Pablo León de
la Barra Geaninne Gutiérrez-
Guimarães

To tell the truth I have no idea how many syllables are being used.

I liked the juxtaposition of the two names.

There are real people.

Pablo León de la Barra and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães.

They are both of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and are exhibition curators for the “Measuring Infinity” show the features the kinetic constructions of the Venezuelan sculptor Gertrud Goldschmidt as reviewed by Holland Cotter. 

I have never heard of Pablo León de la Barra, Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães or Gertrud Goldschmidt.

But how can you ignore those names?

suspicious neatness
spongelike ramshackle craftless
continuously vile

Adapted from the complete first sentence of Jim Harrison’s Wolf: A False Memoir.

The sentence describes upper lower Michigan as well as upper Michigan.

The sentence, one long sentence, the opening sentence of the Wolf, is two pages long.

Mr. Harrison admitted he did it that way because he could.

The sentence reads:

You could travel west out of Reed City, a small county seat in an unfertile valley with a small yellow brick courthouse and a plugged cannon on its lawn next to a marble slab with the names of the World War One and Two dead inscribed in gold and the not dead plainly inscribed with the suspicious neatness of cemetery script, those who served, farther west through fifty miles of pine barrens dotted with small farm settlements often of less than thirty people, or merely a grocery store and gas station adjoined by a shabby aluminum trailer or a basement house with the first and perhaps second stories awaiting more prosperous times, the stores themselves with little and aged stock — lunch meat, bologna pickled in a jar, Polish sausage, tinned foods covered with dust, plaquettes of fish lures, mosquito repellent in aerosol cans, live bait and a pop cooler outside the door — but not many of these — a narrow road through mixed conifers, cedar and jack pine, some stunted scrub oak, birch, and the short-lived poplar, a pulp tree usually living less than twenty years and clotting the woods floor with its rotting trunks and branches, and west through the low pelvic mysteries of swamps divided invisibly from the air by interlocking creeks and small rivers, made unbearable in spring and summer by mosquitoes and black flies, swamps dank with brackish water and pools of green slime, small knolls of fern, bog marshes of sphagnum, spongelike and tortuous to the human foot and bordered by impenetrable tamarack thickets: in short a land with no appreciable history and a continuously vile climate, lumbered off for a hundred years with few traces of the grand white pine which once covered it, an occasional charred almost petrified stump four feet in diameter, evidence of trees which rose nearly two hundred feet and covered the northern half of the state and the Upper Peninsula, razed with truly insolent completeness by the lumber barons after the Civil War with all the money going to the cities of the south — Saginaw, Lansing, Detroit — and east to Boston and New York; and the houses, even the large farmhouses on reasonably good land, sloppily built, ramshackle and craftless compared to Massachusetts or Vermont; west to Lake Michigan then to turn north along its coast to the Straits of Mackinac, cross the mammoth bridge, travel west another three hundred miles through the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula and then north again into the comparatively vast, the peopleless Huron Mountains.

From Wolf : a False Memoir by Jim Harrison, (1937-2016) New York : Dell, 1981

the quality of
mercy not strain’d droppeth as
heaven’s gentle rain

The quality of mercy is not strain’d.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway.
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God Himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Act 4, Scene 1).

Watching the Andy Griffith show the other night, I watched as Andy and Barney rescue a pack of dogs from a thunder storm.

When they get back, Andy says to Barney, “Anyway, you did a good thing, Barn. You did a cardinal act of mercy.”

And Barney replies, “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”

Andy stares at Barney with that big eyed – open mouth Andy stare.

Barney looks him back and says, “You’re not talking to a jerk, you know!”

Big Bill visits Mayberry.

Just as like a gentle rain that droppeth from heaven.

the silence for me
is more important than words
give space to silence

Give space to silence.

I liked that.

I like that a lot.

It comes from a quote from film maker, Gianfranco Rosi.

Mr. Rosi was interviewed about his documentary on the life of Pope Francis, Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis.

The interviewer, Radheyan Simonpillai, writes, “A lot is said during the quiet moments in Gianfranco Rosi’s In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis, when the holy figure takes a pause from giving hopeful or apologetic speeches to stare into the abyss, lost in his own thoughts and prayers.

Those are opportunities for Rosi, the documentary film-maker behind Fire at Sea and Notturno, to invite the audience into contemplation and leave room for skepticism and ambivalence.”

Then Mr. Simonpillai quotes Mr. Rosi:

“The silence for me is more important than the notes itself.”

“My own interpretation as a film-maker is to give space to silence.“

“Sometimes words aren’t even enough.”

Give space to silence.

Sometimes words aren’t even enough.

Sometimes …

Give space to silence.

So many times.

Words aren’t even enough.

Give space to silence.