Well-Fancied Choices

[Video: “custom movie trailer” for the 1945 film Detour. A piano player hitchhikes across the United States to be with his girl. On the way, he crosses paths with The Wrong Woman…]

From whiskey river:

Bees

In every instant, two gates.
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.

But the faint cries — ecstasy? horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?

(Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart [source])

…and:

What we have deduced about the Big Bang is almost exactly wrong. Instead of a Big Bang, the genesis of the universe consisted of the uneventful, accidental, hushed production of a single quark.

For thousands of millennia, nothing occurred. The solitary particle floated in silence. Eventually it considered moving. Like all elementary particles, it realized that its direction of travel in time was arbitrary. So it shot forward in time and, looking back, it realized that it had left a single pencil stroke across the canvas of space-time.

It raced back through time in the other direction, and saw that it had left another stroke.

The single quark began to dash back and forth in time, and like the individually meaningless actions of an artist’s pencil, a picture began to emerge.

If it feels to you that we’re connected by a larger whole, you’re mistaken: we’re connected by a smaller particle. Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time. Our little quark sweeps like a frenetic four-dimensional phosphor gun, painting the world: each leaf on every tree, every coral in the oceans, each car tire, every bird carried on the wind, all the hair on all the heads in the world. Everything you have ever seen is a manifestation of the same quark, racing around on a space-time superhighway of its own invention.

It began to write the story of the world with sagas of war, love, and exile. As it spun out stories and allowed the plots to grow organically, the quark became an increasingly talented storyteller. The stories took on subtle dimensions. Its protagonists engaged in moral complexity; its antagonists were charming. The quark reached for inspiration into its own history of loneliness in an empty cosmos: the adolescent with his head on the pillow, the divorcee staring out the coffee shop window, the retiree watching infomercials — these became the prophets of the quark’s text.

(David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The real exercise of will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto.

It is a life dignified, I think, by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement. In the actual work, a discipline, a service. Or, to utilize the metaphor of childbirth which never seems to die: the writer is the one who addtends, who facilitates: the doctor, the midwife, not the mother.

(Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories)

…and:

Giving Up Green

Sometimes he determines what his choice
requires: if once or twice in coming years
it may seem awkward not to call on friends
with lawns, to walk in gardens, drive through towns
of houses lined in moss and bound with vines,
or gaze from passing trains at rain-soft valleys
lush with ferns and grass, he still might turn
his looking back on bricks and carriage axles.
Here, more simply, moving through a city
bare of cloud, its blocks secure, its river
earnest planes of shade and sun, his practice
slows to basic tasks and paces. Hours
of looking at a single rationed lime.
A morning till a leaf is only veins.
An afternoon of making stems appear
more lucid than their vase’s frosted glass.
And yet his daily track grows longer, routes
extended: then he worries, climbing stairs,
that sheer exhaustion might obscure a lack
of patience. Or of nerve. So when the clear
that comes at five o’clock on cloudy days
engulfs the nearby roofs in gold and rose,
a stain of noon beneath the darker flaring
indigos of dust, he maps a blue,
a red, a yellow square across the wall
and stares. It’s almost more than he can stand.
His curtains fill the room with fading air.
Below, a window frames a woman paring
apples: knife and hand; the skin unwinding
shyly from her guiding wrist, unwrapping
flesh and falling loose in severed curves.
He stops to rest. She smoothes a strand of hair.

(Siobhan Phillips)

__________________________

Note: about the film Detour, Roger Ebert has said (per Wikipedia):

This movie from Hollywood’s poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.

When I got on a B-movie and noir film kick back in the 1990s, Detour was on everyone’s must-see list. It’d be on mine now. If you haven’t come across it before, you can watch (and download) the whole sixty-eight minutes at the Internet Archive; a high-quality version (preceded by a thirty-second commercial) appears on YouTube, as well.