Horizontals

It is the title of an opera by Robert Wilson that resounds in my mind as I lay down here a quotation from Aaron Shurin's "Generation" piece which concludes Unbound: A Book of AIDS. The title: the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down. The quotation:

[B]ut the radical size of these toppled beings was commanding. You never see them horizontally where their enormity can be measured human-scale. They were at once desperately, environmentally, evolutionarily sad, like beached whales, and gawkingly thrilling. A hundred years lost, but the integrity with which their falling rewrote the landscape drew me to their monumental sides again and again to gape.

After a storm, even the devastation has a beauty.

And so for day 820
12.03.2009