secret passage

166  "The space of this photograph hypnotizes me, and all my traveling has had only one purpose: to find, at long last, the secret passage into its interior."   Andrzej Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag

this is the sort of line, essay, voice, I've been missing   Sunday late afternoon.  Sweet "party" visit with Pattie, K & C earlier;  They were so pleased to have gotten photos with Chris Pappas at the dem hdqtr on main street before they got here.   

Monday

bright, warm, 1 pm lunch  pool day tomorrow day off tomorrow  drive?  so lovely the trees and air and light but need walking   just strolled walmart for first time in 10 days   woman and her son (college) asked me if I were all right on way out into the parking lot and then she said I was strong, stronger than her, I was carrying my bags in both hands, did I look that wobbly?  most likely she was too shy to say how much she was admiring my luminous indigo pants  

"In a moment the low sky closes like a door, and everything is gone.  That's why I rush to make these trips, why I'm so avid for details that will soon vanish and need to be re-created out of words.  I don't know why all this is, and I lost the hope, long ago, that I would find an answer.  Therefore, to be safe, I write down everything that happens, substituting consistency for justice and meaning."  197  On the road to Babadag

by the way in this used copy of the book there is a ticket, a Juror Badge from the Superior Court of Santa Cruz County Report Week: 02/22/2022  

"This is what haunts me---this extra being that everyone can do without, this superfluity that is not wealth, this hiddenness that no one explores, secrets that, ignored, are lost forever, memory that consumes itself." 195 

"But it's great, in the middle of winter, to say "Fuck this, I'm going to Abony, that hole in the centre of the Hungarian lowlands . . . . I'm going from one nowhere to another." " 188  

Danilo Kiš  appears "To travel means to live" he wrote in 1958 quoting Hans Christian Andersen

(why then did I sigh earlier over an email from Sage's Michelle saying they have a similar Med cruise for next September 2027  ---  of course we should sign up for it, no?   But at least tomorrow I'm plotting to drive to a Capadocia Cafe in the sunshine and go the long way over and maybe even back.   

on Kiš's father's project---"If such a book were published, all travel would become pointless, would be replaced by reading."   Ah, so, there!  now we're talking!!!!

Stasiuk  born in 1960  Stasiuk admitted that he "always wanted to write a Slavonic On the Road and place it in a quite geographically limited and historically complicated space

In Stasiuk's own words, "[t]here is no individual, human story in this book [...]. I wanted rather to write about geography, landscape, about the influence of material reality on the mind".^[2] Jadąc do Babadag received the Nike Award for the best Polish book of 2005

withdrew to the small hamlet of Czarne in the Beskids, a secluded part of the Carpathian mountain range in the south of Poland. Besides writing, he spends his time breeding sheep. Together with his wife, 

writer, then, good deal like Handke so far as landscape and materiality   "mystical marriage 204

everything should begin on square one "Back to square one.  Which is where everything should begin.  That's what it depends on, on the imagination, which draws no conclusions.  Memory, meteorology, visions."  205   Now there's a wonderful bumper sticker or yard sign!! (to replace the dumb science is real created by a Madison librarian).  

Memory, meteorology, visions.  That explains why the evening news is as it is, not money!! ha

"To ease the dreariness of inland sailing, I pretended

inland sailing  so, driving all around where ever is a good thing; sanctioned by the Stasiuks of our literary culture   

230 "I always play the idiot, but reality wins, as usual."