Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

To Know the Unknowable Other

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[Untitled image by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The photo’s caption on Instagram read: “The end-of-year holidays are a time for families to draw together and, as families will, poke one another to the point of discomfort”… Now I’m thinking I should entitle it, “Poking the Unknowable.”]

This week, whiskey river reminded us (via its characteristically impeccable curatorship of others’ words) that (a) this is a very weird time to be traveling, but also that (b) aside from current travels, just the memory of past ones feels a little alien — even to those who haven’t been on the road:

But time has got very slippery these days. Days, weeks, months and years merge into one another. Images will pop up of work trips to the US, or Australia in the Photos widget on my phone and not only will I struggle to remember when the trip happened, the very fact that it did is becoming increasingly unreal.

All I know with any certainty is that I get up, stuff happens, and I go to sleep, over and over again. The past is a dream that I have here and now, the future a fantasy that likewise is a figment of my imagination that I experience here and now.

(Euan Semple [source])

The book I’m reading now, too, feels rather alien, exactly because it records an itinerary — several of them — formerly unimaginable to me. The author, Charles Foster, is a British naturalist; the book itself, Being a Beast, is predictably therefore about the natural world. But it’s “about” the natural world in the sense (as the title suggests) of inhabiting the natural world — not as a human, striding about on two legs and occasionally crouching down to observe wildlife, patronizingly, as though doing the creatures a favor. No: Foster set out to live the daily lives of the animals he discusses — badgers, otters, foxes, red deer, and swifts.

Like most journeys, Foster’s — into the heads of the creatures he’s curious about — mix aspirations satisfied with intentions foiled, plans (always for good outcomes) with surprises (disappointing mixed with good). (I’m only about halfway through the book so far, but have not yet encountered any disasters or tragedies. Foster’s a gifted writer, an entertaining eccentric, so perhaps he simply avoids reporting of great and genuine unhappiness.) As a badger, he manages to adjust his sleep cycle — creeping out of his Welsh hillside burrow for nocturnal foraging — and learns to eat worms, to recognize their varieties by their textures and unique slipperiness. As a fox in East End London, he’s awakened by a policeman from his daytime snooze by “under the rhododendrons.” The policeman says:

“Why do you have to sleep here, may I ask?”

“You may indeed ask, but I don’t suppose you’ll like the answer. I’m trying to be a fox, and” (I rushed on, trying to avert my eyes from the torrential hemorrhage of the officer’s residual goodwill) “I want to know what it’s like to listen all day to traffic and to look at ankles and calves rather than at whole people.”

This last observation was a bad, bad mistake. I knew it as soon as it was out…

Uncertainty and workload trumped his instincts, and he told me to “bugger off home, sir” (the italics were powerful on his lips) “and get a life.”

“That,” I said, “is exactly what I’m trying to get.”

Comedy aside, note about this passage that it presents a Janus of alienness — an animal’s face gazing at the human, a human’s at the animal, across a barrier which neither of them can ever actually climb or penetrate. The same barrier, indeed, exists between you and me, or between you and anyone else you have ever encountered — will ever encounter. Foster himself acknowledges this, in a sort of side jaunt into the nature (!) of animal/human consciousness:

The universe I occupy is a creature of my head. It is wholly unique to me. The process of intimacy is the process of becoming better at inviting others in to have a look around. The sensation of loneliness is the crushing acknowledgment that however good you get at giving such invitations no one will be able to see very much at all….

What might it mean for an unconscious creature to dream? Indeed to sleep at all? What’s being lost when “consciousness” is lost? What accompanies the creature into the world beyond the veil? If badgers aren’t conscious in a sense comparable to us, their sleeping smiles and winces are more inscrutable than consciousness itself. I prefer the lesser mystery…

When I experience a pleasurable stimulus, my facial muscles contract in a particular way. When a dog experiences a stimulus that indicates a benefit to the dog that is comparable to the benefit of which my pleasure is an index, its facial muscles contract in a more or less identical way.

And so on.

Being a Beast was published in 2016, well before the coronavirus tide flooded the world. But — in that context, and taken together with Euan Semple’s words above — it’s interesting to note: even when we’re sharing life only with other humans (and some animals, if we’re lucky), those we already “know” intimately, even after a seemingly interminable period of adopting one another’s rhythms as our own, the barriers of consciousness remain. We still live in our separate heads. We may think — fool ourselves into thinking — we know the minds on the other side of the impermeable membrane, because we know the behaviors which (surely?) highlight those minds’ motivations, decisions, and, well, essences. But no: as always, the operative word there is impermeable.

There is no challenge, no mystery at all, in thinking “I know X.” No, what makes each “same” day different, and differently worth living, is always trying to know X: trying, failing, trying again. There’s an inexhaustible source of surprise, delight — and sure, occasional disappointment — to be found on that journey. Maybe, in this small way, we can regard the pandemic as an opportunity we’d never have been offered otherwise, as — gasp — as a blessing?

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A Vision of Future Sugar Plums

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[Image: partial screen capture from a photo of Michael Heizer’s monumental artwork, City, as found via Google Maps.]

Even reliably non-sectarian whiskey river finds itself in a holiday spirit today… although, since it is whiskey river, after all, it carries a bit of a knowing twist:

The Christmas Letter

Wherever you are when you receive this letter
I write to say we are still ourselves
In the same place
And hope you are the same.

