Author Archives: Anita Sullivan

“I am a merry-go-round mannikin yanked by the pole at the top of my head and tossed off the wheel. My pole goes into the soft ground. I see the whirling stars beneath my chin. I hear that foolish bird, the ancient one, swallow the music box when a lesser god tossed it out of […]

“Much soul-searching is taking place in these historically difficult times, some of it private, but some through the enormous and complicated sieve of the collective unconscious. We feel one another’s pain, enough so that once again we find ourselves re-visiting the perennial Problem of Humans, and once again hoping for the possibility to see it […]

“This is not an anecdote about a cat and a squirrel, it is about the living geography of landscape as it regularly contorts itself into an occasion for art. Spontaneously, with no need for embellishment because this is what the universe does all the time; you just have to be awake while it happens. For […]

“I began collecting bits and pieces of other people’s writings at an early age. I still have some of these yellowed pieces of paper with my original savings. Eventually, I got officious about it and began to type them up and paste them into a loose-leaf notebook. In earlier centuries, they used to call these […]

“Like an ancient map, its spirit roads in the visible realm can, effectively, never be found. A dish, about the size to fill two slightly cupped hands. Narrow, vaguely circular, disappearing from not only view but from longing itself, into the pinkish shadows beyond the treehouse, a kind of context it carries as an outer […]

“Thus it was I found myself recently on my hands and knees in full sunlight confronting the usual collection of weeds, many of which were already producing lovely tiny white, pink, or purple flowers. I will spare you the list. As I was filling my bucket, I became vaguely aware that even in weeding there […]

“The sky is always dark blue, trending towards lavender/when I remember and say—we should not go extinct,/and each time this knowledge arrives/like a silent taxi headlamp in the rain./This evening it comes in a black and white video/of Grigory Sokolov playing a Bach Partita.”—Anita Sullivan On the Other Hand By Anita Sullivan EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—February […]

“But such hasty assumptions would ruin an ancient double-monster analogy/of particularly delicate dreadfulness, the current manifestation of which/ we recognize to be—just lately—infiltrating this and/ other trainyards each night/but do not call out its common name while we endure through sleep.”—Anita Sullivan On the Other Hand By Anita Sullivan EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—1 December 2020— “Analogue: […]

“We don’t understand this virus from the inside out. We don’t even know in what sense it is ‘alive.’ It seems not to have any means or purpose other than simply to continue. This reminds us of the story of the Welsh cauldron, into which dead soldiers could be tossed, where they would seethe and […]

“How could this precarious situation come to pass? That instead of climate change we humans might instead be finished off a bit sooner by a simple attack of a highly infectious disease we failed to prepare ourselves for. But we don’t see it that way yet because even here in Oregon, which has a fairly […]