[Image: “Please Refrain Yourself,” 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 poet discovers himself alone on a darkened stage, suffering temporary amnesia. What terror not to be able to remember or to imagine what you wanted to say. A language dysfunction, a disease of imagination’s present time. The expectant audience sits unmoving and utterly silent. A small asexual voice offstage prompts the first words of a monologue in whispers, and the poet begins to speak, a time-delayed recitation of the future. A light at the back of his head comes on and moves to direct his footsteps as the ghostly unembodied voice continues to prompt him. When it stops, he asks himself: ‘What was I saying, what was it I wanted to say? This is a play I am making up and someone is directing me from the wings. I want to scratch at the back of my head where the light is coming from, but it only gutters when I swing my hand and remains out of reach. There is a silence you choose and a silence that descends on you when the prompter decides to make you nervous, and that is terrifying. I cannot memorize what I will think to say when it tells me. It is so unnewtonian it takes your breath away.’

(Bruce Whiteman [source])

…and:

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly [source])

…and:

By watching our thoughts over a period of time, we can see that the mind is operating literally ‘by itself ‘. Thoughts ‘just appear’ and keep on appearing automatically. We have this feeling that it is ‘me’ who is thinking, but this is just a conditioned reflex caused by the concept of ourself as an individual. By watching thoughts we can see how they appear unbidden, uncalled. Just try not thinking for a even a few seconds and see that it is impossible. No ‘me’ is controlling them. We may have the illusion of purposely thinking about a particular subject, but notice that the idea to purposely think about something comes by itself. Then we do it, automatically, but with the false feeling we are the ‘decider’. That feeling of being the ‘decider’ is not us, it belongs to the mind. It is something we are perceiving.

This is not proven in just a few minutes of thought watching. It often takes many months of diligent watching to really see it and to be convinced. This is because the conditioned feeling of being the ‘thinker’ is so deep that the very idea that the mind goes its own way seems ridiculous. But the payoff of this single discovery is enormous in terms of liberation and deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe.

(Galen Sharp [source: nothing canonical, but found here])

From elsewhere:

One night Werner and Jutta tune in to a scratchy broadcast in which a young man is talking in feathery, accented French about light.

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

The broadcast hisses and pops.

“What is this?” whispers Jutta.

Werner does not answer. The Frenchman’s voice is velvet. His accent is very different from Frau Elena’s, and yet his voice is so ardent, so hypnotizing, that Werner finds he can understand every word. The Frenchman talks about optical illusions, electromagnetism; there’s a pause and a peal of static, as though a record is being flipped, and then he enthuses about coal.

Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years—eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers And eventually the peat dried and became like stone, and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it into your house, and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight—sunlight one hundred million years old—is heating your home tonight….

Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, and then a piano comes on, playing a lonely song that sounds to Werner like a golden boat traveling a dark river, a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein: the houses turned to mist, the mines filled in, the smokestacks fallen, an ancient sea spilling through the streets, and the air streaming with possibility.

(Anthony Doerr [source])

…and:

# 41: Marlene Dietrich is widely said to have claimed, somewhere: “It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.” Good for her, and good for her friends. And I don’t disagree, except to add, y’know, that I can always call up my own mind. (And I bet she could, too.)

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)