Running After My Hat

Unknowns, Unseens, Unstateds, Undones

July 11, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

Vincent Van Gogh: 'A Pair of Shoes' (1886)

[Image: A Pair of Shoes (1886), by Vincent Van Gogh. See the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

We live in a huge net and web of being, human and non-human and we have obligations towards it but the only way to fulfill them is by doing it from the inside. Not from the head, not from what we’re told to do, but to discover for ourselves what needs doing and then start doing it.

(Jane Hirshfield [unconfirmed source])

…and (italicized stanzas, following epigraph):

Mon Semblable

“No man has ever dared to describe himself as he truly is.”
-Albert Camus

I like things my way
every chance I get.
A limit doesn’t exist

when it comes to that.
But please, don’t confuse
what I say with honesty.

Isn’t honesty the open yawn
the unimaginable love
more than truth?

Anonymous among strangers
I look for those
with hidden wings,

and for scars
that those who once had wings
can’t hide.

Though I know it’s unfair,
I reveal myself
one mask at a time.

Does this appeal to you,
such slow disclosures,
a lifetime perhaps

of almost knowing one another?
I would hope you, too,
would hold something back,

and that you’d always want
whatever unequal share
you had style enough to get.

Altruism is for those
who can’t endure their desires.
There’s a world

as ambiguous as a moan,
a pleasure moan
our earnest neighbors

might think a crime.
It’s where we could live.
I’ll say I love you,

which will lead, of course,
to disappointment,
but those words unsaid

poison every next moment.
I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone ever has.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate?

We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.

(Abraham Maslow [unconfirmed source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: “Muskrat Ramble” (Various Performers)

July 9, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

Among the mass-media images burned into my brain from the 1950s is a 45rpm recording of this song by a Dixieland band called “The Firehouse Five Plus Two.”

That group had an interesting back story: all the members were employees (mostly animators) for Walt Disney Studios. While recording and performing, they hung onto their day jobs. For instance, the group’s founder and trombonist, Ward Kimball, was one of the so-called “Nine Old Men” who formed the core of the animation department during Disney’s run of classic cartoons: Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia… You can certainly see the Disney influence in the “self-portrait” at right.

I wish I could play that version for you today, but alas — can’t find a copy. Instead, I’ll tell you what I know about the song, and offer up a couple other performers’ takes on it.

The song’s composer of record was jazz trombonist “Kid” Ory. I say “of record” because Ory apparently sort of dashed off the song in 1926 as a composition for Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five band. That band didn’t have a lot of hits, but “Muskrat Ramble” was one of them, and Armstrong evidently felt a sense of proprietorship towards it. As recounted (second hand) in Gene Henry Anderson’s book, The Original Hot Five Recordings of Louis Armstrong:

Ory says he originally conceive [“Muskrat Ramble”] in Los Angeles, revising it out of an exercise in a saxophone study book: “I wrote it back around 1921 when I was playing in a taxi dancehall at Third and Main in Los Angeles. It had no name then. Lil Armstrong gave it that title at the record session.” But Louis Armstrong told Dan Morgenstern in Down Beat [15 July 1965, 18]… “I wrote Muskrat Ramble. Ory named it, he gets the royalties. I don’t talk about it.” On the other hand, Sidney Bechet once remembered “Muskrat Ramble,” or at least its second theme, as an old folksong he heard in his youth, “The Old Cow Died and the Old Man Cried” [Jazz Record (July 1945)].

Bechet’s vague memory aside, the one thing I get from that passage is that Armstrong and Ory didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye on its composer. Nevertheless, Ory had the copyright (eventually getting paid those sore-point royalties for it).

Here’s Armstrong’s Hot Five version:

[Below, click Play button to begin Muskrat Ramble (Louis Armstrong). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:32 long.]

[audio:muskratramble_louisarmstrong.mp3|titles=’Muskrat Ramble’|artists=Louis Armstrong]

In 1950, lyricist Ray Gilbert added lyrics befitting the raucous — and yes, rambling — feel of the music. (It’s possible that Gilbert himself worked for Disney, although I haven’t confirmed it: he also wrote the lyrics to “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from Song of the South.) Among performers who had a hit with this version were The McGuire Sisters; their take on it went to Billboard #10 in 1954:

[Below, click Play button to begin Muskrat Ramble (The McGuire Sisters). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:16 long.]

