I’m not sure what’s going on; apparently something got updated which shouldn’t have, or vice-versa. Going with this bare-bones look for now. Please be patient while I try to figure this out. THANKS!
Real-Life Dialogue: Red, Green, and White Edition
The setting: a Sunday morning in early December, in a small kitchen in a small home in a North Carolina suburb. Water is heating in a couple of electric appliances. She stands at the counter, before a cup with a spoon it, awaiting the silence from one of the appliances. Her cup is brightly colored with the hues most often associated with the month, at least in the US.
He (with a nod towards the cup): Ah. I see you’ve wasted no time getting into the Christmas spirit.
She: Why not? I’ve unpacked the whole set — you want one?
He: No, thank you. Those cups are too small.
(Her mouth drops open.)
She: Grinch!
(They turn away from each other, each smiling in secret self-satisfaction to have played their assigned roles to a T.)
Only You, and You Alone
[Image: “PADC12-15 Being stripped,” the enigmatic title of this work by a photographer who identifies himself — at least on Flickr — as “(T)imothep.” The piece was offered there under a Creative Commons license (thank you!), and of course that’s how I’ve reused it here.]
From whiskey river (italicized lines):
Advice to Myself #2: Resistance
Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.
(Louise Erdrich [source])
The next selection doesn’t come from whiskey river at all. In this scene of the novel, a wealthy middle=-aged industrialist has returned, during a ferociously cold snowstorm, to his hometown in North Dakota; he spends a semi-nostalgic night on a frozen lake, in an ice-fishing hut. While out there he is visited by a figure familiar to him from childhood nightmares, who says:
You, sir, derive less real pleasure from this world than anybody who’s ever come through here. You are blind and deaf and cold to the touch and you have no taste and music and poetry and good cooking are lost on you. You’re all tied up in knots about money and getting old and the daily insult of the bathroom mirror. You walk down city streets with no eye for your fellow citizens, you are offered magnificent music and exit early so you won’t get caught in traffic. You think happiness is somewhere out in the future but you have no more idea what it is than you could explain radioactivity. You are a man of stunning ineptitude. Your daddy knew about engines, plumbing, hydraulics and arc welding and pouring concrete, gutting a deer, cleaning a walleye, digging a fish hook out of your thumb, not to get rich but just to get by, and here you are and you feel superior to him and you can’t pour piss out of a boot when the instructions are printed on the sole… You walk through life like you’re waiting for it to begin any day now. And it’s almost over.
(Garrison Keillor [source])
…and (from a different novel):
The thoughts she considers real come to her when she is alone or taking the child for a walk in the stroller. For her, real thoughts do not concern people’s ways of speaking and dressing, the height of sidewalks for the stroller, the ban on Jean Genet’s The Screens, or the war in Vietnam. They are questions about herself, being and having, existence. Real thoughts plumb the depths of transient sensations, impossible to communicate. These are the things her book would be made of, if she had the time to write, but she no longer even has time to read. In her diary, which she rarely opens, as if it posed a threat to the family unit and she were no longer entitled to an inner life, she writes, “I have no ideas at all. I don’t try to explain my life anymore” and “I’m a petite bourgeoise who has arrived.” She feels she has deviated from her former goals, as if her only progress in life were of the material kind. “I’m afraid of settling into this quiet and comfortable life, and afraid to have lived without being aware of it.” Just as she makes this observation, she knows she isn’t ready to give up the things this diary never includes, the living-together, the shared intimacy, the apartment to which she eagerly returns after class, the sleeping side-by-side, the sizzle of the electric razor in the morning, the tale of The Three Little Pigs at night, the repetition she believes she hates, which ties her down—all the things whose lack she felt when she left for three days to write the CAPES, and which, when she imagines their accidental loss, make her heart grow heavy.
(Annie Ernaux [source])
…and (from yet another source):
Mirrors exist for a reason — a reason which has nothing to do with the shape of your eyebrows or mouth, the lines in your forehead and cheeks, the stray hair suddenly sprouting where no hair had sprouted before. Indeed, you don’t need a mirror at all if you regularly take stock of the most important observations a mirror can trigger.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
___________
Footnote: having come up with the title of this post, I feel duty-bound to include the following…:
(I’m not sure, but the film in which this performance is embedded may be Rock Around the Clock.)
