[From the mind of Ze Frank.]
Un Momento, Por Favor
[Image found at What My World’s Like]
From whiskey river:
Visiting the Graveyard
When I think of death
it is a bright enough city,
and every year more faces there
are familiarbut not a single one
notices me,
though I long for it,
and when they talk together,which they do
very quietly,
it’s in an unknowable language —
I can catch the tonebut understand not a single word —
and when I open my eyes
there’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.
There are the stones.
(Mary Oliver, from Red bird [source])
…and:
…Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion.
We have agreed internationally on the speed of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute, or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with being visible. And when we think of a moment of time, when we think what we mean by the word now, we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline calibrations on the watch.
As a result, we are a people who feel that we don’t have any present, because we believe that the present is always instantly vanishing. This is the problem of Goethe’s Faust. He attains his great moment and says to it, “Oh still delay, thou art so fair.” But the moment never stays. It is always disappearing into the past.
Therefore we have the sensation that our lives are constantly flowing away from us. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to waste; time is money. And so, because of the tyranny of clocks, we feel that we have a past, and that we know who we were in the past — nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were — and we believe we also have a future. And that belief is terribly important, because we have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply us with everything we’re looking for.
You see, if you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely frustrated.
(Alan Watts [source, in slightly different form])
Why Do Good?
[Image found at the Volunteering England site]
Yesterday’s New York Times (online edition) carried a new entry [JES: link now fixed!] in their “Opinionator” series of weighty questions: “Is Pure Altruism Possible?”
At a certain level, this is the stuff of unresolvable university-level dorm/roommate bull-session debate. The arguments against “pure altruism” seem cold-bloodedly obvious — even if taken to the extreme. Someone who knowingly and apparently willingly sacrifices his/her own life to save someone else’s, well, aren’t they just acting out of a desire to feel good about themselves, to show off as it were, to be noble and be sure we know it? The author of the column (Judith Lichtenberg, a Georgetown University professor of philosophy) isn’t so sure, though. She concludes:
Altruism is possible and altruism is real, although in healthy people it intertwines subtly with the well-being of the agent who does good. And this is crucial for seeing how to increase the amount of altruism in the world. Aristotle had it right in his “Nicomachean Ethics” [link added]: we have to raise people from their “very youth” and educate them “so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.”
But yes: that right there, that troublesome “ought.” How much does altruism just (or “just,” in quotes) fulfill a sense of obligation — of mere duty, per society’s “rules” — as opposed to a genuine sense of self-sacrifice?
And if you’re not ready for philosophy today, or at the moment, can a purely altruistic character ever work in fiction? Must they all have dark and selfish sides in order to be believable? Can dark and selfish characters sacrifice themselves without sacrificing credibility?
______________
Update: Querulous Squirrel, who comments at RAMH often, has come up with a fictional diarist — one Serena Passion — whose most recent entry brooded about those who like to think of themselves as (but never quite are, in SP’s eyes) good people.
Update #2: Duh! For reasons I can’t explain, I used a link not to the Times Opinionator column, but to a post on Froog’s blog. Corrected. Apologies to those who might have been confused, and also to Froog (who perhaps wondered why his stats had mysteriously nudged upward for 24 hours).
Just Who Do You Think You Are, Anyway?
[For information about the video, see the note at the bottom of this post.]
From whiskey river:
There is never anything more truthful
Than what you yourself make of it
Except the possibility that is always there
Behind you, at the back of the mirror,
Behind the brain, in back of the universe —
And that also as you will make it.
(Peyton Houston, from The Changes [source])
…and:
When you find yourself asking, irritably and rhetorically, “Why the hell does he keep doing that?!” — I strongly recommend you answer the rhetorical question. The causal story revealed in the answer, which always has roots outside the person, might reduce counter-productive blaming and contempt, and it will give you vital information about how the behavior might be changed.
(Thomas Clark, from Encountering Naturalism)
…and (italicized portion):
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin.
(Alan Watts, from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)
Val-deri,Val-dera
[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]
[Below, click Play button to begin The Happy Wanderer. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:17 long.]
The Missus and I have a favorite, half-kidding/half-serious theory about the modern world: that it’s set up to drive its denizens (especially us) crazy. Just in case you haven’t noticed: the pace of life never slows down, and there’s more and more stuff to fill every minute, and every bit of it is urgent and ever more resistant to prioritization. Music is louder and faster, TV commercials more obstreporous, money tighter, our friends and families both frailer and more distant, food and drink more dangerous, streets more crowded and more polluted (despite new regulations every year pretending to fight both traffic volume and air pollution), “communication” trivially easy and also easily trivial, civic discourse threatening to run off the rails at every nerve-jangling second…
Furthermore, of course, no one we know is getting any younger — a situation thorned with a thousand frustrations all its own. Speaking for myself, I am certain that gravity is much stronger than when I was a kid, and air resistance much weaker, and objects theoretically meant to be held in the hands seem aerodynamically designed these days to leap away and down to the floor almost as soon as I touch them.
And knowledge? Pfft! When it comes to knowledge, the situation really gets dire. Computers and networks grow ever more stubborn, refusing not only to play with one another but to play with me, dammit. I can download books tens of thousands of times faster than I can read their first chapters. Facts once gluey slither around in my head like greased marbles…
Note the peculiarly Baby-Boomer view of the world: if something hasn’t been set up to make life easier, it’s because we must be beset by enemies, entire wicked cabals of them, bent on keeping us from whatever we want at the moment. Because, you know, it’s all about us.
