[Image: “No Mowing (No Kidding),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I admit, I laughed when I saw this sign — planted, as it was, in the center of a large marshy area beside the path.]
From whiskey river:
One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine. She said “Look at how pretty the stars shine!” He said “Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine.” She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed with being out with the only man who, at that moment, knew why stars shine. Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world.
(Richard Feynman [source])
…and:
Consider the difference between the two types of globemaps of planet Earth, the physical and the political. The first is a marvelous wiggly affair, blue, green, brown, yellow, and occasionally white. The second, especially on the North American continent, is angrily scratched across with straight lines, and the one earth (and we should not forget the one air) covered with patches of contrasting colors to identify the domains of differing bands of gangsters. Which of the two more closely resembles Earth as seen from outer space?
(Alan Watts [source])
Not from whiskey river:
“This is your house,” says the poet Conrad Aiken, and you know he is talking about the human skull. “On one side there is darkness,” he warns you; “on one side there is light.” He wrote better than he knew, that sad-voiced man, for nature had pondered the problem before him. On the table as I write lies the skull of a relative of ours, a spectral creature which flits from tree to tree in the night-time forests of Borneo. It is about the size of a kitten’s skull, but it possesses a most remarkable feature. If the human cranium were built to similar proportions, every aspect of the human face would be squeezed to provide for two great bony saucers with projecting rims. These saucers would occupy and extend far beyond the area now represented by our eye sockets. We would then possess the enormous owl eyes of a creature who is totally nocturnal but who must leap and spring about in the midnight darkness of a tropical rain forest.
This is your house, said nature, in essence, to the spectral tarsier, and the light, what there is of it, must be made to come in. This is your house, she also said to man, but your eyes will be day eyes. You will not need to cherish every beam of moonlight, or the spark of a star through a leaf. You will see what you must, but leave the dark alone. So this far-off relative of ours, with the thin and delicate fingers of a man, lives the life of a ghost. And man, who bumps his head and fumbles in the dark because of his small day-born eyes, fears the ghosts of the dark above all things.
(Loren Eiseley [source])
…and:
Recycling Center
The labeled bins on the California hillside
catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars.
Families pull up with their interesting trash
and start unloading: Here, sweetheart,
this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle
hits with a thud. Diet soda cans
spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun-
permitting bottles from a day’s pleasure
are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children
who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic,
as matter greets itself and starts to change.What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered
into the bin, we could see it waiting there,
could believe everything is alive and specific
and personal, could tell by the tilt of one
bottle against the next that it’s difficult
to be singular, to have identity, to keep
an outline safe in the terrors of space.
Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts,
tossing it in; and the bottle lies there
in the two o’clock position, temporarily itself,
before being swept into the destiny of mixture…And what if some don’t want to. What if some items
in the piles of paper, the orange and blue
envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers
pressing through the cloudy windows
with our names, some among those pale sheets curled
with moisture, would rather stay as they are.
It’s spring; we’ve thrown away mistakes—
tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized
drafts of poems—that which was blank
shall be made blank again—but what if
that failed letter wants to be a failure,
not go back to pulp, and thought…
Or across the parking lot, where light insists
on changing the dull cans, a few cans don’t want
to be changed, though they should want to,
shouldn’t they, should want to be changed
by light, light which is called sweet reason,
honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes
from the parking lot looking helpless
though it is matter that has been betrayed…All afternoon the bins are carried off
by those who know about where things should go,
who are used to the clatter the cans make,
pouring out; and the families, who believed change
would heal them are pulling away in their vans,
slightly embarrassed by that which refused…
The bins fill again with hard substances,
the hills bear down with their fugitive gold,
the pampas grass bending low to protect
what was briefly certain and alive with hope.
(Brenda Hillman [source])
___________________
Aside: One side effect of this long-running series of Friday dances with whiskey river is that one or the other of us periodically repeats ourselves. In my case, at least, these echoes are generally inadvertent… Brenda Hillman’s “Recycling Center,” as it happens, cropped up here almost eleven years ago.
Leave a Reply