[Image: still from Man Made Monster (1941).]
From whiskey river:
I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day.
(Pablo Neruda, from “Walking Around” [source])
…and:
You’ve heard “Don’t believe everything you read.” Here are some useful spinoffs: Don’t believe everything you think. Don’t believe everything you tell yourself. And most especially, don’t believe everything you feel.
(Rev. O. M. Bastet [source unknown])
…and:
As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.
(Ayya Khema [source])
Not from whiskey river:
9773 Comanche Ave.
In color photographs, my childhood house looks
fresh as an uncut sheet cake—
pale yellow buttercream, ribbons of white trimsqueezed from the grooved tip of a pastry tube.
Whose dream was this confection?
This suburb of identical, pillow-mint homes?The sky, too, is pastel. Children roller skate
down the new sidewalk. Fathers stake young trees.
Mothers plan baby showers and Tupperware parties.
The Avon Lady treks door to door.Six or seven years old, I stand on the front porch,
hand on the decorative cast-iron trellis that frames it,
squinting in California sunlight,
striped short-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck.I sit in the backyard (this picture’s black-and-white),
my Flintstones playset spread out on the grass.
I arrange each plastic character, each dinosaur,
each palm tree and round “granite” house.Half a century later, I barely recognize it
when I search the address on Google Maps
and, via “Street view,” find myself face to face—foliage overgrown, facade remodeled and painted
a drab brown. I click to zoom: light hits
one of the windows. I can almost see what’s inside.
(David Trinidad [source])
…and:
The best day of my life — my rebirthday, so to speak — was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.
It was eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent enquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of mind are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood, over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in thee world, with Kangchenjunga and Everest unprominent among its snow-peaks, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.
What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking…
It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything — room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.
(D.E. Harding, from “On Having No Head” [source])
…and:
Asking for Directions
We could have been mistaken for a married couple
riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago
that last time we were together. I remember
looking out the window and praising the beauty
of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world
with its back turned to us, the small neglected
stations of our history. I slept across your
chest and stomach without asking permission
because they were the last hours. There was
a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new
Chinese vest that I didn’t recognize. I felt
it deliberately. I woke early and asked you
to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more,
and I said we only had one hour and you came.
We didn’t say much after that. In the station,
you took your things and handed me the vest,
then left as we had planned. So you would have
ten minutes to meet your family and leave.
I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion
and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was
aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest
and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you
through the dirty window standing outside looking
up at me. We looked at each other without any
expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.
That moment is what I will tell of as proof
that you loved me permanently. After that I was
a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker
which direction to walk to find a taxi.
(Linda Gregg [source])
All this talk of losing one’s self, finding one’s identity, and so on… But isn’t it interesting how much of one’s self is bound up in the selves of others? I bet we’ve all had — or will have — this experience: we lose someone else, by choice or by chance, thanks to failed romance or death or whatever… and it feels like we’ve lost a piece of ourselves. If I were a science-fiction writer on another planet, trying to invent the creatures we know as humans, I don’t think I’d ever come up with that cruel twist. Because fiction is supposed to make sense, right?
Here’s John Hiatt, from his new Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns album, his narrator here just (re)learning that lesson — and not at all grateful for the instruction:
[Below, click Play button to begin Adios to California. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:47 long.]
Lyrics:
Adios To California
(John Hiatt)Smokey room and a thin blue light
Her arms were pale as white
Trying to outlast the night
Howlin’ at the moonLiving in the canyon then
Hangdown Hanna and Whiskey Jim
Dirty jeans and mudslide hymns
That all began with soon[chorus:]
So Adios to California
Nothing to do but turn around
Always thought there’s someone comin’ for ya
Only way you’d leave this townPasadena in the rain
Eatin’ donuts and readin’ Twain
How much longer can my brain
Set itself on fire?You said “That’s it for me”
Have a little faith, it might set you free
But your faith is no good, you see
For me and my desire[chorus]
Two cigarettes from the package gone
You must have thought about it just that long
I never knew you were so strong
I guess I never will[chorus]
(That narrator might or might not be Hiatt himself, whose second wife committed suicide — immediately after which he left the West Coast to return to Nashville.)
whaddayamean says
thanks for the song! good friday editing listening.
oh btw your bot-stopping prompts are hilarious. today’s includes the greek letter delta, which i’m afraid does not appear on my keyboard. so you may never actually read this comment.
John says
whaddayamean: Ah, grasshopper… perhaps you DO have a delta on your keyboard. It may be hiding in your numeric keypad.
(Qualifier: I have no idea if this works with Macs or Linux. But I think you posted that comment from a Windows PC, so I’ll take a chance…)
Here’s what you do (for future reference, here or elsewhere):
You should’ve just typed a lowercase delta.
There are actually quite a few oddball characters you can “type” this way. Do a search on “alt codes” and you’ll probably find more than you’ll ever want to use!
Glad you liked the music, as always!
Jayne says
That Hiatt song is the perfect accompaniment here.
How do we know ourselves but by relation to others? That question has troubled me so. It is where I stump for words. Who are we without others to confirm who we are? To confirm our very existence.
