In the Chaotic Landscape Between the Ears

[Image: “The Inescapable Subject (Mini-Hoop Toss, Santa Monica, California),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (italicized portion):

I am not one who has attained the Tao. I would like to house my spirit within my body, to nourish my virtue by mildness, and to travel in ether by becoming a void. But I cannot do it yet. I tried to house my spirit within my body, but suddenly it disappeared outside; I tried to nourish my virtue by mildness, but suddenly it shifted to intensity of feeling; and I tried to wander in ether by keeping in the void, but suddenly there sprang up in me a desire. And so, being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it. Therefore strange were my travels.

(T’u Lung (also known as T’u Ch’ihshui), translated by Lin Yutang [source])

…and:

Wide, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written: In the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as we write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.

(Edmond Jabès [source])

…and (ibid.):

The Meadow

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,

and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself.

We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.

(Robert Musil [source])

…and, from whiskey river proper:

Barbarians

Here and there, between trees,
cows lie down in the forest
in the midafternoon
as though sleep were an idea
for which they were willing
to die.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

Not from whiskey river:

I have always been a hoarder of human emotional experience and knot my scars together like a fisherman’s net, the molting crab caught inside of which is my own damn self. My heart has never been blank, or capable of anything besides angrily clicking its crabby claws and offering my unprotected carapace for mercy or for frying.

(Juliet Grames [source])

…and:

Writing is a damnable compulsion. Someone who can stand and watch the person he loves most die and, without wanting to, pick out everything worth describing to the last convulsion, that’s a real writer. A philistine would protest: how awful! But it’s not awful, it’s just suffering. It’s not a career, not something you pick like a desk job. The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don’t write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.

(Stanis?aw Lem [source])

…and:

Spaces We Leave Empty

The jade slipped from my wrist
with the smoothness of water
leaving the mountains,

silk falling from a shoulder,
melon slices sliding across the tongue,
the fish returning.

The bracelet worn since my first birthday
cracked into thousand-year-old eggshells.
The sound could be heard
ringing across the water

where my mother woke in her sleep crying thief.
Her nightgown slapped in the wind
as he howled clutching his hoard.

The cultured pearls.
The bone flutes.
The peppermint disks of jade.

The clean hole
in the center, Heaven:
the spaces we left empty.

(Cathy Song [source])

…and:

#24: “Empty space” is not empty: it’s stuffed to the gills with energy, and therefore with mass. Similarly, saying “I don’t remember” — an event, a face, a factoid — does not suggest a hole in the fabric of your past; that transparent gap continues, even now, to shimmer, to vibrate like a note played on a guitar string. It sounds, still, within your soul, at a frequency you simply can’t sense.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists.)