[Image: Still from Institute Benjaminta (1995), by the Brothers Quay. For an interesting interview with them about it, see this page at the Electric Sheep site.]
From whiskey river:
In reality there has never been a day in our lives (and maybe not one hour or even one minute) when something happened that did not eventually lead to significant results. However, in the onward rush of events it is usually hard to see these patterns.
(Manjusvara (David Keefe), Writing Your Way [source])
…and:
There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously, they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result, white spots appear in our biography — scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days — while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements itself, and towers over us in wonder after wonder.
And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origins and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.
(Bruno Schultz, Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass)
Not from whiskey river:
Mapping the Genome
Geneticist as driver, down the gene
codes in, let’s say, a topless coupe
and you keep expecting bends,real tyre-testers on tight
mountain passes, but instead it’s dead
straight, highway as runway,helix unravelled as vista,
as vanishing point. Keep your foot
down. This is a finite desert.You move too fast to read it,
the order of the rocks, the cacti,
roadside weeds, a blur to you.Every hour or so, you pass a shack
which passes for a motel here:
tidy faded rooms with TVs onfor company, the owner pacing out
his empty parking lot. And after
each motel you hit a sandstormthick as fog, but agony.
Somewhere out there are remnants
of our evolution, genes for howto fly south, sense a storm,
hunt at night, how to harden
your flesh into hide or scales.These are the miles of dead code.
Every desert has them.
You are on a mission to discoverwhy the human heart still slows
when divers break the surface,
why mermaids still swim in our dreams.
(Michael Symmons Roberts [source])
…and:
Morningside Heights, July
Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil. I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
The sky blurs — there’s a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner. How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon. A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.
(William Matthews [source])
…and:
Children in a Field
They don’t wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green. What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless
through the high grass and into the willow-
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.
(Angela Shaw [source])
…and:
Grandpa liked to laugh at what he called a “greenhorn.” Grandpa was green himself, so he wanted to laugh at somebody who was a little greener, which is natural. Here’s an example of the greenhorn joke that so fascinated Grandpa:
One day a stranger came upon a man engaged in a desperate struggle with a bear. What astonished the newcomer most of all was a woman (evidently the man’s wife) standing by with a rifle in the crook of her arm, as calm and unperturbed as Annie Oakley, smoking a corncob pipe.
The newcomer rushed up to the woman and cried, “Don’t you see what’s happening? Why don’t you shoot the beast?”
The woman took the pipe out of her mouth, surveyed the excited stranger, and said, “I’m aimin’ to do just that, but I want to see if the bear won’t save me the trouble.”
(Homer Croy, “What Grandpa Laughed At,” The Rotarian, August 1948 [source])
Finally, in 1964 The Beatles urged us to slow down already, especially if we were a certain young lady. The song itself takes its sweet time getting around to the lyrics, with a 30+-second instrumental opening. (That’s Lennon on lead vocals — double-tracked and singing with himself.)
Lyrics:
Slow Down
(by Larry Williams; performance by The Beatles)Well, come on pretty baby, won’t you walk with me?
Come on, pretty baby, won’t you talk with me?
Come on pretty baby, give me one more chance
To try to save our romance!Slow down, baby, now you’re movin’ way too fast.
You gotta gimme little lovin’, gimme little lovin’,
Ow! if you want our love to last.Well, I used to walk you home, baby, after school,
Carry your books home, too.
But now you got a boyfriend down the street,
Baby what you’re tryin’ to do?You better slow down, baby, now you’re movin’ way too fast.
You gotta gimme little lovin’, gimme little lovin’,
B-b-b-b-b! if you want our love to last.[instrumental break]
Well you know that I love you, tell the world I do.
Come on, pretty baby, why can’t you be true?
I need your love baby, oh so bad,
The best little woman that I’ve ever hadSlow down, baby, now you’re movin’ way too fast.
