There Is No Refuge
In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
You couldn’t see these cold water restrooms
Or this baggage overload
Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads. ~~~ Refuge of the Roads (Joni Mitchell)
A comparison of two visual depictions of the earth speak volumes in terms of our terminal decline over my lifetime.
The photo above is the vision of the earth and the world that I grew up with, The Age Of Aquarius.
Joni Mitchell nailed it in “Woodstock” and (lyrics above) later sang of the immensity of that photo (but I think she was singing of the first moon landing Apollo 11, July 1969.)
The story of the above photo is told here by The Guardian:
When Bill Anders took this photograph from the Apollo spacecraft on Christmas Eve in 1968, our relationship with the world changed forever
This photograph is now half a century old. It was taken by the astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 as the Apollo 8 spacecraft rounded the dark side of the moon for a fourth time. When Earth came up over the horizon, Anders scrabbled for his Hasselblad camera and started clicking.
In that pre-digital age, five days passed. The astronauts returned to Earth; the film was retrieved and developed. In its new year edition, Life magazine printed the photo on a double-page spread alongside a poem by US poet laureate James Dickey: “And behold / The blue planet steeped in its dream / Of reality, its calculated vision shaking with the only love.”
That vision has been destroyed by US military madness and collapsing Empire (see the new “Earth” below)
Again, Joni saw it happening:
… Sitting in a park in Paris, France
Reading the news and it sure looks bad
They won’t give peace a chance
That was just a dream some of us had. ~~~ California (from the Blue album)
It is incredible to explore this database, click on map markers or use the dashboard. You can turn the world and see all the madness:
