The Taking In; the Giving Out

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[Image: “He Knew What He Had to Do,” by Alan Levine. Found it on Flickr, and am sharing it here (with minimal alteration) under its Creative Commons license — thank you!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

For the traveler today
Among the Zen parables, one koan is called “Just Drinking Tea”. Tea represents Zen spirit: he who tastes it tastes Zen.

Hot plum tea is offered to a visitor arriving from afar. Honey and sugar are dissolved in hot water and a pickled plum with the seed removed is proffered between the points of chopsticks. The visitor first steeps the plum briefly in the honey water. He then removes and eats it before drinking the tea. The sourness of the plum and the sweetness of the tea relieve the fatigue of the journey.

For the cook today
The three spirits of zen cooking –
First, the heart of pleasure.
Second, the heart of kindness.
Third, it’s a big deep heart.
Pay attention to everything.

These are Dogen’s three spirits of zen cooking. The happy spirit feels joy and gratitude at the privilege of being assigned the worthy task of cooking, an opportunity to follow the true way. The venerable spirit calls upon a kind heart in the pursuit of food that will please the diner. The great spirit does not flinch from the smallest detail and offers unwavering help in the unshakable quest for improvement.

For all of us today
“Taste as much of this as you can. Swallow what you need and spit out the rest.”

(Taizan Maezumi [source: unknown; appears in a handful of Facebook posts and PDFs but never with an actual citation])

…and:

Home For Thanksgiving

The gathering family
throws shadows around us,
it is the late afternoon
Of the family.

There is still enough light
to see all the way back,
but at the windows
that light is wasting away.

Soon we will be nothing
but silhouettes: the sons’
as harsh
as the fathers’.

Soon the daughters
will take off their aprons
as trees take off their leaves
for winter.

Let us eat quickly –
let us fill ourselves up.
the covers of the album are closing
behind us.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and:

A Winter Notebook

2

I am not available
At the moment
Except to myself.

Downstairs the plumber
Is emptying the big tank,
Water-logged.
The pump pumped on and on
And might have worn out.

So many lives pour into this house,
Sometimes I get too full;
The pump wears out.

So now I am emptying the tank.
It is not an illness
That keeps me from writing.
I am simply staying alive
As one does
At times by taking in,
At times by shutting out.

(May Sarton [source])

From elsewhere:

Physical labor as a bringer of sleep doesn’t seem to do much for me. But the woods do, where thoughts of weather, of food, and of the day’s journey so dominate the mind that everything else subsides. The rise and fall of temperature and of wind, the beginning and the end of rain matter here in a way that is irrelevant elsewhere. With the right gear, it is a pleasure to live with the weather, to wait for sun and feel the cool of rain, to watch the sky with absorption and speculation, to guess at the meaning of succeeding events. I hate feeling miserably wet and cold. But with boots, heavy wool socks, rain pants, rain parka, and a wide-brimmed hat I have been dry and warm through all the downpours, on and off the river.

(John McPhee [source])

…and:

When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

The Bait

Saturday mornings, before
my weekly chores,
I used to sneak out of the house
and across the street,
grabbing the first grasshopper
walking in the damp California grass
along the stream.
Carefully hiding a silver hook
beneath its green wings,
I’d float it out
across the gentle ripples
towards the end of its life.
Just like that.
I’d give it the hook
and let it ride.
All I ever expected for it
was that big-mouth bass
awaiting its arrival.
I didn’t think
that I was giving up one life
to get another,
that even childhood
was full of sacrifice.
I’d just take the bright green thing,
pluck it off its only stalk,
and give it away as if
it were mine to give.
I knew someone out there
would be fooled,
that someone would accept
the precious gift.
So I just sent it along
with a plea of a prayer,
hoping it would spread its wings this time
and fly across that wet glass sky,
no concern for what inspired
its life, or mine,
only instinct guiding pain
towards the other side.

