What to Do With Ourselves, and Vice-Versa (If You Follow)

[Image: “[the only moment we were alone],” by user ‘nooone’ on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) I think I did a triple-take before I realized what I was looking at here.]

From whiskey river:

John Ashbery, in an interview in the Poetry Miscellany, talks about wasting time: “I waste a lot of time. That’s part of the [creative process]… The problem is, you can’t really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted. Poetry disequips you for the requirements of life. You can’t use your time.” In other words, wasted time cannot be filled, or changed into another habit; it is a necessary void of fomentation. And I am wasting your time, and I am aware that I am wasting it; how could it be otherwise? Many others have spoken about this. Tess Gallagher: “I sit in the motel room, a place of much passage and no record, and feel I have made an important assault on the Great Nothing.” Gertrude Stein: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” Mary Oppen: “When Heidegger speaks of boredom he allies it very closely with that moment of awe in which one’s mind begins to reach beyond. And that is a poetic moment, a moment in which a poem might well have been written.” The only purpose of this lecture, this letter, my only intent, goal, object, desire, is to waste time. For there is so little time to waste during a life, what little there is being so precious, that we must waste it, in whatever way we come to waste it, with all our heart.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

Your Life

You will walk toward the mirror,
closer and closer, then flow
into the glass. You will disappear
some day like that, being
more real, more true, at the last.

You learn what you are, but slowly,
a child, a woman, a man,
a self often shattered, and pieces
put together again, till the end:
you halt, the glass opens—

A surface, an image, a past.

(William Stafford [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The utter simplicity and obviousness of the infused light which contemplation pours into our soul suddenly awakens us to a new level of awareness. We enter a region which we never even suspected, and yet it is this new world which seems familiar and obvious. The old world of our senses is now the one that seems to us strange, remote and unbelievable — until the intense light of contemplation leaves us and we fall back to our own level.

Compared with the pure and peaceful comprehension of love in which the contemplative is permitted to see the truth not so much by seeing it as by being absorbed into it, ordinary ways of seeing and knowing are full of blindness and labor and uncertainty.

The sharpest of natural experiences is like sleep, compared with the awakening which is contemplation. The keenest and surest natural certitude is a dream compared to this serene comprehension…

A door opens in the center of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.

(Thomas Merton [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Falling Water
(excerpt)

When I survey the mural stretched across the years
—Across my heart—I notice mostly small, neglected
Parts of no importance to the whole design, but which,
In their obscurity, seem more permanent and real.
I see the desks and auditorium, suffused with
Yellow light connoting earnestness and hope that
Still remains there, in a space pervaded by a
Soft and supple ache too deep to contemplate—
As though the future weren’t real, and the present
Were amorphous, with nothing to hold on to,
And the past were there forever. And the art
That time inflicts upon its subjects can’t
Eradicate the lines sketched out in childhood,
Which harden into shapes as it recedes.
I wish I knew a way of looking at the world
That didn’t find it wanting, or of looking at my
Life that didn’t always see a half-completed
Structure made of years and filled with images
And gestures emblematic of the past, like Gatsby’s
Light, or Proust’s imbalance on the stones.
I wish there were a place where I could stay
And leave the world alone—an enormous stadium
Where I could wander back and forth across a field
Replete with all the incidents and small details
That gave the days their textures, that bound the
Minutes into something solid, and that linked them
All together in a way that used to seem eternal.

(John Koethe [source])

And, finally… Boz Scaggs wrote “We’re All Alone” in 1976; it closed his album Silk Degrees that year, but he never released it as a single in its own right. (It came out as the B side of a couple other songs from that album.) Other performers latched onto it right away. Rita Coolidge’s 1977 cover seems to have been the top-selling one (although not even close to the first).

It’s a lovely but a very strange song (at least as presented in Coolidge’s version). Musically, most pop songs build towards a conclusion — a big finish — perhaps followed by a chorus repeat, or a trailing-off coda of reduced intensity. But the tune of “We’re All Alone” just sort of teases the listener: it rolls, and rolls, and rolls, and ROLLS… and then backs off, and starts all over again.

[Caveat, as always when I talk about music: I have absolutely no musical credentials or even vague qualifications to comment on how music “works,” is composed, or pretty much anything else. I’m just talking about how it sounds to me.]

The lyrics, too, strike me as atypically — for a pop love song — indirect. They explicitly refer to another party a few times (my love, dear, and of course simply you), but don’t really spell out anything about that person: nothing extolling (or even mentioning) any of their virtues, nothing about the story of the singer and the sung-to. Instead, they present a series of soft imperatives: cry no more, dream, learn, let it all begin… In fact, the more I look at it, the more I wonder if the song might have begun life as a mantra: a chant to oneself, describing and intending to invoke a sort of gentle ecstasy of meditation.

Or, of course, maybe I’m just overthinking the whole thing. (Anything I might say about, well, anything from 1977 should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Not only was I — yes — all alone then, but… well, let’s just say I could have used at least one “ecstasy of meditation” that year!)

[Below, click Play button to begin We’re All Alone. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:40 long.]

[Lyrics]