MT GOAT atop Cornucopia Peak, w/ Whitebark Pines, South Wallowas [ click photo for next . . . ]

Like my friend Joe Whittle, Wallowa photographer, writer
& mountain runner, says, "Wolves never killed anybody
in the PNW. But Mt. Goats have!" It true, a year or two
ago in the Olympics, a hiker was evidently gored to death.
This guy in the picture, I call General Priam, a kind of
protector spirit of Pine Valley below. He made unambiguously
clear to me that he was going to stand his ground. [Photo
made with a standard lens, so the distance you see is
the actual distance.]


On the road in the American Northwest.


Passion only comes with the route

one has found for oneself.




SIMPLICITY

In Politics, the most radical idea is simplicity;

In Art, the most difficult idea is simplicity;

In Science, the most necessary idea is simplicity;

In Religion, the most mysterious, arduous, complex
idea—is simplicity.



ON THE MASCULINE ENERGY OF CONTROL

Once the balance of masculine and feminine principles
is lost, mere competition between the genders
will replace complementarity.

There’s something about the decidedly masculine energy of control
that loves the crisp, clear, straight lines of a laser’s or bullet’s trajecto-
ry. Think of it:—straight walls, straight pipes, straight roads, straight
dams.

Pity the time when we no longer cry out that life is not only a matter of
the shortest, most efficient route between points a and b, but that there
is more, and that life is from another perspective—the eternally femi-
nine—essentially round.

Pity the time when time itself is seen not just an arrow flying fast and
furious to its goal, but also a mysterious, rhythmic pulse of wheels
turning within wheels which comes round with the miracle of each
new birth.

Pity the time when we acquiesce in our silence and become at once
both imitator and victim of this powerful, but oh-so-one-sided straight-
line universe of men in love with the illusion of mechanical control.

THE LITTLE CLAVIER please preview 150 of 631 pages
w/ my black & white photography [opens in new window]








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All Photographs & texts by Cliff Crego © 1999-2012 picture-poems.com
(created: IX.18.2012)