Losing a loved one by any means is a cruel twist of fate. But isn’t it also the pain and the bittersweet that confirm we are human?
I’d like to achieve the level of consciousness that doesn’t require a head (or even a body) to understand ourselves and everything around us. Yes, I’d like to do that while I’m still alive…
(That would be an interesting read… a novel by a sci-fi writer from another planet!)
Nance says
For many years, I was living deep inside the questions that lead to headlessness. The question at the forefront of all I needed (anymore) of a mind was, “Is that true?” I had learned to doubt my thoughts, my emotions, even my actions; I spent a lot of time floating in near-ecstasy.
Then, I went to a long boot-camp-like conference (which could have appropriately been named The One Too Many conference) and they wanted to sell me books. I was asked to be willing to give up everything, including ID and debit cards. The goal was to “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. No feeling is final.”
But, first, they needed to run that debit card for the books.
This was beautiful, John, and it reminds me of the floating feeling. I miss it. There are so many people on the East Coast whose lives have been flooded out from under them, who would feel so much better without their heads today. I’m sure many of them will see water as if for the first time and question whether a tree really should stand here and another there. Or whether one actually needs a home, after all.
It’s very tempting to float free. But I couldn’t figure out why, while I lived in that feeling, I might still need to buy the books.
John says
Jayne: “that song is the perfect accompaniment here” — so says the maven of interleaving prose and song. High praise. I blush.
Simon and Garfunkel’s* Sounds of Silence album contained two songs that I bet I wasn’t the only teenage boy to think of as cynical anthems: “I Am a Rock” and “Richard Cory.” (Thematically, but not musically, “A Most Peculiar Man” falls into the same general category.) Their protagonists are isolated, bitter, angry. They don’t need anybody.
I can’t remember when the lightbulb went on over my head and I stopped liking those songs. There’s a certain satisfaction in regarding the world with your jaw set grimly, staring off across the landscape, alone, and probably mounted on a horse. But we all know how the Marlboro Man turned out.
____________
* Hmm. And why haven’t I included any of their music here so far? That’s gotta be corrected!
John says
Nance: Is it true? — a very seductive question. I don’t know which decade this would have been, the years you’re speaking of. But pretty much everyone who grew up in the mid-20th-century US grew into that question, even if they weren’t born to it. An awful lot of stuff supposedly beyond debate turned out otherwise.
(Speaking of which… I don’t think you’ve dabbled in Google+, have you? It’s got one practical advantage for me over Twitter and FB: I can use it in my browser at work, Anyway, just yesterday I posted a link to a brief article at Forbes, the headline of which was: “Physicists Create a Hole In Time to Hide Events.” The article contained too many mind-bending phrases to cite — I’d be copying-and-pasting the whole thing — but where I suddenly came screeching to a halt was this:
Uh, what? Time lenses?!?)
Please write about The One Too Many conference at greater length sometime. You always seem an icon of wry level-headedness; imagining you as floating-free-headless requires more brain power than I can muster!
Jayne says
@John – That’s interesting, they are indeed cynical songs but I just love that album in its entirety.
Paul Simon is making some great new music… ;)
marta says
When I was a kid–I mean from about age 8 until high school, the Bridge over Troubled Water was my favorite record and I memorized all the words to all the songs. At 8 I could sing Cecelia and The Boxer…and not really have much understanding what I was singing about. The only song I remember my mother singing to me was At the Zoo.
I suppose in part I liked the album because it belonged to my mother, and when she left my dad her Simon and Garfunkel albums were what she left behind. I think she asked for them, but my dad never bothered to send them to her and I wouldn’t take them because I wanted to keep them for myself. Eventually she stopped asking for them.
I used to think I was who my parents made me. You know, that certain things about my personality and self were shaped by experience and all that. But now that I have a son and I see how he is and what bothers him and how he reacts to things, I think that perhaps I would be just like I am even if my parents had been happy and had made different choices.
I’m also going to check out that time lenses thing you mention…I didn’t see the post at Google+, but I spent the weekend mostly disconnected from the net. And who am I if I’m not connected?
John says
marta: Boy, I really like that story about your mom’s S&G albums. It says a lot about S&G’s music, a lot about your mother, a lot about your father, and of course a lot about you and your relationship to them both. All in 65 words, three sentences. How do you do that?!?
When I was a kid, one of my favorite thought experiments (although I didn’t know there might be an actual term for them) was: If I had been born to two different parents, would I still be, well, I Would I have been born to different ones instead? This wasn’t some sort of wish-fulfillment; I loved and got along great with both parents. It was an actual exercise in something like philosophy: what would it mean to be “I” if I were somebody else?
Then my mind would bend, and I’d put the whole train of thought aside.
(Hope it’s all right that I made a correction for you, replacing “under Trouble Water” with “over Troubled Water.” The image of someone laying themselves down like a bridge under troubled water was just too… disturbing!)
marta says
@John – Oh, I am GLAD you made the change. It’s funny because when I wrote that, I stopped and looked at it thinking, “Something is wrong with that.” But my brain wasn’t really working, combining water under the bridge and Simon and Garfunkel. And my memory may be wrong but I think I made that title mistake as a kid.
I used to imagine finding out who my “real” parents were. That was true wishing for me.