Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

In a State of Grace, Where We Can Find It

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[Image: “The Missus in the Temple of Athena (Nashville Parthenon; November, 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’ll let my anonymous friend from over the way do the verbal honors solo today; nodding in agreement, I’ll just, well… just point, so to speak.]

From whiskey river:

In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. One starts to feel that everything in existence — whether people or things — breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. The world’s truth is impalpable.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

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“Food Is Very Important”

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[Image: “Bark Studies #1,” by John E. Simpson. What is the single most significant feature of the tree depicted in this image? Of everything you see here, what — which crevice, which ridge, which color tone, white or black or gray or sepia tint, which individual pixel — what “counts” as the single most important? Now pretend that what you see here is not just this image, nor even the entire tree itself, but the whole world. Now ask yourself those same questions. Whatever your answer, does your answer hold a lesson within it? If so, is that lesson more important than any other… or than any single pixel in the image?]

Certainly as The Missus and I live out in the world at large, we come across one thing or another which we consider important: noteworthy, appalling, annoying, beautiful, and so on. And we know, at some level, that “importance” isn’t either-or or black-and-white — it’s not the flipside of, say, utter irrelevance. It’s just a point in a continuum, in a context: the context of the moment…

But anyhow, in thinking about that the other day, I came across the following Zen story:

It was the summer of 1971. I was living at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center—the first Zen monastery in America. Its founder and resident teacher was Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master who had come from Japan to America to teach meditation to Americans, mostly young. One of those young Americans was Robert, well known among us as a nonstop talker and a fervent proselytizer of brown rice as the perfect spiritual food.

One afternoon I came across Suzuki Roshi and Robert in the courtyard, and Robert was, as usual, talking animatedly. “Wouldn’t you agree, Suzuki Roshi, that brown rice is the perfect Zen food? Isn’t it the perfect balance between yin and yang?” The brown rice diet was trendy in those heady counterculture days, and we served it every day in Tassajara’s meditation hall. Suzuki Roshi was unusually accepting of our counterculture ideas, and rarely criticized us. In those days, brown rice was rarely eaten in Japan. White rice was the norm. For all I knew, Suzuki Roshi was eating brown rice for the first time at Tassajara.

“Don’t you think brown rice helps us attain enlightenment?” Robert was saying.

Suzuki Roshi listened to Robert talk on for some time without saying anything. Finally, when Robert paused for breath, Suzuki Roshi said quietly, “Food is very important.”

(Lewis Richmond [source])

I laughed to myself. And then I flipped over to a section in whiskey river’s commonplace book, where the anonymous blogger records some of their favorite (and no, not necessarily the “most important”) quotations and clips among the ones they’ve posted. Like this one:

The process of practice is to see through, not to eliminate, anything to which we are attached. We could have great financial wealth and be unattached to it, or we might have nothing and be very attached to having nothing. Usually, if we have seen through the nature of attachment, we will tend to have fewer possessions, but not necessarily. Most practice gets caught in this area of fiddling with our environment or our minds. “My mind should be quiet.” Our mind doesn’t matter; what matters is nonattachment to the activities of the mind. And our emotions are harmless unless they dominate us (that is, if we are attached to them) – then they create disharmony for everyone. The first problem in practice is to see that we are attached. As we do consistent, patient zazen we begin to know that we are nothing but attachments: they rule our lives.

But we never lose an attachment by saying it has to go. Only as we gain awareness of its true nature does it quietly and imperceptibly wither away; like a sandcastle with waves rolling over, it just smooths out and finally—where is it? What was it?

(Charlotte Joko Beck [source])

“Huh,” I thought. Maybe the whole concept of interestingness masked an unhealthy attachment — a “this, not that” attachment not unlike Robert the monk’s fixation on one type of rice vs. another. And then I kept reading:

First Step

Beginnings
are sometimes foggy.
The path is not always clear.
The end of one begets another.

To begin, put one foot
in front of the other.
Your foot knows where to land,
the one that moves forward first.
Forget about the best foot.

Just put it out there.
Stop traffic if you have to.
Go home if that is where it leads you.
Go back to work
if that is where your foot falls.

