Putting Aside the Enchanter’s Wand

[Video: “Somebody That I Used to Know,” performed by Walk Off the Earth. Lyrics here. See the note about the video at the bottom of this post, too.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

What Narrative Is For

How fine the mind that can calculate
change and recognize destiny,

as if luck had something to do
with knowing, as if the lease

signed with the eyes closed
meant happiness, or even time

that’s bearable, slow breaths exchanging
the currency that wanting spends,

and how fine that sedatives
and jewels exist, those slanted elegies.

So there are errands and hours
when you hear your own breath—

or feel my breath coming from within you—
and register the haunt of cicadas

summering under the porch. So there is time
spooking off into the wings.

These are going to be big surgeries, bloody
gauzes of conditions, when loss

must be measured, and then
there are the outcomes, the calls

that must be made. Wouldn’t we all like to avoid
being the reason for anguish, to understand

why it’s so easy to cut ourselves
on our own edges? Silent,

the responders. They might
have the answers, but they’re not

telling, even when the vise grips
go for the nails. All that’s left is to know

we will suffer through almost anything—
make sure to remember it well.

(Margot Schilpp [source])

…and:

Art gives us the knowledge that many have gone before, and had the same strange feelings and the same unanswerable questions, and that we are not alone in the art-endeavor, let alone life. It gives us the knowledge that people have always been stupid and violent and cruel, and compassionate and confused and curious and wondrous and astonished and tired. What it does not give us is answers. It gives us instead a picture. It does not ask that we analyze the picture, but that we stand before it and look, in the hope that looking might turn into gazing. For gazing will hold our attention for a very long time.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and in those aspects of the reality which we are capable of apprehending. Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the illusory parts which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must continually be on the watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness, we must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it. Too much “wisdom” is as bad as too little wisdom, and there must be no magic tricks. We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter’s wand and his book of the words. One must find a way of being in this world while not being of it. A way of living in time without being completely swallowed up in time.

(Aldous Huxley [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Mushrooms

for Jon and Jill

Eyeing the grass for mushrooms, you will find
A stone or stain, a dandelion puff
Deceive your eyes—their colour is enough
To plump the image out to mushroom size
And lead you through illusion to a rind
That’s true—flint, fleck or feather. With no haste
Scent-out the earthy musk, the firm moist white,
And, played-with rather than deluded, waste
None of the sleights of seeing: taste the sight
You gaze unsure of—a resemblance, too,
Is real and all its likes and links stay true
To the weft of seeing. You, to begin with,
May be taken in, taken beyond, that is,
This place of chiaroscuro that seemed clear,
For realer than a myth of clarities
Are the meanings that you read and are not there:
Soon, in the twilight coolness, you will come
To the circle that you seek and, one by one,
Stooping into their fragrance, break and gather,
Your way a winding where the rest lead on
Like stepping stones across a grass of water.

(Charles Tomlinson [source], from Selected Poems 1955-1997)

…and:

It is better to believe than to disbelieve; in doing you bring everything to the realm of possibility.

(Albert Einstein [quoted EVERYWHERE, but never attributed to a specific lecture or written work])

…and:

Lake Echo, Dear

Is the woman in the pool of light
really reading or just staring
at what is written

Is the man walking in the soft rain
naked or is it the rain
that makes his shirt transparent

The boy in the iron cot
is he asleep or still
fingering the springs underneath

Did you honestly believe
three lives could be complete

The bottle of green liquid
on the sill is it real

The bottle on the peeling sill
is it filled with green

Or is the liquid an illusion
of fullness

How summer’s children turn
into fish and rain softens men

How the elements of summer
nights bid us to get down with each other
on the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful
whether or not
it will change the world one drop

(C. D. Wright [source])

_____________

About the video: “Somebody That I Used to Know” was released originally in 2011 by its creator, a performer known as Gotye, described by Wikipedia as “a Belgian-Australian multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter.” His own performance (and corresponding video) has done really well — the song won two Grammy awards in 2013, and has sold (according to Wikipedia) over 13 million copies, while the video, as of right now, has been viewed 540 million times. Nick Messitte, of Forbes.com, recently called “Somebody That I Used to Know” the “only Reggae Rock song I can think of that reinvented the genre while still staying pretty much inside of it.”

The video cover by Walk Off the Earth, shown above, has had a “mere” 160 million views. (These numbers stagger me.) Still, while Gotye’s video is pretty great, and certainly hints at magic, Walk Off the Earth’s version has a nearly hypnotic attraction. It’s all one take, for starters. And even though I know it might very well be a lip-synced performance, damn, getting all five members of the band working a single guitar is a pretty clever bit of magic — legerdemain — in its own right.