October 9, 2005
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Today’s Sermon:
Magical ThinkingOn this date– “In 1936,
the first generator at Boulder
(later Hoover) Dam began
transmitting electricity to Los Angeles.”
– Today in History, Associated Press“Brightness doubled
generates radiance.”
– Hexagram 30“I know what nothing means.”
– Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays
“Nothing is random.”
– Mark Helprin in Winter’s Tale
Maria Wyeth in Las Vegas:“… She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank
tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of
dealers’ patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song
lyrics. When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she
would play back the day’s tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a
fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer’s rake
in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the
guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a
crosswalk on the Strip. A sign on Fremont Street. A light
blinking. In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on
eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.By
the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body
stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that
was the difference between Maria and other. She
had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for
even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get. As
if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint
sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She
could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light
intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in
front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which
was which. ‘Maria,’ she felt someone whisper one night, but when
she turned there was nobody.She began to feel the pressure of
Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of
the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out
there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own
body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great
power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow
canyon below the dam’s face, elevators like coffins dropped into the
bowels of the earth itself. With a guide and a handful of
children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in
the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden
intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched, clung to the
railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that
carried the river beneath the dam. The platform quivered.
Her ears roared. She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great
pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.‘Just how long
have you been here now,’ Freddy Chaikin asked when she ran into him in
Caesar’s. ‘You planning on making a year of it? Or what?’”Related material
New York Times Book Review
and Log24, July 15, 2004:
A quotation that
somehowseems relevant:
O the mind, mind has mountains,
cliffs of
fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.
Hold them cheap
May who
ne’er hung there.