You don’t have to
go anywhere
Just rest.
After you step,
take another.
Forget about the weather.
Step
Step again.

(Robin Heerens Lysne [source])

The first step: important, yes. Yet no more important than the step after, which in turn is neither more nor less important than the one preceding or the one following, and ultimately, no step more important than any other…

Our 2021 odyssey, such as it is, will include (I think) another five stops after we fly back to our car at the end of our current two-week break here in Florida. This will put us in Las Vegas in mid-December, as we’ve been hoping… None of those intervening stops were on our bucket list of “must-see” places — they’re just on a more or less straight line west from our car’s current location to Vegas. We expect each stop will, yes, differ from the others. But I’m going to resist assigning them relative importance (ha).

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How to Set Aside the Unwanted: Foreground the Diversions

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[Photograph, more or less untitled, by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) These yellow rubberized mats are visible at many street corners and elsewhere on curbs around the United States, and make curbs less of an obstacle for, e.g., users of wheelchairs. Those little nubs or bumps protruding from the surface? They’re called truncated domes. That term, as well as the color (see below), suggests that the photo’s title should incorporate the words “aureolin,” or perhaps “gamboge,” and “truncation”… and, maybe the concept of, uh, domeness.]

I’ve been trying, with mixed success, to cultivate a frame of mind with which to face my diminishing allotment of years with something like equanimity. The phrase I keep returning to: “No regrets; no resentments.” I have to fight the urge to sample both of those bitter fruits of earlier years, and suspect I’m not alone (although many people seem to linger in the produce aisle over one or the other, squeezing them, sniffing them, and putting them back — over and over). One of the most useful tools for distracting me from these temptations is indulging in my curiosity. As whiskey river offered a few days ago:

I have a friend who speaks of knowledge as an island in a sea of mystery… We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow. And still the mystery surrounds us. It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring.

(Chet Raymo [source])

Having caught this at one of the river‘s posts, I glanced at the next day’s, too — to whit:

The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours.
The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea,
the fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro,
the rods of the yawning branches trolling the breeze,
the rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass,
the coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road,
the echo of benediction on a house—
its rooms of pain, its verandah of remorse
when joy lanced through its open-hearted doors
like a hummingbird out to the garden and pool
in which the sky has fallen. These are all yours,
and pain has made them brighter as absence does
after a death, as the light heals the grass.
And the twig-brown lizard scuttles up its branch
like fingers on the struts of a guitar.

(Derek Walcott [source])

What the hell, I wondered, was “gamboge”? It looked like a typo. It wasn’t italicized — so, all things being equal, I guessed it to be a legitimate English-language word…

And so it is. Gamboge, Wikipedia tells me, is the name of a pigment — “partially transparent deep saffron to mustard yellow… It is the traditional colour used to dye Buddhist monks’ robes.” (The same source, on the word’s etymology: “[it] derives from Gambogia, the Latin word for Cambodia.” Color (haha) me skeptical, but I have a hard time imagining the Romans knew enough of that land to give it a name.) The hue (also called “cobalt yellow”) is popular among artists in either oil or watercolor paints. The problem with the substance traditionally used to produce this color is that it’s not particularly durable; it fades over time. (It’s also somewhat toxic.) So in more recent decades, artists instead turned to an artificial substitute, with a more melodious name: aureolin. Alas, it too is far from perfect — a “defective” paint.

…which led me to a whole string of books by the artist and author named Hilary Page, at whose site I encountered that defective-paint assertion — and further jargon like “PY175, a lemon Benzimidazolone,” and so on. See for example this “web update” of a page in one of her books, including the image shown at right. (Caption: “I had boards of these paint samples in every sunny window in my house to test each paint for lightfastness.”)

And having encountered Ms. Page’s particular expertise, I inadvertently found myself reading about the precursor of Lego building blocks. Some of these are of course a sort of golden color… and — at least in their Lego form, especially the so-called baseplates — also rather suggestive of truncated domes:

Funny how that all works out, eh?

Not really funny, but also worthy of comment: any regrets and resentments I might’ve been harboring when I woke up today are, well, gone.

