You Gotta Look If You Wanna See

[Image: conceptual design/sketch of the Look-See Tree, by Ally Reeves (2007). For more
information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and:

Dear Reader

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish — my echo, my twin —
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can’t help traveling together.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see?

Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”

The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up — mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale — the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.

Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

(Annie Dillard [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Mice

This morning in the cold shed
I unlocked two from traps
with a trowel, freeing them for
the brushpile, where overnight
something will recycle them.

They are whole in this weather,
self-contained, and their eyes
looked up—beady, yes, but
sincere about their inability
to comprehend why chewing holes
in my rubber waders is wrong.

Then I remembered when you
were little how I used to tell you
I drove them to the P & B bus stop
and bought them tickets.

Can you still see them as I do now,
Dead End Kids clambering
up the steps in their plaid caps
and plus fours, heading for
the back window, where they’ll
wave until the bus
turns for the highway?

(Brendan Galvin [source])

…and:

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

(Annie Dillard [source])

Is Was there anything more frustrating than waiting for a wonderful letter — let’s say an email, nowadays — that you just knew was in the offing? From a college admissions office, say… or maybe a long-silent (if not exactly lost) love? The Marvelettes didn’t think so. And they let the mailman know, by damn.

[Below, click Play button to begin Please Mr. Postman. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:30 long.]

[Lyrics]

________________________

About the image: In 2008, the city of Pittsburgh, PA, celebrated its 250th anniversary by — why not? — holding a festival of robots. (This wasn’t as odd as it probably sounds; Carnegie-Mellon University, located in Pittsburgh, has a world-class program in robotics.) They solicited contributions from the arts and technical communities. Among the entries was this: the Look-See Tree, by Ally Reeves. From a blog post of hers, in November, 2007:

The Look-See Tree is a mobile artwork housing 6 motion activated mini-theatres. The small theatres contain robotic animals in somewhat natural settings within a large tree structure.

From afar, viewers will see a large, sparsely limbed tree trunk lying on its side, supported by wheels, and connected to a bike. As they approach, viewers will notice the leaves of the tree, which sprout and are withdrawn repeatedly and irregularly implying an unusual fluctuation in seasons. Closer inspection will reveal several glowing hollows in the tree trunk. As viewers approach and peek in, they will see fictional animals that will respond to their presence by either beginning or ending a gesture — hiding, vocalizing, shifting, or jumping, and otherwise reacting to visitors…

There’s much more; see the full blog post. And yes: she actually built it, and towed it around city parks.