“Traversed by iron where the water drips down”, first on the trail where 395 passes over: water dripping from bridge producing brown on the concrete below. Then it is the bridge over 395 I commute across: sign is green and so not iron but copper or bronze I suppose and “where the water drips down” the concrete has been traversed. Now today on the trail beneath Carlin Springs I see water issue from a spout creating a dark pattern on the wall and I’m unable to refrain from recalling — “where the water drips down”.
There was the moment when I realized that the Raymond Carver story I had recently read was very similar to the conclusion of the Altman movie Shortcuts and that maybe he had based that movie on Carver and that maybe I had known that once, that Altman definitely had, (he definitely had).
There was the moment I read Purity of Heart in the morning, and the moment I conceived that Summs performs the exercise known as a plank so strenuously that he actually transfers himself to another dimension. Summs achieves in one scenario what the book calls “rigor mortis alive”, making the plank permanent. He becomes covered in rock and and dung and coprolites and is dug up again and thawed out and exhibited to millions of eager museum goers after some future ice age. But in the other scenario he doesn’t know what happens: the pain and stress induced by his performance of the plank is so great that the actual Book of Summs, the books Summs occurs in, is itself shaken –the book tumbles from the reader’s hands because of the extraordinary exertions of its principle character — Summs tumbles out of the “ice” of the Book of Summs — from out of The Statue of Summs has appeared Summs himself — entering the reader’s dimension that way. At this point he becomes the real Summs, who is possibly known as Summus, and who will refer to himself as “We Are.”
[Wlk]
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 