Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

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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To Be as Aware and Alone as Can Be — Naturally

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[Image: “Sedona: Leaf and Shoe,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’d titled the image before realizing it actually depicts two leaves — the obvious one, and the ageing, deteriorated thing up there in the northwest quadrant — which maybe makes the whole thing more poignant, I dunno. I certainly didn’t mean it as a comment on the shoe-wearer’s age and deterioration!]

One of whiskey river’s offerings in the last week was a poem whose ostensible subject might have been familiar to romanticized-nature poets like Wordsworth: the multi-sensory beauties of the natural world. Yet there’s also something distinctly modern about it — something about the natural world as it could be regarded particularly “nowadays,” immersed in a global pandemic and buffeted by techno-socio-political turmoil:

The End of The World

“We’re going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”
So they stopped the car where the river curled,
And we scrambled down beneath the bridge
On the gravel track of a narrow ridge.

We tramped for miles on a wooded walk
Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk.
Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor
While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore.

We came to a bend, where the river grew wide
And green mountains rose on the opposite side.
My guides moved back. I stood alone,
As the current streaked over smooth flat stone.

Shelf by stone shelf the river fell.
The white water goosetailed with eddying swell.
Faster and louder the current dropped
Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped.

I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,
My journey done where the world ended.
I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,
The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

(Dana Gioia [source])

Oh, sure, there’s a mention of a car. But that’s not the modern touch I’m thinking of. I’m thinking more of the sensibility: a progression — from being with others to being by oneself, from a shared to a personal experience. But notice, too, the touch of an ancient tradition: if it were truly modern, that focus on the personal would force an observation on the self. (Y’know, like, “What does this all say about me?”) Instead, Gioia’s poem regards — very obliquely — a self only in a context of nature… as an elementary particle within a molecule, perhaps.

It reminds me of this (not from whiskey river, although it possibly could have been):

Let us change our way of thinking and our way of looking. We have to realize that silence comes from our heart and not from the absence of talk. Sitting down to eat your lunch may be an opportunity for you to enjoy silence; though others may be speaking, it’s possible for you to be very silent inside… Being alone does not mean there is no one around you.

Being alone means you are established firmly in the here and the now and you become aware of what is happening in the present moment. You use your mindfulness to become aware of every feeling, every perception you have. You’re aware of what’s happening around you in the sangha, but you’re always with yourself, you don’t lose yourself. That’s the Buddha’s definition of the ideal practice of solitude: not to be caught in the past or carried away by the future, but always to be here, body and mind united, aware of what is happening in the present moment. That is real solitude.

(Thich Nhat Hanh [source])

Always with yourself, aware of what is happening but not really aware of your self as such. Real solitude. And a real comfort.

By the way, for anyone who might be wondering: the cataract removal surgery in my right eye went just fine. The only real hitch (aside from — surprise! — my elevated blood pressure): the doctor could not use his beloved femtosecond laser, and had to resort, after all, to the good old manually wielded scalpel. But the eye is fine — presumably all but healed. (Next week I meet with him for the last time about the surgery, and also probably to discuss a follow-up surgery in the left eye, sometime in the next few weeks.)

As you may know, I was quite nervous about how or even whether I’d be able to understand the voices of any of the attending medicos. As it happens, they were all very good about either wearing clear plastic shields or simply tugging their masks out of the way, so I could see their mouths as they talked. But… Well, I’m not sure how to explain this… Picture me lying on my back on a gurney or surgical bed-type thing, looking up. Positioned at the top of my head is the surgeon; to the right and left, nurses or other aides. So from my perspective, none of their mouths were right-side-up. It turns out that I can’t lip-read a mouth that’s turned sideways, and can do so for an upside-down mouth only with great difficulty.

There’s always something, as they say. (Only I can’t hear them when they say it sideways.)

