Eric Maas > Recent Status Updates

7. Odysseus door Alkinoös ontvangen

En dan ineens, zodra Odysseus spreekt, is daar een verhaal, in plaats van een uitputtende opsomming van beschrijvingen, eigenschappen en betuigingen.

3.22 - November 9th
Getting nearer and nearer (only 20 yards between the Falcon and the Human now)

When hawks have gone from sight, you must look up into the sky; their reflection rises in the birds that fear them. There is so much more sky than land. (p. 81)

3.21 - November 6th

Morning was hooded and seeled with deep grey cloud and mist. The list cleared when the rain began. Many birds fled westward from the river, golden plover high among them. Their melancholy plover voices threaded down through the rain the sorrowing beauty of ultima thule. (p. 79)

3.20 - November 4th

3.19 - November 2nd
Slowly Baker seems to build a relationship with the tiercel. They recognize each other…

1.01 - September 28

3.18 - October 30th

3.17 - October 29th

And I’m particularly amazed by Bakers audacity to interpret the animal behaviour, and catch myself thinking ‘how does he know that is what the birds motivate?’ Or at least, he writes his thoughts down very convincingly and I see no reason to doubt them.

A hawk‘s kill is like the warm embers of a dying fire. (p. 75)

Actually, my attention is more drawn to the observer than to the birds, either hunter or hunted. I am impressed by his loyalty, going out to the estuary for what seem to be long hours (midday, sundown I noticed so far) just about day in day out. By his knowledge of all many different ‘s names and their turning up so richly and diverse.

So far, the experience of a peregrine‘s presence seems to be more impressive than writing about it. I can appreciate the excitement of Baker supporting the bird in all these various (or similar) situations, but as yet, it is not particularly engrossing.

I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The ancient is lost in a shadow world, and gives no sign. (p. 11)

And more presence of death on this first page, this last one being very distinct, but even before death and decay are all around… mind though, this is all mixed with benign smiles around…

0. Prologue
…a group of shrouded figures passed, bearing a corpse, and the sight arose a dim, restless foreboding.

And after mention of Matthiessen’s wife Deborah dying the year before, that is a far more grim start than expected. But I am immediately involved, even while sync reading with J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, which has a completely different atmosphere…

3.11 - October 18th

The bird out of place it’s always the first to die. Terror seeks out the odd, and the sick, and the lost. (p. 65)

Baker just pointed at me, it seems. Better watch out…

3.07 - October 12

[The dunlin] passed into his dark outline, and did not re-appear. There was no brutality, no violence. The hawk’s foot reached out, and gripped, and squeezed, and quenched the dunlin‘s heart effortlessly as a man’s finger extinguishing an insect. Languidly, easily, the hawk glided down to an elm on the island to plume and eat his pretty. (p. 60)

6. Odysseus en Nausikaä

’…aanhoor me nu! U deed het eerder niet toen de vermaarde Schudder van de Aarde op mij bleef beuken en ik schipbreuk leed. Geef dat ik bij het volk van de Faiaken waar vriendschap en wat medelijden vind.’ (p. 131)

3.04 - October 7th

I was like a galaxy to him, too big to be seen. (p. 55)

Reading Baker’s train of thought, the field mouse seems like a long-tailed Sisyphus. Eating to live; never getting ahead, moving always in the narrow way between a death and a death…

3.03 - October 5th

3.02 - October 3rd

3.01 - October 1st

I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified. (p. 51)

2. Peregrines

1.0 - Beginnings

…a ‘belief’ is not something subject to will. ’It seems that I cannot present y own belief in something as am achievement, because, by presenting it, I would disqualify it as belief’.
— Prof. Hampshire, Thought and Action

…our history, which is but a long account of c calamities. (p. 295)

…finally the killing, accomplished in this case not by putting the cocoons out of the sun or in a hot oven, as was often the practice in the past, but by suspending them over a boiling cauldron. The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising staan for upwards of three hours, and when the batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the killing business is completed.

…a great number of people spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights, and reminiscent of instruments of torture or cages. It was a peculiar symbiosis which […] makes more apparent than any later form of factory work that we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we invented (p. 283)

9. The Temple of Jerusalem – Charlotte Ives and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand – Memoirs from beyond the grave – In Ditchingham churchyard – Ditchingham Parm – The hurricane of 16th October, 1987

There was no glare from streetlights or houses to dull the sky. But the stars had come out, in a display so resplendent as I had seen only over the Alps when I was a child, or over the desert in my dreams. […] Unchanged and, it seemed to me, more magnificent than ever before, they revolved above me. (p. 267)