Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Talking Ourselves into Disaster

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

Thanks to the vagaries of our travel schedule this week, today’s post may seem — seem (?) — sketchy and amorphous. But that’s only because I lack the time to fill in the gaps; I’m sure you, whoever you are, can supply the necessary spackling yourself — especially if you’ve seen how this works over the years, especially recently! So let’s lay it out there — first, from whiskey river (italicized lines):

Little Epiphanies

The difference between what’s required
and what’s desired is the difference

between the chocolate and the cake,
the car and the new car smell, the nightie

and the night. There’s so much I want
to twist round my fingers, to stroke

and stir, sketch and stretch, but so much
I should sweep and scrub, strip

and sterilize. But I’d rather wring dirt
from my pores, turn it to ink instead,

rather scurry to my driveway to study
the moon’s abrupt phrases than kneel

with bucket and mop to banish shadows
that have sprung up on my kitchen

floor, darkening my soles as if I were
anointed, a kind of low-rent henna

for the lazy and uninhibited.
I should keep the unmentionables

unmentioned, nudity prohibited,
purses to a minimum, but I thrive

on clutter—my gaudy bras and bags
of yarn, my malfunctioning pens,

last chance reams of slightly damaged
paper. The difference between what’s whole

and what’s held, what’s withheld
or revealed, what’s real and what’s

revelation—that’s what I seek,
rest of my life spent in search

of little epiphanies, tiny sparks surging
out of the brain during the clumsiest speech.

(Allison Joseph [source])

…and then a couple of bits not from whiskey river:

…a record-high gap has opened up between Americans’ personal attitudes and their evaluations of the country. In early 2022, Gallup found that Americans’ satisfaction with “the way things are going in personal life” neared a 40-year high, even as their satisfaction with “the way things are going in the U.S.” neared a 40-year low. On top of the old and global tendency to assume most people are doing worse than they say they are is a growing American tendency to be catastrophically gloomy about the direction of this country, even as we’re resiliently sunny about our own household’s future.

…Sure, voters like to hate things at the national and abstract levels, which seems to open the door for bold change. But because most Americans say they’re personally fine, they might resist too much experimentation. This creates a confusing voting bloc, which is constantly angry about the state of things, but also fundamentally conservative about any change that overturns their “rather happy” life and “at least okay” finances.

I have a final theory of what’s going on here. With greater access to news on social media and the internet, Americans are more deluged than they used to be by depressing stories. (And the news cycle really can be pretty depressing!) This is leading to a kind of perma-gloom about the state of the world, even as we maintain a certain resilience about the things that we have the most control over. Beyond the diverse array of daily challenges that Americans face, many of us seem to be suffering from something related to the German concept of weltschmerz, or world-sadness. It’s mediaschmerz—a sadness about the news cycle and news media, which is distinct from the experience of our everyday life. I’m not entirely sure if I think this is good or bad. It simply is. Individual hope and national despair are not contradictions. For now, they form the double helix of the American spirit.

(Derek Thompson [source])

…and:

Lilies

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall
in the wedge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful

as that old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face

of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?
When van Gogh
preached to the poor
of course he wanted to save someone—

most of all himself.
He wasn’t a lily,
and wandering through the fields
only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in this world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river,

where the ravishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues—
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Now, and Then, and Every Catastrophic Now and Then in Between…

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

I don’t know much about self-identified “poet, teacher, and storyteller” Mark Nepo — not more than I gathered on a quick run through Wikipedia and his Web site a few minutes ago. So I can’t say, y’know, that I can recommend much let alone everything he’s written. But a week ago, whiskey river offered up a one-paragraph sample; in the event, I didn’t see it until two days ago: the day of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The sample, and the prescient coincidence of its whiskey river posting vis-a-vis the headlines and developing story, quite shook me. So I sought out the entire piece from which the whiskey river excerpt came. You can read it here (originally published in the magazine in 2013, re-run at the site in 2016).

For now, though, here is the paragraph cited by the river, and the equally striking one which precedes it:

Each of us must make our peace with suffering and especially unnecessary suffering, which doesn’t mean our resignation to a violent world. For the fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence. As our heart breaks with compassion, it strengthens itself and all of humanity. Can I prove this? No. Am I certain of it? Yes. We are still here. Immediately, someone says, “Barely.” But we are still here: more alive than dead, more vulnerable than callous, more kind than cruel — though we each carry the lot of it.

That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

(Mark Nepo [source])

(Aside: as I said, I myself know little about Mark Nepo. But this isn’t his first appearance at RAMH, all of them on Fridays, unsurprisingly. Maybe I should dive a little deeper.)

The day before the shooting, whiskey river added the following, which feels like something of a postscript to Nepo’s piece:

Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates — take back your mind and your body and begin to engage with the fact that you are alive, you are going to die, nobody knows what being alive is and nobody knows what dying is. You’re involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder. There is no mundane dimension, really. If you have the eyes to see it, it’s all transcendental.

(Terence McKenna [source, apparently])

When the news is so appalling that it seems everyone is talking about it — especially online — what else, really, can be said? I don’t feel equipped to inspire people to action, one way or the other. I have no “power” — not even readership, really. It’s fun to fantasize myself in the role of a latter-day knight-errant, roaming the Internet and rallying people — Americans — to a cause…

But there are so many causes to rally them to.

One thing I’ve noticed — from my position on the left of the spectrum — is that we become outraged over causes in seriatim, one at a time. We’re outrage generalists: we freak out about guns, and then there’s a climate disaster on one coast or another, and then there’s a heinous law passed in State A (and copycat laws in States B, C, D, and E), and then… Personally, I think we suffer from then-exhaustion. It never stops. And when it seems momentarily to have backed off, for relief we turn to the media (news and social) for fresh, if less consequential, subjects of outrage: celebrity scandals, foreign wars, music and other artistic works which are, in truth, no worse than not my taste, of course the egos of the super-rich and -famous.

I wish it were possible for us to organize ourselves along more specialized lines, without trying to fix it ALL. It can’t ALL be fixed at once, and it can’t ALL be fixed by parceling out our outrage, pointlessly, in bursts which last only as long as the current news cycle. But if we could just group ourselves, y’know? Cluster, with others of like mind, around the one cause we feel most motivated to act on and competent to contribute to, actively and not passively. Sure, there would be drift, if for no other reason than to prevent burnout on the ramparts. But a little drift out and back would be healthy, renewing our own spirits and reigniting our own passions (as well as those of the new, temporary group)…

Wish-fulfillment, no doubt. But ask the bees and the ants, ask— oh, hell, I don’t know; ask the members of any other damned social species except humans. They’ll tell you. Just look at them. They don’t all work on solving every single problem facing the group. They don’t work in series, either. (Picturing the discussion: “Okay gang, now let’s all run over here and tackle this mess!” “But what about the mess we’re already tackling? It’s still a mess—” “Don’t worry! We’ll get back to it!” Etc. Ridiculous.) They work in parallel. The drones do this. The workers do that. The hunters do one thing, and the nurturers the other.

Could we?

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A Figure, Seen from the Back, Forever Approaching

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

We will be leaving Las Vegas on June 1 — headed first for the Grand Canyon, and then for a Grand Tour of California: Joshua Tree, and then over to San Diego and on up the coast to see the redwoods in the north. (We’ll do a little jog east for Yosemite and Tahoe, somewhere in the middle.) Neither of us has spent much time in the state before — no time at all since we’ve been together (pushing 30 years now)… so we’re looking forward to making its acquaintance, even for just the month we’re there. I wonder if we’ll recognize each of the sights we’ve always imagined, separately and as one?

Of course, with less than two weeks left before we hit the road again, this time for 100% unknown territory, I approached whiskey river this week not with trepidation, but with a certain, well, mindset — my mind’s eye turned to horizons never before seen. And found:

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
too 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.

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.

6. How I Would Paint the Big Lie

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])

Closer to home, such as it is, I spent the last week forcing myself to read a book by an author with whom I was completely unfamiliar. Now, I am typically a generous reader — inclined to give every author the benefit of even many doubts. This particular author — let’s call them X — has apparently had a very successful career so far: numerous novels, a Pushcart Prize for short stories, many loyal readers. The book I read was the first of a new series with an intriguing premise: a young true-crime reporter, a woman at that, in 1880s New York City. All of which hinted at the prospect of a quick, light read, very much what I was looking for after Richard Powers’s The Overstory…

Obviously I’m being a little coy about not identifying X or even X’s book. That I caught up with it, took it by the shoulders and turned it around — only to wince at what I’d committed to — well, yes, I was very, very disappointed. But disappointment isn’t an objective perception; it has more to do with the expectations brought to an experience than it has to do with the experience itself, and to this extent it reveals a flaw between one’s own ears — not necessarily (in this case) a flaw between an author’s.

