From whiskey river (except for the last five lines; numerous other differences vs. the alternate source linked below):
Exercise
First, forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every daythen forget what day of the week it is
and do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
and then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possiblefollow these by forgetting to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them
around after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to countforget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backwards
starting with even numbers
with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
forgetting it all until everything
is continuous againgo on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fireforget fire
(W. S. Merwin [source])
…and:
Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies, your dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?
(Stephen and Ondrea Levine, from Who Dies? [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Things I Didn’t Know I Loved: After Nazim Hikmet*
I always knew I loved the sky,
the way it seems solid and insubstantial at the same time;
the way it disappears above us
even as we pursue it in a climbing plane,
like wishes or answers to certain questions — always out of reach;
the way it embodies blue,
even when it is gray.But I didn’t know I loved the clouds,
those shaggy eyebrows glowering
over the face of the sun.
Perhaps I only love the strange shapes clouds can take,
as if they are sketches by an artist
who keeps changing her mind.
Perhaps I love their deceptive softness,
like a bosom I’d like to rest my head against
but never can.And I know I love the grass, even as I am cutting it as short
as the hair on my grandson’s newly barbered head.
I love the way the smell of grass can fill my nostrils
with intimations of youth and lust;
the way it stains my handkerchief with meanings
that never wash out.Sometimes I love the rain, staccato on the roof,
and always the snow when I am inside looking out
at the blurring around the edges of parked cars
and trees. And I love trees,
in winter when their austere shapes
are like the cutout silhouettes artists sell at fairs
and in May when their branches
are fuzzy with growth, the leaves poking out
like new green horns on a young deer.But how about the sound of trains,
those drawn-out whistles of longing in the night,
like coyotes made of steam and steel, no color at all,
reminding me of prisoners on chain gangs I’ve only seen
in movies, defeated men hammering spikes into rails,
the burly guards watching over them?Those whistles give loneliness and departure a voice.
It is the kind of loneliness I can take in my arms, tasting
of tears that comfort even as they burn, dampening the pillows
and all the feathers of all the geese who were plucked to fill
them.Perhaps I embrace the music of departure — song without lyrics,
so I can learn to love it, though I don’t love it now.
For at the end of the story, when sky and clouds and grass,
and even you my love of so many years,
have almost disappeared,
it will be all there is left to love.
(Linda Pastan, from Queen of a Rainy Country)
1994′s Pulp Fiction focused on the restarting of things we might have imagined dead. Old pulp themes, obviously. The life of Bruce Willis’s beat-up boxer, Butch. The heartbeat of Mia Wallace (played by Uma Thurman). The soul of hitman Jules Winnfield (Samuel Jackson). John Travolta’s real-life career…
It also defibrillated the popularity of a fairly minor sub-genre of rock: surf music. Wikipedia says Quentin Tarrantino chose it as the main ingredient of the film’s soundtrack, but not because the music — or the film itself — had anything to do with the ocean. Rather, said Tarrantino, “To me it just sounds like rock and roll, even Morricone music. It sounds like rock and roll spaghetti Western music.”
The closing song, “Surf Rider,” was a hit in 1963 when performed by a group called The Lively Ones, and (with most of the other songs) returned to the charts when the soundtrack was released. It played over Pulp Fiction‘s end credits, and I’m not sure I can explain just how right the song’s pace and rhythm felt as I sat in the theater after the first time I saw the film, grinning, my pulse still racing:
[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:19 long.]
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“Surf Rider” was recorded first not by The Lively Ones, but by The Ventures in 1962 — the song itself essentially a reboot. Even the title “Surf Rider” was new; at first, The Ventures called it “Spudnik”**. And while the melody and much of the instrumentation was unchanged, the original had been quite a bit less, uh… lively:
[This clip is 2:25 long.]
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* See Nazim Hikmet’s original poem (translated by Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing), “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” here.
** Yeah: “Spudnik.” I had no idea where that title came from, although it obviously played on “Sputnik,” the name of the first Soviet satellite (1957). This page on the history of The Ventures provides an answer:
The Ventures recorded a song [band member] Nokie Edwards wrote, called “Nokie’s Tune”. When they put together their album Mashed Potatoes And Gravy the song was cleverly rechristened “Spudnik”. [Band member Bob Bogle, apparently, said] “Some group recorded it under the name ‘Surf Rider’ and claimed the writing. Our attorneys wrote them a letter and asked them to cease and desist, which they did.” When the Mashed Potatoes album was renamed The Ventures’ Beach Party, the “Surf Rider” name stuck even more. “These days, when someone requests the song, its always ‘Surf Rider’, never ‘Spudnik’.”