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Straddling the Margin Between Art and Life

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[Image: “Khamir,” by John E. Simpson — one of my #jes_storypix series on Instagram, in which generally heavily edited photos of “real life” are used to illustrate imagined narratives. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The caption: “Khamir had been staring at his phone for what felt like an hour. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t called yet, couldn’t believe she’d stoop to such a… a betrayal. A lazy betrayal at that! She knew how much he depended on her, needed her. Now the whole thing had fallen apart… Blinking back bitter tears, he finally punched in their private number, held the phone to his ear. When her voicemail picked up, he spoke rapidly: ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll call off the air strike. Happy now?’”]

This week, whiskey river points us (in the case of this quotation) in the direction of an old, real-world debate:

Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words…

(Lawrence Ferlinghetti [source])

Maybe it’s not so much a debate as an assertion, or maybe even just a forceful suggestion: that in order to accomplish sweeping societal change, the poets must lead the charge. (References to poetry really may mean art in general, but I’ll stick to Ferlinghetti’s script for now.) Well, no — maybe “must lead the charge” overstates the case; perhaps the point is more like “Even poets can and should contribute to the revolution.” In those terms, I can buy it — I strongly doubt that anyone but poets themselves looks to the poets for political, social, cultural guidance.

On the other hand, poetry — again, art in general — certainly can and sometimes does help shift the Zeitgeist in one direction or another, especially in concert with other cultural influences. Poetry — especially recent poetry — may suffer a bad rap (it’s too dreamy, too moody, too confessional, too abstract or weird), but it’s difficult to separate what we know of a given age’s general nature from the poetic (etc.) movements it engendered — the Romantics pushing back against the Enlightenment, the Beats excavating the hollows under the postwar-US bourgeois civilization, and I guess even the Zen poets’ and artists’ fascination with nature at a time when Japan was ruled by warlords…

Calling the 2020s something like The Pandemic Age — I don’t know, a bit premature, yes? (Together with everything else — climate change, political upheaval, economic crises, and so on — in my worst moods I sometimes fear we’re seeing The Last Age.) But I wonder what the art of now will look like in the rearview mirror, decades hence. What — of early 21st-century neuroses, preconceptions, perspectives, emotional states — what will linger in human consciousness of what, at this point in history, it means to be human? What will poetry and the other arts have, y’know, wrought in the meantime?

The past year has rewarded me with, among other things, a burst of reading, both fiction and non-fiction. When I was young, as I remember those years anyhow, I read constantly. But over time it became a habit experienced in hindsight rather than in a given moment: a book, even a short one, might take me two or three weeks to finish. My reading took place only in a blurry sort of half-hour or so each night as I descended into sleep, and that was it.

One book I read last summer was a 2014 novella called Sleep Donation, by Karen Russell. It posits a world in which the United States suffers a plague (!) — one of insomnia. The ailment becomes so widespread that an entrepreneur has developed a means to transfer excess sleep from those who get through the night without difficulty to those who lie awake staring into the dark. The most highly valued donors, of course, are those who sleep without interruption… and without nightmares.

The system works pretty well, except — well, how do you know if someone has awful nightmares? (You ask them.) And if insomnia, and nightmares, can be passed around like a virus, what happens when a donor with a godawful recurring and communicable nightmare either doesn’t know it, or chooses for whatever reason to disguise the fact?

Meet Donor Y:

“Donor Y” walked into a sleep bank in San Diego and asked to register. It was his first time donating sleep. According to his file, he is a forty-two-year-old white male, five feet seven, 189 pounds, 128/67 blood pressure, no sexual partners sharing the bed with him, no children. He checked no on all the disqualifying boxes: Sleep apnea: no. Sleepwalking: no. He was next handed the CDC alphabetized list of all three hundred known contagious nightmares —

  • Abomination, horned
  • Ambulance, frozen yellow siren
  • Anthill, no queen
  • Ants, flesh-eating
  • Aorta, burst
  • Asteroid, green
  • Attic, grandmother’s ghost
  • Attic, padlocked toy chest
  • Avalanche, death of self
  • Avalanche, death of spouse
  • Avalanche, live burial

Et cetera. Donor Y did not check a single box.

(Karen Russell [source])

Donor Y’s sleep donation has terrible consequences both foreseeable and surprising. (For instance, people who “catch” his nightmare often choose to give up sleep entirely rather than endure it again, becoming amphetamine-dependent… and, of course, they eventually go mad and die.)