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Finding Color: Looking for It, and Then Looking Harder

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[This, pretty much. The only difference: I took the photo on our arrival a couple days ago. But since yesterday afternoon, the sky has been white-clouded, sunless, and rainy, the light weak: what color you see out the window above is, right now, genuinely drained.]

This week, The Missus and I have been wrapping up the northeastern leg of our Road Trip 2021. We spent at least a few days — beginning in mid-August — in every New England state, over a week in New Jersey, and all the rest here and there in New York State, including Long Island. (Pennsylvania: our apologies, but we’re pretty much just passing through!) At the moment, I’m looking out the windows of a 19th-century farmhouse in the westernmost corner of New York; brushing up against the glass is a spray of pokeberry, almost — almost, but not really — reminding me of its cousins down in North Florida, in the wooded area behind our house. Beyond, the wooded back yard is predominantly pale green and yellow, with some splotches of unenthusiastic orange. (The only orange in sight: incandescent light on wood surfaces. And not a bit of red.)

Our timing, to the extent we’d planned it at all, was more or less intentional. We’d thought, y’know, we’ll get up to the Northeast at summer’s peak, and stay there into autumn: avoiding the oppressive heat of the South and Midwest, lingering for the changing woodland colors a month or two later. 2021, as it happens, was not the year to meet those objectives, and I wonder if — never mind when — we might again see such a year…

Next on the itinerary, starting in a few days: probably heading down through Ohio, into Kentucky and Tennessee, maybe getting as far as Arkansas before temporarily changing course for a Thanksgiving back in South Florida — which by then should be more or less in its own version of autumn. (Read: green, unexciting, more or less just like summer — unless the hurricane season lingers…)

But, y’know, at least I’m experiencing all this in good company. And just a few days ago, whiskey river, as is its wont, had something to say about a reality of my life — this reality:

Fall Song

It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.
I have found you in the story again.
Is there another word for “divine”?
I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now.
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
Slightly overcast
Yellow leaves
Your jacket hanging in the hallway
Next to mine.

(Joy Harjo [source])

P.S. It’s not especially relevant to today’s theme, but whenever I think of autumn leaves, I think of the memories encapsulated in this post, from not quite 13 years ago.

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How (Not) to Worry… Even (Especially) About Worrying

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[Image: an entry, from August, in my #jesstorypix series on Instagram. The caption reads: “It was the last day he’d remember marveling at anything — anything at all. But on this day, this morning by the banks of the Savannah River, yes: he marveled. He marveled at the smoke in the sky, the height of the flames in far-off Jacksonville, casting their eerie light on the clouds, the absence of any other people… and yet, the frighteningly normal pall that underlay it all…”]

Among the several weekly newsletters I subscribe to in the hope they’ll make me smarter, gentler, cleverer, and/or simply more me is one called Aeon. (It’s a nonprofit publication with offices in Australia, Great Britain, and the US. Subscriptions are free; contributors include philosophers, psychologists, scientists, numerous other authorities, artists, and so on. It sums up its mission: “We are committed to big ideas, serious enquiry and a humane worldview. That’s it.”) However, I don’t read every weekly edition of the site’s offerings (which probably indicates my wishy-washy commitment to becoming smarter, gentler, etc.).

This week, whiskey river drew my attention to “The usefulness of dread,” an essay first published at Aeon in 2018, with this excerpt:

An anxiety is a lens through which to view the world, a colouration that grants the sufferer’s experiences their distinctive hue. The Buddha alerted us to a fundamental metaphysical feature of this world, the ‘co-dependent arising’ of all that we experience and know. That is, nothing possesses existence independent of all else that makes it so: an anxious person inhabits a world coloured and contoured by their own, highly individual anxieties; it is a world co-constructed by the sufferer and his or her anxieties. Anxiety is therefore a perspective, a hermeneutical relationship with the world, whose text now gets read in a very peculiar way by this anxiety-laden vision. Things and persons and events fall into focus depending on their interactions with our anxieties: that man in the corner becomes threatening, this chair becomes unstable and unbalanced, that food becomes the agent of a fatal illness, my family — my wife, my daughter — appear as targets for cruel twists of fate. I live in a distinctive world shaded and illuminated by an idiosyncratic anxiety.

