Potpourri: June 17-18 (2022 Edition)

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

Technically, it’s still the evening of June 17 — a day early for my annual June 18th post, and (because it’s a Friday) technically requiring of me a whiskey river Friday post. On the other hand, because (a) I will on June 18 be driving from Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, to Yosemite National Park, and (b) I give myself blanket permission every June 18 to blog about whatever I want… well, you, dear reader, get this mishmash.

So let’s give whiskey river the floor, and see where our anonymous friend leads us. Like, here:

To be is to have mortal shape, mortal conditions, to struggle, to evolve. Paradise is, like the dream of the Buddhists, a Nirvana where there is no more personality and hence no conflict. It is the expression of man’s wish to triumph over reality, over becoming. The artist’s dream of the impossible, the miraculous, is simply the resultant of his inability to adapt himself to reality. He creates, therefore, a reality of his own—in the poem—a reality which is suitable to him, a reality in which he can live out his unconscious desires, wishes, dreams. The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art. When man becomes fully conscious of his powers, his role, his destiny, he is an artist and he ceases his struggle with reality.

(Henry Miller [source])

…and here:

The Elephant in The Room

The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn’t.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there’s no
room to talk
about it.

(Kay Ryan [source])

Kay Ryan’s poem is one of numerous poems, by numerous poets, in a collection regarding (as the title says) “Resistance, Rebellion, Life.” Like the other poems in the book, “The Elephant in the Room” is manifestly political in nature. But it also says something to me, on the occasion of turning one more than my allotted three score and ten — specifically, it says something to me in the context of Henry Miller’s quotation above:

I’ve thought a lot, in the last year, about the fact that my verbal self — at least, the storytelling facet of that self — seems to have moved somewhere offshore, out of reach. It’s absconded, gone…

Part of me imagines that bringing my “big book” to fruition still lies ahead. When I started to tell that story of four old guys — retirees — and a nephew (and niece-in-law) of one of them, thirty years ago, what the hell did I know about old guys’ minds, motivations, disappointments, fears? (Haha — I barely knew anything about my own.) So maybe, I tell myself, maybe now at last I’ll be able to bring that story fully into the light, with some firsthand knowledge of those characters’ inner lives…

But then there’s another, less sanguine voice in my head. I know that I don’t have another three decades to continue to mess around with it all. I’m not even sure it’s worth messing around with, y’know?

And, well, let’s face it: as long as The Missus and I remain rootless, as a practical matter there’s just no way I’ll ever be able to sit down, day after day, to do the spadework required even of a story in which I had 100% confidence.

It’s a hell of a thing, I’ll tell you.

On yet another hand, I’ve got my photography to keep me humming along on at least a couple of cylinders in the meantime. While we’re at Yosemite, I’ll be taking a half-day course called “In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams” (whose exquisite black-and-white photographs engraved that National Park in the national imagination). I don’t think I’d find fulfillment in recreating or replicating Adams’s work (as though such a goal would be possible), but I’m looking forward to entering into something like a mystical, posthumous conversation with him — kind of like the Reddit “Ask Me Anything” dialogues, which illuminate unknown or forgotten aspects of a pop-culture figure’s life and work for the benefit of anyone paying attention.

It won’t be the same thing as storytelling, I know — it won’t be a narrative which results. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll help me say something enduring.

We’ll see (as we generally do, heh).