All that level-headedness and high-minded professionalism aside, I can’t resist wrapping up this post something as follows:

Imaginary Paintings (cont’d)

8. How I Would Paint X’s Book

Gray corseted prose,
draping shirt-cardboard figures.
Statements of the obvious
cribbed from Wikipedia
and offered to the reader
in colored-cellophane drapery,
as though transparent giftwrap
could transfigure misshapen contents.
A finish line staggered across,
breathlessly, panting for refreshment.

(JES)

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Finding the End in the Middle

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[Image: “Lemme Out!,” by Alan Levine. Found it on Flickr, of course; there, the photographer explains that he released the wasp unharmed after taking the photo — and pleads, jokingly, for a bit of karmic payback for his good deed. But in the context of this week’s post, I couldn’t help thinking of the wasp’s own experience of karma, before and after release…]

Let’s talk about karma — that mysterious force of revenge or redemption, that Thing Out There which either comes back to bite us or secures our place among the angels (depending on the sort of life we’ve led). Curse or comfort: you pick (because if you don’t, it will happily pick for you!).

I’ve always been suspicious of karma, at least as the term is casually and most often used; if it were actually “true” then the universe must suddenly — instantly — have become much more automated than I’d ever imagined it could be — a condition which seemed at odds with the chaotic jumble of non-cause-and-unlikely-effect I could see just by looking around at a given moment.

(Not of course that I was worried about karma — that dire consequences might lurk around the corner for me, or, for that matter, that fame and fortune lurk there. I haven’t led anywhere near a blameless life, the gods (and far too many humans!) know, but I haven’t been a horrible person, either. I just figure what happens, happens.)

But karma turns out to be a useful concept if you stop thinking about it as a scorekeeping — an accounting — tool. Suppose you imagine the ideal-to-you you, using whatever yardstick you’d like. How would you set out to make that happen? I mean, I don’t know anything about “you” out there, but I bet just going through this mental exercise will move you in the direction of what you’ve imagined. That turns karma not into a force imposed on you from the outside, but into a force sprung from you yourself…

A couple of readings this week along these lines. First, per usual, here’s one from whiskey river (italicized lines) a few days ago:

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

(Tony Hoagland [source])

…and then, not from whiskey river but from a newsletter I subscribe to (an issue in my inbox this week):

Many often mistake karma for the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature. So, it is easy to become imprisoned by our karma and to think that the cause always lies elsewhere—with other people and conditions beyond our control, never within ourselves. But it is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma. It is always possible to change your karma. You can make new karma. But there is only one time that you ever have to do it. Can you guess when that might be?

[…]

The very act of stopping, of nurturing moments of non-doing, of simply watching, puts you on an entirely different footing vis-à-vis the future. How? Because it is only by being fully in this moment that any future moment might be one of greater understanding, clarity, and kindness, one less dominated by fear or hurt and more by dignity and acceptance. Only what happens now happens later. If there is no mindfulness or equanimity or compassion now, in the only time we ever have to contact it and nourish ourselves, how likely is it that it will magically appear later, under stress or duress?

(Jon Kabat-Zinn [source])

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RAMH@14.005479: In Search of Stasis

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[Image: Cover of Off Flew the Hat, a 2017 children’s book by Nili Ariely about — apparently — the pleasures of writing a blog over the course of many years. Says the description at that Amazon page, it’s about “about the wonders of discovery and friendship.” But even absent the latter — fresh friendships and shared discoveries — there’s always the thrill of a new discovery for oneself…]

In a typical week, whiskey river offers me at least one solid tie-in to something I’ve been thinking about. This week, a bonus: it floated two selections my way appropriate to the post’s theme. First:

The Mountain

My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist’s life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain.
Why do I lie
to these children? They aren’t listening,
they aren’t deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks—
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.

(Louise Glück [source])

… and then there’s this:

Rising in Perilous Hope

What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.

