Ruth Bosch 2012

"What I am now is waves and particles, I don't need to walk around, I just go."

- from Pilgermann

".....still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, nothing comes to an end, the action never stops, it only changes...."

- from Pilgermann

I did this in my field, up in the back forty. Buckland, Massachusetts. Or Western Massachusetts.

In memory of Russell Hoban 1925-2011

Ruth Bosch 2011

There is a wonderful restaurant in western Massachusetts, The Wagon Wheel. I think there's a joke there somewhere, something about biting the wheel, but I never get it quite right. Anyway, this year's quotation was left there, in one of their fascinatingly decorated bathrooms. The walls are covered with black and white family photos, nearly all in black frames. One of my favorites is of two older men, dressed like bankers, lying down on the floor and putting together the tracks of a toy train set. Another favorite is this:

Under it I put a quotation from Pilgermann. I didn't have any yellow paper but made a color quotation for a heading.

Certainly we are the slaves of that which looks out through our eyes, and it is nothing simple, that outlooker; does it want to live, does it want to die? As with my arms red up to the elbows I sew up the wounded I crave to be where the shouting is, the cries and groans, the clash of weapons. I am afraid to be there but what looks out through my eyes wants to put me there, it doesn't want to be left out of anything, it wants to be everywhere at once, it wants to be included in all matters of life and death, wants to be at the same time here in the shuddering light of the torches and there across the river in the obscurity of battle and the night.

Ruth Bosch November 2010

Trubba not

As is often the case I have no copy of Riddley Walker, having given  mine away again. The last one, bought mere moments before at the fall festival library sale up the street, went to the woman standing next to me in line as we waited for pumpkin doughnuts and cider. We were watching radiant and victorious pumpkin doughnut eaters come away from the tent. The line itself was a half-hour project so there was  time to get acquainted. My companion was wearing a shirt with a bat logo and the name "Alternative Tentacles". When I admired it she pointed out that the decorative border around the bat was actually a pattern of overlapping tentacles. I just gave her Riddley Walker immediately and tried to describe and do justice to my experience of Russ's books, including bats and tentacles. She was gracious and did not move away.  All of this is to say that "Trubba Not" was the quote I was sure of in my bookfree condition, left in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts with gratitude.