You Feel Your Life as a Weekend

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[Image: “Misty Morning, Loch Rannoch 6,” by a Flickr user with the handle “xylophilist” (Gr: wood lover.) The original photo is here; I’m pretty sure the photographer is one Tim Haynes, whose Web site is here. I use this photo today under the terms of the photographer’s generous Creative Commons license; thank you!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Things I Want Decided

Which shouldn’t exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you are alive?

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things—
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world?

(Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

(André Gide [source])

…and:

February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

(Margaret Atwood [source])

…and:

What does it feel like to be alive?

Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!

It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

(Annie Dillard [source])

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

[…continuing from above…]

Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: you flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years. Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fall off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on a coconut palm’s trunk until you fall asleep again, and the winds let up? You fall asleep again, and you slide in a dream to the palm tree’s base; the winds die off, the lights dim, the years slip away as you idle there till you die in your sleep, till death sets you cruising down the Tamiami Trail

Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country.

O Augenblick verweile.

(Annie Dillard [ibid.])

…and:

My Brother the Artist, at Seven

As a boy he played alone in the fields
behind our block, six frame houses
holding six immigrant families,
the parents speaking only gibberish
to their neighbors. Without the kids
they couldn’t say “Good morning” and be
understood. Little wonder
he learned early to speak to himself,
to tell no one what truly mattered.
How much can matter to a kid
of seven? Everything. The whole world
can be his. Just after dawn he sneaks
out to hide in the wild, bleached grasses
of August and pretends he’s grown up,
someone complete in himself without
the need for anyone, a warrior
from the ancient places our fathers
fled years before, those magic places:
Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea,
Port Said, Alexandria, Lisbon,
the Canaries, Caracas, Galveston.
In the damp grass he recites the names
over and over in a hushed voice
while the sun climbs into the locust tree
to waken the houses. The husbands leave
for work, the women return to bed, the kids
bend to porridge and milk. He advances
slowly, eyes fixed, an animal or a god,
while beneath him the earth holds its breath.

(Philip Levine [source])

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The Taking In; the Giving Out

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[Image: “He Knew What He Had to Do,” by Alan Levine. Found it on Flickr, and am sharing it here (with minimal alteration) under its Creative Commons license — thank you!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

For the traveler today
Among the Zen parables, one koan is called “Just Drinking Tea”. Tea represents Zen spirit: he who tastes it tastes Zen.

Hot plum tea is offered to a visitor arriving from afar. Honey and sugar are dissolved in hot water and a pickled plum with the seed removed is proffered between the points of chopsticks. The visitor first steeps the plum briefly in the honey water. He then removes and eats it before drinking the tea. The sourness of the plum and the sweetness of the tea relieve the fatigue of the journey.

For the cook today
The three spirits of zen cooking –
First, the heart of pleasure.
Second, the heart of kindness.
Third, it’s a big deep heart.
Pay attention to everything.

These are Dogen’s three spirits of zen cooking. The happy spirit feels joy and gratitude at the privilege of being assigned the worthy task of cooking, an opportunity to follow the true way. The venerable spirit calls upon a kind heart in the pursuit of food that will please the diner. The great spirit does not flinch from the smallest detail and offers unwavering help in the unshakable quest for improvement.

For all of us today
“Taste as much of this as you can. Swallow what you need and spit out the rest.”

(Taizan Maezumi [source: unknown; appears in a handful of Facebook posts and PDFs but never with an actual citation])

…and:

Home For Thanksgiving

The gathering family
throws shadows around us,
it is the late afternoon
Of the family.

There is still enough light
to see all the way back,
but at the windows
that light is wasting away.

Soon we will be nothing
but silhouettes: the sons’
as harsh
as the fathers’.

Soon the daughters
will take off their aprons
as trees take off their leaves
for winter.

Let us eat quickly –
let us fill ourselves up.
the covers of the album are closing
behind us.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and:

A Winter Notebook

2

I am not available
At the moment
Except to myself.

