[Ed: As the coauthor who developed the structure and presentation of this first-ever fully online publication at the CGS—the Colorado Groundwater Atlas—I wanted to help draw attention to the issue of groundwater generally. This is an edited version of the initial RockTalk blog post when the Atlas was first published in 2020. Written for both the general public (Sections 1-8 and 13) and a technical audience (Sections 9-12), the Atlas is an excellent primer on this critical and rapidly diminishing resource.]
An aside
My neighbor, Christie, directed my attention the The Last Word On Nothing (LWON) blog—she writes for it—and I’ve been reading it regularly over the past couple years. That led to my belated discovery of the work of Colorado-based author Craig Childs who also writes for LWON. He’s “an anecdotal science writer, citizen naturalist, an eye in wild places.” I’m currently absorbing and enjoying his first book of essays, “The Secret Knowledge of Water,” published in 2000, a series of intimate takes on this elemental feature of western landscapes. (Well, technically, “Stone Desert Journal,” published in 1999, and republished in 2022, was his first book.)
Water in the US West is a big deal … I should probably assemble a bibliography of essential readings on the topic! Maybe someday. Meanwhile, I’ve got to go water some of the few native trees on my property with captured rainwater that came last night, it’s been a pretty dry year again, so far.
The mighty Colorado River starts out as a seep from a wetland at its headwaters, La Poudre Pass, Rocky Mountain National Park. Wetlands are important carriers of near-surface groundwater. Photo credit: David Noe.
Groundwater
Everyone knows that water, wherever it might be found—at the surface or underground—is essential for life. However, few people are aware that groundwater is everywhere beneath their feet. It fills the pore spaces between grains of soil, sand, and gravel as well as the fractures and voids in hard bedrock (Figure 02-01 – pdf download). It may be just below the surface—accessible by digging with simple garden tools, or it may be hundreds of feet down in hard rock—requiring expensive drilling with specialized equipment.
The infinitely flat earth, lake of mud, river,
waveless sea, sky, sky of earth, blazing grasslands,
road, grey asphalt road for cars to drive along.
Rooted.
Immovable.
There is just a single cry.
What does it say?
It says
I AM ALIVE
I AM
That’s what it says. Faced with the immensity of time, with lake of
mud, river, sky, road, always the same cry
and it is not easy to hear what it is saying:
And it is not TO LIVE!TO LIVE! but perhaps TO LOVE! or TO DIE!
From deep in the throat.
Faced with indifference, pool of dead water amid
impassive vegetation, cold body between the sheets
refusing with closed mouth and eyes
It hurls itself forward
Smashing its way
It is yet another cry
It says: Slut! Filth! Trash!
Disgrace!
In the stifling black night, forests of sounds, vain
dreams, world turned upside down preposterous
shadow of the intelligible, mane growing inwards,
hairs that have already invaded throat and belly,
There is a light
the tip of a cigarette
the reflection from a storm-lantern
the eye of a cat
Straight rigid cry, hit, cat’s eye, gleam, droplet,
point, hole, tower, stone, word, noise, taste, skin,
being, being,
tigers, tigers,
ticks that I let loose upon you
demons that are my sentence of extermination
for me, for you, for all,
to burst through the sky, the skin, indifference. Ho! Ho! Houa! Houa!
Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave. War. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. New York, NY: Atheneum, 1973.
I first stumbled on the work of future Nobel Literature Prize winner, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, way back in 1986 or so, whilst cruising the voluminous stacks at CU’s Norlin Library, back when there were stacks, and back when I was moderately well-read in French literature—Duras, Mauriac, Malraux, Sartre, Barthes, Ellul, Weil, Breton, Baudelaire, along with the Situationists, etc., mostly in translation. Despite my familiarity with French literary landscapes and my extended experiences traversing France, Le Clézio’s language style posed a challenge to my modest proficiency level. Aside from Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) for which he was awarded the Prix Renaudot, the CU library fortuitously had copies of all his early works in translation including Le Déluge (1966) – The Flood, trans. Peter Green (1967); Terra Amata (1967) – Terra Amata, trans. Barbara Bray (1967); Le Livre des fuites (1969) – The Book of Flights (1971); La Guerre (1970) – War (1973); Les Géants (1973) – The Giants, all trans. Simon Watson-Taylor (1975); Voyages de l’autre côté (1975); and Désert (1980). The impact of Le Clézio’s narratives, reminiscent of my earlier literary revelation with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, was profound. Through immersive storytelling, he masterfully captures intricate and hallucinogenic details of diverse settings, unfolding psychospiritual voyages through the perspectives of rootless characters perpetually grasping at ever elusive meaning. Regardless of the particular protagonist, all Le Clézio’s works offer a highly recommended exploration of the human experience.