(Eric Chock [source])

Don’t Panic: The Stranger on the Road May Well Be Yourself

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[Image: “Plaza Convocation,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

In my experience, you always think you know what you’re doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn’t and you couldn’t. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That’s my idea. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It’s a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not. Honestly, I never sit down to write anything without thinking, This is a weird thing to be doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I don’t know. It feels funny to do these things, but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look.

(David Hickey [source])

…and:

Too Easy: to Write of Miracles

Too easy: to write of miracles, dreams where the famous give
mysterious utterance to silent truth;
to confuse snow with the stars,
simulate a star’s fantastic wisdom.

Easy like the willow to lament,
rant in tramples roads where pools
are red with sorrowful fires, and sullen rain
drips from the willows; ornamental leaves;
or die in words and angrily turn
to pace like ghosts about the walls of war.

But difficult when, innocent and cold,
day, a bird over a hill, flies in
—resolving anguish to a strange perspective,
a scene within a marble; returning
the brilliant shower of coloured dreams to dust,
a smell of fireworks lingering by canals
on autumn evenings—difficult to write
of the real image, real hand, the heart
of day or autumn beating steadily:
to speak of human gestures, clarify
all the context of a simple phrase
—the hour, the shadow, the fire,
the loaf of a bare table.

Hard, under the honest sun, to weight
a word until it balances with love—
burden of happiness on fearful shoulders;
in the ease of daylight to discover
what measure has its music, and achieve
the unhaunted country of the final poem.

Sicily, 1948

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

(Elizabeth Bishop [source])

From elsewhere:

The Good God and the Evil God

The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.

The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”

The Evil God did not answer.

And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.”

“Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.”

And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.”

The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.

(Kahlil Gibran [source])

…and:

We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So, too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul, which is the principle of all our acts…

The soul does not find itself unless it acts. Therefore it must act. Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death. But my soul must not project itself entirely into the outward effects of its activity. I do not need to see myself, I merely need to be myself. I must think and act like a living being, but I must not plunge my whole self into what I think and do or seek always to find myself in the work I have done. The soul that projects itself entirely into activity, and seeks itself outside itself in the work of its own will is like a madman who sleeps on the sidewalk in front of his house instead of living inside where it is quiet and warm. The soul that throws itself outdoors in order to find itself in the effects of its own work is like a fire that has no desire to burn but seeks only to go up in smoke.

(Thomas Merton [source])

#51: The two men met at an intersection known to both, but recognized by neither.

“I haven’t seen you in forever!” exclaimed the younger man to the older.

“And I,” replied the older, laughing, “could say the same thing for you!”

“Want to walk together for a while?”

“Thought you’d never ask. Where you want to go?”

“I think,” said the young man, and paused. “…I think it doesn’t much matter. How about that horizon over there?”

The older man laughed. “That’s funny. That’s exactly where I myself was headed!”

And so they set out, not quite arm in arm — but all but.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

In Proportion to the Capacity for Delight

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[Image: “Sometimes, Things Just Jump Out,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

How Much Happens in a Day

In the course of a day we shall meet one another.

But, in one day, things spring to life—
they sell grapes in the street,
tomatoes change their skin,
the young girl you wanted
never came back to the office.

They changed the postman suddenly.
The letters now are not the same.
A few golden leaves and it’s different;
this tree is now well off.

Who would have said that the earth
with its ancient skin would change so much?
It has more volcanoes than yesterday,
the sky has brand-new clouds,
the rivers are flowing differently.
Besides, so much has come into being!
I have inaugurated hundreds
of highways and buildings,
delicate, clean bridges
like ships or violins.

And so, when I greet you
and kiss your flowering mouth,
our kisses are other kisses,
our mouths are other mouths.

Joy, my love, joy in all things,
in what falls and what flourishes.

Joy in today and yesterday,
the day before and tomorrow.

Joy in bread and stone,
joy in fire and rain.

In what changes, is born, grows,
consumes itself, and becomes a kiss again.

Joy in the air we have,
and in what we have of earth.

When our life dries up,
only the roots remain to us,
and the wind is cold like hate.

