Shadows Over Stuff

“It’s me. I was just calling to tell you that there is a big white cloud coming.”
Cartoon by French cartoonist Voutch, from his 2007 collection, This Is as Bad as It Gets. (Click to enlarge.)

From whiskey river:

From Here to Eternity

One day you wake up
and your life is over.
But it doesn’t mean
you have to die.
It means last October was yellower
than this, and this the yellowest
anyone can remember.
It means you have produced enough tears
to fill, to one-eighth of an inch
of the top, Lake Baikal,
and now someone would like to swim.
It means what it meant
to listen to the teacher
tell the story of Dante and Beatrice
and break down crying in the middle,
because his wife was taken away by the police
last night, you so happy
to be dismissed early
you and your pals broke out
a pack of cards on the tram.
It means you are more interested
in the shadows of objects than objects
themselves, and if asked to draw anything
you would only need charcoal
to convince the world
it is waiting, in the shadows
of things, and you will wait back.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living.

(R. H. Blyth, from Haiku, Vol. 1)

…and:

Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,
And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew,
And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss,
Acquire their forms before we do.

(Osip Mandelstam, from “Octaves: 7”  [source])

Not from whiskey river:

An ICF was an Imaginary Childhood Friend, those pretend friends one sometimes has when a child. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t go away when no longer required; they simply wander the earth until their host dies. They share common DNA with fictional people like the [Wing Commander] in that they are constructs of the human mind — living stories, if you like. Because of this they are quite visible to fictional people and, on occasion, to us as something normally dismissed as “ghosts” or “a trick of the light.”

(Jasper Fforde, The Woman Who Died A Lot: A Thursday Next Novel)

…and:

Mrs. Hill

I am so young that I am still in love
with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings,
submarines powered by baking soda,
whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually,
not even them. Nobody can hear them.

Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering
on our front door shouting, and my father
in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in
trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow
pleading, oh I’m so sorry, so sorry,
so sorry, and clutching the neck of her gown
as if she wants to choke herself. He said
he was going to shoot me. He has a shotgun
and he said he was going to shoot me.

I have never heard of such a thing. A man
wanting to shoot his wife. His wife.
I am standing in the center of a room
barefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman
is crying and being held and soothed
by my mother. Outside, through the open door
my father is holding a shotgun,
and his shadow envelops Mr. Hill,
who bows his head and sobs into his hands.

A line of shadows seems to he moving
across our white fence: hunched-over soldiers
on a death march, or kindly old ladies
in flower hats lugging grocery bags.

At Roman’s Salvage tire tubes
are hanging from trees, where we threw them.
In the corner window of Beacon Hardware there’s a sign:
Who has 3 or 4 rooms for me. Speak now.
For some reason Mrs. Hill is wearing mittens.
Closed in a fist, they look like giant raisins.
In the Encyclopaedia Britannica Junior
the great Pharoahs are lying in their tombs,
the library of Alexandria is burning.
Somewhere in Cleveland or Kansas City
the Purple Heart my father refused in WWII
is sitting in a Muriel cigar box,
and every V-Day someone named Schwartz
or Jackson gets drunk and takes it out.

In the kitchen now Mrs. Hill is playing
gin rummy with my mother and laughing
in those long shrieks that women have
that make you think they are dying.

I walk into the front yard where moonlight
drips from the fenders of our Pontiac Chieftain.
I take out my dog whistle. Nothing moves.
No one can hear it. Dogs are asleep all over town.

(B. H. Fairchild [source])

…and:

General Motti: [speaking of the Death Star] Any attack made by the Rebels against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they’ve obtained. This station is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it.

Darth Vader: Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet, or even a whole system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

(Star Wars (1977))

The puzzle box that was Pulp Fiction included dozens of chiaroscuroed little corners, including certain moments in the soundtrack. That soundtrack famously (albeit briefly) kick-started the languishing surf-music genre — the rollicking guitar-and-horn-driven sound of performers like Dick Dale. And in general, it mapped to the tempos and tones of the interweaving plotlines. Now, for obvious reasons (hey, it WAS a Tarantino film), associating the film with noise and bursts of violent action comes naturally to most people. But a few deceptively quiet moments are scattered throughout, too: “deceptively,” because they had the (temporary) effect of anesthetizing you to what had just come before, and what was about to erupt.

One of my favorite such moments features Bruce Willis as aging boxer Butch. The night before, he’d refused to throw a fight (although he’d already been paid to throw it), and the gangster who put the money up has sicced a paid killer on him. Butch has just met the killer and has, let’s say, resolved that issue. Full of himself, believing that he’s about to get out of town safely, he’s at the wheel of a tiny little car, singing along with a genial little ditty on the radio…

…unaware that things are about to go terribly, terribly wrong (and not just for him).

The little ditty in question: 1965’s “Flowers on the Wall,” by the Statler Brothers:

[Below, click Play button to begin Flowers on the Wall. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:25 long.]

[Lyrics]

For the heck of it, here’s that scene from the film: