At the Outset

From whiskey river:

Morning

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best–
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso–

maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins–
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows–
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Diagnosis

By the time I was six months old,
she knew something was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

(Sharon Olds [source])

…and:

I have been led to understand that tomorrow you are going to graduate. Well, my strong recommendation is that you don’t go. Stop! Go back to your rooms. Unpack! There’s not much out here…

True, there may be some practical problems. The deans may come tapping at your door like hotel concierges, wondering about checkout time. Tell the dean through the door that you don’t think you should go out into the world with a C minus in Economics 10… Tell him to stop the process. Why should the process go on? You’ve decided to stay. You’re not going to budge!

After a while the dean will go away. Deans always go away. They go away to ponder things. They will assume that your parents will finally force the issue. They’ll want you home. But I am not so sure. I have the sense that parents would rather not know what’s being sent home to them these days from college — not unlike receiving a mysterious package tied with hemp, addressed in rather queasy lettering from Dutch Guiana.

If your parents insist you pack up and come home, there are always measures. If you’re a chemistry major, tell them that you’ve become very attached to something in a vat of formaldehyde. If you’re prelaw, tell them that you’re thinking of bringing home a tort. Your parents will probably have forgotten what a tort is, if they ever knew, and it sounds unpleasant — something that your mom wouldn’t want to have stepping suddenly out of a hall closet. Surely, there is hardly an academic field of one’s choice which does not have a nightmare possibility with which to force one’s parent to pony up enough to allow nearly a decade of contemplation in one’s room.

You’ll remember the king in Alice in Wonderland. When asked, “Where shall I begin?” the king says, “Begin at the beginning, and go on until you come to the end; then stop.” What I am suggesting is that you stop at the beginning, stop at your commencement. It’s not very interesting to stop at the end — I mean everyone does that. So stop now. Tell them you won’t go. Go back to your rooms. Unpack!

(George Plimpton, from his 1977 commencement address, Harvard University [source])

Finally, a tribute to The Muppet Show — an extended, two-minute version of their theme song, “Let’s Get Started”:

___________________

Note: The image at the top of this post is the very first televised image of the surface of Mars, from July, 1965… as rendered using pastel crayons. (Note wooden frame around it. As one wag said in a comment thread I was reading about this, it probably would look better mounted on a refrigerator than framed at all.)

For a full explanation of how engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) found themselves — white shirt-sleeved shirts, black-rimmed glasses, etc. — standing around coloring a bunch of three-inch strips of  paper, see this page by Dan Goods. (Goods, himself a JPL staff member, co-curated a “Data + Art” show for the Pasadena Museum of California Art; the show included this image.)