(Marge Piercy [source])

Aside from the fact of, well, duh, Friday, today’s post has one other raison d’être, as I hinted a week ago: today is the 14th anniversary (plus a couple days, hence the nerd-jokey post title) of my first post at Running After My Hat.

Some statistics, since then:

  • 1,667 posts, or about 119 posts a year (1,805 total, counting those I haven’t actually published for one reason or another)
  • 104 pages (120 total)
  • 7,176 comments (2,645 of which have been mine; plus 12 “in moderation”)

…and some thoughts about those statistics:

119 posts a year — two to three every week — sounds weirdly inflated even to me. But that’s only because I, and almost certainly you, have gotten used to the Fridays-only tempo around here. There was a time (he said, propping up his feet on a cracker barrel and lifting a harmonica to his lips to maximize the nostalgic moment) when I was determined to write a post every single day — and for a brief while actually did so. What happened? Just the usual: the world moves on, and we move on with it… especially online, when today’s Hot Tech (e.g., blogging) becomes tomorrow’s Quaint Handicraft. Maybe we need an Etsy just for blogs.

The “pages” count is probably about right, although I’ve never tried to verify it. A page is WordPress’s version of an undated diary entry. The top menu here shows you, apart from the “Home” link, links to four such pages:

The fact that you can see only four there points out a distinguishing feature of pages vs. posts: the former can be “found” pretty much only if the blogger has chosen to link to them. The pages themselves may lead you to other pages and/or to actual posts — you can see examples of both by clicking on that About Running After My Hat link at the top of the blog.

So what about the other 116 “pages”? What’s on them?

Some are private — scratchpad-type things, notes to myself (especially about the blog) and so on; you can’t find them by searching the Web, say. Some are password-protected, meaning I’ve shared them with other parties for particular reason(s) — you might be able to find links/references to one in a Web search, but without the proper password you couldn’t actually read the contents. (A good example: a series of pages I used while participating in an online writer’s workshop about six years ago — taking apart and reassembling a novel in which I’ve invested a lot of time and energy. Other workshop participants could read those pages because I’d shared the password with them.) Back in 2012, I wrote The Propagational Library, a science-fiction novella (sort of) by posting one chapter a week, in “real time” (meaning, the chapters as posted were first drafts, posted the day I wrote them) — and indexed them all, with some general commentary, on a single “table of contents” sort of page.

The rest? I’m not sure how to characterize them… You’ll just have to find them the same way I did a moment ago: by poking around to see where the hyperlinks lead you. (The links to actual posts here look like this: https://johnesimpson.com/blog/[yyyy]/[mm]/[title, in compact form] — if a link directs you to a RAMH resource which has no [yyyy] or [mm] component, you can bet it’s a page and not a post; the posts are always dated.)

Anyway, about today’s post’s title: yes, I’m getting a bit restless. But it’s a peculiar sort of restlessness — I’m wanting to, well, be parked somewhere for a while — somewhere I can think of as “home,” physically, really, geographically. (We’ve been parked with The Stepson since mid-December, but that’s only a borrowed, temporary resting spot, good only until we hit the road again in a few weeks; I’m restless, that is, to really come to rest.)

In a bloggish sense, though, I’m equally restless. I can’t recapture the “feel” of blogging in the early 2000s, when loose groups of a few dozen people who didn’t even know one another in real life would chance to gather (not in so many words) and “listen to” one another, round-robin style, and then to “talk” for a little while about the monologue they’d just read. These days, the choices seem to be:

  • Quick one- or two-paragraph (if that) pronouncements of one kind or another, which may or may not draw anyone else into a conversation;
  • “influencer”-focused long-form writings, via the likes of Substack, Medium, etc., in which Big Names craft professional essays upon which their audiences may comment but not really in the form of conversation (it’s like the sotto-voce muttering during a theatrical intermission); and
  • maybe — maybe — podcasts, to which I will never adapt because, y’know, hearing (and also because these are really just audio versions of the long-form Substack/Medium essays, with the additional option of including more than one “influencer” at a time, in conversation).

But I don’t despair. I think I can find value in writing regularly again, even if no one ever reads it — just because, by posting it in the open, I’ve exposed myself to the danger opportunity mere chance that someone might drop in…

In the meantime, I thank you — whoever you are, however (in)frequent a visitor you might be — for visiting Running After My Hat. I appreciate knowing you might be out there!

