
On this Super Full Moon in Pisces where my emotions take over every little hair on my body. I think the long hand of mantis is pulling randomly. A green-golden flash pulls forth a book dusty on the shelve. Portraits and Observations The Essays of Truman Capote. The book is opened to A Voice from a Cloud. I usually only read the first paragraph but so satisfied , my eyes wander with my desire to read two.
“…mysterious, deep, very clear creek…wade and swim in the pure water…”
“One frosty December afternoon I was far from home, walking in a forest along the bank of a mysterious, deep, very clear creek, a route that led eventually to a place called Hatter’s Mill. The mill, which straddles the creek, had been abandoned long ago; it was a place where farmers had brought their corn to be ground into cornmeal. As a child, I’d often gone there with cousins to fish and swim; it was while exploring under the mill that I’d been bitten in the knee by a by a cottonmouth moccasin-precisely as happens to Joel Knox. And now as I came upon the forlorn mill with its sagging silver-gray timbers, the remembered shock of the snakebite returned; and other memories too-of Idabel, or rather the girl who was the counterpart of Idabel, and how we used to wade and swim in the pure waters, where fat speckled fish lolled in sunlit pools; Idabel was always trying to reach out and grab one.” Pg. 283 Par. 2.

“In toto” as a whole : totally or completely
” Excitement-a variety of creative coma-overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole book. Usually when a story comes to me, it arrives, or seems to, in toto: a long sustained streak of lighting that darkens the tangible, so-called real world, and leaves illuminated only this suddenly seen pseudo-imaginary landscape, a terrain alive with fingers, voices, rooms, atmospheres, weather. And all of it, at birth, is like an angry, wrathful tiger cub; one must sooth and tame it. Which, of course, is an artist’s principal task: to tame and shape the raw creative vision.” Page 283, Par 3.