Mashed potatoes. Spudnik. Oh. Well, one man’s clever rechristening is another man’s groan!
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JES, thanks for the great post! I particularly love the Merwin poem, and how it winds all the way down to the basic elements. He’s a great poet. And the idea of amplified thoughts in the Levine passage both intrigues and frightens me — it reminds me of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire”, where the angels could hear your thoughts. Have a happy holiday weekend!
That Levine blows me away. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how what a very good thing it is that we cannot read each other’s (others’?) thoughts, but like hell I’m gonna say why. :)
Do you remember Jules’s wallet in Pulp Fiction? I got that for Eisha’s b’day last year. You can actually purchase one of those. That just cracks me up.
I remember the Ventures recording of Spudnik. The fact that I do helps me understand The Exercise. I’ve already forgotten what time it is; my watch never leaves my dresser now. And I forget and re-forget what day of the week it is–daily; there have been four Saturdays in this week so far. I’m sure I’m on my way to all of the forgettings.
There was an obituary in our local paper last week for a woman who “died of complications of aging.” We should all be so lucky.
It isn’t fire that we forget last; it is eyes.
Jill: Wings of Desire is a wonderful connection to have made — wish I’d thought of it myself. ha. (Even though I have referenced the movie here before, there’s always room for more. :)) Thank you for the good wishes, and I hope your weekend was good, too!
Jules, that wallet has to be one of the most famous in pop culture and. I’m sure Eisha would agree, a highly desirable wardrobe accessory. (I’d like to handle George Costanza’s for a moment, but I sure wouldn’t want to carry it around in a hip pocket.)
About reading one another’s thoughts: In college, I once attended a lecture by a professor at Columbia U, I think in the journalism school. He actually hoped we would someday become a society in which everyone could find out anything about everyone else that they wanted. He said the “only” danger was when government and Big Business had a monopoly on that ability… It was an interesting idea, that the value of knowing personal information — right down to the very thoughts — diminishes drastically the easier it is to obtain (and the easier it is for someone else to obtain ours).
Nance, I don’t think I’d openly admit to having known of “Spudnik” before writing/researching this post. (Maybe it’s just, per the Levine quote, I like to keep certain information close to my chest.) You are a brave and/or very un-self-conscious woman.
That last sentence is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen here. A jewel. Thank you for leaving it!
[Ha ha, speaking of old age, reCaptcha says: boos Prime.]
I’ve been neglecting my blog reading lately. So, okay.
And you’ve disabled the comment section above. Fair enough. But I’ll tell you this.
I kept the tape from my mother’s answering machine. Thing is, it is some weird fangled machine and its cassette tapes have only one hole. Yeah, not the two holes that every other tape cassette has, but one. So, I’ve never been able to play it.
marta: The question is — if you could find a player for that tape, would you listen to it?
Somewhere around here, we probably still have the answering machine with the tape which contains a haunting wrong-number message. The speaker was a gravelly-voiced old guy with a soft Southern accent, and he said something like:
We wonder about Pepper and his Daddy from time to time. If we had any way to locate Pepper, we would have gotten that tape to him years ago.
For some crazy reason, after I wrote the post you’re referring to I sat down this afternoon and watched Cinema Paradiso. Do you know it? As always happens, by the time it was over I was weeping into my beard.
I’m glad I’m not the only (male) person who will admit to getting all misted up at the end of Cinema Paradiso. That montage of ‘censored kisses’ is just devastating.
And I like the original, shorter version, where the mature Anna is glimpsed only in an almost subliminally brief flash in the montage of key moments that plays over the end credits – she’s instantly recognisable (sort of; is it really her?), but it’s just enough to raise questions in the viewer’s mind as to where she is now, and whether there might still be some chance of her and Toto getting together.
