[Image: detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch
(click image for a much larger view of the whole triptych)]
From whiskey river:
You Learn
You learn.
After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises,
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
and you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure.
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn. And learn.
With every good-bye you learn.
(Jorge Luis Borges)
…and:
This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.
To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.
(Terry Tempest Williams [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Men at Forty
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, somethingThat is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
(Donald Justice [source])
…and:
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false, nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary, nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal; nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneous, true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden, but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface: nowhere hating or to fear; shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making; only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong; never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom, greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have; only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
(E.E. Cummings [source])
…and:
My Son the Man
Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.
(Sharon Olds [source])
Finally, Monty Python remind us that even the cleverest questioners sometimes fall short in the answers department:
whaddayamean says
hahahaha YES, that was the note to end on.
whaddayamean says
So I have this plastic container of corn nuts on my desk. My managing editor really, really likes corn nuts. A couple days ago, he came over to my desk and said could he please, please have a number of them. I asked which number, specifically. He said three. I gave him three corn nuts and said, “Three shall be the number of corn nuts, and the number of corn nuts shall be three…” etc etc etc.
At this point our marketing director tuned in, and said, “CORN NUTS!!!!” which is apparently the line from Heathers that the first Heather speaks before she drops over dead.
You can probably imagine what happens at least twice a day now. I’m definitely switching to a different snack next time.
Sherri says
One of those poems up there made me cry, and then the Holy Grail clip made me laugh. I’m so confused.
John says
whaddayamean: Funny, I just saw corn nuts referenced somewhere on TV in the last couple-three days. They must be like paper clips, their presence waxing and waning according to some mysterious calendar.
Anyway, that sounds like a hilarious moment, including your inspired seizing on the Michael Palin moment. Somewhere on your employer’s logo there must be room for a slogan: Where Corn Nuts Live!
Froog and I (and I think Jules, at some point) have gone back and forth before on the way that certain scraps of movie dialogue work their way into the personas of so many people, so that it takes only a single phrase to seed the sudden growth of entire conversations. I love those moments (even if I’m not familiar with the sources, like Heathers in your story).
John says
Sherri: Ha!
At this point a wiseacre might say that if you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention. (A motto for early 21st-century America if there is one.)
marta says
Yes! Heather number says, “Corn nuts” and then crashes through a coffee table dead. I do love that movie.
And it sounds like whaddayamean has a nice place to work.
So, (and this is probably inappropriate but Python reminded me), three nuns died in a car crash. They get to the Gates of Heaven and God tells them they will have to answer a question to get in.
To the first nun he asked, “Who built the ark?”
“Noah.”
“That’s right. Go on in.”
To the second nun he asked, “Who was the mother of Jesus?”
“Mary.”
“Good. Go on in.”
To the third nun, who was the Mother Superior, he said, “I’m afraid your question has to be a bit more difficult. What did Eve say the first time she saw Adam?”
And the Mother Superior said, “Oh, that’s a hard one.”
“That’s right! Go on in!”
marta says
But the joke did actually make me wonder about that first conversation. That idea reminds me of this:
http://fora.tv/2009/04/17/The_Bible_Jonathan_Goldstein#chapter_02
whaddayamean says
hahaha. marta, that joke is TERRIBLE. i mean, terrible in the sense that i just had to read it out loud to everybody in the room. :D
John says
marta: Hilarious! (And utterly out of character. :))
As for the video… haven’t watched the whole thing but I did watch the first 15 minutes, including the specific bit you pointed to. VERY funny (I kept wondering though why the audience seemed so inert; maybe their laughter just wasn’t being picked up on the mic.)
