[Image: “Spirits in the Material World, Plate 3,” by Thomas Hawk; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). As has happened before, with other photographers, I find now that I’ve used Hawk’s work to illustrate earlier posts as well as this one. I don’t know how to conduct a search (of almost 1,500 posts) to find all such favorites, but I wish I did!]
From whiskey river:
The Discovery Of Daily Experience
It is a whisper. You turn somewhere,
hall, street, some great event: the stars
or the lights hold; your next step waits you
and the firm world waits—but
there is a whisper. You always live so,
a being that receives, or partly receives, or
fails to receive each moment’s touch.You see the people around you—the honors
they bear—a crutch, a cane, eye patch,
or the subtler ones, that fixed look, a turn
aside, or even the brave bearing: all declare
our kind, who serve on the human front and earn
whatever disguise will take them home. (I saw
Frank last week with his crutch de guerre.)When the world is like this—and it is—
whispers, honors or penalties disguised—no wonder
art thrives like a pulse wherever civilized people,
or any people, live long enough in a place to
build, and remember, and anticipate; for we are
such beings as interact elaborately with what
surrounds us. The limited actual world we successively
overcome by fictions and by the mind’s inventions
that cannot be quite arbitrary (and hence do reflect
the actual), but can escape the actual (and hence
may become art).
(William Stafford [source])
…and:
Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [source])
Not from whiskey river:
People of the South Wind
1
One day Sun found a new canyon.
It hid for miles and ran far away,
then it went under a mountain. Now Sun
goes over but knows it is there. And that
is why Sun shines—it is always looking.
Be like the sun.2
Your breath has a little shape—
you can see it cold days. Well,
every day it is like that, even in summer.
Well, your breath goes, a whole
army of little shapes. They are living
in the woods now and are your friends.
When you die—well, you go with
your last breath and find the others.3
Sometimes if a man is evil his breath
runs away and hides from him. When he
dies his last breath cannot find the other,
and he never comes together again—
those little breaths, you know, in the autumn
they scurry the bushes before the snow.
They never come back.4
You know where the main river runs—well, for
five days below is No One, and out in the desert
on each side his children live.
They have their tents that echo dust
and give a call when you knock for acquaintance:
“No One, No One, No One.”When you cross that land the sandbars
have his name in little tracks
the mice inscribe under the bushes,
and on pools you read his wide, bland
reply to all that you ask. You wake
from dreams and hear the end of things:
“No One, No One, No One.”
(William Stafford [ibid.])
…and:
Solitary reading is luxurious, especially in summer, and solitude in cities is my favorite kind. In Paris, you can look up from your book and see Proust mirrored in the street life, the architecture, the people walking by. Nothing makes you wiser or sadder than reading Proust, John Ashbery has said—his words are so often still relevant, necessary, illuminating, true. One morning toward the end of summer, for example, after everyone I knew had left the city and I sat reading at the same café at which I’d met friends the night before, half-expecting them to appear again, I reached the final page of Swann’s Way and came upon this:
“The reality I had known no longer existed. That Mme. Swann did not arrive exactly the same at the same moment was enough to make the Avenue different. The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.”
(Deborah Landau [source])
…and:
Engraving: World-Tree with an Empty Beehive on One Branch
A too beautiful view rejects the mind.
It is like a person with a garrulous mouth but no ears.When Basho finished his months of walking,
he took off his used-up sandals,
let them fall.One turned into the scent of withered chrysanthemum,
the other walked out of the story.It’s only after you notice an ache that you know it must always have been there.
As an actor is there, before he steps in from the wing.Another of Basho’s haiku:
a long-weathered skull, through whose eyes grow tall, blowing grasses.They look now into a photograph,
a scraped field in France, September 1916:
men bending, smoking, gleaning the harrowed rucksacks for letters.
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
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