sound of footfalls on the gravel come ahead, close in, grow louder, the sound of one's footfalls on the gravel and the sound, behind, of feet on the sand.

via mad hatters review

Maps and Legends

A few quotes from michael chabon (who's writing i simply love) essay on his childhood experience of moving in to a bran new city, a city that was a vision of a group of "colonists of a dream"

"...Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them. How fortunate I was to be handed, at such an early age, a map to steer by, however provisional, a map furthermore ornamented with a complex nomenclature of allusions drawn from the poems, novels and stories of mysterious men named Faulkner, Hemingway, Frost, Hawthorne, and Fitzgerald! Those names, that adventure, are with me still, every time I sit down at the keyboard to sail off, clutching some dubious map or other, into terra incognita..."

"...The power of maps to fire the imagination is well known. And, as Conrad’s Marlow observed, there is no map so seductive as the one, like the flag-colored schoolroom map of Africa that doomed him to his forlorn quest, marked by doubts and conjectures, by the romantic blank of unexplored territory. The map of Columbia I took home from that first visit was like that. The Plan dictated that the Town be divided into sub-units to be called Villages, each Village in turn divided into Neighborhoods. These Villages had all been laid out and named, and were present on and defined by the map. Many of the Neighborhoods, too, had been drawn in, along with streets and the network of bicycle paths that knit the town together. But there were large areas of the map that, apart from the Village name, were entirely empty, conjectural–nonexistent, in fact." I spent hours poring over that map, long before my family ever moved into the house that we eventually bought, with that V.A. loan, at 5179 Eliots Oak Road, in the neighborhood of Longfellow, in the Village of Harper’s Choice. To me the remarkable thing about those names was not their oddity but the simple fact that most of them referred to locations that did not exist. They were like magic spells, each one calibrated to call into being one particular stretch of blacktop, sidewalk and lawn, and no other. In time–I witnessed it with my own eyes, month by month, year by year–the street demanded by the formula "Darkbush Terrace" or "Night Roost" would churn up out of the Maryland mud and clay, begin to sprout houses, trees, a tidy blue-and-white identifying sign. It was a powerful demonstration to me of the incantatory power of names and naming..."