Not Grasping, Only Groping Towards

[Image: “The Amityville Handheld,” by user v1ctory_1s_m1ne on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license; click to enlarge.) This seemed to me to embody the spirit of today’s theme, without explicitly stating it: it gropes in the right direction.]

From whiskey river:

What We Want

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and:

We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if the beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.

(José Saramago [source])

…and:

But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?

(Haruki Murakami [source])

Not from whiskey river:

“Spiritual path” is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people gope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape; they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why. They leave whatever they find, picking up each stone, carrying it a while, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what is. Their life’s fine, impossible goal justifies the term “spiritual.” Nothing, however, can justify the term “path” for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage — except one thing: they don’t quit; they stick with it. Year after year they put one foot in front of the other, though they fare nowhere. Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark. The planet turns under their steps like a water wheel rolling; constellations shift without anyone’s gaining ground… Their feet catch in nets; they untangle them when they notice, and keep moving. They hope to learn where they came from… Decade after decade they see no progress. But they do notice, if they look, that they have left doubt behind. Decades ago, they left behind doubt about this or that doctrine, abandoning the issues as unimportant. Now, I mean, they have left behind the early doubt that this feckless prospecting in the dark for the unseen is a reasonable way to pass one’s life.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

Stories

It was back when we used to listen to stories,
our minds developing
pictures as we were taken into the elsewhere

of our experience or to the forbidden
or under the sea.
Television was wrestling, Milton Berle,

Believe It Or Not. We knelt before it
like natives
in front of something sent by parachute,

but when grandfather said “I’ll tell you a story,”
we stopped with pleasure,
sat crosslegged next to the fireplace, waited.

He’d sip gin and hold us, his voice
the extra truth
beyond what we believed without question.

When grandfather died and changed
what an evening meant,
it was 1954. After supper we went

to the television, innocents in a magic land
getting more innocent,
a thousand years away from Oswald and the shock,

the end of our enormous childhood.
We sat still
for anything, laughed when anyone slipped

or lisped or got hit with a pie. We said
to our friends
“What the hey?” and punched them in the arms.

The television had arrived, and was coming.
Throughout the country
all the grandfathers were dying,

giving their reluctant permission, like Indians.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

Finally… I’ve posted before, years ago, about the rock’n’roll group Big Daddy, whose special genius is for recasting more or less contemporary songs as 1950s-era hits. From their first album, Cutting Their Own Groove (1991), here’s their take on Wilson Phillips’s “Hold On”: Jackie Wilson redux.

[Below, click Play button to begin ‘Hold On’ (Big Daddy version). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:22 long.]

And just for balance, here’s the Wilson Phillips original:

[Lyrics here and — no doubt — many elsewheres.]