Surprise, Surprise

[Video: high-speed footage (1000fps) of an “eagle owl” in flight. This film has apparently been around for a while, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before this week. Chief virtue, for me: shows me something I couldn’t have imagined on my own!]

From whiskey river:

I cannot help you understand. In the realm of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. Remember that. Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

The Poems of Our Climate

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
pink and white carnations. The light
in the room more like a snowy air,
reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
at the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations — one desires
so much more than that. The day itself
is simplified: a bowl of white,
cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
with nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
the evilly compounded, vital I
and made it fresh in a world of white,
a world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
still one would want more, one would need more,
more than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
so that one would want to escape, come back
to what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
since the imperfect is so hot in us,
lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

(Wallace Stevens [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Paradise Flick

How do we know Eve and Adam were happy,
deprived, as they were, of a childhood?

Eve never knew, unlike Adam, a world
that was free of the chatter of others.

How did she cope? And how could she choose,
if she’d wanted, to live by herself?

What did the man eat that made him hear voices,
while Eve was inventing frustration?

Where could she go for a break from the sound
of Himself, in his skin suit, like Tarzan,

assuring the bush that he’d just given birth to a woman?
Did she smile at the fool, or remind him that he was

asleep when she turned up and found him?
Where could she go to be shot of his need for a mother?

(A pity she woke him.)
Life for them both was a training film shown in real time,

on the zen of zoo-keeping.
When the encyclopedia seller arrived, who could blame her for buying?

No exit pollster asked how she felt
when she left at the end of the movie.

(Michael Sharkey [source])

…and:

The Paris Mouse

hunched over the greasy
burner on the stove
was noir, as in

film noir, as in
cauchemar,
as in le nuit

not blanche but
noir, the dream you can’t
wake up from, meaning she

was a mouse fatale,
licking the old oil
glued to the old

cooktop, feasting
in her tiny hunched-up
sewer life

on fats & proteins for her
bébés all atremble in their
rotting poubel nest,

so when I screamed my piercing
Anglo-Imperial scream of
horror & betrayal—

not my stove, not my traces of
pot au feu—
she leaped, balletic, over

the sink, the fridge, the lave-vaiselle,
& back to the cave & the trash she
scuttled, grim as a witch

in La Fontaine
who has to learn
the lesson we

all must learn:
Reality is always sterner
than pleasures of the nighttime burner.

(Sandra Gilbert [source])

…and:

Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.

The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air — these things will never change.

The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry — these things will always be the same.

All things belonging to the earth will never change — the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth — all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth — these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.

The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.

(Thomas Wolfe)

Despite my apparent fondness for the musical genre known as Americana, I don’t feature much (any? hmm…) “pure country” here. But this duet by David Houston and Tammy Wynette seems to fit right in with today’s theme. One of this couple, we can imagine, is rather less surprised than the other that these dreams never materialize… while the other expresses surprise that they are, still, a couple.

[Below, click Play button to begin My Elusive Dreams. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:53 long.]

[Lyrics]