(Samir Chopra [source])

Now, if you remember this RAMH post from a couple of weeks ago, you’ll recognize why this passage so spoke to me. Naturally enough, I think, I at once hied me hence to read the rest of Chopra’s essay. It may be worth a read for anyone similarly afflicted (at least, if one is not put off by intellectual responses to something as visceral as dread). For instance:

We are rational animals, but implicit in that rationality is an anxiety. The rational animal remembers and has learned from its past; it anticipates and plans for its future; it modifies its present, anxiously, in response to these memories and anticipations; it is anxious to avoid mistakes, even those it cannot remember and has consigned to the unconscious forgotten… I propose a ‘self-as-bundled-anxieties’ theory: we are a bundle of anxieties; by examining them, to see what vexes us, what makes us anxious, we come to know who we are. Anxiety is a reminder that our selves are rather more diffuse and disorderly than we might imagine, that there are more bits to be seized as they swirl ‘about’ and ‘inside’ us…

My anxieties tell me I’m still capable of feeling. They provide an acute reminder that I’m alive and responsive, and yes, anxious. My anxieties about my family inform me that I have let myself become wrapped up in their selves; they inform me of the boundaries I have formed around and about myself; they inform me of what my self is. They inform me of the risibility of the claim that we are isolated beings whose boundaries terminate at our fingertips, at the surface of our skins. Thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.

(Chopra, ibid.)

I’m not sure what to make of all this. Like a superhero, I have donned a cloak pretty much every day of my thinking life (the Cloak of Apprehension and Second Thoughts); by now, a good part of me wonders why I bother to take it off before going to bed. Still, as they say, it’s always possible to have too much of a thing. Maybe I should have a go at Chopra’s approach — this “Good morning, Anxiety! Up already? Good to see you again!” sort of thinking.

Or maybe I’m misstating his case, oversimplifying it. I probably should worry about that before working out anything like a new Life Goal, eh?

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On Aging: The Doing of It, and the Having Done It

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[Image: “The Sign Guys Were Feeling Larky,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This is just the latest in a series of photos I’ve posted on Instagram tagged #jesstorypix, each photo accompanied by a caption telling a sort of microfiction about what the photo might (in my imagination) show. This one’s caption reads: “Once every year, the fellas down in the municipal sign shop followed a tradition: they made up one sign which made no sense, and placed it on a random sign pole somewhere in town. By consensus, their favorite was the one in the middle of the bridge over North Creek. It’d been there since 1987 and still confused the bejeezus out of people who’d never noticed it before.”]

Our anonymous friend over at whiskey river seems to have aging on their mind:

Aging is peculiar, I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy — when the books, clothes, bars, technology – when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?

(Stephanie Danler [source])

…which post predated the following by just a few days:

“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

(John Green [source])

I guess someone, somewhere in what we (sometimes laughably) call The Civilized World, someone must not be thinking at all about aging… Monologuist, erstwhile radio host, practically professional nostalgist Garrison Keillor turns 80 later this year, and the gods know he’s been all but obsessing about the experience recently. E.g.:

I was having a hard time falling asleep the other night because I’d thought of something that I was afraid of forgetting if I fell asleep, which was keeping me awake, not that it was the sort of timeless thing you see printed on coffee cups sold in bookstores, like “Hope is the thing with feathers” or the one Thoreau said about confidently pursuing your dreams, which now I forget the rest of…

In retirement, as I say, my nocturnal life has blossomed into extensive dreams, pastoral epics in which I am a great sailor, an artist, a standup comic, a race car driver, a ballet dancer — dreams of competence and authority — and the other night (I am now getting back to what I started to say in the first paragraph) I dreamed that I had written a perfect limerick and in my dream I was afraid that if I fell asleep I’d forget it, but in my dream I was arguing with myself and thinking, “You’re awake” and the conflict, knowing that my sleep self was wrong, that I was sleeping, woke me up, and I sat down and wrote the limerick, about the famous podcaster Phoebe Judge, host of “Criminal,” which everyone except me (I?) has heard, but I refuse to hear podcasts because earbuds look funny on me, and the challenge was to not use the rhyme “heebie-jeebie.”

