John – Page 2

High Time to Find Your Center

November 15, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “View to the East, 10:12:45 PM,” 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:

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and (ibid.):

How many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to change it, and one not to change it.

(Anonymous […but here’s one source])

Not from whiskey river:

Dream Job

Editorial Assistant. Executive Assistant. Administrative Assistant. Writing
Center Director. Writing Teacher. Receptionist. Poetry Fellow. Technical
Writer. Barista. Waitress. Applying for three jobs a day doesn’t get me a
job. I get an offer from the diner and then the diner burns down. I flop an
interview at the local Subway. I make a couple hundred a month writing
blogs for hotels I cannot afford. I write a blog about Benjamin Franklin’s
Ghost House. It’s a chalk outline in the ground where his house was torn
down. I have a Ghost Life. My friends all get jobs. I know because they
each come to the bar with a polished eye around their neck. The eyes can
foresee only positive futures. In the future, my friends eat takeout and
rescue a dog. They have children they’ve made on purpose and call by
fashionable names. I try to look into their job-eyes, and the eyes close
their bulbous lids. The lids make a horrible smacking sound like someone
closing their mouth to go hmmmm—then not saying what everyone knows
they want to say. Was my phone voice too weak? Did my neck look too
brittle to hold a full-size job-eye? The lease is running out much faster
than my life is. Every day, my apartment gets one-cubic-inch smaller. The
walls get so short I only have room for the bed. I lie there and dream of
having any real job.

(Nicole Connolly [source])

…and:

The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities—a lot of religions have local deities, presiding spirits, geniuses of the place. You could imagine that in those [old country] songs Kentucky or the Red River is a spirit to which the singer prays, that they mourn the dreamtime before banishment, when the singer lived among the gods who were not phantasms but geography, matter, earth itself.

There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

How many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb?
The peach blossoms fall softly on the warty old frog.

(Bhikkhu Sujato [source])

Introducing a New Science-Fiction Story

November 13, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: one of 23kpc’s inspirations — science-fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul‘s rendering, from the mid-20th century, of an asteroid repurposed as a spaceship.]

For a couple of months now, over on Substack, I’ve been building an ongoing work-in-progress — a (sort of) science fiction novel, called 23kpc. I thought long-time RAMH readers might want to check it out, especially if you’re at all interested in — or at least willing to try — science fiction.

Now, I use the term “science fiction” advisedly. 23kpc is not serious science fiction, and will quite possibly offer few satisfactions to fans of that sort. The first-person protagonist, Guy Landis, is a private eye aboard a twenty-Nth-century spaceship: a retrofitted asteroid, now a luxury liner, dubbed the ISS Tascheter. The “vibe” falls roughly into the subgenre of something called Decopunk: science fiction with a mid-20th-century sensibility straight out of 1930s Hollywood. Guy’s not at all techno-savvy and must rely on others to explain the ship’s workings, as needed. There’s a lot of so-called “handwaving,” in other words: stuff just sorta-kinda works, without explanation. If you insist on knowing the mechanics of how the ship is moving, or how the passengers and crew live to survive what will likely be a centuries-long trip to the other side of the galaxy… well, save us both the distress at quite possibly never knowing, and just move along.

Otherwise, you might try out the first installment, called “Reviving an Inert Narrative,” posted in early September. (Each posted installment includes a link to the next installment, when the latter becomes available.) While I welcome subscribers, a subscription — or even a Substack account — shouldn’t be necessary (for now) to read that post and the subsequent ones. It’s up to 18 chapters so far, with a new post every Friday/Saturday.

(There’s also a reader’s guide available, but it won’t be of much use to you unless you’ve been following the story all along.)