Then let us change our skin,
our nails, our blood, our gazing;
and you kiss me and I go out
to sell light on the roads.

Joy in the night and the day,
and the four stations of the soul.

(Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid [source])

…and (ibid.):

Whether success or failure: the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

(Julia Cameron [source: see note, below])

…and (ibid.):

Zero Hour

It was the hour of simply nothing,
not a single desire in my western heart,
no ancient system
of breathing and postures,
no big idea justifying what I felt.

There was even an absence of despair.

“Anything goes,” I said to myself.
All the clocks were high. Above them,
hundreds of stars flickering if, if, if.
Everywhere in the universe, it seemed,
some next thing was gathering itself.

I started to feel something,
but it was nothing more than a moment
passing into another, or was it less
eloquent than that, purely muscular,
some meaningless twitch?

I’d let someone else make it rhyme.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.

(Margaret Renkl [source])

…and:

As he hurries along, considering his options, a sparrow darts boldly towards spilled grain. Bao smiles at its bravery. Most people only notice eye-catching birds like eagles and swans that have auspicious meanings, or geese, mandarin ducks, and doves that signify fidelity.

(Yangsze Choo [source])

…and:

Noticing

Often a crumb on my plate at the last
looks at me. On my tongue like a snowflake
it melts for awhile—and splendor discovers
itself in this world out of such quiet things.
Those times, anything breathed on or thought
about, even for an instant, is bread.

At the corner just below the streetlight
there’s a branch twisted by the wind. Surrounded
by darkness, hardly surviving, that branch
waits to wave in its yellow cone
when anyone passes and looks up. For years
it lives by such notice, eyes and sun.

Strange—things neglected begin to appeal
to a part inside us. It is called the soul.
These times, it lives on less and less.

(William Stafford [source])

____________

A note on the Julia Cameron quote: This seems to be one of those quotes which get passed around from one source to another — its first and likely anonymous sharing online having just slightly missed the actual source. Except for a very slight change to the opening words, the passage pretty obviously comes from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. You’ll find the relevant passage here at the Internet Archive, about halfway down the page. There, you’ll see that Cameron goes on to discuss the writings of May Sarton on the same topic, and indeed quotes from Sarton’s A Journal of Solitude. But there’s no evidence — none that I can find, anyhow — that Sarton rather than Cameron actually wrote this passage (despite the many misattributions). Score one, I guess, for pedantry! *laughing*

[back]

All to Know the Home of Your Own Name

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[Slideshow: “The Dark Tarn of Auber–or Not, Respectively,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Written words can be a source of entanglement as well as of liberation; unless the right person takes it at the right time, the elixir turns to poison. Please be careful.

(Torei Enji [source])

…and (ibid.; italicized portion):

You may think that you have died and even that you have risen again; but both will be a dream.

This has a terrible meaning, especially for imaginative people. We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change [which] I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself—to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed, & then to find yourself still in bed.

(C.S. Lewis [source])

…and (ibid.):

One suggestion is to regard your personality as a pet. It follows you around anyway, so give it a name and make friends with it. Keep it on a leash when you need to, and let it run free when you feel that is appropriate. Train it as well as you can, and then accept its idiosyncrasies, but always remember that your pet is not you. Your pet has its own life, and just happens to be in an intimate relationship with you, whoever you may be, hiding there behind your personality.

(Wes Nisker [source])

…and (ibid.):

One of the biggest factors in stress is cognitive distortion — we make an absurd situation into a catastrophe. We create our own reality out of it. Like, “You make me crazy!” Well, nobody makes you crazy; you make your self crazy. There is a tremendous amount of humor in that . If we could just take a breath and step away and be witnesses to our own absurdity, we’d be cracking up most of the time. What humor can do is make your life less of a problem. A laugh is a break. It removes the dark lens that you see your life through and gives you a lighter lens that gives you clarity. As you step away and get less involved in getting pissed off, you achieve a certain level of enlightenment. In other words, humor takes you to a higher place.

(Loretta Laroche [source: unknown])

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

An Improvement in Stairs

Through the oculus of the bus terminal at Boston’s South Station, light falls
for a hundred feet. A shock, a god, a pillar of light, like that of the Pantheon

if the Pantheon had a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts, surly young workers
at the Greyhound desk, & an escalator rising to its height—

just like it, that light. A patent for an early escalator called it an improvement
in stairs. An improvement, surely, how I’m standing still & still, somehow,

going up & up & up. My favorite patents are the ones Houdini sought for tricks
never performed: a block of ice he would leave whole, a box within a water-filled box

he would escape from dry. (I should mention: at least one thing in this poem is a lie.)
I can disappear, too: from one place, from another. There’s nothing quite as nice

as leaving, when you’re in the mood. There’s nothing quite as nice as coming back.
Years ago, I stood beneath the Pantheon & thought how beautiful, how sublime,

how like the bus terminal at South Station, if it had a Dunkin’ Donuts.
During the war, Houdini offered to teach soldiers headed to the front

how to escape torpedoed vessels, German handcuffs. As a kid
in Appleton, Wisconsin, he’d dreamed of playing baseball—

the stage of the stadium, the long fly making its escape.
The way there is a place in the game called home

& the goal is to get there
again & again.

(Mairead Small Staid [source])

…and:

In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.

(Clarissa Pinkola Estés [source])

…and:

Driving Home from Keyworth’s

Sharing the lap belt, we slide imperfectly into each other
as Dad speeds through an overpass. His daddy raised

Porsches—he raced Porsches—but he is not his father. He doesn’t have
the money to have bad ideas and this is a new truck so we

better not touch something we’re not supposed to. My brother
and I share a Zippo and Swiss Army Knife. All we are allowed

to light are our own birthday candles. Mom says we can cut
the beige-dead slack off of grass. Wanna see the seat belt catch

fire? one of us whispers. The other one replies, No, let’s watch
Dad drive. So we do. Our love is not yet fooled away from worship.

Everything our father does has wings. And because we behaved
while he left us in the car with the engine running as he ducked

into Keyworth’s Hardware store, Dad lets us pretend to steer.
Each of us on a knee, our inherited hands, pulling. We tussle

up the driveway. They are saving us an ashtray fortune, dimes
collide with quarters. My brother, his blond hair, calls out about

a squirrel five yards away that might run into the road. Dad shouts
with joy-of-the-moment, Kids! We raise our keen eyes and yodel

and howl—I’m being ridiculous now. But have you ever sat next
to a person and known the home of your own name?

(Tennessee Hill [source])

…and:

The mustard-pot got up and walked over to his plate on thin silver legs that waddled like the owl’s. Then it uncurled its handles and one handle lifted its lid with exaggerated courtesy while the other helped him to a generous spoonful.

“Oh, I love the mustard-pot!” cried the Wart. “Wherever did you get it?”

At this the pot beamed all over its face and began to strut a bit, but Merlyn rapped it on the head with a teaspoon, so that it sat down and shut up at once.

“It is not a bad pot,” he said grudgingly. “Only it is inclined to give itself airs.”

(T.H. White [source])

ADMIN: Ongoing Look-and-Feel Discombobulation

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Regular visitors here may be even more confused than I am — and that’s saying something — about various mysterious layout changes in the last couple months. At the moment, just to list a couple things:

  • The right-hand menu — including a Google-based search form and various other ways of accessing old comment (chronologically, by category, and so on), as well as links to my various other online presences (Instagram, Substack, etc.) — has drifted to the bottom of the page, where it looks ridiculous.
  • The header image — the Japanese woodcut of the guy chasing his hat in a windstorm — now also appears in the footer, for unknown reasons.

