SHADOW HANDS

Photo-by-okilok.jpg

This shadow picture reminded me of Robinson Jeffers, a poet I ran across when I was reading philosophy as an undergraduate. Robinson Jeffers inspired many eco-poets. His work celebrates the enduring beauty of sea, sky...the world of nature and strives to create a vision of  that world in which human experience is questioned, qualified, and even decentered. Jeffers’ efforts to shift “emphasis and significance from man to not-man” is central to both his poetry and his personal philosophy.

Here's a link if you want to see an image of the hands "Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara" : http://www.ventanawild.org/news/fe99/caves.html

 Hands

By Robinson Jeffers 1887–1962

Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara

The vault of rock is painted with hands,

A multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men’s palms, no more,

No other picture. There’s no one to say

Whether the brown shy quiet people who are dead intended

Religion or magic, or made their tracings

In the idleness of art; but over the division of years these careful

Signs-manual are now like a sealed message

Saying: “Look: we also were human; we had hands, not paws. All hail

You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters

In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down

And be supplanted; for you also are human.”