Confused Reality

From whiskey river:

The most interesting thing about the world is its fantastic and unpsychoanalyzed character, its wretched and gallant personality, its horrible idiocy and its magnificent intelligence, its unbelievable cruelty and its equally unbelievable kindness, its gorilla stupor, its canary cheerfulness, its thundering divinity, and its whimpering commonness.

(William Saroyan [source])

…and:

The Great Clod belches out breath and its name is wind. So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly. Can’t you hear them, long and drawn out? In the mountain forests that lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts. They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan, and howl, those in the lead calling out yeee!, those behind calling out yuuu! In a gentle breeze they answer faintly, but in a full gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fierce wind has passed on, then all the hollows are empty again. Have you never seen the tossing and trembling that goes on?

(Chuang Tzu [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Alphabet Conspiracy

The word is the making of the world. —Wallace Stevens

It’s a filmstrip afternoon
and we’re all grateful
to the humming projector
in the middle of our desks,
the closed blinds, the absence of a real adult.

There’s a vague promise of revelation
from the title
and the dark, tree-lined streets, the voice
calling from a house
carrying within it our freedom not to answer.

Inside another house, a little girl in a pretty dress
is falling asleep
at her father’s desk, turning into
Alice in Wonderland
as her mind falls down the rabbit holes of grammar.

The Mad Hatter and Jabberwocky
tell her to lure
the letters into a trap so they can beat them
to death with mallets.
We’d like to see that. Without words

no one could tell us what to do.
We know grammar is just a byproduct,
like schizophrenia, of a brain that grew
too fast for its own good
and that history is a series of conspiracies

by accidental despots. Mrs. Bradford is
falling asleep on the wide window ledge,
her blue polyester pants gapped
to reveal her white socks
and pink spotted shins. We try not to look.

The Mad Hatter doesn’t say that the alphabet
was first used to keep track of property
or that for centuries people believed
if women learned to write
the lost world would never be recovered

or that the Mayans believed
outsiders wrote things down
not in order to remember them
but to free themselves
into the work of forgetting.

That year Mrs. Bradford taught us about
the Lewis & Clark expedition
over and over again. We never learned
why it mattered so much to her
or what possible use it could be to anyone.

The professor tells Judy about
the thousands of words
Arabs needed for camels and their parts,
the dozen words Eskimos had for snow,
and a chimp who learned seven human words.

A voice made visible says:
magic is a matter of fact to you,
Every miracle has to have its qualifications,
reservations, footnotes
and our heads rise from our desks.

The rest of the year will be a series of
substitute teachers
who teach us nothing but footnotes
and their own reservations.
Mrs. Bradford dead of a brain tumor.

We sit in our sixth-grade desks with the blinds
closed against the tree-lined streets
as the letters of the world rise up
and, forming a single word,
eclipse our world and fill our mouths with shadows.

(Rita Mae Reese [source])

…and:

Anything is one of a million paths… Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. I will tell you what it is: does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

(Carlos Castaneda [source])

…and:

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!

(Jalal al-Din Rumi [source])

While searching for the original, definitive text of Rita Mae Reese’s “The Alphabet Conspiracy” (above) — and before just giving up and accepting the Poetry Foundation’s version — I came across an odd bit of background: the poem is based on an episode of an old, 1950s-60s “educational TV” series called The Bell Laboratory Science Series. This one (with embedded animations by Fritz Freleng, one of the masters of Warner Brothers cartoons) was on linguistics; others covered astronomy, physiology, the senses, time, and so on.

I found a YouTube playlist (with subtitles!) for the entire “Alphabet Conspiracy” episode. Here’s Part 1:

Warner Brothers animation or not, I don’t think this threatens the legacy and popularity of any more recent science series!