[audio:muskratramble_mcguiresisters.mp3|titles=’Muskrat Ramble’|artists=The McGuire Sisters]

[Lyrics]

Of course, I guess I should say, many of a certain generation (and later) may not know this tune as “Muskrat Ramble” at all — let alone with these lyrics. For that audience, the more familiar interpretation might be Country Joe McDonald’s solo performance of his “F-I-S-H Cheer / Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” enshrined in this recording of the Woodstock film (and yeah, he modified the “F-I-S-H Cheer” for this):

[Lyrics]

(McDonald was sued by Ory’s descendants in recent years for violating copyright on the tune. They lost the case, though, on the grounds that they’d waited too long — decades — to make their case.)

Far, Near — No Matter

July 4, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “november twenty two,” by farrahsanjari on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons License.)]

From whiskey river:

If you think of this idea of nothingness as mere blankness, and you hold onto this idea of blankness, you haven’t understood it. Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe. All the suns, moons and stars, and the mountains and rivers, and the good men and bad men, and the animals and the insects, the whole bit — all are contained in the void. So out of this void comes everything and you are it. What else could you be?

(Alan Watts [source])

…and (also used previously at RAMH, here):

The search of reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh.

We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.

Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

(Abraham Joshua Heschel [source])

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

In This Season of Waiting

Under certain conditions,
when the moon in the western sky
seems frozen there, for instance

even as the sun is rising in the east,
so that soon two sides of the coin
will be facing each other;

or when the snow
which is a stranger here
fills our trees with its cold flowers;

when the single
bluejay at the feeder
is so still

it could be enameled there,
then the earth becomes an emblem
for whatever we believe.

(Linda Pastan [source])

[Read more…]

Sometimes, It’s Just Bliss. Sometimes, It’s the Whole Point.

June 27, 2014 by John 4 Comments

[Video: Lindsey Stirling and The Piano Guys, “Theme from Mission Impossible.”
See the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Sometimes, When the Light

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not knowing. The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

(Robert Penn Warren [source])

…and:

I believe that it is bracing and vital to live in a world in which we do not know all the answers. I believe that we are inspired and goaded on by what we don’t understand. And I hope that there will always be an edge between the known and the unknown, beyond which lies strangeness and unpredictability and life.

(Alan Lightman [source])

[Read more…]

Jamais Vu

June 20, 2014 by John 4 Comments

'Ocean,' by Pawel Kuczynski

[Image: “Ocean,” by Pawel Kuczynski. I could have selected any of his images to illustrate this post,
but this one called to me more insistently than the others.]

From whiskey river:

Imaginary Paintings

1. HOW I WOULD PAINT THE FUTURE

A strip of horizon and a figure,
seen from the back, forever approaching.

2. HOW I WOULD PAINT HAPPINESS

Something sudden, a windfall,
a meteor shower. No—
a flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom,
transformed into a stranger
to beautiful to touch.

3. HOW I WOULD PAINT DEATH

White on white or black on black.
No ground, no figure. An immense canvas,
which I will never finish.

4. HOW I WOULD PAINT LOVE

I would not paint love.

5. HOW I WOULD PAINT THE LEAP OF FAITH

A black cat jumping up three feet
to reach a three-inch shelf.

6. HOW I WOULD PAINT THE BIG LIE

Smooth, and deceptively small
so that it can be swallowed
like something we take for a cold.
An elongated capsule,
an elegant cylinder,
sweet and glossy,
that pleases the tongue
and goes down easy,
never mind
the poison inside.

