Un Momento, Por Favor

[Image found at What My World’s Like]

From whiskey river:

Visiting the Graveyard

When I think of death
it is a bright enough city,
and every year more faces there
are familiar

but not a single one
notices me,
though I long for it,
and when they talk together,

which they do
very quietly,
it’s in an unknowable language —
I can catch the tone

but understand not a single word —
and when I open my eyes
there’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.
There are the stones.

(Mary Oliver, from Red bird [source])

…and:

…Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion.

We have agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible. And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word now, we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline calibrations on the watch.

As a result, we are a people who feel that we don’t have any present, because we believe that the present is always instantly vanishing. This is the problem of Goethe’s Faust. He attains his great moment and says to it, “Oh still delay, thou art so fair.” But the moment never stays. It is always disappearing into the past.

Therefore we have the sensation that our lives are constantly flowing away from us. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to waste; time is money. And so, because of the tyranny of clocks, we feel that we have a past, and that we know who we were in the past — nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were — and we believe we also have a future. And that belief is terribly important, because we have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply us with everything we’re looking for.

You see, if you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely frustrated.

(Alan Watts [source, in slightly different form])

Not from whiskey river:

It is hard to feel affection for something as totally impersonal as the atmosphere, and yet there it is, as much a part and product of life as wine or bread. For sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature. It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing that the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night.

(Lewis Thomas, from “The World’s Biggest Membrane” in Lives of a Cell [source])

…and:

Wild Gratitude

Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,
And put my fingers into her clean cat’s mouth,
And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,
And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,
And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,
I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,
Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing
In everyone of the splintered London streets,

And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke’s
With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,
And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,
And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry.
All day today — August 13, 1983 — I remembered how
Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,
For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience.

This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General
“And all conveyancers of letters” for their warm humanity,
And the gardeners for their private benevolence
And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers,
And the milkmen for their universal human kindness.
This morning I understood that he loved to hear —
As I have heard — the soft clink of milk bottles
On the rickety stairs in the early morning,

And how terrible it must have seemed
When even this small pleasure was denied him.
But it wasn’t until tonight when I knelt down
And slipped my hand into Zooey’s waggling mouth
That I remembered how he’d called Jeoffry “the servant
Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,”
And for the first time understood what it meant.
Because it wasn’t until I saw my own cat

Whine and roll over on her fluffy back
That I realized how gratefully he had watched
Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork
Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently
Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening
His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose
Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or
Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse,
A rodent, “a creature of great personal valour,”
And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped.

And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry — and every creature like him —
Who can teach us how to praise — purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.

(Edward Hirsch [source])

This week, we had our household’s customary routines and daily pace overturned by the installation of wood flooring in a couple of rooms, replacing the wall-to-wall carpet. This took the installers a couple of days: they not only had to take up the carpet and lay down the wood, but in between those two steps they also had to “re-grade” the sub-flooring so it was as flat and level as possible. On Wednesday night, therefore, our activities on the ground floor were limited to just the kitchen and the master bedroom/bathroom.

This must be how colonists of other planets will someday feel. Of course, we had to keep the inner airlock closed, lest The Pooch wander out and pick up spackle and dust on her paws and tongue. (Full-grown at maybe eight inches high, she tends to pick up all sorts of debris just standing still on any less than immaculate surface.) So we stayed in our little two rooms watching TV and reading, as alien echoes filtered through the door. Occasionally one of the humans would venture forth out the airlock to hunt for food or beverage. The Pooch accompanied one of us on a little foray to the front yard; she floated maybe four feet above the planet’s surface until reaching the outermost airlock, at which point the gravity of the situation (ingestion of water and foodstuffs, the passage of time) took over.

We do love our little adventures.

I think I first saw Jim Henson’s 1965 short film Time Piece during a film course in college. It’s a small, jeweled classic, in which not a single Muppet makes an appearance. During its limited theatrical run, it reportedly played in New York on a double bill with the French tragic/romantic film A Man and a Woman. Those theatergoers may have felt like they’d wandered into the wrong theater.

________________________

P.S. At the What My World’s Like site where I found the image that opens this post, I found an interesting couple of quotations from filmmaker Paul Schrader, in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross:

The secret of the creative life is often to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We are paid to take risks, to look silly. Some people, like racing car drivers are paid to take risks in a more concrete way. We are paid to take risks in an emotional way.

The film critic is like a medical examiner. He gets the cadaver on the table, he opens it up, and tries to figure out why it died. The filmmaker is like the pregnant mother who is simply trying to nurture this thing. You have to keep the medical examiner out of the delivery room because he will get in there and he will kill that baby.

This doesn’t have much to do with the week’s nominal topic, but I like it.