Turning to a Compass Point that Does Not Exist

November 8, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “In Another Direction” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river (highlighted portion):

The Poet
(1644-1694)

To suddenly perceive the world as if it were something you had never seen before, and to grasp for an instant, mutely enduring the shock of total comprehension, the outrageous unlikelihood of being here to witness it, and of its being there at all—this is a matter of grace, but also a cruel and conditional ecstasy, one no mental effort can prolong, one that in fact consists of the grievous poignancy with which it bleeds away, fading and vanishing almost before it has fully begun, lasting only long enough to leave you with the familiar sense of missing out on something, raised to a more desolate power by the discovery of what it is. Look at this staggering sight—new leaves shining with a light that’s come here from the sun. Even if they can’t recall it, or outright deny it, everyone knows of this eerie event for which they found no name. But how many will spend their days readying themselves for what may well never recur; how many will devote the rest of their lives to the preposterous discipline of waiting, waiting and maintaining constant vigilance for a glimpse of what they can no longer see; of inwardly orienting themselves to a direction that does not exist. And who among them will gradually shed, year by year, every vestige or hope of a place in the world, becoming increasingly familiar with the taste of fear? This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.

(Franz Wright [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

(Jalaluddin Rumi [source])

…and:

What matters is that you allow your heart—not your ego—to rule your life. Then very little matters because you will be a humble person and you’ll take most of life as it comes. If it rains, you get wet; if they don’t show up on time, you wait; if they don’t pay you, you eat less; if they don’t love you, so what, you didn’t come to please them anyway; if they don’t think you’re special, that’s marvelous, it frees you from having to thank them for their compliments. If life doesn’t go the way you want, accept the way it does go, use it as your teacher.

(Stuart Wilde [source])

Not from whiskey river at all:

From the polyphonic clangor of holiday meals, before the quarrels began with eternal enmities sworn, another great story emerged in fragments, intertwined with the one about war: the story of origins.

Men and women began to appear, some nameless except for a kinship title, “father,” “grandfather,” “great-grandmother,” reduced to a character trait, a funny or tragic anecdote, the Spanish flu, the embolism, or kick from a horse that carried them off—and children who hadn’t lived to be our age, a multitude of characters we’d never know. Over years, and with no small effort, the tangled threads of family were unraveled, until at last the “two sides” could be clearly distinguished, the people who were something to us by blood from those who were “nothing.”

(Annie Ernaux [source])

…and:

I Have Folded My Sorrows

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday’s pains.
Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters.
Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.

The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;
The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity.

(Bob Kaufman [source])

…and:

Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods.

If no one heard it, did it happen?

If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

(V.E. Schwab [source])

…and:

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.

And he answered:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.

When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

(Kahlil Gibran [source])

We Choose What to Fear and What to Embrace

November 1, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: The so-called “Cosmic Bat Nebula,” officially designated Lynds’ Catalog of Dark Nebulae — i.e., LDN — 43 (photo credited to Mark Hanson and Mike Selby). Spotted this photo at NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” (APOD) post for October 27; the caption there notes: “Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.”]

From whiskey river:

This Only

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here.
Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,
When the first snow fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

(Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Robert Hass [source; not exactly canonical, but it’ll do for now])

…and:

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

(Roberto Bolaño [source])

Not from whiskey river:

There were dead children in every family, carried off by sudden incurable diseases: diarrhea, convulsions, diphtheria. All that remained of their brief time on earth were tombstones shaped like baby cribs and inscribed “an angel in heaven.” There were photos that people showed while furtively wiping their eyes, and hushed, almost serene conversations that frightened surviving children, who believed they were living on borrowed time. They would not be safe until the age of twelve or fifteen, having made it through whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, mumps, ear infections, and bronchitis every winter, escaped tuberculosis and meningitis, at which time people would say they’d “filled out”…

The blurred and damaged photo of a little girl standing on a bridge in front of a guardrail. She has short hair, slender thighs, and knobby knees. She holds her hand over her eyes to block the sun. She is laughing. Written on the back of the photo, Ginette 1937. On her tombstone: died at the age of six on Holy Thursday, 1938.

(Annie Ernaux [source])

…and:

Halloween

Some yellow sunflowers open down the street,
A ladder is open beneath someone’s apple tree.
Beneath a dead sky the contours are flattened.
So the land of the dead is closer today.

