Live Like Dragons

I snapped this picture three years ago, as I was so taken with the words, found scrawled on the door of a parking lot in Downtown Austin.  The site used to connect with The Dobie Mall and Movie Theatre, a former art house treasure, which is now closed. Currently, it is the easiest way to park and walk to the Harry Ransom Center.  I was returning from a long visit that day, as I'd recently discovered that you could visit and call up items from the archives and had immersed myself in some original drafts of L. Frank Baum's The Tin Woodsman of Oz, and The Magic Of Oz.


On my way back to the car I saw this quote, and was inspired.  I do not know where it is from, and a google search hasn't been very helpful.  Of course at the time, I didn't look closely enough through my lens to realize how blurry the photo was, so I unfortunately have nothing clearer, and cannot read the smudge of pink in the corner that may be a persons name.  If anyone lives near the Dobie on the U.T. campus and wants to send me a better photo, I would be forever grateful.  Or if anyone knows more about the stanza?

And maybe it's better not to know where its source. If it turns out to be an incredibly famous piece of literature, then it's context and meaning may change, destroying what I was touched by in the first moments.  As long as the source remains a mystery, the quote is equally mysterious, and I can endow it with the provenance I want it to have in order to raise it's potency to me.

I have thought about the quote a lot, wondered about its meaning. After reexamination it seems a lot more seditious than what I'd initially imagined.  It doesn't just say be free, ,it says take your freedom even if it means robbing others, and I while I'd always figured that the Kings had probably been tyrants and enslavers and deserved whatever was coming to them, did the angels deserve the same treatment?.  And is it worth their unwilling sacrifice so that we may thrive? I guess, I have to say my answer is a qualified "yes", at lest initially, or I wouldn't have felt that unexpected stomach flutter the first time I read it, that little ping like riding an elevator down, or speeding down hilly roads.  But that was when the angels remained metaphorical.  In reality? I want to fly, to soar, like everyone else.  But I'd like to think its possible to to do grow my own wings, and to defy my Kings without robbing the innocent. Or, barring that, to borrow the wings and to fly with the angel's assistance and approval.  Otherwise, I don't know that I could really enjoy the flight.