For those of you who haven’t followed Marta’s link above, it shows a reading and talk by an author, Jonathan Goldstein, starting with an excerpt from this book. Here it is:
(The “Chapter 2” segment which Marta refers to begins about 1:10 into the video, and lasts about 3:30; if you don’t pause it, it will continue on to show the rest of the reading + talk.)
smitaly says
Can’t say exactly what prompts me to write after at least an entire year of silently enjoying your offerings (well, I have passed many on to loved ones across the globe). This evening I stumbled upon this entry that includes “You Learn.” Aptly, it was discovered in the course of a canceled evening requested by a close friend who wisely chose instead to make himself available to a close friend of his who likely needed consoling. Seems the friend’s girlfriend was suggesting they call it quits…
Even without my back story, “You Learn” is a very moving piece that made me want to know more. A side step to whiskey river provided little of substance. Seems this was not written by Borges, nor by someone named Veronica Shoffstall… or was it? I write from Italy, which will explain why I provide the following Italian link (the important parts are in English) that may, or may not, shed clearer light on the matter.
http://www.ilcalderonemagico.it/poesie_Shoffstall.html
Thank you for such consistently penetrating rays from “home.”
smitaly
John says
smitaly: I’m very happy to make your acquaintance!
As you probably know, I try to locate some authoritative source for each of the quotations I use here on Fridays, whether I saw them on whiskey river or elsewhere, and then I link to that source in a little notation which looks like this: [source]
“You Learn” was a difficult one to track down. I did notice that Veronica Shoffstall is credited as the poet in a couple of places. But apparently she was the translator of the Borges poem, which was titled “Y Uno Aprende” in the original Spanish.
I don’t read Spanish myself, so can’t vouch for the translation; but if you’re interested, this apparently is the original:
(Here is one source for that, with different line breaks.)
Thank you so much for stepping out of the shadows!
smitaly says
Fascinating stuff… The two examples in Spanish not only differ from one another (the final line in the one above ends with “and with each day one learns/you learn” whereas in the linked version it’s “and with each goodbye one learns/you learn,”), but the example in English includes whole lines and concepts (“with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child” is the most egregious* example) that are not in the two Spanish versions. You might call it the reverse of what Gordon Lish did to some of Raymond Carver’s work.
* and then there are the fun twists and turns of “egregious”…
cynth says
Oh, John, what a wonderful post! Thanks so much for enlightening and well-“lightening” my days. And Marta that joke was hilarious!
John says
smitaly: The vagaries of translation!
The only non-English language for which I’ve ever done more than an ad-hoc translation is Latin, which (I will admit) I’m proud to have been very good at, although it’s been 30-some years since my last college course and I haven’t done it since. One thing which frustrated me from the start was the woodenness of the translation acceptable to the instructors. I don’t wish to be unkind to people who’ve probably passed on, and they may have been under some constraint invisible to me; for all I know, they may have actually preferred to see freer translations than they were getting. But the boilerplate idiomatic-phrase translations which they insisted we do drove me crazy.
The only one I remember now, and at that I don’t remember the Latin, was “[to] steal a march.” Every single time we encountered that verb (phrase?) in the original Latin, we had to translate it to the counterpart — in person and number and tense and mood, all that — in English: to steal a march; stole a march; had to have stolen a march; etc. If someone actually wrote the counterpart passage in English, from scratch, they’d NEVER have repeated that construction over and over and over, but would have devised synonyms, metaphors, and other devices expressly to expand on the meaning of the original.
In the case of the Borges poem — and I can’t explain the different Spanish “original” versions! — well, who knows? I simply love that grace of a woman/grief of a child line, and didn’t feel it (in the English version of course) to be out of place. Would Borges have objected? Would he think, Hmm, that’s not bad — wish I’d written that myself!? Beats me. :)
One of my Internet-technology books, Just XSL, was translated into Chinese (I don’t know what KIND of Chinese, exactly) after its original publication in English. I was never much for writing really formal tech-related pieces, which is possibly one reason why I never wrote a bestselling tech book, and always wondered how successfully (or not) the translator had rendered some of my loose prose. (Here‘s a page at RAMH showing an illustration from the book, the Chinese-text caption, and the original English caption. What I was discussing at that point was how — very generally — “morphing” software works to translate one image into another.)
John says
cynth: What a lovely compliment — thank you! To have (en)lightened your day (something I don’t get a chance to do very often) positively (en)lightens mine!