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There’ll Be New Dreams, Maybe Better Dreams and Plenty…

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

The Missus and I have been more or less parked here in Las Vegas since mid-December. It’s been nice — at least from our perspective, haha — to share some extended time with The Stepson, and our stereotypically-Vegas activities (casinos, shows, fine dining) have been practically nonexistent… so it’s been good to just, y’know, depressurize after the fits-and-starts dash across the country that took up our last four or five months of 2021. Now it’s April, solidly into springtime, and a certain restlessness is setting in: time to hit the road again, aimed — however indirectly — back at the East Coast.

But first, well, it’s April. We have a clutch of medical/dental appointments lined up next week — just regular checkups — back in the last place we called home, in North Florida. So we’ll fly back for that, and while we’re in the state we’ll also spend a couple weeks with family and friends before heading back here.

But, ahem, as I was saying: It’s April. And whiskey river has taken the opportunity to remind me of the month’s mixed signals:

April

How the light is sad.
How it will not leave us alone.
How we are tugged up staircases
by the way it angles across landings.
Or just our faces—tipped
to the clear, depleted sky.
How because of sunset, the imagination
headquarters in the west.

Spring in the north: all that
tawny grass and gravel and nothing
green to sop up the excessive honesty.

Outside our windows,
something like youth or promises.
How the wind blows right through them,
blossoming. Fleet.

(Jan Zwicky [source])

Whenever and wherever we finally settle down, sometime in a few months (“few” even more loosely defined than usual), the two of us agree that a chief motivator for us will be the priority to the household of a dog. It’s been four-and-a-half years since The Pooch died, and we just can’t stand being dogless anymore.

Happily, then, and happily along several dimensions, as I sought to come up with something to complement — and perhaps answer — Jan Zwicky’s poem, I came across this:

April

The optimists among us
taking heart because it is spring
skip along
attending their meetings
signing their e-mail petitions
marching with their satiric signs
singing their we shall overcome songs
posting their pungent twitters and blogs
believing in a better world
for no good reason
I envy them
said the old woman

The seasons go round they
go round and around
said the tulip
dancing among her friends
in their brown bed in the sun
in the April breeze
under a maple canopy
that was also dancing
only with greater motions
casting greater shadows
and the grass
hardly stirring

What a concerto
of good stinks said the dog
trotting along Riverside Drive
in the early spring afternoon
sniffing this way and that
how gratifying the cellos of the river
the tubas of the traffic
the trombones
of the leafing elms with the legato
of my rivals’ piss at their feet
and the leftover meat and grease
singing along in all the wastebaskets

(Alicia Ostriker [source])

…and then again, this:

April Is a Dog’s Dream

april is a dog’s dream
the soft grass is growing
the sweet breeze is blowing
the air all full of singing feels just right
so no excuses now
we’re going to the park
to chase and charge and chew
and I will make you see
what spring is all about

(Marilyn Singer [source])

Woof!, eh?

______________

Note: This week’s whiskey river Fridays post comes to you courtesy of, well, Thursday: Friday is our day to fly back to Florida (translation: chaos). As for the next couple of weeks, well, let’s just take them as they come. (For one thing, Running After My Hat turns 14 the middle of next week…) Thanks in any case, and as ever, for visiting RAMH!

Note 2: By the way, this post’s title alludes — as I believe Alicia Ostriker’s “April” may allude — to Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.”

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Watching Yourself Stumble Through a Crowded Labyrinth

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Dragon*con 2010

[Image: “Dragon*con 2010,” by Ethan Trewhitt. (This is just a static frame from a video a little over a minute in length; you can click on the image to see the video itself, over on Flickr. In any case, of course, I use it here under a Creative Commons license.) Says the caption, in part: “The Marriott lobby, crowded with the costumed and uncostumed, brims with disorder as people move in every direction at once. I think that it would be fascinating to track each individual person in this video and view their course as they navigate the maze and simultaneously create it by simply existing.” Implicit in the caption: that Trewitt himself added to the tumult… by simply existing. Heh.]