Downstairs the plumber
Is emptying the big tank,
Water-logged.
The pump pumped on and on
And might have worn out.

So many lives pour into this house,
Sometimes I get too full;
The pump wears out.

So now I am emptying the tank.
It is not an illness
That keeps me from writing.
I am simply staying alive
As one does
At times by taking in,
At times by shutting out.

(May Sarton [source])

From elsewhere:

Physical labor as a bringer of sleep doesn’t seem to do much for me. But the woods do, where thoughts of weather, of food, and of the day’s journey so dominate the mind that everything else subsides. The rise and fall of temperature and of wind, the beginning and the end of rain matter here in a way that is irrelevant elsewhere. With the right gear, it is a pleasure to live with the weather, to wait for sun and feel the cool of rain, to watch the sky with absorption and speculation, to guess at the meaning of succeeding events. I hate feeling miserably wet and cold. But with boots, heavy wool socks, rain pants, rain parka, and a wide-brimmed hat I have been dry and warm through all the downpours, on and off the river.

(John McPhee [source])

…and:

When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

The Bait

Saturday mornings, before
my weekly chores,
I used to sneak out of the house
and across the street,
grabbing the first grasshopper
walking in the damp California grass
along the stream.
Carefully hiding a silver hook
beneath its green wings,
I’d float it out
across the gentle ripples
towards the end of its life.
Just like that.
I’d give it the hook
and let it ride.
All I ever expected for it
was that big-mouth bass
awaiting its arrival.
I didn’t think
that I was giving up one life
to get another,
that even childhood
was full of sacrifice.
I’d just take the bright green thing,
pluck it off its only stalk,
and give it away as if
it were mine to give.
I knew someone out there
would be fooled,
that someone would accept
the precious gift.
So I just sent it along
with a plea of a prayer,
hoping it would spread its wings this time
and fly across that wet glass sky,
no concern for what inspired
its life, or mine,
only instinct guiding pain
towards the other side.

(Eric Chock [source])

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Don’t Panic: The Stranger on the Road May Well Be Yourself

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[Image: “Plaza Convocation,” 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:

In my experience, you always think you know what you’re doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn’t and you couldn’t. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That’s my idea. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It’s a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not. Honestly, I never sit down to write anything without thinking, This is a weird thing to be doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I don’t know. It feels funny to do these things, but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look.

(David Hickey [source])

…and:

Too Easy: to Write of Miracles

Too easy: to write of miracles, dreams where the famous give
mysterious utterance to silent truth;
to confuse snow with the stars,
simulate a star’s fantastic wisdom.

Easy like the willow to lament,
rant in tramples roads where pools
are red with sorrowful fires, and sullen rain
drips from the willows; ornamental leaves;
or die in words and angrily turn
to pace like ghosts about the walls of war.

But difficult when, innocent and cold,
day, a bird over a hill, flies in
—resolving anguish to a strange perspective,
a scene within a marble; returning
the brilliant shower of coloured dreams to dust,
a smell of fireworks lingering by canals
on autumn evenings—difficult to write
of the real image, real hand, the heart
of day or autumn beating steadily:
to speak of human gestures, clarify
all the context of a simple phrase
—the hour, the shadow, the fire,
the loaf of a bare table.

Hard, under the honest sun, to weight
a word until it balances with love—
burden of happiness on fearful shoulders;
in the ease of daylight to discover
what measure has its music, and achieve
the unhaunted country of the final poem.

Sicily, 1948

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

(Elizabeth Bishop [source])

From elsewhere:

The Good God and the Evil God

The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.

The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”

The Evil God did not answer.

And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.”

“Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.”

And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.”

The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.

