See the Mountain… Ask the Questions… Watch for Answers

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[Video: “Mars in 4K: The Ultimate Edition,” compiled from the NASA originals by an independent filmmaker who runs a Patreon project dubbed “ElderFox Documentaries.” The video’s description as posted at YouTube says: “A few years ago I threw together some Mars images and rendered them in 4k. Back then, I had little editing knowledge. The video went on to get over 60 million views. It was something that hadn’t been done before, and was a case of the right place at the right time. I’m not expecting this video to come close to the view count of the original, but I just wanted to do it justice and give you all something nice to watch.”]

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

My eleven-year-old son came to me recently and in a tone of patient suffering, asked, “How much longer do I have to go to school?”

“About fifteen years,” I said.

“Oh! Lord,” he said despondently. “Do I have to?”

“I ’m afraid so. It’s terrible and I’m not going to try to tell you it isn’t. But I can tell you this — if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher and that is a wonderful thing.”

“Did you find one?”

“I found three,” I said.

It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not so easy and it is not for the most part very fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

(John Steinbeck [source])

…and:

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.

Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.

(Alan Watts [source: nothing canonical; quoted in various forms here and there, e.g. here])

…and:

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial.

(Tom Robbins [source])

From elsewhere:

I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already.

Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein [source])

…and:

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

# 999, or Thereabouts (Epilogue)

Keep walking. Just keep walking: as fast as you can, no faster. (Perhaps it’s not walking, as such… No: it’s definitely not walking, as such…) Maybe you go just a few steps, and then you have to rest; maybe you can go a mile before stopping to catch your breath. Should a passerby offer a lift, and you feel like talking, ride with them for a distance — take a load off. And then when your paths diverge, walk some more. Walk. Walk…

There will come a time when you walk for just two steps, before needing to rest. And then you will walk just one more step, and need to rest again. And perhaps if you’re lucky, there will be a bench (no luck involved, there’s always a bench), and you can rest on the bench, and say honestly and without regret: I’ve walked enough.

Look back the way you came then. How far you’ve walked! How much higher you are now than when you started! You didn’t even realize you were ascending — it was just putting one foot ahead of the other, over and over…

Close your eyes. Remember the first hundred steps. Remember that odd building you passed, the one with the funny turrets, and the first passerby who stopped for you and that strange story they shared — what was it, something about a pet chinchilla? — and that stand of willows in the middle of the field, by the little creek, and the way the startlingly purple sun rose on the first day after the first night you slept in the open. Remember the one-thousandth one hundred steps, the bus station you passed, with all the waiting taxis… the older driver who stopped to talk but did not offer you a ride… That first night it rained…

Rest.

Rest.

Rest.

Rest… and always, always remember.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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Finding Your Way on the Route You Already Know

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[Image: “Homeward (2019),” 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:

The Dead

At night the dead come down to the river to drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old photographs.
They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures,
which are cracked and yellow.
Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.
They tell each other stories.
They make so much noise
they wake us
as they did when we were children and they stayed up
drinking all night in the kitchen.

(Susan Mitchell [source])

…and:

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein [source])

…and:

One afternoon, a man named Harry went mountain climbing. All in all, things were going very well. Then suddenly, the path he was walking on gave way, taking Harry with it. With flailing arms, Harry managed to grab a small branch on the side of the mountain. Holding on for dear life, he screamed, “Help! Help! Is anybody up there?”

Miraculously, the clouds parted, and a beam of light illuminated Harry as he hung tenuously from the branch. A voice—clearly the voice of God—spoke directly to Harry and said: “Harry, I will save you. Let go, Harry; I will save you. Let go.”

Harry thought hard about this. Then, with a sudden burst of conviction, he looked up the mountain and shouted, “Is anybody else up there?”

(Benjamin Shield [source])

From elsewhere:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

(Agnes De Mille, in conversation with Martha Graham [source])

…and:

Glory-of-the-Atlantic
(excerpt)

It’s early, low tide, the beach just coming to life:
devout ladies davening in lounge chairs,
the homeless roused from hard-worn sleeping bags,
joggers, skulkers, cabana boys unfolding hotel umbrellas,
icing down the day’s allotment of Michelob Ultra.
Tourists are wandering down from the boardwalk
to the timidly breaking surf, couples from Toronto,
jet-lagged families from France and Brazil,
dazed, sun-dazzled, amazed—one guy actually
staggers at the water’s edge, staring straight past me,
and I can see on his face what he wants to know—
am I still on the plane, am I sleeping, or is this real?
Before he can ask, I slide from the sandbar
backward into the water’s warm, saline embrace.
Of course it signifies the womb as well as the void.
Of course death absorbs the living, a mirror
made of sponge. Of course we travel between realms
far exceeding in mystery water, earth, and air.
Of course we leave behind a mark, a volt,
a wave-eaten relic. Of course nothing endures
but that which forges its armature of grief,
the soul. Of course it’s real, of course it’s a dream,
you’re adrift, you’re asleep, you’re on a plane
traversing tropospheric darkness, you’re watching
sunlight strike prisms against the windows of your eyes,
you’re underwater, it’s real, it’s a dream,
a voyage, an immersion—any day now, any century,
any minute we will arrive at our final destination.

(Campbell McGrath [source])

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From Arriving to Having Arrived — and Then What?

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[Image: “Stay Put,” by photographer Akiva Shapero. Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). In their different ways, the couple in this photo struck me as iconically impatient and dissatisfied with their setting: looking elsewhere, apparently trembling with a desire to get moving — elsewhere, anywhere — and, in any case, physically there but psychically adrift.]

From whiskey river:

Whence all this hurry to arrive at a state? Are you not already face-to-face with the eternal mystery? Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Watchful Waiting
(excerpt)

It’s where you are in your imagination
That’s important, for the life of simply staying where you are
Is a shadow’s life, that leaves you by yourself, alone and scared.
Why can’t we just move on? The light up ahead is soft
And seems to beckon us, glowing with a promise of beginning
Once again, as if there were still time.

(John Koethe [source])

…and:

Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me
(excerpt)

…I’m the one into whose
arms you fall when you fall through all of space. The one
who tells you infinity is another hoax. I’m the being
who has no manners, or mannerisms. I have no style.
I settle on nothing; I decide nothing. This is not
a final place. There is no such place. I am the being
who whistles to you and distracts you from self-absorption.
I am the mosquito in your ear, an iridescent fly, a lightning bug.
This clearing is full of false lights, flickers that stop
when you look. I’m the being that’s tricky because you
try to make me conform to your senses. You
have no senses here. You have nothing.

(Alice Notley [source])

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