Putting Wings on Your Say-So Doesn’t Mean It’ll Fly

[Image: “Oodnadatta track”; found on Flickr, taken by a photographer who identifies himself as simply “Brett.” The subject is a sculpture called “Planehenge,” in Australia’s Mutonia Sculpture Park. (The short bit about the sculpture park begins around 5:25 into that video.) The motorcycle is apparently Brett’s own, not part of the Planehenge work.]

From whiskey river:

Listen, listen. In a filmed interview I conducted with the writer James Baldwin, more than 40 years ago, he said, “No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that,” Baldwin continued, “I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example,” he went on, “are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous,” he finished. Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological and even spiritual statement, not just a political or racial or social one. He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us. We continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.

(Ken Burns [source])

…and (first stanza):

The Sixth Meditation: Faces of God

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve.
To insist we are damned because a country girl
talked to the snake one afternoon long ago.
Children must starve in Somalia for that,
and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities.
It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes
of molten lead. Because she was confused
by happiness that first time anyone said
she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be
the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks
and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also
created in His image.

____________

The forest must
not show the other face: slugs and grubs,
nematodes, and greenhead flies laying eggs
so their white larvae squirm in the filth.
Tent caterpillars, high in the trees, swarm out
from their offensive shrouds to eat the green
luxury bare. Spiders cast their nets in the dark.
Aphids gorge on lice. The braconid wasps lay eggs
under the skin of sphinx caterpillars so the larvae
will bore their way out through the host.
The other faces of God are not mediated by our
heart’s need. We are not stone, nor even jungle.
We are animals haunted by love. Not spirits
buried in flesh, but the flesh itself.
And the spirit we are is not separated from it.

(Jack Gilbert [source])

Not from whiskey river:

[341]

The greatest stress. How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.” If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to crave noting more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [source])

…and:

“To a forest,” Mannon said, “we might appear as forest fires. Hurricanes. Dangers. What moves quickly is dangerous, to a plant. The rootless would be alien, terrible.”

(Ursula K. LeGuin [source])

…and:

Poem For A Lady [*]
Whose Voice I Like

so he said: you ain’t got no talent
if you didn’t have a face
you wouldn’t be nobody

and she said: god created heaven and earth
and all that’s Black within them

so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit
they tell me plenty sisters
take care better business than you

and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings
and all good things to eat
and said: “that’s good”

so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under
yo skirt and been giving you the big play
you’d a had to come on uptown like everybody else

and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib
from adam and said we will call this woeman and her
name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts
that simone may sing a song

and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu

so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
and i’ll show you a hungry person

(Nikki Giovanni [source])

_____

* Aside: the “lady” of Nikki Giovanni’s poem was Lena Horne.

[back]