As If / As Is

[Image: adapted from “Mermaid birdbath closer,” by Flickr user “orchid dude.” There are a lot of images of mermaids in concrete and stone in some kind of watery setting, but this one by far had the best representation of one of the despondent and possibly ill-tempered creatures depicted in Matthea Harvey’s poem this week…]

From whiskey river:

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

(Cheryl Strayed [source])

…and (epigraph + last two stanzas):

The Blue Guitar

“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar.'”
— The Blue Guitar (Wallace Stevens)

I do my best to tell it true
a thing exceeding hard to do
or tell it slant as Emily
advises in her poetry,
and, colour blind, how can I know
if green is blue or cinnabar.
Find me a colour chart that I
can check against a summer sky.
My eye is on a distant star.
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar.’

‘I have,’ the man replied, ‘it’s true.
The instrument I strum is blue
I strum my joy, I strum my pain
I strum the sun, I strum the rain.
But tell me, what is that to you?
You see things as you think they are.
Remove the mote within your ear
then talk to me of what you hear.’
They said, ‘Go smoke a blue cigar!
You do not play things as they are.’

‘Things as they are? Above? Below?
In hell or heaven? Fast or slow …?’
They silenced him. ‘It’s not about
philosophy, so cut it out.
We want the truth and not what you
are playing on the blue guitar.
So start again and play it straight
don’t improvise, prevaricate.
Just play things as they really are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are

are not the same as things that were
or will be in another year.
The literal is rarely true
for truth is old and truth is new
and faceted — a metaphor
for something higher than we are.
I play the truth of Everyman
I play the truth as best I can.
The things I play are better far
when changed upon the blue guitar.’

(P. K. Page, from The Blue Guitar [source])

…and:

Under the trees,
welcoming spring.
Things take care of themselves.

[…]

Filling the eye,
blue, blue mountains
in all directions.

(Gesshu Soko [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else… Authentic and inauthentic were words that Fats used often, inside his own head; they had laser-precise meaning for him, in the way he applied them to himself and others.

He had decided that he possessed traits that were authentic, which ought therefore to be encouraged and cultivated; but also that some of his habits of thought were the unnatural product of his unfortunate upbringing, and consequently inauthentic and to be purged.

(J.K. Rowling [source])

…and:

The body and soul are like a coach and horses and a coachman. The horses are desires. The coachman is the ego, the “I” that controls the desires and looks where he’s going (and makes sure the foot doesn’t go in the wrong place). But inside the coach is a passenger. Who is riding in the coach? It’s our soul. “Coachman, would you stop, please?” “Coachman, you are going a little too fast.”

I am riding in my coach, and now and then my coach needs a grease job or a new bearing or a joint replaced. [While in the hospital after breaking my hip,] I’m in the coach shop for a hip joint, and they’re the coach repair experts. That’s fine as long as I know who I am—that I’m not the coach, that I am a passenger inside the coach riding along merrily, merrily, merrily.

(Ram Dass [source])

…and:

The Backyard Mermaid

The Backyard Mermaid slumps across the birdbath, tired of fighting birds for seeds and lard. She hates those fluffed-up feathery fish imitations, but her hatred of the cat goes fathoms deeper. That beast is always twining about her tail, looking to take a little nip of what it considers a giant fish. Its breath smells of possible friends. She collects every baseball or tennis ball that flies into her domain to throw at the creature, but it advances undeterred, even purring. To add further insult to injury it has a proper name, Furball, stamped on a silver tag on its collar. She didn’t even know she had a name until one day she heard the human explaining to another one, “Oh that’s just the backyard mermaid.” Backyard Mermaid she murmured, as if in prayer. On days when there’s no sprinkler to comb through her curls, no rain pouring in glorious torrents from the gutters, no dew in the grass for her to nuzzle with her nose, not even a mud puddle in the kiddie pool, she wonders how much longer she can bear this life. The front yard thud of the newspaper every morning. Singing songs to the unresponsive push mower in the garage. Wriggling under fence after fence to reach the house four down which has an aquarium in the back window. She wants to get lost in that sad glowing square of blue. Don’t you?

(Matthea Harvey [source])