This crazy-makingness, I am convinced, is tied in somehow with the laws of thermodynamics. You know: matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, at best just turned into other forms of matter and energy. The total amount of matter (or energy) in the universe is a constant. All that. Because, see — so my theory goes — the total amount of information in the universe is a constant, too. When you move 150 pounds of information from a blog to Twitter, let’s say, it remains at 150 pounds total — just diffused and vaporous and spread out so no one can see the whole anymore, just the individual molecules…
It Went Right By You
[Image: “Lodz, PL, 1994.” A photo by Mark Pimlott from his 2008 exhibit, All Things Pass,
at Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (click for original)]
From whiskey river:
Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It’s the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.
(Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin [source])
…and:
Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night.
(John O’Donohue, from Anam Cara [source])
…and:
Sleepless
Can’t get clear of this dream,
can’t get sober.Spring breeze chilly
on the flesh: me all alone.My orphan sail
finds the bank
where reed flowers fall.All night
the river sounds
the rain falling:
listen.
(Yuan Mei, from I Don’t Bow to Buddhas [source])
When Neurosis Calls
Bon Mot for the Week*
From poet David Kirby, who will be participating in a cross-disciplinary conference on creativity around these parts later this week:
I tell my own students that art is the deliberate transformed by the accidental, that you pursue your plan doggedly while staying open to the startling revelations that can kick your work up to a new level.
“The deliberate transformed by the accidental”: I like it.
____________________
* Post title shamelessly cribbed from Froog. For simplicity and directness, it just can’t be improved upon (although I don’t plan to steal it for good!).
Is It Love? (Local Edition)
Among the valued newcomers to RAMH‘s roll of occasional commenters, you may have encountered one “Ashleigh Burrows.”
(I use the quotation marks there because that name, as I understand it, is a nom de plume. Which makes it interesting that she calls her blog The Burrow: it’s an eponym for a pseudonym, and how many times can one claim to have seen one of those before?)
a/b, as she styles herself in her comments here, there, and elsewhere, is (like many of us) a writer still unconvinced that simply writing well is enough. When not actively fretting along those lines, she fills in the blog with, well, good writing on a wide variety of topics — provocative questions, political commentary, accounts of daily life with a cast of bizarrely nicknamed characters (The Big Guy and G’ma, sure, got them, and the Big and Little Cuter I pretty much understand to be her kids — but Amster? Aged Parm?)…
Anyway, I direct your attention to a recent post at The Burrow, “Is It Love?” It’s full of the sort of nagging, not-quite-rhetorical questions which some of us (yes) love to chew on:
- Can one look at another with devotion and desire, knowing that the feelings are not returned, and still call it love?
- Is there a cognitive component that is necessary for love to exist?
- Can you love someone you do not need? If the loved one were to vanish and you felt no pain, did you really love at all?
And so on. She sums up:
Many, many questions. I’m not sure the answers are available. I’m not sure that your answers would be mine (or [jilted lover of Aeneas] Dido’s). I just know that love is strange.
Aye. That it is… strange, and troublesome as hell. Even more than “the sex talk,” I wonder how parents manage “the love talk” for their blossoming charges. I don’t have any kids myself, of course. But if I did, what follows would be how I might try to explain it to them — in hopes of arming them before the first thunderbolt hit.*
When It’s Not Quite (Yet, Still) Light
[Image: “Zodiacal Light vs. Milky Way,” by Daniel López;
featured at Astronomy Picture of the Day on March 20, 2010]
From whiskey river:
Incandescence at Dusk
(Homage to Dionysius the Areopagite)
There is fire in everything,
shining and hidden —
Or so the saint believed. And I believe the saint:
Nothing stays the same
in the shimmering heat
Of dusk during Indian summer in the country.Out here it is possible to perceive
That those brilliant red welts
slashed into the horizon
Are like a drunken whip
whistling across a horse’s back,
And that round ball flaring in the trees
Is like a coal sizzling
in the mouth of a desert prophet.Be careful.
Someone has called the orange leaves
sweeping off the branches
The colorful palmprints of God
brushing against our faces.
Someone has called the banked piles
of twigs and twisted veins
The handprints of the underworld
Gathering at our ankles and burning
through the soles of our feet.
We have to bear the sunset deep inside us.
I don’t believe in ultimate things.
I don’t believe in the inextinguishable light
of the other world.
I don’t believe that we will be lifted up
and transfixed by radiance.
One incandescent dusky world is all there is.But I like this vigilant saint
Who stood by the river at nightfall
And saw the angels descending
as burnished mirrors and fiery wheels,
As living creatures of fire,
as streams of white flame….1500 years in his wake,
I can almost imagine
his disappointment and joy
When the first cool wind
starts to rise on the prairie,
When the soothing blue rain begins
to fall out of the cerulean night.
(Edward Hirsch [source]; here‘s a good place to start learning about the mysterious figure whose name appears in the epigraph)
…and:
Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.
(Jeanette Winterson, from Gut Symmetries [source])
…and:
I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.
(Haruki Murakami, from The Sputnik Sweetheart (translated by J. Philip Gabriel) [source])
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