Tritone interval

Paul,

Your last selection from Longley’s collection (“The Snow Leopard”) together with that image from deep within the forest up by Mount Douglas is uncanny. You have already remarked in your last post of the presence of untimely death in both of our work for round 4, and to which we had arrived at independently. I’m assuming one is allowed to write of “presence” and “death” in the same sentence.

And it is that cat, of course, winding in and amongst the legs of the Longley and the young woman and their single spoken words together – that is the lyric shock. We’ve all had absent-minded conversations with others, maybe also such single chance encounters, together animals like cats and dogs twirling around us. I can imagine many such taking place in a forest clearing as in your image with some dogs about – especially if our friend Gerry is anywhere nearby. The abruptness of the woman’s exit, and the leopard and snow and paws that follow, still makes me a bit light-headed upon re-reading.

So the cat and leopard led me to DeFlitch’s fox:

Many of the poems in “Confluence” have rivers in or near Pittsburgh where DeFlitch was raised. The Androscoggin River in “My Mother’s Handwriting” is, however, in the US Northeast and close to where she now lives and works. There are pines and insects and birdlife throughout the two verses, an invocation of “North”, of the effect a human voice must have when sounded on the water in a religious register, the last verse sheltering a luminous fox.

And, yes, her mother’s handwriting is present.

So here is my own handwriting:

All of this led me to a rather brash experiment. I don’t think the approach works quite yet, but it might if I “plow the field” (i.e., try and try again) a bit longer over the next few months and years:

I decided for this round to use only found photography – or more exactly, images that I scanned over ten years ago from a huge pile of 1000 or so photomat prints loaned me by my dad. This little archive is now one of my treasures to which I often return. It contains siblings and relatives and schoolmates and parents and churches, all mixed up within a single antiseptic Lightroom catalog with the worst tags possible (my bad). So for this round I chose from this archive some photos of rivers in Central BC, including one river I return to every time I visit Prince George (the Fraser at a spot just a few hundred meters after it is joined by the Nechako). I also decided to segment the images into vertical slices, then mixing them up, then playing with sequence, and finally using alcohol-gel transfer to place them onto some BFK Rives onto which I impressed (once with ink, once blindly) a phrase that has been running through my head for years.

So there are several leaps from “The Snow Leopard” to here – tone tone tone leading to a less-than-harmonious ending note. Yet the whole experience of working through this round had me reflecting more and more upon the other rivers flowing past me in my childhood in Central BC – Blackwater, Salmon, Crooked, Cottonwood – which I had largely ignored while living there. These must still be doing something silently within my own underground psychic riverbeds. I constantly try to get away from all this PG stuff, and it ain’t working. 🤔