As you probably know, RAMH, like many other blogs which have been around for as long (or longer), runs on a blogging platform called WordPress. The standard WordPress look-and-feel has itself changed over time — on top of which, many blogs (like this one) are built on “themes” which control stuff like colors, fonts, the placement of elements on a page or within a post, and so on; there are free themes, and professional themes you can buy and then customize further, on your own. Once you’ve got those general things set up to your satisfaction, you can proceed to add various so-called plug-ins which add other capabilities: audio players, image slideshows, and so on…

All of those elements — core WordPress, the selected theme, the look and behavior of plug-ins — are managed, i.e. controlled, by different entities: corporations, individual developers, groups of them. And they’ve all got to be kept in sync with one another or, well, weirdness creeps in.

I don’t know what the hell is going on with it all anymore, and I no longer have the patience to make it all “right” when the changes are obviously being done without notification. Stuff Suddenly Just Doesn’t Work the Same Anymore. So, alas: for a good while, at least, I’ll just fix things that don’t seem to work at all, period. I’ve got too much “stuff” here to pull the plug on RAMH for a good long while, and I’ll continue updating it from time to time (including the “whiskey river Fridays” series). But I’ve got other things competing for my attention and I just can’t keep diddling with the stuff around the edges here.

To repeat what I hope underlies all the content here: I sincerely appreciate everyone who visits here, comments, likes posts, shares them elsewhere, and so on. Thank you all, VERY much.

Sights Unseen (Until You Suddenly See Them)

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[Image: “Umbrella Bag (Northern California, June 2023),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Sometimes one sees the world in a way one is not aware of at other times. We’re never really seeing the world, we’re only seeing a moment’s take on the world. This is true of images. Images are a way of seeing the world which you didn’t notice before, and something you cannot make by an act of will; it’s something that is suddenly revealed to you. The world has layers, and you start seeing that these layers happen all at once; they’re all together. I think that’s what is startling about images. At the moment of seeing, they seem so obvious. Why didn’t I see that before? Mandelstam wrote wonderfully about images. He said that an image is not an act of will. A real image is something that occurs to you. He said an image is like running across a river on a bridge of boats, and when you get to the other side, you look back and see that all the boats have moved or drifted and are in different places, and you realize it would be impossible to do all over again. That’s always seemed like a great image right there.

(W.S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Adrift on the Lake

Autumn sky illuminates itself all empty
distances away toward far human realms,

cranes off horizons of sand tracing its
clarity into mountains beyond clouds.

Crystalline waters quiet settling night.
Moonlight leaving idleness everywhere

ablaze, I trust myself to this lone paddle,
this calm on and on, no return in sight.

(Wang Wei [source])

…and (italicized portion):

There was also another reason why it was now possible to paint. It was because there was one central fact that made it seem worthwhile going on, whatever the objective value of the pictures to other people. It was that I had discovered in the painting a bit of experience that made all other occupations unimportant by comparison. It was the discovery that, when painting, something from nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a fusion into a never-before-know wholeness; not only were the object and oneself no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action towards it, the movement of one’s hand together with the feeling of delight in the “thusness” of the thing, they all seemed fused into a wholeness of being which was different than anything else that had ever happened to me. It was different because thought was not drowned in feeling, they were somehow all there together. Moreover, when this state of concentration was really achieved one was no longer aware of oneself doing it, one no longer acted from a centre to an object as remote; in fact, something quite special happened to one’s sense of self. And when the bit of painting was finished there was before one’s eyes a permanent record of the experience, giving a constant sense of immense surprise at how it had ever happened: it did not seem something that oneself had done at all, certainly not the ordinary everyday self and way of being.

(Marion Milner [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Meeting the Light Completely

Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.

Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.

And then
what is said by all lovers:
“What fools we were, not to have seen.”