You gotta gimme little lovin’, gimme little lovin’,
Ow! if you want our love to last.
whaddayamean says
yessss mermaids. why mermaids? (i guess that’s the point.)
John says
whaddayamean: you too, huh?
The “dream dictionary” at dreammoods.com says:
Which is pretty weird: a handful of words summarizing the “meaning,” and a whole bunch of words devoted to the alternative interpretation. I’ll settle for the “mysterious, vulnerable and secretive” female interpretation!
marta says
Have you seen the Brit com Red Dwarf? (I think I’ve asked before.) They show the Cat thinking about a mermaid. She walks out of the ocean because her bottom half is human and her top half is fish. The guys are confused about this. The Cat mocks them and says something about humans getting things the wrong way around.
It’s both a funny and disturbing moment (disturbing if you think too much about it). But I suppose that interpretation of mermaid makes sense.
Otherwise, I’ve been long interested in the idea of the small moment leading to something. It isn’t always the big things–weddings, births, etc. It is the small moment that changes your life.
Jayne says
Well, I’ve sure been slowed down here this morning. Quite happily so… starting with the Quay Brothers, I ventured off to take in the stop-motion animation of Street of Crocodiles–which has such a dark, haunting feeling. (Reminded me of a Fellini film, like, say, Nights of Cabiria?) It’s amazing what well positioned dolls and superior camera work–not to mention patience, and time!– can evoke. The brothers, through their adroit use of stop-motion animation, get right to the heart of the “whole” as being accumulated fragments.
And like Marta, I believe that all those small fragmented moments lead to something. I trust that each fragment has meaning. Perhaps some fragments float freely, and we are long unaware of their presence. But they dance around us in a mishmash, and eventually, that mishmash develops a rhythm and beat, a heavy bass that we cannot ignore. And the dance may turn out to be an in-your-face bump and grind, or a sweeping ballet, or some kind of interpretive modern movement, no matter, it has meaning and is part of our story.
Such an interesting collection, and beautiful imagery here, John. It really resounds with me–maybe because I so strongly believe that nothing occurs without reason. That each moment, each fragment of words and actions, or silence, or even complete nothingness is part of the tortuous journey to a larger understanding of life and the world.
Subconsciously, I think, we instinctively connect those fragments. I know I am horribly (really, it’s a damn menace) aware of those little moments, and am often haunted by them (what does this mean, how will it manifest in the future?, is it an omen, is it fortune?). And as I get older, I don’t want to miss one little shred of them.
(OK, time for a coffee break and a good stretch. You know, I’ve never dreamt of mermaids.)
Nance says
“…as a result, white spots appear in our biography — scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days.”
You know I get restless and squirmy when things get too mystical–Now, there’s a phrase: “too mystical”–so I was starting to check out on this one, after filing it away as an interesting psychological phenomenon with which we’re all familiar.
Then, (Ms. Too Smart By Half, here) I got waylaid by Morningside Heights, July, which feinted to my gritty realism. Leaving me wide open and unprepared for Children in A Field, so I teared up.
You can’t fix that with a Beetle song and a corny grandpa joke. Now, I gotta walk around with my unanswered questions about the universe hanging out all day, peeking around the peeling edges of the apparent and wondering which impulses to follow up on.
Dang.
And why are you people talking about mermaids? What am I missing?
John says
marta: I think you have asked me about Red Dwarf before. Not sure though. I watched — tried to watch — an episode or two years ago, when the series was being shown on some US cable channel like Bravo or A&E (could it have been PBS?!?). The problem was that back then, closed captioning was no option at all — and I just could not for the life of me figure out what was going on.
(Compare that experience, for instance, to watching Monty Python under the same circumstances. The Pythons tended to speak like broadcasters: into the mike, facing the camera (lip-reading!), with relatively “clean” accidents… and the shows were broadcast over and over and over, rather like Seinfeld re-runs nowadays. On top of which, even though the situations depicted in Pythonland were often absurd, even with the sound completely off you could sorta-kinda guess what a given skit was about. But Red Dwarf? No way, at least as far as I could determine.)