A girl who loves radio, Phoebe,
Has AM and FM and CB,
And plays them proudly,
Constantly, loudly,
At 370 dB,
And when she was caught
She fired a shot
At the cops with her personal BB,
And when she turned deaf
She shouted the F-
Word that’s not found in Mister White, E.B.

It is a perfect limerick, not that this is the solution to our national dilemmas, but the limerick is one enterprise in which perfection is possible, and that is why I keep returning to it. I look back at my life and I see a series of sinking ships and gunshot wounds in my feet, but “A girl who loves radio, Phoebe” is right up there with the five or six perfect ones I’ve written. This column is not perfect. It strikes me as somewhat disorganized and scattered, but, as I say so often, it is what it is. Someday I’ll write about that.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

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Keep Your Eyes Open, and Wonder

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

From whiskey river (italicized passage)… In the full portion of the essay from which this excerpt is taken, Mary Ruefle is musing about forms of communication — letters, smoke signals, the phone messages left by people trapped in the World Trade Center on September 11, 20 years ago (I don’t know if our whiskey river blogger friend made that last connection, but it chimed right with me, this week):

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us – that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

I took one of those nests and pinned it to a wall in my study. Then I pinned a folded handwritten letter inside the nest. I did this years ago. I don’t know why I did it. I just did it.

Nothing I understand haunts me. Only the things I do not understand have that power over me.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

In these terms, it occurs to me, a raging curiosity about, well, everything can be understood as a a desperate drive to be haunted by nothing: never again to lose sleep over matters mundane or cosmic, never to obsess about the substance behind a question mark… I’m not going to think too hard about this, because if I start to wonder — i.e., to act on my curiosity — about curiosity itself, well, that way lies madness. But I’ll let some others do my thinking for me, e.g.:

…and:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

(Albert Einstein [source])

…and:

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

(Bill Bryson [source])

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I/Thou/We: A Surprised Affection

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[Image: “Selfie (at Altitude),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I don’t often post one of my photos here within a few days of doing so over at Instagram, but this one felt to me to fit easily into the context of this week’s readings, as a sort of visual counterpoint.]

Here’s one of whiskey river‘s offerings over the past week:

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

In one of those rare, unironically happy coincidences with which social media sometimes blesses us, Facebook offered me a “Your Memories” item a few days ago — I’d shared it on the same day in 2017. Less coincidentally, probably, I’d also shared a chunk of it here at RAMH on the same day I posted it to Facebook (and a different chunk a couple years before that):

I came away from the [Tucson] zoo with something, a piece of news about myself: I am coded, somehow, for otters and beavers. I exhibit instinctive behavior in their presence, when they are displayed close at hand behind glass, simultaneously below water and at the surface. I have receptors· for this display. Beavers and otters possess a “releaser” for me, in the terminology of ethology, and the releasing was my experience. What was released? Behavior. What behavior? Standing, swiveling flabbergasted, feeling exultation and a rush of friendship. I could not, as the result of the transaction, tell you anything more about beavers and otters than you already know. I learned nothing new about them. Only about me, and I suspect also about you, maybe about human beings at large: We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are stamped with stereotyped, unalterable patterns of response, ready to be released. And the behavior released in us, by such confrontations, is, essentially, a surprised affection. It is compulsory behavior and we can avoid it only by straining with the full power of our conscious minds, making up conscious excuses all the way. Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls. When they are massed together, all touching, exchanging bits of information held in their jaws like memoranda, they become a single animal. Look out for that. It is a debasement, a loss of individuality, a violation of human nature, an unnatural act.

Sometimes people argue this point of view seriously and with deep thought. Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print up leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to all of them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: Be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can’t do this and keep a straight face.

Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our mind of civilization, as affection or friendship or attachment. I don’t see why it should be unreasonable for all human beings to have strands of DNA coiled up in chromosomes, coding out instincts for usefulness and helpfulness. Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.

(Lewis Thomas [source])

Addendum: Another social-media coincidence… For more on the interrelationships between humans and animals, see this Susan Orlean essay over at Medium. It made me wonder about how Thomas’s essay might have differed if he’d imagined the otters as food animals rather than objects of curiosity or entertainment.