In Search of the Absence of Field
[Image: “Discontinuities,” 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:
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
(Mark Strand [source])
…and:
One spring, as peach blossoms filled the valley below with a spray of white fragrance, an ancient sage wandered the Heights of Shang. There on a hillside stripped of everything else, he saw a large and extraordinary tree. So huge it was, the horses that drew a hundred chariots could be sheltered under its shade. “What a tree this is!” he thought. Imagining the amount of timber it must contain, he marveled that the tree had never been cut down.
But as he sat beneath it and looked up into the tree’s branches, he saw how twisted and crooked they were. Turning in every direction, none of them were large enough to be made into rafters or beams. He reached up and broke off a twig, tasting the sap. It was sharp and bitter. “This tree would be useless for tapping,” he concluded, “producing no syrup of any worth.” The leaves, too, gave off an offensive odor as he broke them. They were too fragile to be woven into mats or braided into baskets. They would not even make good mulch! Even the roots, as he studied them, were so gnarled and knotty that one could never carve a bowl or fashion a fine decorative box out of them.
The sage said at last; “This, indeed, is a tree good for nothing! That is why it has reached so great an age. The cinnamon tree can be eaten; so it is cut down. The varnish tree is useful, and therefore incisions are made in it. We all know the advantage of being useful, but only this tree knows the advantage of being useless!” The wise man sat in the shade of that great tree for the rest of the day, as a light wind drifted up from the valley below. He breathed the scent of distant peach blossoms and sat in studied silence, happily contemplating his own uselessness.
(John Chang McCurdy and David R. Brower (foreword), adapted from a poem by Chuang Tzu [source: the book itself is here, but I didn’t find this text within it, or anywhere but in an unrelated (?) book, here])
Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:
The Seven Selves
In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whisper:
First Self: Here, in this madman, I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night. I can bear my fate no longer, and now I rebel.
Second Self: Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given to me to be this madman’s joyous self. I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts. It is I that would rebel against my weary existence.
Third Self: And what of me, the love-ridden self, the flaming brand of wild passion and fantastic desires? It is I the love-sick self who would rebel against this madman.
Fourth Self: I, amongst you all, am the most miserable, for naught was given me but odious hatred and destructive loathing. It is I, the tempest-like self, the one born in the black caves of Hell, who would protest against serving this madman.
Fifth Self: Nay, it is I, the thinking self, the fanciful self, the self of hunger and thirst, the one doomed to wander without rest in search of unknown things and things not yet created; it is I, not you, who would rebel.
Sixth Self: And I, the working self, the pitiful labourer, who, with patient hands, and longing eyes, fashion the days into images and give the formless elements new and eternal forms—it is I, the solitary one, who would rebel against this restless madman.
Seventh Self: How strange that you all would rebel against this man, because each and every one of you has a preordained fate to fulfill. Ah! could I but be like one of you, a self with a determined lot! But I have none, I am the do-nothing self, the one who sits in the dumb, empty nowhere and nowhen, while you are busy re-creating life. Is it you or I, neighbours, who should rebel?
When the seventh self thus spake the other six selves looked with pity upon him but said nothing more; and as the night grew deeper one after the other went to sleep enfolded with a new and happy submission.
But the seventh self remained watching and gazing at nothingness, which is behind all things.
(Kahlil Gibran [source])
…and:
Robinson’s Telephone Rings
the Tuesday after he was last seen.
A policeman is there to pick the shrill thing up.
Who is it? the couple of friends present ask as he cups it to his ear.
Then hangs up. There was no one there.
They have come to recon a vacant property—a mise en scéne:
Knoll butterfly chairs—a pair of them—
two red socks soaking in the white bathroom sink,
a saucer of milk for the cat to drink,
a stack of reel-to-reel tapes,
a matchbook from the Italian Village where he ate his last spaghetti dinner,
& two books he’d been re-reading, or wanted someone to think he had:
The Devils & The Tragic Sense of Life.
Preoccupation & a certain mode of self-presentation.
Even when absent, Robinson has a style.
No wallet, though. No watch, no sleeping bag, no bankbook.
The apartment looks the way it feels to read a newspaper that’s one day old.