The land of the dead, they say, is closer.
But what if my lot lies with the living?
Out in the yard a long-billed bird eats something from dust.
Its throat has a dark patch in the shape of a smile
But full, as if its throat had been slit open.

But look, the bird is still pecking and alive.
Elsewhere, a sports game, ropes of rain come down and open the earth.
Here it’s so dry they’d just roll off the dust.

But what if my loves, like the bird, are living?
What if my loves, like the bird, are living for now?

Most of the apples have already fallen.
The sunflowers turn into dusty spiked balls.
But what if my land is the land of the living?
The bird from the dust takes flight
Then turns multiple—

A handful of birds rising in the dead sky
Opened to receive them.
But my loves for now are here and living, and I want more of them.
Like the bird on the ground I pick what I need from the dust.

(Lindsay Turner [source])

…and:

#61: We vote (we insist) for the sake of a future we desire: a future peopled with laughing children, adults who validate or complement our own tastes and preferences with their own, strangers who wish us no ill (as we wish for them). Yet we vote also in rebuke of the remembered past: those horrors which haunt our minds from nightmares we experienced ourselves or witnessed in the lives of others, and never want to live through or see again. At the conjunction of those two impulses lies the empty oval we fill with ink, the switch we choose to throw, the thumb we turn up or down. To vote only from the one impulse — the smiling hope or the fretful anger — is to betray the holiness of the responsibility not just as citizens, but as human beings: to kid only ourselves (if not anyone else) that we are good.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

Strangers on Our Own Turf, in Our Own Time

October 25, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “In Clover,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging.

(John O’Donohue [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally – arriving boat – wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change—
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

(Jorie Graham [source])

Not from whiskey river:

There are a hundred kinds of silence.

There’s the thick silence of places long sealed shut, and the muffled silence of ears stoppered up. The empty silence of the dead, and the heavy silence of the dying.

There is the hollow silence of a man who has stopped praying, and the airy silence of an empty synagogue, and the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves.

There is the awkward silence that fills the space between people who don’t know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don’t know where or how to start.

(V.E. Schwab [source])

…and:

If You Said You Would Come With Me

In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills. The clouds were near and very moist. I was walking along the pavement with Anna, enjoying the scattered scenery. Suddenly a sound like a deep bell came from behind us. We both turned to look. “It’s the words you spoke in the past, coming back to haunt you,” Anna explained. “They always do, you know.” Indeed I did. Many times this deep bell-like tone had intruded itself on my thoughts, scrambling them at first, then rearranging them in apple-pie order. “Two crows,” the voice seemed to say, “were sitting on a sundial in the God- given sunlight. Then one flew away.”

“Yes… and then?” I wanted to ask, but I kept silent. We turned into a courtyard and walked up several flights of stairs to the roof, where a party was in progress. “This is my friend Hans,” Anna said by way of introduction. No one paid much attention and several guests moved away to the balustrade to admire the view of orchards and vineyards, approaching their autumn glory. One of the women however came to greet us in a friendly manner. I was wondering if this was a “harvest home,” a phrase I had often heard but never understood.

“Welcome to my home… well, to our home,” the woman said gaily. “As you can see, the grapes are being harvested.” It seemed she could read my mind. “They say this year’s vintage will be a mediocre one, but the sight is lovely, nonetheless. Don’t you agree, Mr…”

“Hans,” I replied curtly. The prospect was indeed a lovely one, but I wanted to leave. Making some excuse I guided Anna by the elbow toward the stairs and we left.

“That wasn’t polite of you,” she said dryly.

“Honey, I’ve had enough of people who can read your mind. When I want it done I’ll go to a mind reader.”

“I happen to be one and I can tell you what you’re thinking is false. Listen to what the big bell says: ‘We are strangers on our own turf, in our own time.’ You should have paid attention. Now adjustments will have to be made.”