In the ‘Director’s Cut’ (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ‘Director’s Cut’ I preferred to the original release; producers know what they’re doing, most of the time!), there’s a protracted explanation of how Alfredo had conspired to keep them apart (far too laboured: we get it; but it’s only one small part of the forces that separated them – why couldn’t he get exempted from his national service, why did she never write to him, why didn’t he try to find her when he got out of the army??), and a really clunky and unsatisfying sequence where he meets her in the present and they have a brief fling for old time’s sake (I think they have sex in the back of a car. Fifty-year-0lds having car sex?! Where’s the romance in that?). It just kills all the allusiveness, all the magic of the sparer version. Sometimes we need loose ends, we need not to know.
I see on IMDB that the original Italian release was half an hour longer than the international one, so perhaps this was much closer to the later (and even longer) ‘Director’s Cut’ and included these unnecessary elements.
Which version did you just watch, JES?
A particular bane of the ‘Director’s Cut’ phenomenon, I find, is that it becomes impossible to find any other version on DVD.
For example, I’d much rather show Apocalypse Now to my students here than Apocalypse Now: Redux (some interesting additions, but inordinately long, and not overall an improvement on the original), but I just can’t find it.
Froog: I’ve encountered a couple of other guys who have the same response to Cinema Paradiso. But both The Missus and, decades ago, The Former Missus, seemed more interested in my response than moved themselves… I’ve always assumed it to be the rara avis: a frank tearjerker aimed at the male psyche rather than the female.
The version I watched was on one of our satellite channels, Ovation; I’d recorded it during its broadcast overnight during the weekend. Consequently it was heavily interrupted with commercials — a rotten way to watch it, really: even though you can zip through them on playback, it still takes you out of the moment every time you have to reach for the remote control. Anyhow, I suspect it was already long enough this way that it’s NOT the director’s cut; there was no latter-day meeting between him and the girl (called “Elena” in the version I watched?).
I don’t know what the credits showed because they did this awful thing a lot of channels do now, squeezing the accelerate credits into, like, 20% of the screen and filling the rest of it with the next show’s opening. But there was a moment when grownup Toto is sitting in his old bedroom in his mother’s house; he’s set up a small projector on the bed, and is watching a montage of clips of the girl and (need I say “of course”?) visibly moved, in a dozen complicated ways. His mother peeks in through a partially open door, sees what he’s watching, looks sadly down at the floor, and leaves without interrupting.
I’m with you on the need-not-to-know. (That may be one reason why I couldn’t work myself into a lather over the questions left unanswered by the Lost TV series finale last week.) Just about everyone agrees the surest way to ruin a joke is to explain it; some “Director’s Cut” editions apparently forget that the same thing is true of drama — particularly drama with a highly personal “vision” (like Apocalypse Now).
For some reason this makes me wonder if you’ve seen Pan’s Labyrinth. A director’s cut of that which filled in all the gaps would be ghastly.
Was it Elena? Perhaps I misremembered. It’s ringing a bell now. Maybe I blocked that out because an Elena (well, Helena – close enough) was the first – and possibly biggest – derailment of my life, when I was just a Freshman.
Tornatore has a lovely, painterly eye for composition sometimes. I first saw this just under 19 years ago, and I remember seeing that opening shot (well, near the beginning – I hope I’m not completely misremembering it; I’m almost afraid to watch it again in case I am) of the bowl of lemons on the windowsill…. and thinking to myself in those first few seconds, I am going to love this film.
For me, the montage of kisses represents the sacrifices you make, the things you miss out on – perhaps wilfully, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps foolishly – to pursue grander dreams.
I’ve only just thought of this, but it has suddenly occurred to me that women seem to get messed up over the ‘serious’ relationships that have gone awry, whereas men dwell more upon the brief-glorious-doomed ones (or, in my case, the completely unrequited ones).
Oh, there’s hours of bloggery in analysing the possible reasons behind that.
I’ve noticed you mention Pan’s Labyrinth once or twice before.
I gather you – with your taste for fantasy and the macabre – are quite a fan. I am afraid I rather emphatically am not. For me, it just didnt’ hang together at all.
I like del Toro’s Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, but that one…. well, there must be some things we disagree on.
I thought Pan’s Labyrinth was brilliant! I certainly would avoid a director’s cut. On a completely different level of film, the new version of the first Star Wars movie (the real first one, the one from 1977–or thereabouts) irritates me no end. And Lord of the Rings–the cut version is better and Peter Jackson would agree.