The French philosopher Henri Bergson has had a rather muddled, on-again/off-again reputation over the decades since he lived and died (1941). Philosophical controversy, of course, does not at all resemble pop-culture controversy — no one, to my knowledge, has accused him of scandalous personal behavior. But jeez, philosophers can sure fight zealously among themselves; this seems especially so when their philosophies depend, as Bergson’s apparently did, on deep understanding of other fields, particularly science and mathematics.

Anyway, I’ve never read a complete work of his, only excerpts quoted by others. It no doubt reflects my own lack of intellectual rigor that such excerpts have struck me as completely reasonable. Take, for example, the following from a recent whiskey river post:

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening.

Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.

(Henri Bergson [source])

I read through that essay (from 2015, and not by Bergson himself) at the link provided by whiskey river. Therein I found a nice metaphor — certainly for contemporary “civilized” life:

Picture yourself in a giant labyrinth. Billions of other people are also in the labyrinth, but it is so large and wild that you only see a minuscule fraction of them. At the end of the labyrinth is a nebulous It, a prize with no concrete existence, that means something slightly different to each of the maze’s travelers. You sometimes worry as you wander through the maze if you’ll ever reach It, or if there even is an It. You see some people running through the maze, knocking others over in the process, thirsty to finally discover It. Some people aren’t even moving at all, just hanging out, sitting against one of the tall hedges within the maze.

You can choose to judge the people who are unlike you in how they approach the maze’s challenge. Or, you can talk to them, show them respect and try to learn something from them as you work your way through the maze. You may find yourself in a standstill at times, or in a sprint.

What must be remembered over all else is that you’re in a maze. You’re part of the game, and it’s not just your game — it’s everyone’s.

(Charlie Ambler [source])

Sometime back in the 1980s, I worked as a computer programmer for a giant international telecommunications firm. Because our management was enlightened, we occasionally had chances to attend presentations and seminars outside our specific area of expertise, especially if they were clearly business-oriented somehow. One of these I remember was a small group session, led by guy who’d developed his own desk-calendar system of logging upcoming appointments, noting their results, and annotating those results in some structured way. (This was just at the very dawn of the personal-computer era, so it was all done via paper, held in a special leather-covered binder for which — naturally — he would be happy to supply the custom pages to support the whole system.)

I don’t think any of us present followed his system for more than a month. But the guy was an entertaining, self-deprecatory speaker, and it was hard not to like him. I never forgot one of his points:

He was talking about rush-hour traffic jams, especially in the summer. You’d be sitting there fuming, sometimes glancing nervously at the dashboard temperature gauge, and you might spend 10-15-20 minutes at a time without moving more than a few feet. Eventually your frustration would boil over and you’d start to project outwards. You’d glance around to the side, in your rear-view mirror, and you’d think: Look at all these idiots. All this traffic. Where are all these idiots going at the same time? What do they think they’re doing? Why are they in my way, and why the hell aren’t they moving?!?

And then, they guy said, sometimes if you were lucky, it would suddenly hit you: You’re out there too — the guy laughed at this point, as he pointed at each of us in the small room — you’re the traffic!

I always loved that story.

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Trapped, Wriggling, Pinned (Like an Insect) to a Board…

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[Image: “impossible decisions,” by a Flickr user who identifies themselves as “danna § curious tangles.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you for that option!)]

This week, whiskey river offered us some road-trip advice — in which the road trip in question is not literally a road trip, although the metaphor sure works in this case. The river gave us just the one italicized stanza, but the whole thing feels relevant:

Before We Leave

Just so it’s clear—
no whining on the journey.
If you whine, you’ll get stuck
somewhere with people
like yourself. It’s an unwritten law.
Wear hiking boots. Pack food
and a change of clothes.
We go slowly. Endurance won’t
be enough, though without it
you can’t get to the place
where more of you is asked.
Expect there will be times
when you’ll be afraid.
Hold hands and tremble together
if you must but remember
each of you is alone.

Where are we going?
It’s not an issue of here or there.
And if you ever feel you can’t
take another step imagine
how you might feel to arrive,
if not wiser, a little more aware
how to inhabit the middle ground
between misery and joy.
Trudge on. In the higher regions,
where the footing is unsure,
to trudge is to survive.

