Stunned by the View from the Edge of the Known

[Image: “Map of Nowhere,” by Grayson Perry. Per the museum’s description card where I saw this work: “Map of Nowhere takes inspiration from the Ebstorf map, a hand-painted thirteenth-century mappa mundi (world map) from northern Germany. The Ebstorf map depicted the world centered on Jerusalem and encircled by the head, hands, and feet of Jesus Christ. In his version, Grayson Perry has created a wry commentary on both modern life and the mappa mundi genre by replacing Christ with his own self-portrait. Filling Perry’s orb, the center of which is an ‘island of doubt,’ are highly detailed depictions of buildings, plant and animal life, and anatomy with contemporary labels such as ‘“’lifestyle guru,’ ‘Starbucks,’ and ‘Shopaholic.'” For a better, enlargeable view of the etching, and Perry’s own extensive commentary, see here — it’s worth it!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Landscape Mode

Overlooking the Cumberland River,
Clarksville, Tennessee,
early November 1996

In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than
earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray
inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river,

ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along,
pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity
of Hollywood in its prime, the eye climbs down to greet

with shining gusto trees along the shore, Opryland
beyond the frame, the blue horizon hidden in a sea
of possibilities. And beyond this there’s jazz: Jimmy Giuffre’s

“Train on the River” stretched out strong like a pet cat
—and that’s that. But not quite. This poem paints
poorly what sketchers and colorists do best. The rest

should come out empty, allowing you to fill in your own
basic emptiness, your openness, your self-portrait
forged and cataloged; on quiet exhibit, on temporary loan.

Descended from clouds immensely more ancient than China,
you never quite becoming the background, the field in a sky
whose subtle earthiness sails over our heads altogether.

(Al Young [source])

…and:

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and:

We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the color of our notions about what we do know: If we call death a sleep it’s because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

But that’s how all life is; at least that’s how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but it is also a table. We sit down at the table not at the pinetree.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

From elsewhere:

I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have written the play or while I am not writing at all. I believe that artistic creation is spontaneous. It certainly is so for me… Fantasy is revealing; it is a method of cognition; everything that is imagined is true; nothing is true if it is not imagined.

(Eugene Ionesco [source])

…and:

When you think about it, for sheer bulk there’s more art done with Crayolas than with anything else. There must be billions of sheets of paper in every country in the world, in billions of boxes and closets and attics and cupboards, covered with billions of pictures in crayon. The imagination of the human race poured out like a river in high and lowe paces. Even presidents and prime ministers and generals all used Crayolas sometime in their lives.

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air—explode softly—and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth—boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either—not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. A child who touched one wouldn’t have his hand blown off.

(Robert Fulghum [source])

…and:

The Conversation

Fireflies, Col. Glenn calls them—
banging the capsule’s wall to prove
their movement. This
will be the gesture Hollywood

claims as history—how space
dazzles even the seasoned airman,
maddens like Titania’s touch.
The movie version sees

what he sees: Florida yawn, Delta yawp,
a sunrise inside every hour,
lightning over the Indian Ocean.
Yet the operatic soundtrack, paced

in gilded silence, is not what he hears.
Wonder-ese is not the language
he speaks. For this,
we turn to the transcript. Pilot

to Cap Com; Cap Com to Pilot.
This is Friendship 7, going to manual.
Ah, Roger, Friendship 7.
Pilot, Texas Cap Com, Cape Canaveral.

Cap Coms chiming in from Canary,
Canton, Hawaii, Zanzibar, India,
Woomera: every visual check
on the gyros, inverter temp,

every correction to pitch and yaw,
fuel, oxygen, Ah, Roger, Ah, Over.
Say again your instructions please.
Over. Do you read? Standby.

You can be honest. This
is Godspeed-less, workaday chatter.
This is not what you’d save if
the National Archives were in flames.

You’d grab those proclamations.
You would cart the Magna.
You’d roll up the Constitution
like a favorite dorm-room Van Gogh,

and run. But I’ve got this one.
Because in these pages
my grandfather lives forever—
a Navy captain charged

with Glenn’s vitals, stretching
his stethoscope across 162 miles
and 18 tracking stations.
I hear him in each pressure check.

I see him biting his lip,
leaning toward a bank of dials
while the retropackage breaks, burns.
No one knows if the heat shield

will hold. Captain Pruett
goes unnamed. This
is how history claims us:
not in the gesture of one but

in the conversation of many,
the talk that gets the job done.
We climb into the syrup-can capsule
to circle the Earth three times.

The miraculous swarm, we realize,
is condensation. The light
will wink at us,
flake and ice of our own breath.

(Sandra Beasley [source])