7. HOW I WOULD PAINT NOSTALGIA

An old-fashioned painting, a genre piece.
People in bright and dark clothing.
A radiant bride in white
standing above a waterfall,
watching the water rush
away, away, away.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

…there are things we take on faith, without physical proof and even sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong”. We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing. The previous questions are questions of aesthetics, morality, philosophy. These are questions for the arts and the humanities. These are also questions aligned with some of the intangible concerns of traditional religion…

Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

(Alan Lightman [source])

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The Devil(s) You Don’t Know

June 13, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Cadejos,” hand-painted etching on paper, by Todd Freeman; found on Flickr.
(Click to enlarge.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

…and:

My definition of a devil is a god who has not been recognized. That is to say, it is a power in you to which you have not given expression, and you push it back. And then, like all repressed energy, it builds up and becomes completely dangerous to the position you’re trying to hold.

(Joseph Campbell [source])

…and:

To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.

(Anne Carson [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Harry Belafonte, “Lead Man Holler”

June 11, 2014 by John 2 Comments

Promotional poster for Island in the Sun. Lurid, eh? Note the helpful logo-ish device at the top right, depicting a, y’know, actual island literally in the sun. Just in case you hadn’t already gotten the message!

You may be surprised — as I was — to learn that this week was once designated as “Harry Belafonte — Island in the Sun Week.”

Of course, this wasn’t a true national celebration but a promotional ploy for the film which opened this week in 1957, starring Harry Belafonte (also James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, Dorothy Dandridge, and Michael Rennie). The film needed whatever promotional help it could get, because the Alec Waugh novel it was based on had ignited an uncomfortable firestorm of controversy, especially around the US South.

(The South Carolina legislature threatened to fine any movie theater which showed the film $5,0000. It was banned outright in Memphis. And according to the Turner Classic Movies site, “in New Orleans, the American Legion launched an unsuccessful campaign to halt the film’s screening on the grounds that it ‘contributes to the Communist Party’s aim of creating friction between the races.'” But the protests against it reached at least as far north as Minneapolis. Not that any of this actually hurt its box office much: it was the sixth biggest-earning film of the year.)

So what was the big deal?

If you didn’t know any of the cast, and didn’t know anything about the book, but relied solely on the poster above for information about the film, well, you might still have the question. I mean, look at them: about as homogeneous as it’s possible to be, ethnically speaking.

An illusion, of course, thanks to some artful work with color saturation, lighting, and watercolors. The main character, Harry Belafonte’s David Boyeur, is an up-and-coming black labor leader and politician on the fictional island of Santa Marta, during its transition from English colonial to black rule. (Strike 1 for the film’s chances in the mid-’50s South.) Boyeur develops not-quite-a-relationship with wealthy white socialite Mavis Norman (strike 2), but at least it goes nowhere — ultimately broken off, for both of their noble sakes. (They never quite kiss, even.)

(At least, that’s how the film works out — a hastily cobbled-together outcome, the book having ended with a real Boyeur/Mavis relationship.)

And finally, throw in a handful of other interracial twists: Boyeur’s principal antagonist, white Governor Maxwell Fleury (James Mason), is exposed as the grandson of a black man; Maxwell’s sister Jocelyn (Joan Collins) becomes pregnant, doesn’t want to saddle her white lover with an interracial love child… but is relieved to find out that at least her and Maxwell’s mother was white; and Maxwell’s aide Justin (Stephen Boyd) develops a romance with the mixed-race Margot (Dorothy Dandridge). Indeed, Jocelyn and Margot wind up moving with their lovers to England, where they can perhaps put all the societal judgment behind them. (Strike 3, and maybe by now we’re even working our way into the next inning.)

The film came out while Belafonte was at a popular peak, and featured two songs — the title song, and “Lead Man Holler” — to whose composition he had (at least in theory) contributed. They became two of his biggest hits.

“Lead Man Holler” itself might be called a cadence calypso number: one meant primarily to supply a rhythm to manual laborers working repetitive tasks. It reminds me a lot of some of the call-and-response chants Boy Scout leaders and drum majors, with their charges, used to sing out during parades when I was a kid, e.g.:

You ain’t got no friends on your left!
(Your LEFT!)
You ain’t got no friends on your right!
(Your RIGHT!)
Sound off!
(SOUND off!)
Cadence count!
(CADENCE count!)
One, two, three-four…
(One, two… THREE-FOUR!)

