A few pictures of our trip to Russia in 2009.

I write this with my own blood, though I know it will not be read.

I cannot say for sure how much time I have left, how long these doors will hold back the seething bubbling anger of the priests that clamor to extinguish the last flames of my consciousness.

Voyager 1 carries with it the greetings of mankind into the unimaginably vast reaches of interstellar space, in the form of a golden record. Inscribed on the record are the words “The Sounds of Earth” and it contains greetings, sounds, music, and images of the people of Earth. Among the artefacts on this record is the record’s only example of rock and roll, the song Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry.

Perhaps this is why we need poets, to express the inexpressible. To find attributions that may hint of realities that lie beyond the cages of length and breadth and height. But a map of the world, no matter how detailed, is not the world…

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward …

I returned yesterday from a rather tiring but fantastically enjoyable hike, the Whale Trail in the De Hoop nature reserve. I will write a little more about the hike in a later post, but right now I would like to post a few pictures.

sometimes I close my eyes and charge raggedly over open ground,
swaddled in gentle air
that is torn by the song of leaden hornets
and ripped by orange tongued serpents of black smoke.

It is a rather beautiful myth that Eskimos have multiple words for snow. It is a great explanatory device that helps us to understand that there may be many more subtle variants of the same object or experience than our language would suggest, or that we may at first surmise. For example, there are many more kinds of Eskimo than we commonly have words for