Discoveries

[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original, “a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang.” More info here and here.]

From whiskey river (which excerpted from this poem, in different words, via translation):

The startling reality of things

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.

I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.

Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea that other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet
And was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

…and:

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.

(John O’Donohue [source])

Not from whiskey river:

It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right — now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.

(Horace Walpole, who — per Wikipedia — coined the word serendipity in this passage from a letter to a friend)

…and:

…through a sequence of events too complex to recount here (the connections between which, in any case, are never fully explained), everything in [the protagonist] Lorimer’s life begins to go wrong. His reversal of fortune is attributed to a principle defined in one of the reflective passages from his diary that punctuate the action of the novel:

[…]

”So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design. Serendipity and zemblanity: the twin poles of the axis around which we revolve.”

Zemblanity in Lorimer’s life takes many forms: a paranoid rock star selects him as a confidant; his car is vandalized, either by the subject of one of his insurance investigations or by Flavia Malinverno’s jealous husband; he inherits his elderly neighbor’s dog; his father dies.

(from a New York Times review of William Boyd’s Armadillo (1998))

Finally… There’s so much information on the Web about the long-lived American New Wave band Devo that i’d feel ridiculous trying to summarize it all. While I admit that I have not followed their idiosyncratic career, the bits of it that I have been snagged on have always entertained (and in some cases challenged) me. While researching this post, I serendipitously — perhaps even zemblanitously — came across a couple of static YouTube videos of what seems to be an obscure song by them, “Find Out.”

Unambiguous information on “Find Out” is difficult to, er, find. One of the two videos’ descriptions says that it’s from the Oh, No! It’s Devo album (1982). This seems to be true only if you’re referring not to the original album, but to a remastered re-release in 1995; Wikipedia reports that “Find Out” was the B-side song of the single “Peek-a-Boo,” which may explain its obscurity.

In any event, of the two videos on YouTube, the one below has the better audio (I think — but Lord knows, I’m no authority!). Lyrics, per usual, appear below the video.

Lyrics:

Find Out
(Devo)

I’ve seen ’em doing battle
I’ve heard in times of war
still I keep on going
though it’s different than before
they’ve been riding high
up where the cold winds blow
miles above that highway
where the rest of us all go

to find out
you have to find out
it’s good to find out
before you open your mouth
find out
now don’t you find out
you better find out
before you fill in the blanks

go find out what it takes
to make a boy break down and cry
go find out his young mistake
is a premature goodbye (it’s a privilege you can buy)

find out
where it goes
find out
faster roads
find out
it never grows
find out
for yourself

you never tried to find the time it takes
to work it out
it’s not a waste to taste
the sweat it takes
to work it out

Work!

You don’t need a battle
you don’t need a war
you don’t need any lessons
to find out what’s in store

you been riding high
you felt the cold winds blow
now get back on the highway
where the others have to go

and find out
and maybe when you do
you’ll even find out
you haven’t got a clue
unless you find out
it’s never like they say
your gonna find out
you’ll take it all the way

go find out what it takes
to make a boy break down and cry
go find out his young mistake
is a premature goodbye (it’s a privilege you can buy)

you never tried to find the time it takes
to work it out
it’s not a waste to taste
the sweat it takes
to work it out

find out
before you open your mouth
you better find out.