(Kahlil Gibran [source])

…and:

We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So, too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul, which is the principle of all our acts…

The soul does not find itself unless it acts. Therefore it must act. Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death. But my soul must not project itself entirely into the outward effects of its activity. I do not need to see myself, I merely need to be myself. I must think and act like a living being, but I must not plunge my whole self into what I think and do or seek always to find myself in the work I have done. The soul that projects itself entirely into activity, and seeks itself outside itself in the work of its own will is like a madman who sleeps on the sidewalk in front of his house instead of living inside where it is quiet and warm. The soul that throws itself outdoors in order to find itself in the effects of its own work is like a fire that has no desire to burn but seeks only to go up in smoke.

(Thomas Merton [source])

#51: The two men met at an intersection known to both, but recognized by neither.

“I haven’t seen you in forever!” exclaimed the younger man to the older.

“And I,” replied the older, laughing, “could say the same thing for you!”

“Want to walk together for a while?”

“Thought you’d never ask. Where you want to go?”

“I think,” said the young man, and paused. “…I think it doesn’t much matter. How about that horizon over there?”

The older man laughed. “That’s funny. That’s exactly where I myself was headed!”

And so they set out, not quite arm in arm — but all but.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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All to Know the Home of Your Own Name

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[Slideshow: “The Dark Tarn of Auber–or Not, Respectively,” 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:

Written words can be a source of entanglement as well as of liberation; unless the right person takes it at the right time, the elixir turns to poison. Please be careful.

(Torei Enji [source])

…and (ibid.; italicized portion):

You may think that you have died and even that you have risen again; but both will be a dream.

This has a terrible meaning, especially for imaginative people. We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change [which] I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself—to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed, & then to find yourself still in bed.

(C.S. Lewis [source])

…and (ibid.):

One suggestion is to regard your personality as a pet. It follows you around anyway, so give it a name and make friends with it. Keep it on a leash when you need to, and let it run free when you feel that is appropriate. Train it as well as you can, and then accept its idiosyncrasies, but always remember that your pet is not you. Your pet has its own life, and just happens to be in an intimate relationship with you, whoever you may be, hiding there behind your personality.

(Wes Nisker [source])

…and (ibid.):

One of the biggest factors in stress is cognitive distortion — we make an absurd situation into a catastrophe. We create our own reality out of it. Like, “You make me crazy!” Well, nobody makes you crazy; you make your self crazy. There is a tremendous amount of humor in that . If we could just take a breath and step away and be witnesses to our own absurdity, we’d be cracking up most of the time. What humor can do is make your life less of a problem. A laugh is a break. It removes the dark lens that you see your life through and gives you a lighter lens that gives you clarity. As you step away and get less involved in getting pissed off, you achieve a certain level of enlightenment. In other words, humor takes you to a higher place.

(Loretta Laroche [source: unknown])

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

An Improvement in Stairs

Through the oculus of the bus terminal at Boston’s South Station, light falls
for a hundred feet. A shock, a god, a pillar of light, like that of the Pantheon

if the Pantheon had a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts, surly young workers
at the Greyhound desk, & an escalator rising to its height—

just like it, that light. A patent for an early escalator called it an improvement
in stairs. An improvement, surely, how I’m standing still & still, somehow,

going up & up & up. My favorite patents are the ones Houdini sought for tricks
never performed: a block of ice he would leave whole, a box within a water-filled box

he would escape from dry. (I should mention: at least one thing in this poem is a lie.)
I can disappear, too: from one place, from another. There’s nothing quite as nice

as leaving, when you’re in the mood. There’s nothing quite as nice as coming back.
Years ago, I stood beneath the Pantheon & thought how beautiful, how sublime,

how like the bus terminal at South Station, if it had a Dunkin’ Donuts.
During the war, Houdini offered to teach soldiers headed to the front

how to escape torpedoed vessels, German handcuffs. As a kid
in Appleton, Wisconsin, he’d dreamed of playing baseball—

the stage of the stadium, the long fly making its escape.
The way there is a place in the game called home

& the goal is to get there
again & again.

(Mairead Small Staid [source])

…and:

In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.

