The Ordinary Mystery

[Image: Les Amants (The Lovers) (1928), by René Magritte — one of the “stars” of a recent traveling exhibit of Magritte’s work, The Mystery of the Ordinary. See the note at the foot of this post for a macabre detail.]

From whiskey river:

I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, ‘I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say’; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

..and:

Losing My Sight

I never knew that by August
the birds are practically silent,
only a twitter here and there.
Now I notice. Last spring
their noisiness taught me the difference
between screamers and whistlers and cooers
and O, the coloraturas.
I have already mastered
the subtlest pitches in our cat’s
elegant Chinese. As the river
turns muddier before my eyes,
its sighs and little smacks
grow louder. Like a spy,
I pick up things indiscriminately:
the long approach of a truck,
car doors slammed in the dark,
the night life of animals — shrieks and hisses,
sex and plunder in the garage.
Tonight the crickets spread static
across the air, a continuous rope
of sound extended to me,
the perfect listener.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

I do not think I really have anything to say about poetry other than remarking that it is a wandering little drift of unidentified sound, and trying to say more reminds me of following the sound of a thrush into the woods on a summer’s eve — if you persist in following the thrush it will only recede deeper and deeper into the woods; you will never actually see the thrush (the hermit thrush is especially shy), but I suppose that listening is a kind of knowledge, or as close as one can come. “Fret not after knowledge, I have none,” is what the thrush says. Perhaps we can use our knowledge to preserve a bit of space where his lack of knowledge can survive.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Coffee Cup

The newspaper, the coffee cup, the dog’s
impatience for his morning walk:
These fibers braid the ordinary mystery.
After the marriage of lovers
the children came, and the schoolbus
that stopped to pick up the children,

and the expected death of the retired
mailman Anthony “Cat” Middleton
who drove the schoolbus for a whole
schoolyear, a persistence enduring
forever in the soul of Marilyn
who was six years old that year.

We dug a hole for him. When his widow
Florence sold the Cape and moved to town
to live near her daughter, the Mayflower
van was substantial and unearthly.
Neither lymphoma nor a brown-and-white
cardigan twenty years old

made an exception, not elbows nor
Chevrolets nor hills cutting blue
shapes on blue sky, not Maple Street
nor Main, not a pink-striped canopy
on an ice cream store, not grass.
It was ordinary that on the day

of Cat’s funeral the schoolbus arrived
driven by a woman called Mrs. Ek,
freckled and thin, wearing a white
bandana and overalls, with one
eye blue and the other gray. Everything
is strange; nothing is strange:

yarn, the moon, gray hair in a bun,
New Hampshire, putting on socks.

(Donald Hall [source])

…and:

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

The individual parts played by other instrumentalists — crickets or earthworms, for instance — may not have the sound of music by themselves, but we hear them out of context. If we could listen to them all at once, fully orchestrated, in their immense ensemble, we might become aware of the counterpoint, the balance of tones and timbres and harmonics, the sonorities. The recorded songs of the humpback whale, filled with tensions and resolutions, ambiguities and allusions, incomplete, can be listened to as a part of music, like an isolated section of an orchestra. If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.

(Lewis Thomas [source])

…and:

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. Fiction should be both canny and uncanny. In a good deal of popular criticism, there is the notion operating that all ?ction has to be about the Average Man, and has to depict average ordinary everyday life, that every ?ction writer must produce what used to be called “a slice of life.” But if life, in that sense, satis?ed us, there would be no sense in producing literature at all.

(Flannery O’Connor [source])

…and:

[Ann] put the tray on the bar, looked at him one more time without speaking. And then she startled the hell out of him, by simply reaching out and touching his face. The hell—?

Vertigo. The ends of the room-wide mirror seemed to rush towards him, as though enfolding him, as though he were falling through a silvered tunnel into the reflected room and out of the real one, a rush of sound, bleached-blonde buxom Ann transforming before his eyes into a tall slender woman with hair the color of midnight and then back into Ann again as the big cat at her feet stood, stretched, yawned, and walked off, the mirror now rolling back and away from him, the sound spiraling away thhhhhhhhwippppp! Suddenly back at the bar, forearms crossed and flat upon the polished oak. Feeling himself shaking his head to clear it, feeling himself say Well good God damn and what the hell was that?, and then realizing he was neither shaking his head nor speaking but just staring at his reflection.

(JES, Seems to Fit)

________________________

About the image: While most of Magritte’s work doesn’t “mean” anything, as far as I know, Wikipedia provided this bit of background about this painting:

On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt at taking her own life; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Léopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. Her body was later discovered a mile or so down the nearby river… Supposedly, when [Magritte’s] mother was found, her dress was covering her face, an image that has been suggested as the source of several of Magritte’s paintings in 1927-1928 of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants.