"...the dialectical notion of truth-as-unconcealing--which we might symbolize with a hyphen-like vinculum, here representing the horizon line..."

~Xavier Klasi, 1976

Vinculum: 1) a unifying bond; 2) a straight horizontal mark placed over two or more members of a compound mathematical expression and equivalent to parentheses or brackets about them. See also VETCH.

Vetch: Any of a genus (Vicia) of herbaceous twining leguminous plants including valuable fodder and soil-building plants.

Both terms are akin to Latin vincire, to bind.

Horizon and soil: Both are truthful as in slowly revealing. Also, they show off to each other.

A road is a horizon that revolves like a belt on an engine. Roadcuts are planted in a white and purple mane of crown vetch.

The painter has been sitting here and there. He sat gingerly in the grass under trees that dropped small, randy fruit, which sour the air by melting into a paste the color of raw sugar. He sat on a broad slope of rock on whose left edge a foot-wide braid of water runs; he looked at the sky through the break in foliage made by the smooth chest of stone. He sat on a stool among sharp-edged stems and saplings, looking at one square foot of complicated ground and listening to crows and faroff engines.

He knows himself to be incapable of spending a hundred years on a painting.

Correspondences:

Pumpkin to moon to light bulb.

Bird's breast to nest.

Just as the body of the bird both shapes and inhabits the nest, the house is human-sized.

If it is too small it may put the mind in a shell.

But if it is too large, it oddly replaces the body, because while its half-acre rooms and aggressive facade might inflate its occupant's standing, they also render his body a pathetic miniature when set against their proportions.

A horse enters a stone barn through the man-door. Wild turkeys, half a dozen, heave themselves into the tops of tall trees.

Do the humans fit the hill?

"Ivar led Alexandra and Emil to his little cave house. He had but one room, neatly plastered and whitewashed, and there was a wooden floor. There was a kitchen stove, a table covered with oilcloth, two chairs, a clock, a calendar, a few books on the window-shelf; nothing more. But the place was as clean as a cupboard.

"'But where do you sleep, Ivar?' Emil asked, looking about.

"Ivar unslung a hammock from a hook on the wall; in it was rolled a buffalo robe. 'There, my son. A hammock is a good bed, and in winter I wrap up in this skin. Where I go to work, the beds are not half so easy as this.'

"By this time Emil had lost all his timidity. He thought a cave a very superior kind of house. There was something pleasantly unusual about it and about Ivar. 'Do the birds know you will be kind to them, Ivar? Is that why so many come?' he asked.

"Ivar sat down on the floor and tucked his feet under him. 'See, little brother, they have come from a long way, and they are very tired. From up there where they are flying, our country looks dark and flat. They must have water to drink and to bathe in before they can go on with their journey. They look this way and that, and far below them they see something shining, like a piece of glass set in the dark earth. That is my pond. They come to it and are not disturbed. Maybe I sprinkle a little corn. They tell the other birds, and next year more come this way. They have their roads up there, as we have down here.'"

~Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

Speaking of axes:

“A truly subterranean space is not only closed but also has an element of verticality...If we go or imagine going underground, we enter an environment where organic nature is largely absent, but we also retrace a journey that is one of the most enduring and powerful cultural traditions of humankind: a metaphorical journey of discovery through descent below the surface. Even in places that lack caves, such as the Kalahari Desert and the flat landscapes of Siberia, the preliterate inhabitants assumed a vertical cosmos. Nature was assumed to be as deep as it was high. Narratives about journeys to the world below were inherently sacred...

The more I worked with American subterranean stories, the more I realized that they did not fill the same cultural role as in the Old World....American writers typically develop the theme of a technological environment on a horizontal plane...The conditions are entirely different in Europe, where it is much harder to find open land: the vertical journey makes more sense when the horizontal possibilities are much more limited than in the New World.”

~Rosalind Williams, interviewed by Sina Najafi in Cabinet #30

We might have known that every mine is a pin. But this would make every road a tower.

Unhinged pin:

"In the Museum of Modern Art catalogue accompanying the 2001 exhibition 'Mies in Berlin,' a hand-tinted print of one of these photographs is accompanied by a caption that states, 'Glass Skyscraper Project—No intended site known.' Current research strongly suggests that Mies did not intend for the photographs to be understood as portraying a particular place; the model was intended as a proposal for a new theory of light in architecture. Yet Mies took the unusual step of placing his design in what appears to be a real site, replete both with history and evocations of nature. The caption that the catalogue gives the project seems to imply that it is for no place. This impression is paradoxical. The thirty-story building clearly stands in a somewhere, and yet that somewhere is considered a nowhere."

~Josiah McElheney

This house melted before we ever saw it. Two pins flanked its entrance, left and right.



In the fire one pin was badly injured. Another remains healthy. Before the event they were a pair to mark a home. Now, unequal, they have separated their functions--one to suffer, perhaps die sooner, in its skeletal look and eventual absence declaring the disaster.



The other to mark its own safety from fire, and to hint at a time before a mistake.



Long after the smoke had spread too thin to smell, someone came to tend another pin. They pulled down the old one and threw it under the unburned tree. They put a new one in the spot and planted mums. These have died.

The weaver sits cross-legged in bed, tracking the in-and-out phasing of crickets along the fabric of the dark. There may be a warp and weft to the lines they make: one is nearly continuous like a creek, another sings steadily but with slow openings and closings inside the sound, another punctuates the song, like a clock’s second hand, with a raspy double note. All these are perpendicular to each other; what they weave comes in the window as a sheet.

She is not thinking of it now, but the painter will not be able to paint this sheet into his mural. Today he was beginning to sketch outbuildings lightly onto the wall. A small barn they both know well, opening out on the downslope side, with some vehicle lurking in its dust and half-dark.

What she is thinking is, what season will it be in the mural?