Awake, Really Awake… for Good or Ill

[Image: “Insomnia, or Nocturnal Awakening,” by “neosurrealist” artist George Grie; I found it here. Click the image for a larger view. More, in the footnote to this post.]

From whiskey river:

The Whale

It is 1970
and the summer of love is over.

I am three years old, barefoot,
running along the surf
near Florence, Oregon,

where an eight-ton sperm whale
beached itself and died, the carcass
rotting now,
an entrance carved into its massive flank
for cases of dynamite, 500 pounds of explosives
necessary to rend open the interior
so scavengers can pick the skeleton clean —

but for me, it is the doorway to another world,
the body of the sacred I might enter into,
its eyes drained of all but a giant benevolence,
flukes wide as the tailfins of bombers
overhead, my mother

hoisting me to her hip as engineers argue
blasting caps and stand-off distance,
equations to undo the intricate puzzle
of muscle and bone —

the way life waits for us all
with great patience, the electrons orbiting
in their shells like distant planets we never see,
the constellations which bind the universe
undone this day, at least for this one body
beached on the sand as we witness the blast
from the sawgrass dunes,

the sudden
jolt of nerves as the body absorbs
the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward
in jets of tissue and meat,
the local news reporter dropping to his knees
to cover his head with a clipboard
while the cameraman does the same,
my mother shielding me with her torso
turned away from the blast

and I remember everyone smiling
afterward, laughing, each of us amazed
the day a god was blown to pieces on the beach
and we all walked away from it, unscathed.

(Brian Turner, from Phantom Noise [source])

…and (including extra highlighted text):

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

(Richard Dawkins, from Unweaving the Rainbow [source])

…and:

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

(Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451 [source])

Not from whiskey river:

A Time Past

The old wooden steps to the front door
where I was sitting that fall morning
when you came downstairs, just awake,
and my joy at sight of you (emerging
into golden day–
the dew almost frost)
pulled me to my feet to tell you
how much I loved you:

those wooden steps
are gone now, decayed
replaced with granite,
hard, gray, and handsome.
The old steps live
only in me:
my feet and thighs
remember them, and my hands
still feel their splinters.

Everything else about and around that house
brings memories of others — of marriage,
of my son. And the steps do too: I recall
sitting there with my friend and her little son who died,
or was it the second one who lives and thrives?
And sitting there ‘in my life,’ often, alone or with my husband.
Yet that one instant,
your cheerful, unafraid, youthful, ‘I love you too,’
the quiet broken by no bird, no cricket, gold leaves
spinning in silence down without
any breeze to blow them,
is what twines itself
in my head and body across those slabs of wood
that were warm, ancient, and now
wait somewhere to be burnt.

(Denise Levertov [source])

Just about anyone who knows her — at least in her online incarnation — will tell you: Jules is an outstanding source for music (especially new music) recommendations. Sometimes she apologizes for turning over a blog post to multiple video/audio cuts, given that people visit her 7-Imp site to read about books. Nobody really minds, though. The woman simply has taste.

Anyway, it was Jules who first introduced me to the music of her friend Natasha Borzilova. Borzilova has quite a bio, and it may not be one whose protagonist, you’d expect, would someday wake up in Nashville as a successful Country-Western artist. But, well, there she is.

And here she is, too, on the title track of 2008’s Cheap Escape:

[Lyrics]

__________________________________

About the image at the top of this post: Russian-born artist George Grie began his career using traditional media — oil on canvas. (Some examples here.) Now a resident of Canada, his particular interest lies in “neosurrealism”: “a combined imagery of dreams and fantasies or subconscious mind visions in fine-art painting, digital-art graphic, and photography.”

You can build and purchase a customized calendar of his works at Zazzle.

…and yes, I just realized: both the neosurrealist visual artist and the Country-Western musical artist featured in this post were born in Russia. Good for the Western hemisphere, I say — although not so good for the Eastern.

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