Secret Vespers

Let me shout out to Perspectives Magazine, which has published a short story of mine, The Canvas, in its July, 2009 issue. The magazine’s tagline is, “where inanimate objects have their say,” and my story is told by a canvas with a violent distrust of its painter.

You can find it here:

• http://perspectivesmagazine.googlepages.com/about

Somewhere on that page is a way to buy the magazine, and somewhere else is a way to preview it online; you can read my story and many others.

Let’s talk about scale! My friend, Tim Maly, writes a blog called Quiet Babylon, and in this post he discusses scale:

• http://www.quietbabylon.com/2009/05/29/6-things-that-give-me-a-crushing-sense-of-scale/

These Secret Vespers installments are tagged with scale, though many others could be. That crushing sense is one of the hardest sensations for me to put to words. Like love, hope, and so many other pre-verbal feelings, I find I can set it up with words or art, but that’s all I can do. The rest happens in the viewer or reader.

I get sort of dizzy, sort of light-heading, and I feel sort of outside myself when the scale of something big hits me. The traffic seen from above a major highway does this to me. The ocean, especially when stormy, does this to me. That documentary, Baraka, does this to me.

But enough about me. What has given you a crushing sense of scale?