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

I Find Myself Defending Pigeons

I love how you never find their bodies, how they never rest their eyes. I love how their breasts are comforters unfolding by their breath. I love that pigeons live in the city, that underestimation never stopped a pigeon from unlatching itself or being old. I want them all unspooling in the air, and bridges that are half sigh and half pigeon. I want to harbor their coo and utilize it for energy. I want to learn to use them the way they want to be used. I want to pigeontail into a quiet night, to let their oddness sit in our hands. You can never know a language until you quiet your own. I want people to write about them. Their leaving ships for land, or standing on their own on a marble statue in the shimmer of a field. I want to talk about the term rock dove, argue over whether or not it’s imperialist. I want the media to implicate us in the pigeon problem, for a couple to sit with their asparagus and kids and realize none of this is far from them, whatever we think. I want oils and watercolors and inks. I want still life with pigeons, since not a one has ever been portrayed with a soul: a flight of them around old bread. And how they’re all the same. How all the world is here with them in hate, since they are rats adorned with angel wings, and the children down the street are free to chase their drag: they want to see a pigeon’s rouge entirely. Let the pigeon have her pigment. Consider the pigeon’s brown and green and everything, the brandishing of his nakedness to the sun, as if nothing is absolute. I love the pigeons’ shoulders, tongues, and wedding nights. I love the pigeon’s place in history, their obsession with living in the letters of our signs. I love their minds, or what I’ve come to believe is their theology. Who knows? Let the pigeons speak. Ask the closest pigeon for his number, for her middle name, if they are ready to die, if the sky gets crowded enough to consider war, if their stores are closed on Sundays. I want to be ready for them to be just like us, but more ready for them to be completely different. I don’t want to waste any time tracing a pigeon’s god to Abraham. I want to get started. Some of us feed pigeons. I love, sometimes, our care. I love, I think, the park bench. I love apples, but I do not love pears. The weather. I love the pigeons, the revolution of wheel to sky. I love the newspaper graying in a different air.

(Keith S. Wilson [source])

Finding Your Way on the Route You Already Know

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[Image: “Homeward (2019),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The Dead

At night the dead come down to the river to drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old photographs.
They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures,
which are cracked and yellow.
Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.
They tell each other stories.
They make so much noise
they wake us
as they did when we were children and they stayed up
drinking all night in the kitchen.

(Susan Mitchell [source])

…and:

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein [source])

…and:

One afternoon, a man named Harry went mountain climbing. All in all, things were going very well. Then suddenly, the path he was walking on gave way, taking Harry with it. With flailing arms, Harry managed to grab a small branch on the side of the mountain. Holding on for dear life, he screamed, “Help! Help! Is anybody up there?”

Miraculously, the clouds parted, and a beam of light illuminated Harry as he hung tenuously from the branch. A voice—clearly the voice of God—spoke directly to Harry and said: “Harry, I will save you. Let go, Harry; I will save you. Let go.”

Harry thought hard about this. Then, with a sudden burst of conviction, he looked up the mountain and shouted, “Is anybody else up there?”

(Benjamin Shield [source])

From elsewhere:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

(Agnes De Mille, in conversation with Martha Graham [source])

…and:

Glory-of-the-Atlantic
(excerpt)

It’s early, low tide, the beach just coming to life:
devout ladies davening in lounge chairs,
the homeless roused from hard-worn sleeping bags,
joggers, skulkers, cabana boys unfolding hotel umbrellas,
icing down the day’s allotment of Michelob Ultra.
Tourists are wandering down from the boardwalk
to the timidly breaking surf, couples from Toronto,
jet-lagged families from France and Brazil,
dazed, sun-dazzled, amazed—one guy actually
staggers at the water’s edge, staring straight past me,
and I can see on his face what he wants to know—
am I still on the plane, am I sleeping, or is this real?
Before he can ask, I slide from the sandbar
backward into the water’s warm, saline embrace.
Of course it signifies the womb as well as the void.
Of course death absorbs the living, a mirror
made of sponge. Of course we travel between realms
far exceeding in mystery water, earth, and air.
Of course we leave behind a mark, a volt,
a wave-eaten relic. Of course nothing endures
but that which forges its armature of grief,
the soul. Of course it’s real, of course it’s a dream,
you’re adrift, you’re asleep, you’re on a plane
traversing tropospheric darkness, you’re watching
sunlight strike prisms against the windows of your eyes,
you’re underwater, it’s real, it’s a dream,
a voyage, an immersion—any day now, any century,
any minute we will arrive at our final destination.

