Maine Metaphor: The Green and Blue House
Описание книги
How to live in rural Maine? How–in the 1980s, when descendants of Maine's settlers wonder about our coming out of the Rust Belt in search of work, in search of a life? They were not bitter about our coming here, where jobs were already scarce–they were incredulous. Why did we come? Sometimes I answered, «God.» God brought us, the formerly middle-class inept, to live among these most hardy and canny of make-do people. God brought us to experience life in Maine, where my spouse sometimes worked turning and trimming four thousand boards a night, waking to drive one hundred miles round-trip to finish our undergraduate educations with the aid of loans and grants. So I studied the place where we came to live. And I forgot where we came from. Rural Maine was ragged, rugged, hardscrabble, and wild–but full of the most visible, vital, natural creation. I've tried to express that aspect of Maine life in The Green and Blue House. And there is the metaphor, also.
Оглавление
S. Dorman. Maine Metaphor: The Green and Blue House
Maine Metaphor
Foreword
The Green and Blue House
Collecting Neighborhoods
The Pluton
The Beautiful Gate
Private Property
Measuring My Moose
Exploring Its Treasuries, Its Upper Chambers
The View and Spirit of the Day
The Beasts
The Weather
The Water
The Silence of Aziscohos
Deer Hill
The Notch
The Body in Vapor
Miracles on Deer Hill
Perspective
Pilgrims and Strangers
Chasing the Water
Drowsing in the Wood Mill
Taking the Controls
Amazed
Forget-me-not
Summer on Solomon’s Porch
The Emotional Gamut of Flight
The Blast Furnace and the Hermit
Earl
Migrations
Patch Mountain Dwellings
Invisible Reality
Greatest Mountain
The Blue Cradle
Reduced In Importance
The Loons Ascend
Streakéd Mountain
Seeing Deer
Отрывок из книги
The Green and Blue House
S. Dorman
.....
Here at the falls we stop. Water feels cool, revitalizing as it runs over hot bare feet. On rocks grow bright green moss, of varying species, wet with this coursing stream. Below me the water-carved cleft, true to shape-name. Its steep, curved and resistant sides are igneous—a twisted funnel, full of foam and force, the experience of living water cutting and smoothing. Here are round smoothed bubbles of rock; much of it bare-bleached above the normal flowline of Bear River.
Vast, ponderous geological work has been done all along our route. The work of humans with their dams, saws, and tableware has coupled with that of forces cold and hot, but greatly natural. They combine to make valleys of toil. Places of hard beauty and ritual: rituals of working, eating, resting, playing. Here grew wood for the mill, pulp for the paper, here emerged water for power. Here’s rest from the week, recreation for kayakers, a funnel for daydreams. A place of soft magical plants, lighted by insects and sun. They tower from ditches on sturdy purple fibrous stocks. We’ve entered the great green-and-blue household, desiring to gather nectar. It won’t be easy, for the glaciers of finance have scraped off the soil of our middle-class upbringings. And exposing, in many places, bare rock.
.....