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Your World Among Many, Many Worlds Within Yours

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[Image: “Black Walnuts by the Thousand,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Consider:

Emerald Spider Between Rose Thorns

Imagine, not even or really ever tasting
a peach until well over 50, not once
sympathizing with Blake naked in his garden
insisting on angels until getting off the table
and coming home with my new heart. How absurd
to still have a body in this rainbow-gored,
crickety world and how ridiculous to be given one
in the first place, to be an object
like an orchid is an object, or a stone,
so bruisable and plummeting, arms
waving from the evening-ignited lake,
heading singing in the furnace feral and sweet,
tears that make the face grotesque,
tears that make it pure. How easy
it is now to get drunk on a single whiff
like a hummingbird or ant, on the laughter
of one woman and who knew how much I’d miss
that inner light of snow now that I’m in Texas.

(Dean Young [source])

…and:

There Is Another Way

There is another way to enter an apple:
a worm’s way.
The small, round door
closes behind her. The world
and all its necessities
ripen around her like a room.

In the sweet marrow of a bone,
the maggot does not remember
the wingspread
of the mother, the green
shine of her body, nor even
the last breath of the dying deer.

I, too, have forgotten
how I came here, breathing
this sweet wind, drinking rain,
encased by the limits
of what I can imagine
and by a husk of stars.

(Pat Schneider [source])

….all of which flowed just from having brushed up, lightly, against this (courtesy of whiskey river):

Who do you think you are? Imagine there’s a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. All truths about all parts of our self. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don’t always have your own best interests at heart. That’s true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You can’t trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know what you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you. And that’s me. And I’m telling you: you are the only you.

(Charles Yu [source])

__________

P.S.Traditionally on this day, I add an entry to my Potpourri series. I hope one will make an appearance later today… but it might get bumped to tomorrow. Who knows? In the series’ Oh, whatever the hell I want spirit, maybe I’ll post it anytime in the next several days… and just back-date it to today. *mad, evil laughter*

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Everything Continuing in All Directions

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[Image — more or less untitled — by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) It does in fact have a functional “title,” but not one I’m particularly fond of, nor chained to. Ideas?]

From whiskey river:

The Wonder Is

The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so that it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close,there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants . . .
One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions — into evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.

(Jaan Kaplinski [source (among others)])

Not from whiskey river:

#23: To appreciate post-apocalyptic fiction, we generally must imagine being among the survivors: the last person to eat a can of beans, say; the last to “own” a pet dog or cat; the last to consult — let alone to care about consulting — a wristwatch. In a world of uncontrolled entropy, we wonder, what must it feel like to defend (successfully or not) the ramparts of order and routine?

Here’s the mystery: any apocalypse — fictional or real, without a “post-” — marks only one point in the timeline. And of course we all know what a given midpoints feel like, in the moment. But what happened at the starting line?

What must it have felt like, say, as the very first person to perform some action that one was aware of performing? Not just the first to open a can of beans, but the first to remember something — something from even a moment ago, let alone from decades ago? What does it mean to “know” something at all, let alone to “remember” it later? When you type a sentence which begins with a capital “W,” do you “know” you’ve just struck that particular combination of keys? Do you “remember” having done so, a split-second or a minute afterwards? Did you ever know or remember it? And if so, did you fail to notice the miraculous first moment when that thing apparently happened on its own, without decision or reflection? Can you even imagine such a moment, as it must have felt when it popped and sparked in your ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestor’s head…?

Maybe living through and then, later, remembering complex experiences — phases of life, everyday (or, for that matter, uncommon) events, people and relationships we consider unforgettable — is like typing a sentence. It’s impossible not to notice a given first-time experience. (To experience something is to notice it, no?) But thereafter? Within the cavernous, routinely mined spaces of our souls, re-experiencing something we’ve lived through consists of just taking a scoop from the tailings piled off to the side, from an imagination-dump — a muddied or gloriously colored dump, as the case may be. But the outcome scarcely resembles anything we might call conscious or controlled… let alone (the gods know) true.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

[Where’s the rest of this “Fridays at RAMH” post? See this note from a couple of days ago.]

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