(Campbell McGrath [source])

A Novel-in-Progress Elsewhere: ’23kpc’

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[Image: a product of the Bing AI image-generation tool. This is the image which heads the so-called “reader’s guide” to my current work in progress; it’s a mashup of the science fiction and mystery genres, inspired by the 1930s Thin Man films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy.]

Longtime RAMH readers may or may not know of my shadow “Running After My Hat” presence (such as it is) over on the Substack platform. (It hasn’t been a secret, really; I added a link to it, some time ago, to the section of the right sidebar headed “RAMH Elsewhere…”) But I wanted explicitly to let you know about it because of an offer I’ve made to followers there, which I now extend to you.

Here’s the deal: as of this moment, everything on my Substack is free to read. But on January 1, a paywall will go up around a portion of it: future installments of a novel-in-progress called 23kpc. All the stuff regarding that novel through Chapter 7 — background and actual contents — will remain freely, publicly accessible. (Note that what’s actually available to read now, without a paid subscription, goes through Chapter 23; after 1/1/2025, all of the novel from Chapter 8 on will go behind the paywall.)

In addition, anyone who’s a free subscriber to the Substack as of January 1 will automatically receive, gratis, a three-month “paid” subscription to allow them to continue reading 23kpc… after which they, too, will need to switch to an actual “paid subscriber” plan. You can read the details of the plans, and some other information, in this post from last night.

Anyhow, to you loyal visitors to my site here, I offer the same deal: if you subscribe to my Substack by January 1, I’ll give you a three-month “paid” subscription to see if you’d like to continue reading there.

Note: you don’t need a Substack account to read publicly available posts there — mine or anyone else’s. But in order to follow/subscribe to specific Substacks, yeah, you’ve got to create an account. That’s also free, by default; you pay for only those publications you want to pay for.

One of these days I may explain here what moved me to try out Substack in the first place, and what I think of it so far. This isn’t that day. In the meantime, if you find yourself interested enough in 23kpc (or, for that matter, whatever else I’m posting over there), I hope you’ll join me there, too.

Thank you sincerely, as always, for supporting what I do here and/or on Substack!

Not Just What to Look At: What Even to *See* in the First Place

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[Image: “Pick One,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

After an old Hasidic master died, his followers sat around, talking about his life. One person wondered aloud, “What was the most important thing in the world for the master?” They all thought about it. Another responded, after a time, “Whatever he happened to be doing at the time.”

(Susan Murphy [source])

…and:

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

(Eleanor Lerman [source])

From elsewhere:

There’s something you learned from experience that took so long you didn’t even realize you learned it: seeing. The development of your visual system takes a long time. Your eyes opened in the womb, but there was nothing to see. When born, your brain didn’t know what the world looked like. It didn’t know the statistics of the world. Of how many edges, corners, and curves there are. Of where they tend to be—the consistent edges of horizons and tree trunks and houses, the consistent corners of paper and dice and windows, the constant curves of the moon and footballs and pies. Of how those edges, corners, and curves tend to relate to each other, to form trees and houses and footballs. And of how they tend to move, in graceful arcs and smooth trajectories, no sudden vanishing, reversing, or plummeting.

These statistics of the visible world are all learned by experience. Raise someone in a world with no vertical lines, and they will not be able to see a vertical object placed before them. Raise someone with one eye closed, and when reopened that eye will see nothing.

(Mark Humphries [source])

…and:

Beehive

Within this black hive to-night
There swarm a million bees;
Bees passing in and out the moon,
Bees escaping out the moon,
Bees returning through the moon,
Silver bees intently buzzing,
Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey,
Getting drunk with that silver honey,
Wish that I might fly out past the moon
And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.

(Jean Toomer [source])

…and:

Undivided attention

A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers, tied up
with canvas straps—like classical music’s birthday gift
to the criminally insane—is gently nudged without its legs
out an eighth-floor window on 62nd street.

