You're the fisher king who saw the hanged man

There were two and a half sets of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence in the house when I was a child, one mixed set of British paperbacks and hardcovers and one later set of American paperbacks and then a couple of duplicates because you never know when you will need to lend one out. I grew up on them from the time I was eleven and received the Collier paperback of The Dark Is Rising (1973) for my birthday. Their number diminished slightly over the years, as a couple of the copies we lent out never came back; recently my mother has been loaning the spare-er survivors to the children across the street (and then carefully isolating them for a sufficient number of days on return). I myself seem to own copies only of Greenwitch (1974) and The Grey King (1975), which does not help when I want to re-read the entire sequence because I cannot clear my head of the line "Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond all imagining." Are we at some kind of midsummer rising, all the more dangerous because it is happening in the bright days where everyone can see it plain and clear as pieces on a chessboard? I keep thinking of Silver on the Tree (1977) where the Black Rider is finally joined by the White, two inhuman figures of extremes because the shades of grey are where the Light gets in, as opposed to the poles of the Dark where humans turn "blinded by their own shining ideas or locked up in the darkness of their own heads." If there is a Rider abroad, it must be the White Rider, mantled in that treacherous killing purity. Caradog Prichard could never have been a poet, but I am beginning to think we got him as President.

And I want a little more than a little

Because I had not previously seen this picture which is just as striking as its subject banked it would be, I thought people might like to know about Brianna Noble and Dapper Dan: "I'm just another protester if I go down there alone, but no one can ignore a black woman sitting on top of a horse."

You might also want to read Zin E. Rocklyn's "The Night Sun," because it's excellent and she is not yet as prolifically published as she deserves to be. (If you want it as an e-book, that can also be done.)

Hawa Allan writes usefully on the inevitably racist history and deployment of the much-discussed Insurrection Act of 1807: "Insurrection in the Eye of the Beholder."

Courtesy of the Boston Globe: "A list of 40+ Black-owned Boston restaurants to support."

How beautiful could a sentence sound?

I got out of the house before it rained this evening and photographed flowers to remind myself the world is still alive.

( Deep in the stars or wherever you are. )

We heard sirens after we got home. Pandemic? Police? There are so many things to stay safe from. And too many of them that must be braved.