The Narrative Image

In our last episode, after appreciating the subtle nuances of Kip’s latest margarita recipe, we were treated to the intermittent unveiling of the Milky Way as patchwork clouds streamed over us to the West. Cows, emboldened by the cover of darkness, venture out to the dry lake’s terminal puddle where the last delicate grasses rise from drying mud.  Minds, free from the constraints of day to day routines, become free to ponder the day’s events and images — to decipher messages preserved in stone for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We are by no means the first to sit comforted by our campfire in this shallow basin. Doubtless, others sat before us, watching the universe display its bright jewels. Here, perhaps before a more convincing lake, those others noted the arrivals and departures of skittish deer and elusive big-horn sheep — not today’s tame cows that pulverize sensitive shorelines with great bovine hooves and trample into the mud a generous portion of...

An Elk, somewhere above The Dalles Dam, but below the John Day Dam, below the stereo and on this side of the Bicentennial glasses, between the ashtray and the thimbles in this three inches that includes the Chiclets, but not the erasers. I had a teacher once (Vicky) who posited with a straight face that the most important thing you can give to starving people is art. Now as then, I still vote for bread, or more specifically, an educational program that teaches sustainable farming and a financial package to help such an endeavor along, but the outlandishness of my teacher's claim haunts me to this day. I wish I could remember the words my teacher used, her normally brash and cool character terrifyingly subverted by the threat of oh-my-god-actual-tears, as she tried to convince us, a handful of her young sculptor's in training, that what she said was true. But I can't. It was thirty years ago or so, and while that may not pose a great problem for gospel writers, it ...