(Clarissa Pinkola Estés [source])

…and:

Driving Home from Keyworth’s

Sharing the lap belt, we slide imperfectly into each other
as Dad speeds through an overpass. His daddy raised

Porsches—he raced Porsches—but he is not his father. He doesn’t have
the money to have bad ideas and this is a new truck so we

better not touch something we’re not supposed to. My brother
and I share a Zippo and Swiss Army Knife. All we are allowed

to light are our own birthday candles. Mom says we can cut
the beige-dead slack off of grass. Wanna see the seat belt catch

fire? one of us whispers. The other one replies, No, let’s watch
Dad drive. So we do. Our love is not yet fooled away from worship.

Everything our father does has wings. And because we behaved
while he left us in the car with the engine running as he ducked

into Keyworth’s Hardware store, Dad lets us pretend to steer.
Each of us on a knee, our inherited hands, pulling. We tussle

up the driveway. They are saving us an ashtray fortune, dimes
collide with quarters. My brother, his blond hair, calls out about

a squirrel five yards away that might run into the road. Dad shouts
with joy-of-the-moment, Kids! We raise our keen eyes and yodel

and howl—I’m being ridiculous now. But have you ever sat next
to a person and known the home of your own name?

(Tennessee Hill [source])

…and:

The mustard-pot got up and walked over to his plate on thin silver legs that waddled like the owl’s. Then it uncurled its handles and one handle lifted its lid with exaggerated courtesy while the other helped him to a generous spoonful.

“Oh, I love the mustard-pot!” cried the Wart. “Wherever did you get it?”

At this the pot beamed all over its face and began to strut a bit, but Merlyn rapped it on the head with a teaspoon, so that it sat down and shut up at once.

“It is not a bad pot,” he said grudgingly. “Only it is inclined to give itself airs.”

(T.H. White [source])

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Sights Unseen (Until You Suddenly See Them)

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[Image: “Umbrella Bag (Northern California, June 2023),” 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:

Sometimes one sees the world in a way one is not aware of at other times. We’re never really seeing the world, we’re only seeing a moment’s take on the world. This is true of images. Images are a way of seeing the world which you didn’t notice before, and something you cannot make by an act of will; it’s something that is suddenly revealed to you. The world has layers, and you start seeing that these layers happen all at once; they’re all together. I think that’s what is startling about images. At the moment of seeing, they seem so obvious. Why didn’t I see that before? Mandelstam wrote wonderfully about images. He said that an image is not an act of will. A real image is something that occurs to you. He said an image is like running across a river on a bridge of boats, and when you get to the other side, you look back and see that all the boats have moved or drifted and are in different places, and you realize it would be impossible to do all over again. That’s always seemed like a great image right there.

(W.S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Adrift on the Lake

Autumn sky illuminates itself all empty
distances away toward far human realms,

cranes off horizons of sand tracing its
clarity into mountains beyond clouds.

Crystalline waters quiet settling night.
Moonlight leaving idleness everywhere

ablaze, I trust myself to this lone paddle,
this calm on and on, no return in sight.

(Wang Wei [source])

…and (italicized portion):

There was also another reason why it was now possible to paint. It was because there was one central fact that made it seem worthwhile going on, whatever the objective value of the pictures to other people. It was that I had discovered in the painting a bit of experience that made all other occupations unimportant by comparison. It was the discovery that, when painting, something from nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a fusion into a never-before-know wholeness; not only were the object and oneself no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action towards it, the movement of one’s hand together with the feeling of delight in the “thusness” of the thing, they all seemed fused into a wholeness of being which was different than anything else that had ever happened to me. It was different because thought was not drowned in feeling, they were somehow all there together. Moreover, when this state of concentration was really achieved one was no longer aware of oneself doing it, one no longer acted from a centre to an object as remote; in fact, something quite special happened to one’s sense of self. And when the bit of painting was finished there was before one’s eyes a permanent record of the experience, giving a constant sense of immense surprise at how it had ever happened: it did not seem something that oneself had done at all, certainly not the ordinary everyday self and way of being.

(Marion Milner [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Meeting the Light Completely

Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.

Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.

And then
what is said by all lovers:
“What fools we were, not to have seen.”

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

I Find Myself Defending Pigeons

I love how you never find their bodies, how they never rest their eyes. I love how their breasts are comforters unfolding by their breath. I love that pigeons live in the city, that underestimation never stopped a pigeon from unlatching itself or being old. I want them all unspooling in the air, and bridges that are half sigh and half pigeon. I want to harbor their coo and utilize it for energy. I want to learn to use them the way they want to be used. I want to pigeontail into a quiet night, to let their oddness sit in our hands. You can never know a language until you quiet your own. I want people to write about them. Their leaving ships for land, or standing on their own on a marble statue in the shimmer of a field. I want to talk about the term rock dove, argue over whether or not it’s imperialist. I want the media to implicate us in the pigeon problem, for a couple to sit with their asparagus and kids and realize none of this is far from them, whatever we think. I want oils and watercolors and inks. I want still life with pigeons, since not a one has ever been portrayed with a soul: a flight of them around old bread. And how they’re all the same. How all the world is here with them in hate, since they are rats adorned with angel wings, and the children down the street are free to chase their drag: they want to see a pigeon’s rouge entirely. Let the pigeon have her pigment. Consider the pigeon’s brown and green and everything, the brandishing of his nakedness to the sun, as if nothing is absolute. I love the pigeons’ shoulders, tongues, and wedding nights. I love the pigeon’s place in history, their obsession with living in the letters of our signs. I love their minds, or what I’ve come to believe is their theology. Who knows? Let the pigeons speak. Ask the closest pigeon for his number, for her middle name, if they are ready to die, if the sky gets crowded enough to consider war, if their stores are closed on Sundays. I want to be ready for them to be just like us, but more ready for them to be completely different. I don’t want to waste any time tracing a pigeon’s god to Abraham. I want to get started. Some of us feed pigeons. I love, sometimes, our care. I love, I think, the park bench. I love apples, but I do not love pears. The weather. I love the pigeons, the revolution of wheel to sky. I love the newspaper graying in a different air.

(Keith S. Wilson [source])

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Finding Your Way on the Route You Already Know

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[Image: “Homeward (2019),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The Dead

At night the dead come down to the river to drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old photographs.
They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures,
which are cracked and yellow.
Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.
They tell each other stories.
They make so much noise
they wake us
as they did when we were children and they stayed up
drinking all night in the kitchen.

(Susan Mitchell [source])

…and:

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein [source])

…and:

One afternoon, a man named Harry went mountain climbing. All in all, things were going very well. Then suddenly, the path he was walking on gave way, taking Harry with it. With flailing arms, Harry managed to grab a small branch on the side of the mountain. Holding on for dear life, he screamed, “Help! Help! Is anybody up there?”

Miraculously, the clouds parted, and a beam of light illuminated Harry as he hung tenuously from the branch. A voice—clearly the voice of God—spoke directly to Harry and said: “Harry, I will save you. Let go, Harry; I will save you. Let go.”

Harry thought hard about this. Then, with a sudden burst of conviction, he looked up the mountain and shouted, “Is anybody else up there?”

(Benjamin Shield [source])

From elsewhere:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

(Agnes De Mille, in conversation with Martha Graham [source])

…and:

Glory-of-the-Atlantic
(excerpt)