(John Ashbery [source])

…and:

Vapor Wake

Intelligence came on
about seven o’clock
that evening, without
any warning, for the
first time in two or three
months—I’d been crying,
my eyes were Christmas bulbs,
love had dropped its honeydew
and my mind was splattered
when suddenly I heard Edith Piaf
singing in the next room
and remembered that pretty souvenirs
were manufactured after the war
to be bought by soldiers
who had greatly suffered,
pink rayon handkerchiefs
with the flags of two countries
embroidered there—lo,
I could leave these shores,
I could sail home, I could
take something with me,
I could leave something in
return, and at that word
it came back, alive.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

Dream of What You Want, Then Choose It

October 18, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Choose wisely you must,” by photographer Pasi Välkkynen. Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

—awright so we’re all
gonna die but now is the
time to sing & see, to be
humble, sacrificed, late,
crazy, talkative, foolish,
proud, indispensable, early
sane, silent, serious

(Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches [source])

…and:

“I can see,” Miss Emily said, “that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.”

“It might be just some trend that came and went,” I said. “But for us, it’s our life.”

“Yes, that’s true. But think of it. You were better off than many who came before you. And who knows what those who come after you will have to face.”

(Kazuo Ishiguro [source])

Not from whiskey river:

At the End of the Endless Decade

For years had anyone needed me
to spell the word commiserate

I’d have disappointed them. I envy
people who are more excited

by etymology than I am, but not
the ones who can explain how

music works—I wonder whether
the critic who wrote

that the Cocteau Twins were the voice
of god still believes it. Why not,

what else would god sound like.
Even though I know better, when I see

the word misericordia I still think
suffering, not forgiveness;

when we commiserate we are united
not in mercy but in misery,

so let’s go ahead and call this abscess
of history the Great Commiseration.

The difference
between affliction and affection

is a flick, a lick—but check
again, what lurks in the letters

is “lie,” and what kind of luck
is that. As the years pile up

our friends become more vocal
about their various damages:

Won’t you let me monetize
your affliction, says my friend

the corporation. When I try to enter
the name of any city

it autocorrects to Forever:
I’m spending a week in Forever,

Forever was hotter than ever
this year, Forever’s expensive

but oh the museums,
and all of its misery’s ours.

(Mark Bibbins [source])

…and:

Vote Your Way to Hell

It’s a long and arduous journey.
Starving with numbness.
Tired of mixing kindness and sabotage.
You can’t trust instinct.
After the election, you can’t believe the weather is wrong again.
The sky cheats on your speech.
The process is complicated and precarious.
Disappointed, there’s no word of a sad sneer.
Nothing has changed.

What else do you expect?
This is already a hell, paved by your blood and passion.
You’d rather go back to the womb, it’s warmer.
May other reckless souls be consumed.

Even so, I want everyone to vote.
Vote your way to an alternative hell.
Congratulations!
You’re part of the construction of our living inferno.

Here, keep cracking and burning bones as fuel.
The walls scream for mercy, sounding like your singing voice.
Many innocent young souls are recognized.
Vote! You deserve limbo, not war.
We need to keep walking in the dark, searching for hellfire and passing offspring an improbable spring and a maybe sunrise.

(Chia-Lun Chang [source])

The Rules

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

Never go outside the expertise of your people.

Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

Keep the pressure on.

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

(Saul Alinsky [source])

What We See When We Finally See

October 11, 2024 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Mirrored Self-Portrait on the Threshold of COVID,” by John E. Simpson. Taken in mid-December, 2019, it wasn’t meant to be flattering in any way. (Which is kind of the point here, today.) And, for the record: no, I never did get the virus, then or since. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Storm on the Island

We are prepared: we build our houses squat,
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
This wizened earth has never troubled us
With hay, so, as you see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees
Which might prove company when it blows full
Blast: you know what I mean — leaves and branches
Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you listen to the thing you fear
Forgetting that it pummels your house too.
But there are no trees, no natural shelter.
You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Turned savage. We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo,
We are bombarded with the empty air.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

…and:

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

(Frederick Buechner [source])