After meeting my future ex-wife for the first time in Köln, Germany in June of 1988, I somewhat reluctantly headed to Arles to attend the Rencontres internationales de la photographie. But first, I spent some days in Paris at pre-arranged meetings with folks at the [now defunct] Centre national de la photographie, the Bibliothèque nationale, and several other rendez-vous. While in Paris, still deeply ensorceled by Le Clézio’s work, I went to his publisher, Gallimard‘s office/bookstore where I bought a couple of his books. They had a binder of press clippings and critical reviews of his work that I mulled over for a time. After some mental practice runs, in my terrible French, I ventured to explain to a couple of the salesladies how much I appreciated his writing, and politely inquired if they could give me his postal address. L’un d’eux a passé quelques appels téléphoniques, faisant descendre une jeune femme extrêmement jolie des bureaux du dessus. Cela a fait tomber mon français primitif dans les toilettes. She said they couldn’t share the address (Je comprends, bien sûr!), but she did make a gracious show of taking the letter I had brought with me and said she absolument would forward it to him. Who knows. That era in Paris, no one willingly spoke English which was quite okay, but I was at more than one embarrassing disadvantage because my lousy French was spoken in a decidedly parler lyonnais, from the hinterlands, down south, mixed with a shifty accent américain: folks were at first confused, then clearly amusé at my miserable diction!
That accent was imprinted on my primitive linguistic neurons back in the third grade in rural Maryland, following the lead of Madame Moon, who taught French to a small group of us after school a couple days a week. A petite and severe silver-coiffed native of Lyon, Mme. Moon held us in a régime ancien of holy terror: if any of us got just a bit obstreperous, she would threaten to come over and sit on us! This provoked an existential fear that I never fully recovered from. We followed every lesson closely, not realizing our French discourse would be marked forevermore: indicated most overtly by our learning the Lyonnaise oui (pronounced as a slack and breathy “whey”) rather than the ‘proper’ Parisienne oui (pronounced as a clipped “we”). C’est comme ça!
Quand même, back to M. Le Clézio, I highly recommend any of his work that is now, since the Nobel in 2008, all in fresh English translation. Better still if you can manage en français, although again, his vocabulary and usage makes for a challenging stretch.
Around when M. Le Clézio received his Nobel, and I was about to undertake my PhD in Australia, I discovered that he had been teaching one semester a year at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Sadly, it never worked out for me to get through there after I returned to the US from Oz. And now, as he’s quite elderly, he’s no longer doing those gigs.
Je lève mon verre pour porter un toast à l’un de mes écrivains préférés!
Otherwise, thank god for those library stacks—a place for enLightened literary (and sometimes other!) encounters that has unfortunately met the same end as telephone books, logarithm tables, paper maps, and French teachers who were at liberty to punish children by sitting on them!
As I catch up, year-end, on a variety of old and new postings from folks, I engage in a blurred comparison process: between what they write (and illustrate), and what I write (and otherwise mediate via image and sound). A number of folks have jumped on Substack, or podcast subscription platforms. It’s hard for me to think about a paying subscription, though, as the monetary side of life is so … sensitive. And I haven’t received a penny in the last decade on my site. How to barter for access to their creative content? Perhaps I’ll raise the issue with some of them. How about a vintage photographic print from my archive for a year’s subscription?
Most others I know have a public (written) voice that is quietly friendly and ultimately readable, compared to mine. I explicitly recall a couple conversations with Norie, my PhD adviser, who said “Be kind to your readers”, something I appreciated, but honestly didn’t understand how to implement. There was and continues to be a profound internal pressure to simply get ideas down in the most precise way manageable with my particular (untempered) linguistic skill-set. As an editor I can clean up an unholy mess of words that someone else has regurgitated, honoring their ideas and intentions and making a kindly and readable text. My own ruminations, while well-edited, have only been subject to a precision test, not a ‘kindness’ test. That test, in itself, is reasonable, but tends to forge a dense, leaden text. My general excuse: texts that I have had to fight my way through understanding very often have been the most rewarding to and impactful of my worldview. Of course, I can’t make any such claims as to my own obfuscations. Giving back the energies of what I have received? Hardly. Ugh!