However, various sources I’ve checked point out that while Boyeur’s singing does guide sugar-cane workers in their jobs, it’s hey, Harry Belafonte up there: almost inexpressibly handsome, gleaming, and (wouldn’t you know it) apparently directing at least part of the rhythmic sing-song at a photo of Joan Fontaine…

Subtext. When it comes to “race” (whatever that is) — at least in the US, especially through a Hollywood filter — there’s always subtext.

[Lyrics]

At Sea

June 6, 2014 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “It Wasn’t Unfulfillment, But Rather Conscious Decisions on Their Path to Happiness,”
a photo by user “skrubu” (Pekka Nikrus) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(David Foster Wallace [source])

…and (same link as above):

If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles — to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are — is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is simply because we are here. The situation can be likened to that of a group of intelligent fish who one day begin wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe, they suggest, there are many other worlds, some of them completely dry, some wet, and everything in between.

Some of the fish grudgingly accept this explanation. Some feel relieved. Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned. Because there is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

(Alan Lightman [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Ond day someone noticed there were stars but no words, why? I’ve asked a lot of people, I think it is a good question. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the bluegreen shoots and the plant called ‘audacity’ that poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

(Anne Carson [source, but quoted here and elsewhere])

[Read more…]

Missing, Lost, Never Found

May 30, 2014 by John 3 Comments

#478162483 / gettyimages.com

From whiskey river:

The Talmud asks the question, “Who is wise?” and gives the surprise answer, “Someone who learns from everyone.” We recognize humility in others by finding something that we can learn from them. Do you hear them? Are you paying attention? There’s something you can learn from everyone, something that only he or she knows, that only he or she can teach you.

It’s like each person’s life has the pieces of a 1,000 piece interlocking jigsaw puzzle. In my experience, no one seems to get issued a complete puzzle. Everyone’s puzzle is missing, on average, seven pieces, and these puzzle pieces are distributed randomly into other people’s puzzles. We spend our lives walking around saying, “Do you need a puzzle piece with a little yellow in the corner and a red line running through it?” Then we meet someone, and he or she says, “Oh, my God, I’ve been looking for it all my life.” We say, “I don’t know what to do with it, I wound up with it, take it, it’s yours.” It’s rarely the author or featured speaker who has your puzzle pieces; it’s usually someone who has a bit part in your life whose name is not recorded in the program.

(Rabbi Lawrence Kushner [unconfirmed source for this version, but see, e.g., this])

…and (italicized lines):

Moonlight

Now comes the white-striped, sharp-nosed digger of dampness
in her black and oily coat.
All night in the moonlight she has been wandering
the stony beach; now she steps
into the gardens and under the street light
like a flat cat.

Her eyes gleaming and her tail aloft, she is afraid
of nothing — not dogs, not policemen who see her
and do not remove themselves from their cruisers, but sail on
down the dark roads.

Everything is famous for something: the eagle for power,
the fox for cunning.
This one we know for her temper and also her smell,
which comes from the wicks of fire.
Yet once I watched and heard her, deep in the woods,
humming to herself as she carried
leaves into her humble house, that was nothing
but a scratched-out hole.

Take care you don’t know everything in this world
too quickly or easily. Everything
is also a mystery, and has its own secret aura in the moonlight,
its private song.

If you meet her
don’t be afraid, just stand still.
And, while you let her stare you down,

notice how she stamps her pretty, little feet.
Notice how she shines.

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]

Confused Reality

May 23, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

From whiskey river:

The most interesting thing about the world is its fantastic and unpsychoanalyzed character, its wretched and gallant personality, its horrible idiocy and its magnificent intelligence, its unbelievable cruelty and its equally unbelievable kindness, its gorilla stupor, its canary cheerfulness, its thundering divinity, and its whimpering commonness.

(William Saroyan [source])

…and:

The Great Clod belches out breath and its name is wind. So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly. Can’t you hear them, long and drawn out? In the mountain forests that lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts. They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan, and howl, those in the lead calling out yeee!, those behind calling out yuuu! In a gentle breeze they answer faintly, but in a full gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fierce wind has passed on, then all the hollows are empty again. Have you never seen the tossing and trembling that goes on?

(Chuang Tzu [source])

[Read more…]