NORTH SHORE

Outside the Cocoon

We go to the North Shore because it’s wild and cold and the atmosphere is electric and wet. It’s an absolutely unforgiving place where things, giant trees, abandoned tin cans, are pounded smooth. We saw stone-crusted gray whales and ratty bald eagles and thought that sunny days and purple flowers are nice but not the same as Edmund Burke’s sublime which is found in “terror, obscurity, power, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence and darkness.”

We are always looking for things that “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life.” Walking in the blinding rain with your chin tilted to the wind using the Pete Seeger method you feel something like this.

Out here in the pre-verbal world things seem slow and uncomplicated, just brute elements really, but then when we laugh and swoop along, back to our future and past, things get very fast and there is music in the air pushing us on.