The Fluttering of Things Going ‘Round (and Sometimes Away, and Sometimes Back)

[Video: La Fée des Grèves, or The Fairy of the Surf, a 1909 silent film by Louis Feuillade, dubbed “film’s first fairy tale” by the Film: Ab Initio blog]

From whiskey river:

A Blessing For Absence

May you know that absence is full of tender presence
And that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.
May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo
May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which holds
The presences that have left your life.
May you be generous in your embrace of loss.
May the sore of your grief turn into a well of seamless presence.
May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from.
May you have the courage to speak out for the excluded ones.
May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.
May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging.
May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one and may your longing inhabit its deepest dreams within the shelter of the Great Belonging.

(John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes)

…and:

Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.

(Margaret Atwood, from Cat’s Eye [source])

…and:

Days begin and end in the dead of night.
They are not shaped long, in the manner
of things which lead to
ends — arrow, road, a person’s life on earth.
They are shaped
round, in the manner of things eternal and stable —
sun, world, God.
Civilization tries to persuade us we are going towards
something, a distant goal. We have forgotten that our only
goal is to
live, to live each and
every day, and that if we live each and
every day, our true goal is achieved. All civilized people
see the day
beginning at dawn or a little after or a long time after or
whatever time their work begins; this they lengthen
according to
their work, during what they call “all day long;” and end it
when they close their eyes. It is they who say
the days are long.
On the contrary, the days are round.

(Jean Giono, from Rondeur Des Jours [source])

Not from whiskey river:

MY FLYING-MACHINE STORY.

For 32 years I have been ransacking the world — that is, so far as I could consistently — watching periodicals of almost every sort, and leaving no stone unturned to furnish information of interest and value to the readers of Gleanings. I have especially tried to have our own journal up to date in scientific matters; and until the past summer I have made haste to present at once to our readers every bit of information I could get hold of. In short, I have had no secrets whatever that I have withheld. But for the first time in my life, during the past summer I have been under a promise of secrecy. When the Wright brothers kindly permitted me to be present while they were making preliminary experiments they especially desired I should keep to myself, at least for the time being, what I saw. I recognized the justice of it, and of course assented. But it was a very hard task for me to keep my tongue — or pen — still when I knew the great outside world knew so little (or nothing) of what was going on. Scarcely a dozen people in this whole universe knew what I knew, but I could not tell it. I have thrown out some hints, you may remember, of what was going on. But one of the brothers suggested “the best way to keep a secret is to avoid letting anybody know you have a secret to keep.” We are told it is hard for women to keep a secret, and I think I must be to some extent feminine in my make-up. Well, just before Christmas my heart was made glad by a letter informing me that, as the experiments for 1904 were probably ended, I might tell the world what I knew about the flying-machine, and therefore I have been made happy. Yes, to-day, Dec 26, I am not only enjoying a happy Christmas but I feel just like saying “A merry and a happy Christmas to you all.” I hope you will enjoy my story about the flying-machine — as much as I enjoyed being out in that big field with the Wright brothers many times during the past summer and fall, watching that wonderful creation of the hand and brain of those two men, while it “learned to fly,” very much as a young bird just out of the nest learns by practice to use its wings.

(Amos I. Root, an eyewitness to the Wright Brothers’ first circular flight, as published in his magazine Gleanings in Bee Culture, Vol. 33 (January, 1905) [source]. The account itself appears later in the same issue, concluding, wisely: “No drinking man should ever be allowed to undertake to run a flying-machine.” Ha!)

I first discovered Joni Mitchell’s music for myself — beyond the songs (by her or as covered by others) played on the radio — via her 1970 album The Ladies of the Canyon. This was early in her career: she hadn’t yet flowered into a folk-jazz-African-Latin sorceress. Even so, I’d never heard anyone whose voice — intonations, pitches, stresses — sounded anything like this. But I also found there a song whose lyrics influenced the way I thought, far beyond most of the music I was hearing at the time. Those lyrics weren’t profound; looking back on them now, squinting at them through my drugstore-reading-glasses of adult “sophistication,” I see a sort of dreamy pop philosophy which (maybe) might not have impressed me very much had I first heard them, say, twenty years later.

But it wasn’t twenty years later. It was then. I’d barely begun to think, for cripe’s sake. I’d barely started to take things seriously, to appreciate that the apparent straight lines of everyday life — first-period classes followed by second-period classes and then third and so on; causes leading to effects; departures, journeys, arrivals, stays — didn’t come close to expressing how the world at large moved…

It’s not a bad song to end a year on, either. Or to start a new one.

[Below, click Play button to begin The Circle Game. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:52 long.]

Lyrics:

The Circle Game
(Joni Mitchell)

Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star

Chorus:
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like when you’re older must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams

[chorus]

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him take your time it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down

[chorus]

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

[chorus]

Happy New Year, everybody!