It’s early, low tide, the beach just coming to life:
devout ladies davening in lounge chairs,
the homeless roused from hard-worn sleeping bags,
joggers, skulkers, cabana boys unfolding hotel umbrellas,
icing down the day’s allotment of Michelob Ultra.
Tourists are wandering down from the boardwalk
to the timidly breaking surf, couples from Toronto,
jet-lagged families from France and Brazil,
dazed, sun-dazzled, amazed—one guy actually
staggers at the water’s edge, staring straight past me,
and I can see on his face what he wants to know—
am I still on the plane, am I sleeping, or is this real?
Before he can ask, I slide from the sandbar
backward into the water’s warm, saline embrace.
Of course it signifies the womb as well as the void.
Of course death absorbs the living, a mirror
made of sponge. Of course we travel between realms
far exceeding in mystery water, earth, and air.
Of course we leave behind a mark, a volt,
a wave-eaten relic. Of course nothing endures
but that which forges its armature of grief,
the soul. Of course it’s real, of course it’s a dream,
you’re adrift, you’re asleep, you’re on a plane
traversing tropospheric darkness, you’re watching
sunlight strike prisms against the windows of your eyes,
you’re underwater, it’s real, it’s a dream,
a voyage, an immersion—any day now, any century,
any minute we will arrive at our final destination.

(Campbell McGrath [source])

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A Novel-in-Progress Elsewhere: ’23kpc’

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[Image: a product of the Bing AI image-generation tool. This is the image which heads the so-called “reader’s guide” to my current work in progress; it’s a mashup of the science fiction and mystery genres, inspired by the 1930s Thin Man films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy.]

Longtime RAMH readers may or may not know of my shadow “Running After My Hat” presence (such as it is) over on the Substack platform. (It hasn’t been a secret, really; I added a link to it, some time ago, to the section of the right sidebar headed “RAMH Elsewhere…”) But I wanted explicitly to let you know about it because of an offer I’ve made to followers there, which I now extend to you.

Here’s the deal: as of this moment, everything on my Substack is free to read. But on January 1, a paywall will go up around a portion of it: future installments of a novel-in-progress called 23kpc. All the stuff regarding that novel through Chapter 7 — background and actual contents — will remain freely, publicly accessible. (Note that what’s actually available to read now, without a paid subscription, goes through Chapter 23; after 1/1/2025, all of the novel from Chapter 8 on will go behind the paywall.)

In addition, anyone who’s a free subscriber to the Substack as of January 1 will automatically receive, gratis, a three-month “paid” subscription to allow them to continue reading 23kpc… after which they, too, will need to switch to an actual “paid subscriber” plan. You can read the details of the plans, and some other information, in this post from last night.

Anyhow, to you loyal visitors to my site here, I offer the same deal: if you subscribe to my Substack by January 1, I’ll give you a three-month “paid” subscription to see if you’d like to continue reading there.

Note: you don’t need a Substack account to read publicly available posts there — mine or anyone else’s. But in order to follow/subscribe to specific Substacks, yeah, you’ve got to create an account. That’s also free, by default; you pay for only those publications you want to pay for.

One of these days I may explain here what moved me to try out Substack in the first place, and what I think of it so far. This isn’t that day. In the meantime, if you find yourself interested enough in 23kpc (or, for that matter, whatever else I’m posting over there), I hope you’ll join me there, too.

Thank you sincerely, as always, for supporting what I do here and/or on Substack!

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Not Just What to Look At: What Even to *See* in the First Place

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[Image: “Pick One,” 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:

After an old Hasidic master died, his followers sat around, talking about his life. One person wondered aloud, “What was the most important thing in the world for the master?” They all thought about it. Another responded, after a time, “Whatever he happened to be doing at the time.”

(Susan Murphy [source])

…and:

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

(Eleanor Lerman [source])

From elsewhere:

There’s something you learned from experience that took so long you didn’t even realize you learned it: seeing. The development of your visual system takes a long time. Your eyes opened in the womb, but there was nothing to see. When born, your brain didn’t know what the world looked like. It didn’t know the statistics of the world. Of how many edges, corners, and curves there are. Of where they tend to be—the consistent edges of horizons and tree trunks and houses, the consistent corners of paper and dice and windows, the constant curves of the moon and footballs and pies. Of how those edges, corners, and curves tend to relate to each other, to form trees and houses and footballs. And of how they tend to move, in graceful arcs and smooth trajectories, no sudden vanishing, reversing, or plummeting.

These statistics of the visible world are all learned by experience. Raise someone in a world with no vertical lines, and they will not be able to see a vertical object placed before them. Raise someone with one eye closed, and when reopened that eye will see nothing.