…and (last two sentences):

I found myself delighted by the language and imagery of the early monks. Here, for example, is the seventh-century monk of Sinai, John Climacus, on the subject of pride, from a book that is still read in Orthodox monasteries during Lent:

Pride is a denial of God, an invention of the devil, contempt for men. It is the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of barrenness. It is a flight from God’s help, the harbinger of madness, the author of downfall. It is the cause of diabolical possession, the source of anger, the gateway of hypocrisy. It is the fortress of demons, the custodian of sins, the source of hardheartedness. It is the denial of compassion, a bitter pharisee, a cruel judge. It is the foe of God. It is the root of blasphemy.

Welcome to the truth: that’s the feeling I have when I read such a text. And the monk Evagrius, the first to write down and attempt to codify the beliefs and practices of the desert monks with regard to sin (which they called “demons” or “bad thoughts”), not only provides me with a means of understanding my own “bad thoughts” but also with the tools to confront them. His view of anger is typically sensible. Anger, he wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control.

(Kathleen Norris [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.

(G.K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

“The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk…

“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price… And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

(V.E. Schwab [source])

…and:

A Letter in October

Dawn comes later and later now,
and I, who only a month ago
could sit with coffee every morning
watching the light walk down the hill
to the edge of the pond and place
a doe there, shyly drinking,

then see the light step out upon
the water, sowing reflections
to either side—a garden
of trees that grew as if by magic—
now see no more than my face,
mirrored by darkness, pale and odd,

startled by time. While I slept,
night in its thick winter jacket
bridled the doe with a twist
of wet leaves and led her away,
then brought its black horse with harness
that creaked like a cricket, and turned

the water garden under. I woke,
and at the waiting window found
the curtains open to my open face;
beyond me, darkness. And I,
who only wished to keep looking out,
must now keep looking in.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

He rolled down his window. The morning cold came roaring in at him and he hung his head out the window and into the wind; it roared around and over and into the pores of his face and scalp, blurring his vision and scrubbing scrubbing his skin but leaving untouched the scent at his core. A thousand questions glittered down at him from the sky, one question per star, only the least consequential of which were sure to be forthcoming from the Jaguar owner’s insurance company but for the most part unanswerable questions about what he was — well, thought he was — and what he wanted (or, well, all right: thought he wanted) to be, and what he had done and would have to do now, what he could do now and what he would never be able to do again. Lined up behind a tractor trailer which was mysteriously obeying the speed limit, on a wild impulse Webster reached forward and shut off the Galaxie’s headlights.

Bobbing like a cork, borne on desire, face to the wind. Heart racing, alone in the dark.

(JES [source])

The Woodsmoke Tang of Elegy in the Autumn Air

October 4, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Willows at Sunset,” by Vincent Van Gogh. Specifically, these willows are “pollarded” willows. Pollarding is the horticultural practice of trimming the new branches of a tree — willows, crape myrtles, etc. — every few years, which serves several practical purposes (including ornamental). The “pollard” refers to the bulbous knob where the new branches grew, which itself grows over time as new material gets added. Says the site where I found this image: “[Van Gogh] used the image of pollarded willows in several paintings, and it seems to have been a form that he was attracted to. There is something stark and rather sinister about the truncated trees, particularly in this picture, as their spiky branches appear to form a grill across the picture surface and in front of the great, glowing sun.”]

From whiskey river:

October

I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.

Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.

Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.

This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.

(Don Thompson [source])

…and (italicized lines):

I Imagine the Gods

I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too broke to afford even the hundred grams
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,
past the Street of the Moon
and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,
the Street of Silence and the Street
of the Little Pissing. We can give you
wisdom, they say in their rich voices.
Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,
the Algerian student with her huge eyes
who timidly invited me to her room
when I was too young and bewildered
that first year in Paris.
Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

(Jack Gilbert [source])

Not from whiskey river:

On the Three Forms of Water
(excerpt)

We are liquid and we are solid, oceanic
matter cloaked in the garment of being.