It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers’ crane,
Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares and dirty white crisscross
patterns hanging like the second-to-last note of a concerto
played on the edge of the seat, the edge of tears, the edge
of eight stories up going over—it’s a piano being pushed
out of a window and lowered down onto a flatbed truck!—
and I’m trying to teach math in the building across the street.

Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned?
All the greatest common factors are delivered by long-necked cranes
and flatbed trucks or come through everything, even air. Like snow.

See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year
my students rush to the window as if snow were more interesting
than math, which, of course, it is.

So please.

Let me teach like a Steinway,
spinning slowly in April air,
so almost-falling, so hinderingly
dangling from the neck of the movers’ crane.
So on the edge of losing everything.

Let me teach like the first snow, falling.

(Taylor Mali [source])

Some Glass Is for Looking Through, Some Is for Seeing Back

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[Image: “Magic Mirror – wine glass with dandelions,” by a photographer identifying themselves as “Traveller_40.” Spotted on Flickr, where it’s shared under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). Per the photographer’s caption there, “There are two glasses and no reflection.” How about that?]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The Life of a Day

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

(Tom Hennen [source])

…and (ibid.):

A monk said: “I have been with you, Master, for a long time, and yet I am unable to understand your way. How is this?”
The Master said: “Where you do not understand, there is the point for your understanding.”
The monk said: “How is understanding possible when it is impossible?”
The Master replied: “If one reaches the point where understanding fails, it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all — perhaps we only need to wake up.”

(Thomas Merton, quoting D.T. Suzuki (in slightly modified form) [source])

…and (ibid.):

Looking, Walking, Being

“The world is not something to look at. It is something to be in.”
Mark Rudman

I look and look.
Looking’s a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That’s
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.

(Denise Levertov [source])

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book (nor from the river itself):

The cry you emitted on your appearance in the world. Your first tottering, uncertain steps. The pain when Susan’s wildly swinging arm knocked out your wobbly tooth in primary school. Recognizing that cluster of trees in the distance, and the relief of knowing you’ll now find your way across the damp, foggy hills back to the welcome warmth of the car. Plucking up the courage to ask for a date, and blurting it all out in a rush. The flush of embarrassment. The quiet euphoria of a yes. Deciding you just have to do something about the clash between the purple sofa and the lime green curtains. Remembering the smell of your mom’s bread and dad’s roast chicken. Cradling your baby. Reading this sentence. And this one…

(Mark Humphries [source])

…and:

Oscar said, “I remember the time that busload of psychoanalysts got stranded here in December. What year was that? They were going to a convention in Vancouver and took the bus because they were afraid to fly. It was a snowy night and the bus rolled into town and stopped to use the men’s room at the Bon Ton and that took a couple hours because there was just one stall and they all had to do Number 2 and each of them had his little ceremonies and reading material and so forth, and by the time they were done, the roads were drifted over and we had to put them up for the night. Actually, for three days. Forty-five short bald men with beards. I remember they loved macaroni noodles in mushroom soup sauce and canned tuna and peas. We took them ice fishing, and they loved that. It was a great novelty to them, sitting in a dark house and looking at a hole in the ice with a fish-line hanging down and a bobber floating in the water. They sat for hours, watching the bobber, writing in their little notebooks. They were sad to leave, I remember. Got on the bus and put their faces to the windows and waved their hankies and away they went.”

(Garrison Keillor [source[)

…and:

Untitled

The story is written, the slip of a girl is loosed
And her life folds over. Against the cold, the waiting
For the what will happen. The next. Wonderful
Awful. The blonde in a chemical bath.
The story keeps on being written
As a woman who waits for never to happen
As an empty wall waits for light to form a bridge
And under it, a mass of open eyes,
Waiting for the awful eventual. Now?
And yes is what is said. Then here it is, the box
We live in where the crazy face of the day looks back
At the closed eye of the night looking in.
A boy of four comes in as an example
Of where the door of life is left open for a moment.
Time tumbles hour after hour until it’s morning again.
Some glass is for looking through, some is for seeing back.
Every outline is a cage one way or another.

(Mary Jo Bang [source])

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