At any rate, George has now embraced substack with his Story Club; T.C. and her husband Dave continue documenting their interesting life between Alaska and Colorado with the Adventures of the Odaroloc Sled Dogs; Owen documents every day from Finland, India, and elsewhere with a short text and image, and has for the past decade; Christie and her friend have their Emerging Form podcast; Zander started Buzzcut both also on substack. Adam has Datatheism; John Hays has Relative Something. As a vital community exploring the sonic world, aporee::maps continues to evolve with more than 58,000 field recordings. I managed to contribute only a handful during the year, with my total around 1,700 since 2008. Just recently the World According to Sound (co-founded by talented public radio sound peeps Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett) announced an interesting calendar of live 90-minute binaural podcasts — Winter Listening Series — digging deeper into sonic phenomena beyond their shorter podcast series on sound. And, while I’m at it, Radio Web MACBA: a non-profit, cultural communication radiophonic project based at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, hosts more than 800 podcasts covering the heights and breadths of radio beyond radio. Oh, not to mention the trove of 400,000 sound recordings from before 1926 that have entered the public domain as of last week. Finally, Lloyd Dunn, formerly a Tape Beatle, continues releasing his rich sonic and visual work on nula.cc.
Then the next anniversary of Art’s Birthday is coming up on 17 January …
If I had more time, I guess I could be rooting around endlessly online, posting a more full review of these and other voices. But then, how would I get any of my own work done? I wonder: what is the ratio of humans to verbiage? And, what was it before the Gutenberg press, before the typewriter, before the PC, before the iPhone, before Fazebuch?
Related posts:
the mortal world the year approaches a close — media layered on media...
Sonya’s current jazz trumpet fav is Nicholas Payton (@paynic), so Chris writes. It’s her birthday and Payton’s in town (Denver) playing, great! Afflatus that arrives with first-person experiencing ones creative muse can be a rare and singular event in life. (It may be possible to make this a regular — daily — event: partnering with muse! What a concept!)
Payton’s a radical, Amiri-Baraka-with-trumpet, but not afraid to pick up a pen: “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore” is of note. And he takes on the legacy of Miles without compunction, without needing to think about compunction.
And following that thread takes me back to this passage from Miles’ autobiography that resonated hard in my mind back when it came out in the early 90s:
The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit. It might have been me playing around with the stove. I don’t remember who it was. Anyway, I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it. That’s as far back as I can remember: any further back than this is just fog, you know, just mystery. But that stove flame is as clear as music is in my mind. I was three years old.
I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn’t been before. To some frontier, the edge, maybe, of everything possible. I don’t know; I never tried to analyze it before. The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That’s where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started, with that moment.
Davis, M., 1990. Miles, The Autobiography, 1st Touchstone ed., New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
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willy a quaint reminder of it all. snowing this morning. hard...
naming “What is it?” we ask, meaning what is its name?...
Wading into those formative texts from 30 years ago or more. Again the intense resonances of practically every paragraph, sentence (this time, listening to the book, rather than reading it). Stumbling again on Miller — it’s not like he was ever recommended to me by someone, and in that, I have no recall of how I came across his writings. The Santa Monica Public Library was the loaning institution, walkable from both abodes there in the Peoples Republic way back when. How does one stumble on Henry Miller? And once found, what to take away? (Why give a damn about what to take away?) When grinding, groaning, swearing through incarnate elbow-clashing existence, it’s not enough to take things away from mediated expressions. Better to simply fine-tune all available sensual resonance and be with the source for the moment, while not being afraid to skip mediated input and simply live.
I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to — and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for — myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live — if what others are doing is called living — but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it… Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel — that bothers me, that rankles. From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this specter, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a lie — everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that is pretty much the greater part of my life.
Miller, H., 2001. Tropic of Capricorn, New York, NY: Grove Press.