As for the ocean: she is coming to collect us
and gather us back into herself, as when,
long ago, your mother picked you up early
from the nurse’s office at school,
and gave you a kiss, and put you to bed,
where you slept without a care in the world.

(Campbell McGrath [source])

New Orleans Love Poem

As my tongue runs
down your spine in bed,
outside my parents’ house
sea levels are rising,
the city filling, flooding,
predicted to disappear
in a hundred years. Outside,
the sky is glazed with light,
soap white. The Mississippi
shimmers. So much beauty.
So how wrong is it
to stay in this room?
To hold each other,
to keep our bodies
safe and alone together?
This house—pink stucco
latticed with mold,
water bubbles in the streets
from storm drains. Asphalt cracks.
And on our screens
bad news unfurls—
War. Fire. Drought.
In my childhood room, you mouth me open.
I close my hands
over your shoulders
then remember driving
to pick up our daughters
while a story about “ecological grief”
played on NPR,
the summer after my mother died.
Outside: magnolia tree lashed with rain.
Tongue. Mouth. Hair.
How wrong is it now to take solace
in the ordinary?
We slide out of our clothes.
A hundred years from now
when the world churns on
without us, the bridge drowns,
braceleted with light.
And here we are, in another
winter of wrong
temperatures. I slip on
my mother’s coat, flash
its red silk lining, invisible skin.
How I wish I could fill its pockets
not with smoke or flood water.

(Nicole Cooley [source])

…and:

Spectacles of Daily Life

There are things you own
without knowing — boat slip
in your name though the skiff
changed hands long ago.
Your people’s unquestioned ways—
prayer cards in the pocket,
canceled casino dice, votives
making a shrine of the bathroom.
These spectacles of daily life
are so small, possess so little mystery
they’re hardly worth writing down.
I drive past Parc Fontaine
where my father lived forty years ago,
but never past his grave. Once was enough—
holding it all in, no ripple of ruckus
from us in leopard print or pearl snaps
still creased from Tractor Supply,
eyes locked on the coffin which was nothing
if not one of Earl’s crab traps
baited with turkey necks
and sinking with no splash.

(Alison Pelegrin [source])

…and:

The ride back to the mainland was peaceful. The parrot-tongued woman was quiet, wearied by her day’s study of the lives of oysters, and Della had the beatific look of a satisfied birder. The boat captain set the autopilot and sat down in an aluminum chair with his book. The engine droned.

Della turned to Roger. “I enjoy chickens,” she said.

But Roger was not surprised. She didn’t smile, and he didn’t expect her to. She was a serious woman, with her mind on birds.

“Not White Leghorns, though,” she said.

“No,” said Roger slowly. “Certainly not White Leghorns.” He squinted thoughtfully. “I would think Golden Sebrights.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding emphatically. “And Silver-laced Wyandottes.”

“Buff Orpingtons,” said Roger.

“Dominiques,” she said, beginning to smile.

“Punkin Holses,” said Roger, “Lakenvelders, and Salmon Favorolles.”

Then she laughed out loud and hugged him tight with both arms. She smelled like pine trees and lichens and hot sand. How odd, thought Roger, that after all, this is what it took—not a flock of scarlet ibises or golden-crowned kinglets, but just the names of chickens, hovering in the air like the sulpher butterflies at the dump.

(Bailey White [source])

Haunting the Margin Between Thee and Me

September 27, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: photo of “On the Margins of the Borderland,” a mixed-media work by António Ole. Found it at the site of the Smithsonian Learning Lab, where it is described this way: “A broken canoe of welded iron holds stacks of newspapers and colonial era papers in one half and piles of crumbling bricks in the stern. Each of the boat’s two sections holds a monitor playing scenes of light reflecting on water and topped by a pied crow. A used fishing net falls across the papers filling the canoe’s broken prow.” For more details, see the note below.]