Now, with captioning, maybe I should revisit.
Anyhow, that does sound like a disturbingly surrealist — almost Dadaist — moment. Did she at least have arms sprouting from the fish upper half, maybe in place of lateral fins?
Small events and experiences do have a way of ballooning, don’t they? I wonder if that’s due to the human tendency to find meaning in everything (or assign it if we can’t find it)…
John says
Jayne: I love the Quay Brothers work — although whenever I encounter their names, I first get confused, thinking instead of the Kray Brothers — another kettle of fish altogether. (The movie about them, The Krays, completely unnerved me.)
People with a predilection for the small things, I believe, often (apparently paradoxically) turn out to be the people with the largest breadth of mind, ambition, talent, and so on. To say that so-and-so is a “big-picture kind of person” generally is meant as a compliment, but failing to pay attention to the little fiddly bits makes any resulting big picture a little superficial and untrustworthy.
If you DO have any mermaid dreams now, you know we’re all going to have fun dissecting them!
John says
Nance: I’ve got a fondness (hmm; maybe a weakness) for the mystical, myself (it feels like such a nice counterweight to the techno stuff of everyday life). That excerpt from Sanatorium…, though, sort of stretched even my limits.
Note that I didn’t provide a non-whiskey river source for that piece. I couldn’t find a more authoritative source — a Google Books page, a searchable Amazon.com preview, a scholarly paper. So for all I know, it’s this particular translation which is at fault, the source of the specific phrase’s squishiness. Just couldn’t confirm that for sure. The general “feel” of the whole excerpt strikes me as true, however, so I stayed with my instinct to include it.
Your weekly descriptions of your wanderings here: almost embarrassingly readable. They’re like reading Bill Bryson on (for example) Australia, vs. visiting Australia oneself.
Froog says
I don’t suppose you’re the only person, JES, whose mind files famous sets of twins in adjacent memory compartments.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but I’m not sure how the Quays pronounce their name. I’d always assumed it was ‘key’, but I suppose it could be ‘kay’ (or ‘kway’??), which would make the association with the East End gangsters all the stronger.
The Krays, of course, spent the last thirty years of their lives in jail. Reggie, the more intelligent and less psychotic of the two, became quite a prolific writer. I’m sure I read in a biography of them once – John Pearson’s The Profession of Violence (a gift from a friend around the end of my university days, a sly jibe at my chosen first career of schoolteaching!) – but can’t verify on Amazon, that his output included an exercise book – consisting of fitness routines that could be carried out in a very small room. I admired the inventiveness and the humour of that.
ReCaptcha, outdoing itself in perversity and spooky appositeness, now confronts me with wrongdoing upside down!!
Jayne says
@John – I haven’t seen the Kray film–I have a lot of flicks to add to the queue.
I got sidetracked here by Nance walking around with her “unanswered questions about the universe hanging out all day, peeking around the peeling edges of the apparent and wondering which impulses to follow up on.” Boy, can I relate to that. Let’s just hope the lead paint’s been ameliorated.
One last note about the mermaids. For quite a while I had one of Klimt’s sea serpents as an avatar on my facebook page. Two years ago I saw (having heard nothing of it previously) a brilliant and fantastical play at Trinity Rep called the Shapeshifter. It was about a young girl who lives in a remote Scottish fishing village and had lost her mother. To cope with her death she conjures three diferrent mythical creatures — a seal/woman, a swan/woman and a dragon/woman. It was so well produced and executed that I was completely caught up in its mystical story. (If you click the link–if it actually works!–I don’t agree with the reviewer’s last paragraph). I don’t think I’d ever focused on a play like that before.
So, I guess my point is that even if I haven’t dreamt of mermaids, it’s obvious that I feel something deeply in my psyche as it relates to the sea and its creatures. After all, its from where we came.