The policeman wants to go back outside, among the lemons & fog & barking dogs.
Out where the sun can copper their faces.
Writing takes space, recordings take time.
The place puts the policeman in mind of something he read recently, about the collapse of a dead star.
About how it takes ages for the light to become motionless.
Seven years after a disappearance, a person can be pronounced dead.
But that’s nothing compared to the size of the ocean.
(Kathleen Rooney [source])
The Grace to Be Found in the Space Between the Lines
[Image: “The There and the Not-There (Duke University Chapel),” 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:
Writing in the Dark
It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don’t always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.Never mind about crossing your t’s, dotting your i’s—
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and (except for the first sentence):
Why don’t we experience a stone as story? Why do we persistently forget to come alive to the world as it is in front of our faces? Why do we have to go to all the trouble of making art so that we can return to where we are and have been all along? I think it is because of the way thought works in us. To be present in the midst of our being what we are is a pure sensation that we can never exactly apprehend. It is fleeting and ungraspable. Thought is always coming a second afterward, telling us something, singing a song of the past. Thought includes the aroma of our being alive, but it also includes so much that is made, so much of doing and piling up, that it tempts us necessarily away from ourselves. To find within our thought and perception (for perception is already thought) a settled free and unmade place takes effort, and this is the effort of art.
(Norman Fischer [source])
…and:
When It Comes
Any time. Now. The next minute.
Years from today. You lean forward
and wait. You relax, but you don’t forget.Someone plans an elaborate party
with a banquet, dancing, even fireworks
when feasting is over. You look at them:All those years when you searched the world
like a ferret, these never happened—your marriage,
your family, prayers, curses. Only dreams.A vacuum has opened everywhere. Cities,
armies, those chairs ranked in the great
hall for the audience—there isn’t anyone.Like a shutter the sky opens and closes
and the show is over. The next act
will deny that anything ever happened.Your hand falls open. It is empty. It never
held a knife, a flower, gold,
or love, or now. Lean closer—Listen to me: there isn’t any hand.
(William Stafford [source])
Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:
To Age
It is time to tell you
what you may have guessed
along the way without
letting it deter you
do you remember how
once you liked to kneel looking
out of the back window
while your father was driving
and the thread then of pleasure
as you watched the world appear
on both sides and from under
you coming together
into place out of nowhere
growing steadily longer
and you would hum to it
not from contentment but
to keep time with no time
floating out along it
seeing the world grow
smaller as it went from you
farther becoming longer
and longer but still there
well it was not like that
but once it was out of sight
it was not anywhere
with the dreams of that night
whether remembered or not
and wherever it was
arriving from on its way
through you must have been growing
shorter even as you
watched it appear and go
you still cannot say how
but you cannot even tell
whether the subway coming
in time out of the tunnel
is emerging from
the past or the future
(W. S. Merwin [source])
…and:
Ovid wrote millennia ago: “In our play we reveal what kind of people we are.” This becomes especially true in our moments of deepest play—which is not always free of anxiety, but nonetheless great fun. Visionary, absorbing, ecstatic, extraordinary, deep play rapidly can become rewarding and healing, or dangerously addictive. Human nature being what it is, that will never change. Our daily routines tend to be haphazard and filled with work, chores, and requirements. How often do we shed all obligations and feel fully alive, freed from the identity we nonetheless cherish, as we use all our senses and become completely open to experience?…
There’s a tradition of wishing on a falling star, but what does one wish on a comet? For those future residents of Earth: may their world still be packed with mysteries. May they still grow giddy on the eve of a great adventure. May they become more responsible to one another and to the planet. May they keep their taste for the renegade. May they never lose their sense of innocence and wonder. May they live to chase brash and astonishing dreams. May they return to tell me, if such a thing is possible, so that I can know the answers to a thousand scrupulous puzzles, hear of whole civilizations that bloomed and vanished, learn what travel to other solar systems has revealed, and behold the marvels that arose while I was gone. If that’s not possible, then I will have to make do with the playgrounds of mortality, and hope that at the end of my life I can say simply, wholeheartedly, that it was grace enough to be born and live.
(Diane Ackerman [source])
High Time to Find Your Center
[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
[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
[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
[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.”]
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
[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])