From whiskey river:

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. So, a man seeking knowledge must be first tested to determine if he is worthy.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

I See My Beauty in You

I see my beauty in you. I become
a mirror that cannot close its eyes

to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind

every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth

month, always the come-point. How
do I stand this? We become these

words we say, a wailing sound moving
out into the air. These thousands of

worlds that rise from nowhere, how
does your face contain them? I’m

a fly in your honey, then closer, a
moth caught in flame’s allure, then

empty sky stretched out in homage.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Least Figure

I tried to think of some way
to let my face become yours.

“Could I whisper in your ear
a dream I’ve had? You’re the only one
I’ve told this to.”

You tilt your head, laughing,
as if, “I know the trick you’re hatching,
but go ahead.”

I am an image you stitch with gold thread
on a tapestry, the least figure,
a playful addition.

But nothing you work on is dull.
I am part of the beauty.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

…and:

Marginalia

Finding an old book on a basement shelf—
gray, spine bent—and reading it again,
I met my former, unfamiliar, self,
some of her notes and scrawls so alien

that, though I tried, I couldn’t get (behind
this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote
to guess what experiences she had in mind,
the living context of some scribbled note;

or see the girl beneath the purple ink
who chose this phrase or that to underline,
the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking—
but they were thoughts I recognized as mine;

and though there were words I couldn’t even read,
blobs and cross-outs; and though not a jot
remained of her old existence—I agreed
with the young annotator’s every thought:

A clever girl. So what would she see fit
to comment on—and what would she have to say
about the years that she and I have written
since—before we put the book away?

(Deborah Warren [source])

…and:

#57: In the diner booth, my old friend’s hands on the table between us; mine, inches away from my friend’s. I don’t recognize those spots on my friend’s hands; my friend seems puzzled by this line on my wrist, the line above that one, the line below. The space between our fingertips swirling, memories tracing the woodgrain and the syrup smears. It’s not obvious where one swirl begins and leaves off, nor one memory, nor another: whose smear is whose; whose memory. All those years, those sticky dots on the timelines, some overlapping, most not. While X was happening to me, Y was rattling my friend’s life; we shared a Z from two different sides, each unrecognizable to the other. No memory, no smear or adhesive moment identical for us both. And yet somehow, a perfectly shared past…

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

_____

Note: more about “In the Margins of the Borderland,” from the work’s label as it appeared at the Smithsonian:

Over the past 15 years António Ole has created several provocative and critically acclaimed installations, of which this is the first. It has been exhibited on three continents and appears here for the first time in North America. The work stems from Ole’s desire to draw attention to the history of colonial and local violence and to the architectural decay that surrounds him in Angola. Inside a broken boat that goes nowhere are police reports the artist collected off the street outside an administrative office. He paired the bundles of papers with birds that no longer fly and bricks that are not being used to build. The birds, net and scenic ocean waves playing on the TV sets refer to Angola’s coast, his homeland. At once haunting and beautiful, this installation reveals Ole’s ability to address difficult subject matter and still create a visually rich experience.

[back to top]

The World’s Happy to Answer the Questions You Don’t Ask

September 20, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Petaluma Ramble No. 2 (No Questions),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

In the Mountains on a Summer Day

Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.

(Li Bai, translated by Arthur Waley [source])

…and:

A Settlement
(excerpt)

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my
mind.

Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you
for everything.

(Mary Oliver [source])

Not from whiskey river:

[Anthropologist Jaime] De Angulo goes on to say that wandering can lead to death, to hopelessness, to madness, to various forms of despair, or that it may lead to encounters with other powers in the remoter places a wanderer may go. He concludes, “When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks. When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a shaman.”

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

It’s meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning—or the lack of it—in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

Once there was a man of Chu’u selling shields and halberds. In praising his shields he said, ‘My shields are so solid that nothing can penetrate them.’ Again, in praising his halberds, he said, ‘My halberds are so sharp that they can penetrate anything.’ In response to his words somebody asked, ‘How about using your halberds to pierce through your shields?’ To this the man could not give any reply.

(Tim Bayne, quoting from Han Fei Tzu [source])