By posting this excerpt along with whiskey river‘s, I don’t mean to suggest that Lawrence Ferlinghetti had science fiction anywhere on his radar when composing “I am signaling you through the flames.” But yeah: good science fiction always says at least as much about the author’s time as it does about the future or the past. When Sleep Donation came out, nobody had ye heard of COVID-19, but even a casual reading of the book could’ve told an extraterrestrial being some valuable lessons about human behavior in such an event.

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A Worldview Shaped by Others’ Eyes and Ears

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[Image: “The Curse of Milhaven,” by Elias Ruiz Monserrat. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you very much!)]

Like many (most? all?) people, at least those influenced by Western culture and values, I go back and forth in my general outlook: Things are so bad, as opposed to Things aren’t as bad as they seem. I’ve been kept awake at night both by crippling, flailing despair and by excited anticipation. But also like many people, I tend to occupy one end of the continuum vs. the other. And for me, the world is generally happier than not.

Many times over the years, I’ve thought about why this might (or might not) be so: why do we favor one vs. the other? The thought experiment that finally nudged me towards an answer was to imagine myself born into a world with no other people at all. (Yes, yes, I know: if there’d never been any other people, I couldn’t have been born at all. Repeat after me: thought experiment.) In such a world, would I — or anyone — tend to be more one than the other?

Last week, as though reading my mind on the subject, whiskey river offered me this:

For when cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are scared someone will take advantage of them. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them — that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world in their mouth, someone will try to poison them.

(Caitlin Moran [source])

Suppose I pose to myself a question: what is this passage about? The answer might unfold like this:

Oh, surely it’s about cynicism… No, wait, it’s actually about cynics — people afflicted with cynicism… and it’s about innocence, and fear, and…

But that doesn’t seem right. Or not complete, anyhow…

And then I got to thinking about Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, the book which I mentioned in last week’s Friday post. In particular, I thought about the chapter in which Foster tries his damnedest to “be” a badger; here, he’s writing about his eventual comfort — his deep satisfaction — with finding himself lying in a Charles Foster-shaped hollow in the earth, about his no longer feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic in such a setting:

…all that swirling atavistic panic slowly cleared. I didn’t hyperventilate if I wasn’t on my actual and metaphorical hind legs, manfully scanning distant vistas and making sense of and plans for the big picture. It was okay to lie in the dark, surrounded by the scratching and humming and thrashing of animals that would one day eat me. From there it was a small enough step not to mind being eaten, and not to mind being in, or getting toward, the state in which one is eaten. And once you’re there, you’re at last a proper ecologist, knowing your place, all ecocolonialism gone. Only then, at the end of a weary and distressing metaphysical road, can you really begin the business of being a badger…

What does the individual badger “hear” as a result of the changing pressures on its tympanum that we choose to call a sound? Strictly speaking, I have no idea. I have no idea what Mozart sounds like to anyone apart from me (and even that sound changes massively with my state of digestion). This isn’t a problem of physiology; it’s the problem of otherness, which we inadequately physiologize as a difficulty in inquiring into the nature of complex central processing. We can’t know that we’re not alone. It is an act of pure faith for me to declare that there are some things I share with my children and my best friends.

(Charles Foster [source et seq.])

Back to my thought experiment: had I been the only human ever on the planet, I would never have known cynicism. Fear, sure; desperation even, of course. (Never having known another person, I doubt that bitterness would have ever occurred to me.) But cynicism (like envy, jealousy, and so on) — that requires an Other. It’s a response not to the way the world is, but to the way people are in the world.

And yet it’s not the only response possible to a world shared with others, as Foster seems to be saying. Once we get to know the others, we can choose to like them, to not like them, to be indifferent to them. If we try hard enough, we can even become them, to a limited extent. But to be cynical about them is no more than a glib prediction of their behavior and its effects on oneself. It’s a vow, furthermore, never again to be surprised.

I think I’ll choose surprise, thanks all the same!

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