Happiness is another journey,
almost over before it starts,
guaranteed to disappoint.
If you’ve come for it, say so,
you’ll get your money back.
I hope you all realize that anytime
is a fine time to laugh. Fake it,
however, and false laughter
will accompany you like a cowbell
for the rest of your days.
You’ll forever lack the seriousness
of a clown. At some point
the rocks will be jagged,
the precipice sheer. That won’t be
the abyss you’ll see looking down.
The abyss, you’ll discover
(if you’ve made it this far),
is usually nearer than that—
at the bottom of something
you’ve yet to resolve,
or posing as your confidante.
Follow me. Don’t follow me. I will
say such things, and mean both.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

We’re at a point now (still in the Las Vegas area) at which our own road trip has been at a standstill for three months. We so needed a break from the three-nights-here-five-nights-there-a-single-night-at-the-other-place pace, y’know? Just finally being able to empty the car of all luggage and travel bags — instead of selecting the one bag or two to tide us over to the next stop — well, it felt like a heavenly indulgence. And we could have done a lot worse than to stay with The Stepson!

…But now, of course and maybe inevitably, we’re hemmed in by the pinch of various realities: the end of the wintertime snuggle-in evenings; a dwindling reservoir of cash set aside for the trip; an ongoing pandemic (despite the kinda unconvincing official reassurances, which feel to me more like a series of exhausted collective “Oh, the hell with it!” pronouncements); inflation and war; the fact of not yet knowing where we’ll even live when the trip is “done”… We daily fight the good fight of not turning on each other simply as a substitute for not being able to fight all the large-scale battles.

This feels like a good time to open up the little book of, well, let’s call them homilies for lack of a better word: the little book we used to refer to here at least once a month for many years, but haven’t since August. Therein, on a well-thumbed page we find a fable of sorts:

#90: On foot, dog-tired, the man approached a busy intersection. He’d never been there before, but as he drew nearer he’d been eyeing it, seemingly larger and busier, with every step: cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks and delivery vans, even bicycle lane, a river of vehicles — any one of which could kill him, and all of which together would certainly obliterate him completely…

Now he was here at the corner.

Now he could see, as he could not from farther away, that the intersection was well marked with traffic signals (not, alas, with “Pedestrian Crossing” ones). This might have given him courage, given him simple hope. Except… except that the traffic never let up, not in any of the four directions, no matter the signals’ red-yellow-green status. Somehow, all the wheeled menaces were managing to thread through the gaps in oncoming and cross-traffic, without stopping or even slowing down.

The man could not understand this. In an infinite universe, he had often told himself, all things must be possible. But surely that didn’t apply to a system as chaotically random as this, driven as it was not merely by physical forces, quantum mechanics, the unpredictable quirky cross-purposed nature of human mood and decision-making…

Then it occurred to him that, well, he too was an animate object. In an infinite universe, he thought… and so he swallowed once, and stepped off the curb.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

______

Note: I am very much aware how lucky I am — we are — to be able to whinge about such dilemmas, vs. the truly excruciating, life-threatening, and/or literally maddening ones pounding at the doors of people around the world right now. See Stephen Dunn’s first stanza, above.

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Coming from Elsewhere, and Now Headed That Way

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[Image: “05a.WMATA.MetroCenter.WDC.8April2016,” by Elvert Barnes. (Found on Flickr, using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

From whiskey river, just a few days ago:

At any particular moment in a man’s life, he can say that everything he has done and has not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to this moment. If he’s being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that’s a fulfilling notion. But if he’s in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.

(William Least Heat-Moon [source])

Well, yes. I guess that’s true — the gods know, How could I have been so stupid? is a question I’ve put to myself a thousand times. The problem with the question, in those words or others, is two-fold: (1) it’s always retrospective, as though one could have anticipated and prepared for every possible mishap or misstep over the course of decades of life; and (2) from a certain perspective, the Nobel Prize winners and great Chiefs themselves surely experienced “How could I be such a dope?” moments. To pluck one arbitrary bad moment from one life and set it alongside an arbitrary moment of glory from another really doesn’t make for a fair comparison — nothing to beat oneself up about or, for that matter, nothing to swell one’s head…

Coincidentally, this comes during a week when I cracked open a book I’ve had for a long time — its acquisition probably triggered, now that I think about it, by a whiskey river-inspired Friday blog post. Early on in the book, back to back, we find a couple of germane passages. The first is a story of an old friend, Nasruddin (the name spelled variously with one or two d’s):

It’s 4 A.M. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him. “Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?” “Sir,” replies Nasruddin, “if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago!”

(Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks [source])

…almost immediately after which, we read:

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there. This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

(Rumi, ibid.)

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Facing The Other, Pretending Not to See Oneself

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[Image: “Ukraine, Day 1,” by John E. Simpson.]

This week has certainly delivered to the world a big, heaping wallop of unease, hasn’t it? I’ve found it difficult to be really philosophical about “it all”; mostly, like many people it seems, I am baffled and rather irrationally angry that “it all” has come to pass… and I say irrationally, because after all, what do I know, and who am I to be having opinions about it?

A few days ago, before the invasion, the onscreen chyron beneath a couple of CNN talking heads said something like, How will a Russian invasion of Ukraine affect your pocketbook? I have no idea what the commentators were saying — the sound was off, and there were no closed captions displaying — but those big boldfaced words really hit me wrong. All I could think was, My pocketbook?!? Jeezus, think about what it would mean for the Ukrainians…!

Explicit references to politics and world affairs seldom bob to the surface over at whiskey river, where the current is always gentle. But the anonymous blogger there is human, after all, and in especially fraught times a given week’s selection may be hard to separate in one’s mind from the real-world context. Or maybe it’s just one’s own imagination that fits an interpretation around something like this (italicized portion):

At the risk of telling you
what you already know, Mrs. Cavendish, here’s
something merely true: the insufficiency of the moon
has been replaced by the lantern, the lantern by
the light bulb, but what won’t go away is the promise
of salvation out there in the bright beyond.
There will always be people who think suffering
leads to enlightenment, who place themselves
on the verge of what’s about to break, or go
dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them
and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush
toward that sure thing that awaits us,
which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.
My dog keeps one eye open when he sleeps.
My cat prefers your house where the mice are.
Stare ahead, my friend. The whole world is on alert.
Mrs. Cavendish, every day is old news.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

I read of people who place themselves on the verge of what’s about to break, and think to myself: Yeah. Like Putin, that fool, that dupe of his own aspirations.

And then I cast around for more, not at whiskey river, and come across first this:

Malignant aggression does not reflect true human nature; it is connected with a domain of unconscious, perinatal dynamics that separates us from our deeper identity. Those who initiate war activities and violence in general are typically substituting external targets for elements in their own psyches, which should properly be faced in personal self-exploration.

(Stanislav Grof [source, but original text unconfirmed])

Yes, I exult, yes: that’s it, exactly!

But no, that’s not “it” after all… or rather, that’s not “it” unless I skip conveniently past that last clause: one’s own psyche, subject to self-exploration. And this, I think, is it — as expressed below, with my emphasis added to the original:

You have to want to lose your appetite for violence or aggression. And to do that, you have to lose your self-righteousness. You have to realize that you cannot continue to have your habitual reaction to something, especially if your reaction ends with violence-physical or verbal-against yourself or somebody else, or even against the government of your country or the terrorists or whomever. You have to accept in your gut that the habitual reaction is poisonous not only to you but to the rest of the world.

(Pema Chödrön [source])

When I was young, I knew a man just a few years older, man who suffered violent mood swings. Medication “helped,” after a fashion: as I recall, it rendered him impassive — functioning, as they say, but also strangely not-human. Yet when unmedicated, he tended to destroy the lives of people around him, principally his family. He seemed alternately obsessed and focused on the strangest ideas, and violently angry about injustices he imagined the world and those people had inflicted upon him. Eventually, with the help of improved medications and other therapies, he came to have something of a normal life — but the memories of those past episodes forever seared themselves in the minds of those (including me) who’d known him back then.

I think back to those young men now: him, going through the inner hell he went through and acted out; and me, watching in horror as he figuratively staggered from one violent encounter to another, lapsing only temporarily into dull-eyed “normalcy.” And I think of my helplessness then, and my helplessness now, and my hope that somehow — somehow — the right balance of remedies can be found, or forged. Maybe then madness can finally be laid to rest: an awful memory, but no more than that.

And then maybe we can return to life as it should be — never again “normal” (because it never was), but at least stabilized by fellow-feeling for strangers and an absence of national envies and judgments. (“National” the key word there: I doubt that we’ll ever, as a species, be free of personal envies and judgments.)

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