Freer than You Think

[Image: “Chess Knights in Battle,” by Ken Teegardin on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The photographer apparently took this photo as some kind of illustration for his own Web site, having to do with senior retirement planning; however, his site seems not to exist anymore. So I’ll use it here, as a photographic metaphor for having options we don’t necessarily see right away.]

From whiskey river:

As they say “to be in the world, but not of the world.” You can go to the Himalayas and miss it completely, and you can be stuck in the middle of New York and be very spiritual. I mean, I noticed in certain places, like New York, it brings out a certain thing in myself. If I go to some place like Switzerland, I find a lot of uptight people because they’re living amongst so much beauty there’s no urgency in trying to find the beauty within themselves. If you’re stuck in New York you have to somehow look within yourself — otherwise you’d go crackers. So, in a way, it’s good to be able to go in and out of both situations. Most people think when the world gets itself together we’ll all be okay. I don’t see that situation arriving. I think one by one, we all free ourselves from the chains we have chained ourselves to. But I don’t think that suddenly some magic happens and the whole lot of us will all be liberated in one throw.

(George Harrison  [source])

…and:

At Seventy-Five: Re-Reading An Old Book

My prayers have been answered, if they were prayers. I live.
I’m alive, and even in rather good health, I believe.
If I’d quit smoking I might live to be a hundred.
Truly this is astonishing, after the poverty and pain,
The suffering. Who would have thought that petty
Endurance could achieve so much?
And prayers—
Were they prayers? Always I was adamant
In my irreligion, and had good reason to be.
Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now,
A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather
A movement of the natural human mind
Bereft of its place among the animals, the other
Animals. I prayed. Then on paper I wrote
Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

(Hayden Carruth, Dr. Jazz [source: none canonical, but found here])

Not from whiskey river:

Proof

Spring comes slow and late in Cleveland, so we learn to look for
signs: the yellow hard-sheathed head of daffodil
which has been visible for days, but won’t unfurl—
and then a loosening, as if one lock had come undone,
a single curl of promise.
We humans, we can’t feel Spring coming,
so we sulk and mumble, numbly wait;
but the black-throated sparrows are different,
they’ve built a nest already in an opened hinge of window,
when I look up I see tail-feathers, sitting and sitting on that wedged-in
pile of sticks, saying faith and faith,

and tonight on my way home, outside a brick apartment building,
suddenly a row of pansies! Such familiar
speckled faces, openings of purple, freckled gold,
and a man standing besied them, pointing,
and the woman he’d brought there, gazing
at the flowers, saying proof and proof,

and I turned the corner into the sun, that bright
setting sun which blinds us
sometimes, in our failings, in our grace.

(Ruth Schwartz [source])

…and:

At the Gym

This salt-stain spot
marks the place where men
lay down their heads,
back to the bench,

and hoist nothing
that need be lifted
but some burden they’ve chosen
this time: more reps,

more weight, the upward shove
of it leaving, collectively,
this sign of where we’ve been:
shroud-stain, negative

flashed onto the vinyl
where we push something
unyielding skyward,
gaining some power

at least over flesh,
which goads with desire,
and terrifies with frailty.
Who could say who’s

added his heat to the nimbus
of our intent, here where
we make ourselves:
something difficult

lifted, pressed or curled,
Power over beauty,
power over power!
Though there’s something more

tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.

Here is some halo
the living made together.

(Mark Doty [source])

…and:

#40: Most people think of our memories as possessions or gifts (things which we have); some, as products of our own activity (things which we do); some, as personal attributes (things which we are). You can find elements of truth in all of those perspectives. The very language for defining our relationship to memory flows naturally, requiring no effort or, really, even attention.

Yet I wonder if there might be a fourth way of regarding memories — not, that is, merely as phenomena for which we are somehow responsible, as phenomena which exist only because we ourselves do. Try this mind game instead: consider memories as the agents, and ourselves as the results. Suppose I am something which my memories have, do, are. Liberation! Suddenly, the burden of remembering truth, of deciding what happened for real and what grew out of my imagination — suddenly that burden goes away. Truth or fantasy, no difference: I am owned by these things; they shape me; I am a facet of them. Then out from the cloud of all possible memories, true or false, have coalesced you, me, us. Maybe we’ve just tricked ourselves into thinking we’re the stars of the show. Maybe each of us is Chekhov’s pistol hanging on the wall, suddenly — just when apt, not before or after — selected for memory’s practical (and often dramatic) use.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)