Without a Thought in Your Little Head

[A favorite cartoon by George Booth in an old issue of The New Yorker from many years ago — blurry, alas, but the only copy I could find online. The caption: “I want you to think good thoughts about someone new at our house. I want you to think good thoughts about a pussycat.”]

From whiskey river:

I can’t find
my thoughts anywhere
this morning. They’ve
left me

alone, no one
to be. I

act like nothing’s
happened, so they don’t
suspect anything

when I
stretch my usual walk
out through

winter-burnished
grasses. And they’re so
preoccupied, they
don’t notice
when I wander

past wafers of seabed
rock angled
up and broken
away into sky, then

sit sun-
warmed facing a familiar
mountain, mirroring

it perfectly. Good
deal. They’ll never
find me here.

(David Hinton [source])

…and:

Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me.

“Doubt nothing, believe everything,” was my friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather.

I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!

My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.

(Charles Simic [source])

To oversimplify a bit, they — the ubiquitous, all-knowing “they” — say it’s not necessarily a bad thing to lose your thoughts… or if not to lose them, exactly, then to train yourself to ignore them: to watch them passing by in your head, like a parade with the sound turned off, neither engaging them nor commenting on them.

I don’t think I’ve ever been able to pull that trick off, almost certainly because I’ve never embarked on a meditation-training program or any such thing. But I think I — and maybe you? — might be familiar with the general feeling of what it must be like, thanks to the nightly experience called hypnagogia. (Wikipedia: “Threshold consciousness (commonly called ‘half-asleep’ or ‘half-awake’, or ‘mind awake body asleep’) describes the same mental state of someone who is moving towards sleep or wakefulness but has not yet completed the transition. Such transitions are usually brief but can be extended by sleep disturbance or deliberate induction, for example during meditation.”)

The stereotypical counting of sheep jumping one at a time over a fence has never worked for me when I shut my eyes, determined to drift off, possibly because I have zero real-world experience with sheep. My usual routine might involve extended breathing-in-and-out, while counting the breaths. I sometimes envision a dark chasm opening up ahead as I am pulled to it — this never feels threatening, rather just like being on a moving sidewalk, entering an auditorium where I don’t know what exactly will happen but where I am sure I will have wondrous experiences. For a long time, some years ago, I was picturing what I thought of as a “story tree”: a spreading, not terribly tall tree festooned not with leaves, but with slips of paper — on each one a complete narrative of some kind, which I could pluck and read on the way to sleep. Most recently, for some reason, I have been picturing myself walking around outside the house in which a childhood friend grew up, a big old white-painted Victorian/Edwardian near-mansion: I walk up the sidewalk to the front porch, ascend the three or four stairs, try to but do not actually open the front door, observe the paint peeling around all the windows, the green shutters, hear the creak of my footsteps as I walk along the wooden porch, feel the breeze tickling my skin as it rustles the stems of flowers along the side wall… (I’m practically nodding off just recounting all that just now.)

On that note…:

The Problem

You are trying to solve a problem.
You’re almost certainly halfway done,
maybe more.

You take some salt, some alum,
and put it into the problem.
Its color goes from yellow to royal blue.

You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem,
as into a Peruvian quipu of colored string.

You enter the problem’s bodegas,
its flea markets, souks.
Amid the alleys of sponges and sweets,
of jewelry, spices, and hair combs,
you ponder which stall, which pumpkin or perfume, is yours.

You go inside the problem’s piano.
You choose three keys.
One surely must open the door of the problem,
if only you knew only this:
is the quandary edible or medical,
a problem of reason or grief?

It is looking back at you now
with the quizzical eyes of a young, bright dog.

Her whole body pitched for the fetch,
the dog wants to please.
If only she could ascertain which direction,
what object, which scent of riddle,
and if the problem is round or elliptical in its orbit,
and if it is measured in foot-pounds, memory, or meat.

(Jan Hirshfield [source])