(Mark Humphries [source])

…and:

Beehive

Within this black hive to-night
There swarm a million bees;
Bees passing in and out the moon,
Bees escaping out the moon,
Bees returning through the moon,
Silver bees intently buzzing,
Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey,
Getting drunk with that silver honey,
Wish that I might fly out past the moon
And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.

(Jean Toomer [source])

…and:

Undivided attention

A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers, tied up
with canvas straps—like classical music’s birthday gift
to the criminally insane—is gently nudged without its legs
out an eighth-floor window on 62nd street.

It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers’ crane,
Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares and dirty white crisscross
patterns hanging like the second-to-last note of a concerto
played on the edge of the seat, the edge of tears, the edge
of eight stories up going over—it’s a piano being pushed
out of a window and lowered down onto a flatbed truck!—
and I’m trying to teach math in the building across the street.

Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned?
All the greatest common factors are delivered by long-necked cranes
and flatbed trucks or come through everything, even air. Like snow.

See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year
my students rush to the window as if snow were more interesting
than math, which, of course, it is.

So please.

Let me teach like a Steinway,
spinning slowly in April air,
so almost-falling, so hinderingly
dangling from the neck of the movers’ crane.
So on the edge of losing everything.

Let me teach like the first snow, falling.

(Taylor Mali [source])

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The Finding of Sincere and Unstunted Delight

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

From whiskey river:

Beat doesn’t mean tired or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific; to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of the heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity.

(Jack Kerouac [source])

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

I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me; the fierceness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud… I will not ask you to forgive this rambling levity. I , for one, have sworn, by the sword of God that has struck us, and before the beautiful face of the dead, that the first joke that occurred to me I would make, the first nonsense poem I thought of I would write, that I would begin again at once with a heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being perfectly silly, perfectly trivial, and as far as possible, amusing. I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel, wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre.

(G. K. Chesterton, in a letter to his fiancée Frances, after the death of her sister Gertrude [source])

…and:

Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us—more range, more depth, more feeling; more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence as also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished. Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it. And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

Not from whiskey river (nor from its commonplace book):

You are the benefactor of great kindness. And you have no idea how much goodness is lavished on the world by invisible hands. Small selfless deeds engender tremendous force against the darker powers. Great kindness pervades this world, struggling against pernicious selfishness and vulgar narcissism and the vicious streak that is smeared across each human heart—great bounding goodness is rampant and none of it is wasted. No, these small gifts of goodness—this is what saves the soul of man from despair, and that is what preserves humanity from the long fall from the precipice into the abyss.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

…and:

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? Rarely. “We are vaguely wretched,” Walter Kerr writes in The Decline of Pleasure, “because we are leading half-lives, half-heartedly, and with only one-half of our minds actively engaged in making contact with the universe about us.” When we allow ourselves to reach the pinnacles of deep play, we become fully available to the world and ourselves, out of context, beyond comparison, and in harmony with life for a few glorious moments. Even when we climb down from those heights, we carry with us some valuable skills and insights. Deep play will always feel enthralling, but its details may change as basic ideas like “control,” “environment,” “self,” “body,” “god,” and countless others we now take for granted begin to evolve.

Yes, I’m sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity. New religions will arise, new art forms, new ways to tantalize or jolt one’s senses. Artists will continue to reveal how the world touches us, how we are linked to the powerful unseen forces of nature. For deep play, people will need sacred arenas, rules, time limits, tension, exaltation, an openness to risk, and the freedom to play. Of course, their versions of deep play will explore new locales, new materials, new ways of evading the grand concourse of society for a few rapturous moments.

But suppose paradise awaits us, as so many tales foretell—freedom from disease, crime, early death. In a transcendent world, what will become of our passion for transcendence?

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

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In Search of the Absence of Field

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dozens of empty seats arranged in several tiers at an unspecified outdoor setting

[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])

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