Being Both Things and Being Neither, All at Once

[Image: “Unused House Numbers,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

We do our twenty minutes of meditation a day in the hope that, properly stilled, our minds will stop just reflecting back to us the confusion and multiplicity of our world but will turn to a silvery mist like Alice’s looking glass that we can step through into a world where the beauty that sleeps in us will come awake at last. We send scientific expeditions to Loch Ness because if the dark and monstrous side of fairy tales can be proved to exist, who can be sure that the blessed side doesn’t exist, too? I suspect that the whole obsession of our time with the monstrous in general—with the occult and the demonic, with exorcism and black magic and the great white shark—is at its heart only the shadow side of our longing for the beatific, and we are like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, who tells the young witch about to be burned at the stake that he wants to meet the devil her master, and when she asks him why, he says, “I want to ask him about God. He, if anyone, must know.

(Frederick Buechner [source])

…and:

Photosynthesis

Morning falls out of its orbit
and swims up through the blue.
Last night, when I heard the news,
I forgot my human hunger.

Now I am making calculations
with a row of ivy and old hibiscus.
I am silent as a shadow in the ferns,
I am frond green and curled.

It may be necessary to drink through
the roots; I could eat sunlight and air,
start a green factory in each finger;
I could make each arm a branch.

Let me begin as stem and leaf.
I’ll make something you can breathe.

(Joyce Sutphen [source])

…and:

As The Poems Go

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you’ve created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.

(Charles Bukowski [source: various, none canonical — apparently from an out-of-print literary magazine, On the Bus])

…and:

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Basho instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Basho answered, simply, “No.”

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Braid

Shoulders knobbed against
a slat-backed chair,
the temples tugged, a pull

at the nape, you felt the up-
sweep as she smoothed the fine
wisps back and tucked

yank into yank
and a third into that
until the consecutive

dodges of thumbs and first
fingers gathered,
fraying and filing

to their end—ended
in an ornament that, suspended,
looked ridiculous, even

on a child who mostly
set forth with
what was called

a “finished” look, some
loose ends in order where
others were not

and a slight weight below
the nape’s pull. The view
others had of it

was invisible to you.
It made something there
where there would have been

a blank—now instead
a kind of face
sent from woman to

woman like a duty,
an obstinate
duty to pattern.

It’s too simple to see
one thing rather
than another, a wish

protruding once it’s been
suppressed, a vise that holds
a thought in its proper

place until it bobs
to the surface
of a generally balmy

sea. Women and
woman only a letter
away—a strand gets

mixed, then mixed
right out of the heaven
of perfect fit;

one kind of accident
turns into another.
The whole head throbs for days.

Black and white are woven
into gray the way
hyperbole has no chance

once it’s juxtaposed
to reason—negation
just a thread among

the available options
and hope itself apparent
there in the very

notion a made thing can last.
Tougher, coarser, split
weave in the years. Shorter,

longer, shorter, the brain
bound to its anchor.
The brushed-out waves

with their rick-rack
shadows, a thread
inside the case,

the case inside
the locket, the locket
beneath the yoke.

All the effort
to save in itself
a form of loss.

You can tell a story
many ways. You can leave
something out or put

something in; you can fool
yourself and hide.
You can shake out

the form or try
to manage every wisp,
but the latter will

only bring you pain.
You went under
the hand and eye of another

and the tether cannot
be undone.

(Susan Stewart [source])

…and:

#2: “It was an interesting experience.”

“I hated it.”

“I loved it.”

“I loved her.”

“I love you.”

With or without pronouns, everything we say about the past — even the very recent past, the that just happened past — while feeling to us intimately bound up with the past, stands somehow apart from it. We write journals; we sit around tables at family gatherings and boardooms, swapping memories; we furrow the past with hindsight, dinging the blade on a rock here or a tree root there, but never pausing until the lines are inscribed, neatly, at least to our eyes up here on the tractor. (But don’t get down, don’t look too close, all the order turns to chaos when observed on hands and knees.)

There’s really no past, you know. Even as we sculpt it so lovingly with our words, our intellect, and our emotion, as we toss scraps of meaning its way in hopes that some might stick, at least for a moment — even then, the past has already slithered away from us. Don’t live in the past: so people — even “wise” people — tell us… to which I say, Ha. It’s impossible to live anywhere else, even if we (ha, again) can’t live there.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)