Wednesday, December 19, 2012

chimpanzee relief

at Chimp Haven

Today we got news that the NIH (National Institute of Health) will allow more than 100 chimpanzees to retire to a chimpanzee sanctuary: Hurrah.  We are slowly putting an end to using chimpanzees for our research.  You can read a news story and see a video about this move at  Chimpanzee Relief  .

In this season of glad tidings and great joy for a humble child who became a man-and-God, we can be humbled and can be glad that finally we are no longer harming animal-beings that are made by God in our own close image.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

sun movement

The first lines of a Tomas Transtromer poem:

The white sun is soaking through the smog.
The light drips, gropes its way down

The sun soaking through the smog!  (The rest of the poem is below.)
Yesterday I came across another sun-sky-movement passage, this time in a very early page of Wallace Stegner's novel, Crossing to Safety.  The narrator has just left his wife to sleep longer and stepped out for a walk in the woods surrounding a cottage they have traveled to the night before.  It is early morning, "keen air, gray light, gray lake below, gray sky through the hemlocks whose tops reach well above the porch."  He walks a bit down a dirt road alongside of a hill:

     Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars.

Wonderful, that "drowned."
Each of these two passage is contained in a fine bit of writing wherein the sun exchanges further with the writer (and us).  Here below is Transtromer's poem,  Looking Through the Ground and the rest of Stegner's paragraph, on page six of the Modern Library paperback edition of his book.  Enjoy!

Looking Through the Ground

The white sun is soaking through the smog.
The light drips, gropes its way down

to my deep-down eyes that are resting
deep under the city looking up

seeing the city from below: streets, foundations--
like aerial photos of a city in war

the wrong way around--a mole photo:
silent squares in somber colors.

The decisions are taken there.  No telling
bones of the dead from bones of the living.

The sunlight's volume is turned up,
it floods into flight cabins and peapods.

translated by Robin Fulton
_________________

     Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars.  Its edges are piled with hills.  Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.