At the Attenuated Center

[Video: “Retro-reflective Fireball Aimer.” (See the “Operation On Target” page at the Boy Scouts of America site for details.) For this project, Boy Scout teams on adjacent mountaintops learned to signal one another using just mirrors and sunlight. The “fireball aimer” simplifies this task, as I understand it, by enabling the sender to aim the mirror precisely at the distant target: when looking though a tiny hole in the mirror, the sender sees a ghostly “fireball” positioned at the exact point where the reflected signal is aimed. The receiver sees only the brilliant pinpoint flash of light.]

From whiskey river:

Unwilling to tolerate life’s ambiguity, its unresolvability, its inevitability, we search for certainty, demanding that someone else must provide it. Stubbornly, relentlessly, we seek the wise man, the wizard, the good parent, someone else who will show us the way.

Surely someone must know. It simply cannot be that life is just what it appears to be, that there are no hidden meanings, that this is it, just this and nothing more. It’s not fair, not enough! We cannot possibly bear having to live life as it is, without reassurance, without being special, without even being offered some comforting explanations. Come on now! Come across! You’ve got to give us something to make it all right. The medicine tastes lousy. Why should we have to swallow it just because it’s the only thing we can do? Can’t you at least promise us that we will have to take it just once, that it won’t taste that bad, that we will feel just fine immediately afterward, that we will be glad we took it? No? Well then, surely, at least you have to give us a lollipop for being good.

But what if we are talking to ourselves? What if there is no one out there listening? What if for each of us the only wise man, the only wizard, the only good parent we will ever have is our own helpless, vulnerable self? What then?

(Sheldon B. Kopp [source])

…and:

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

(Edith Wharton [source])

…and:

The Neurons Who Watch Birds

We have to think now what it would be like
To be old. Some funny little neurons,
Developed for high-speed runners, and quick
Handed bowmen, begin to get tired. They fire

But then lay down their bows and watch birds.
The kidney cells—“Too much thinking!” the Chinese
Say—look around for help, but the kids have
All gone to the city. Your friends get hit by lightning,

And your enemies live on. This isn’t going to get
Better. Crows yelling from the telephone wires
Don’t include you in the stories they tell, and they seem
To remember some story that you haven’t heard.

What can you do? We’ll have to round up
All those little people wandering about
In the body, get them to sit up straight, and study
This problem: How do we die?

(Robert Bly [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

(W.H. Auden [source])

…and:

If we become familiar with what it means to arise and fall in every moment, if we become familiar with the emptiness of the purported self and we come to accept ourselves as a loosely cohering set of compounded things, we don’t believe in the self all the time. Of course, we constantly forget and remember this again, but over time we do become more familiar with ourselves as impermanent, and eventually we come to see the glory of that. The grace of impermanence is that we belong to everything, that we are not separated from anything, that we are not isolated… we may be waves on an ocean, but we are waves that know we are waves.

(Sally Tisdale [source])

…and:

The Archer

The sudden thuck of landing
The arrow made in the mark
Of the center lifted and

Loosened his skin. And so he
Stood, hearing it like many
Thrusting breaths driven to ground.

He abandoned the long light
Flight of arrows and the slow
Parabolas bows dream of

For the swifter song beyond
Flesh. Song of moments. The earth
Turned its molten balance.

He stood hearing it again:
The precise shudder the arrow
Sought and returned to, flaming.

(Vicki Hearne [source]))

…and:

#17: This image-manipulation software lets me select rectangles, ellipses, random shapes precisely, with finely traced pixel-width lines. But it offers another option, too: feathered edges. Feathered. A feathered edge surrounds a shape precisely only at the first pixel-width line. But moving out and away from the center, the line — the “edge” — begins to thin, turns sparse. And if you have specified the feathering properly, the viewer will never be one hundred per cent sure where edge becomes not-edge, where the foreground becomes its surroundings…

Welcome to the past!

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)