We all could use a miniature Bob Newhart in our brains…
Archives for October 2010
Bon Mot for the Week*
From poet David Kirby, who will be participating in a cross-disciplinary conference on creativity around these parts later this week:
I tell my own students that art is the deliberate transformed by the accidental, that you pursue your plan doggedly while staying open to the startling revelations that can kick your work up to a new level.
“The deliberate transformed by the accidental”: I like it.
____________________
* Post title shamelessly cribbed from Froog. For simplicity and directness, it just can’t be improved upon (although I don’t plan to steal it for good!).
Is It Love? (Local Edition)
Among the valued newcomers to RAMH‘s roll of occasional commenters, you may have encountered one “Ashleigh Burrows.”
(I use the quotation marks there because that name, as I understand it, is a nom de plume. Which makes it interesting that she calls her blog The Burrow: it’s an eponym for a pseudonym, and how many times can one claim to have seen one of those before?)
a/b, as she styles herself in her comments here, there, and elsewhere, is (like many of us) a writer still unconvinced that simply writing well is enough. When not actively fretting along those lines, she fills in the blog with, well, good writing on a wide variety of topics — provocative questions, political commentary, accounts of daily life with a cast of bizarrely nicknamed characters (The Big Guy and G’ma, sure, got them, and the Big and Little Cuter I pretty much understand to be her kids — but Amster? Aged Parm?)…
Anyway, I direct your attention to a recent post at The Burrow, “Is It Love?” It’s full of the sort of nagging, not-quite-rhetorical questions which some of us (yes) love to chew on:
- Can one look at another with devotion and desire, knowing that the feelings are not returned, and still call it love?
- Is there a cognitive component that is necessary for love to exist?
- Can you love someone you do not need? If the loved one were to vanish and you felt no pain, did you really love at all?
And so on. She sums up:
Many, many questions. I’m not sure the answers are available. I’m not sure that your answers would be mine (or [jilted lover of Aeneas] Dido’s). I just know that love is strange.
Aye. That it is… strange, and troublesome as hell. Even more than “the sex talk,” I wonder how parents manage “the love talk” for their blossoming charges. I don’t have any kids myself, of course. But if I did, what follows would be how I might try to explain it to them — in hopes of arming them before the first thunderbolt hit.*
When It’s Not Quite (Yet, Still) Light
[Image: “Zodiacal Light vs. Milky Way,” by Daniel López;
featured at Astronomy Picture of the Day on March 20, 2010]
From whiskey river:
Incandescence at Dusk
(Homage to Dionysius the Areopagite)
There is fire in everything,
shining and hidden —
Or so the saint believed. And I believe the saint:
Nothing stays the same
in the shimmering heat
Of dusk during Indian summer in the country.Out here it is possible to perceive
That those brilliant red welts
slashed into the horizon
Are like a drunken whip
whistling across a horse’s back,
And that round ball flaring in the trees
Is like a coal sizzling
in the mouth of a desert prophet.Be careful.
Someone has called the orange leaves
sweeping off the branches
The colorful palmprints of God
brushing against our faces.
Someone has called the banked piles
of twigs and twisted veins
The handprints of the underworld
Gathering at our ankles and burning
through the soles of our feet.
We have to bear the sunset deep inside us.
I don’t believe in ultimate things.
I don’t believe in the inextinguishable light
of the other world.
I don’t believe that we will be lifted up
and transfixed by radiance.
One incandescent dusky world is all there is.But I like this vigilant saint
Who stood by the river at nightfall
And saw the angels descending
as burnished mirrors and fiery wheels,
As living creatures of fire,
as streams of white flame….1500 years in his wake,
I can almost imagine
his disappointment and joy
When the first cool wind
starts to rise on the prairie,
When the soothing blue rain begins
to fall out of the cerulean night.
(Edward Hirsch [source]; here‘s a good place to start learning about the mysterious figure whose name appears in the epigraph)
…and:
Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.
(Jeanette Winterson, from Gut Symmetries [source])
…and:
I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.
(Haruki Murakami, from The Sputnik Sweetheart (translated by J. Philip Gabriel) [source])
