Right Looking

[Image of Fay Ray, by William Wegman (1988), found here, as well as elsewhere
on the Web (e.g., Style Me to the Moon)]

From whiskey river:

My Hand

See how the past is not finished
here in the present
it is awake the whole time
never waiting
it is my hand now but not what I held
it is not my hand but what I held
it is what I remember
but it never seems quite the same
no one else remembers it
a house long gone into air
the flutter of tires over a brick road
cool light in a vanished bedroom
the flash of the oriole
between one life and another
the river a child watched

(W. S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius)

…and:

And now here’s the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

(Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Beginner

Because he’s read about it in a book on Zen
and there are lilies-of-the-valley on the table
in a thin white vase, he takes all morning
to look at them and only them — to concentrate
his sole attention on the lilies-of-the-valley.

Each bell-blossom on each stem is Zen,
he thinks, and the three now fallen on the table,
also Zen—as each leaf and crease, each morning,
and the way the seconds and the minutes concentrate
before they separate… and lilies-of-the-valley.

Suspended in its bubble-universe of Zen
the sun casts window-shadows on the table.
An old refrigerator hums away the morning,
as if it, too, has vowed to concentrate
on being and not being lilies-of-the-valley.

Puns flash across his mind: Now and Zen,
Zen Commandments, Mice and Zen. At the table,
head in hands, he scarcely moves all morning.
Images distill, dissolving like a concentrate.
I must stay focused on the lilies-of-the-valley.

But politics kill Calm… and war and Zen
keep leaping up and leaping on and leaping off the table,
like a cat let loose will leap into the morning,
then start its stalking, tensing, and will concentrate
on anything that sways the lilies-of-the-valley.

“What takes your mind off Zen is also Zen,
dumplings and spring rolls, a vase upon a table,
blossoms, petals, stems… ” The April morning
continues floating in Time’s concentrate,
and lovely, lovely are the lilies-of-the-valley.

(Dick Allen [source])

…and:

Midsummer, Georgia Avenue

Happiness: a high, wide porch, white columns
crowned by the crepe-paper party hats
of hibiscus; a rocking chair; iced tea; a book;
an afternoon in late July to read it,
or read the middle of it, having leisure
to mark that place and enter it tomorrow
just as you left it (knock-knock of woodpecker
keeping yesterday’s time, cicada’s buzz,
the turning of another page, and somewhere
a question raised and dropped, the pendulum-
swing of a wind chime). Back and forth, the rocker
and the reading eye, and isn’t half

your jittery, odd joy the looking out
now and again across the road to where,
under the lush allées of long-lived trees
conferring shade and breeze on those who feel
none of it, a hundred stories stand confined,
each to their single page of stone? Not far,
the distance between you and them: a breath,
a heartbeat dropped, a word in your two-faced
book that invites you to its party only
to sadden you when it’s over. And so you stay
on your teetering perch, you move and go nowhere,
gazing past the heat-struck street that’s split

down the middle—not to put too fine
a point on it—by a double yellow line.

(Mary Jo Salter, Open Shutter [source])

…and:

If you want a sure-fire conversation starter to pull out of your pocket during an awkward social moment, try this: Why do people often look sideways when they’re answering a question? And why do they sometimes look right, and other times look left?…

The reason is probably the same as the reason people generally find it hard to do two things at once, or the reason that it’s hard to concentrate on a book if someone’s talking. Averting your gaze allows you to cut yourself off from a particularly attention-getting and distracting environmental stimulus — the questioner’s face — in order to focus on the answer to the question. The reason your pet cat doesn’t do that is that, for her, memory and thought are more exclusively triggered by what’s in front of her eyes, nose, or ears. Sometimes, that’s true for humans too, such as when you try to remember the name of a type of tree you see. But often, we operate in a world of introspection that isn’t directly environmentally-cued or -controlled.

Recent experiments have added a twist: If you somehow prevent people from averting their gaze, they have a harder time answering a question.

(David Gamon, of The Naked Scientists [source])

Sometimes the best, the sweetest perspectives are retrospective — even when mottled by patches of “If only…” More satisfying yet: looking forward to looking back. Here’s a piercing little two-minute crystallization of that idea: “You’ll Remember,” by Patty Griffin, from 2007’s Children Running Through.

[Below, click Play button to begin ‘You’ll Remember’. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:09 long.]

Lyrics [source]:

You’ll Remember
(Patty Griffin)

Maybe one day, along the way
You’ll remember me, on this island
Smiling at you, how I used to
Maybe one day, you’ll remember

And it won’t be sad, to think of all we had
All unhappy ends could be behind us then
Maybe one day, along the way
You’ll think of me, and you’ll be smiling
Maybe one day, you’ll remember