The dead have died as you know
And will never get better,
And the children are boys and girls
of their several ages and names.

So in closing I send you our love
And hope to hear from you soon.
There is never a time
Like the present. It lasts forever
Wherever you are. As ever I remain.

(John N. Morris [source])

The Missus and I have followed an annual tradition, every December 23rd for the almost 30 years we’ve been together: we go out for a nice dinner. It’s a tradition with twists of its own, of course; in our case, The Missus never knows where we’re going — I selected the venue, make the reservation, and drive us to the place. (When we lived in North Florida, as we did until this year, I generally took a roundabout route as well, just to keep her guessing as long as possible.)

This year, as I’ve mentioned, we’re in Las Vegas to spend some time with The Stepson. So this year, he generously offered to drive us to the restaurant and back. As we made our way from his home in the northern fringes of the city to the Las Vegas Strip (the restaurant is actually in a casino), I was struck by a sudden image of the place in, say, 500 years or so… something like the climactic conclusion of Planet of the Apes, say, or like Michael Heizer’s monumental sculpture, City, not far from here in the Nevada desert.

I imagined, see, not just how the landscape might be different, nearly buried. I imagined as well the remnants of human culture after some colossal catastrophe, probably climatic or geological. In the terms offered by John N. Morris’s poem, for instance: what might be the very last Christmas letter composed and distributed by a Las Vegas resident? Will its author know of the onrushing finality? What on earth might such a letter say, as Christmas letters are traditionally practically required to say, about the preceding year? To whom would the letter even be addressed? And so on.

Not exactly the sort of stuff one would expect to have in one’s head on a December 23rd Christmas date, eh? And yet Christmastime in Vegas worked the magic that could be expected of it: covering up the dark thoughts not in sand, but glitter and noise…

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Turmoil in the Thing Observed, Serenity in the Observer

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[Image: “Work Glove and Woodpile (Livingston, NY; October 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

The Missus and I have made it to Las Vegas for several weeks’ year-end downtime, here at the end of Roadtrip 2021. We’ve little idea what’s ahead for us in ’22 (aside from threading our cautious — and a bit nervous — way among more coronavirus mutations). We’ve considered a few further destinations, but thanks to winter weather they are by and large inaccessible to us… for a few months, anyhow.

And really, the big question remains: wither, ultimately, goeth we? Where are we gonna live?

Came across this item yesterday, posted earlier in the week on whiskey river:

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, are borne along during the waking hours, and at their best they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They may be not quite right, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism, too, is something I particularly want to hold onto. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned to prefer being not quite right, out of place.

(Edward Said [source])

Hmm, I thought. He preferred a dissonant life? One of my pet terms for The Missus is, “my personal disruptor” — it sums up her (to me) charming habit of overturning my own best-laid but generally trivial plans with her more impulsive, grand-and-sweeping ones. So yes, I know the pleasures of occasional dissonance. Even so, I find them pleasing in contrast — against a more neutral, conventional backdrop: colorful accents placed on a tweed fabric, say…

Las Vegas (or anyplace like it) will not become our hometown. I know many people live here in stability — in quite-rightness and in-placeness — despite the conventional view of the city as a place where anything can and often does happen, at any time. But I also know myself: freeing the elephant, right?

I couldn’t possibly regard Edward Said’s view of his life as “wrong.” On the contrary, I think he was right in a way: his self seen as “a cluster of flowing currents,” for example. But I don’t think he had to stop there and say, in effect, I choose a dissonant self over a static one. All that noise and clatter and all those free-flowing forms needn’t be participated in to be appreciated. Regardez, s’il vous plait, this morning’s whiskey river meditation — a sort of “on the other hand…” response to the week’s earlier one:

Time for Serenity, Anyone?

I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world is still alive,
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing
enters into this elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon. day or night.
winter, summer, storm, still—this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

(William Stafford [source])

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On the Road to What Lies Within, by Way of What Lies Without

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[Image: “Eclipse Crescents,” by Jon D. Anderson. (Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photo was taken during an eclipse, obviously; the photographer had the camera pointed at the ground, in a filbert orchard — where he caught all the little pinhole-camera-style images of sunlight created by the leaves overhead. My favorite thing about this photo, though, is the scattered greens of fallen leaves and blades of grass: beautiful reality superimposed on the monotone dreamlike nominal subject, as though to remind you where you are.]

On our Roadtrip 2021 mini-adventure, I’ve probably taken thousands of photographs just with my “real” camera (i.e., not counting the — hundreds? thousands? — taken with my phone’s camera). I haven’t done any kind of statistical analysis, but I bet well over 95% of them will never see the light of day, so to speak: “public” exposure here on RAMH, or over on Instagram or (rarely) Facebook. I doubt that I myself will ever go back to look at the unused ones.

About a month ago, the absurdity finally hit me: by far, most of the photos I was setting aside or discarding depicted subjects already publicly available — generally, depicted them better. Consider, for instance, the hundreds I’d taken while touring the interiors of a couple of the Gilded-Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Oh, I’d shot a handful which turned out satisfactorily as photographs, and I’d kept and “promoted” them, so to speak. The rest, though? Why did I take these half-dozen shots of a grand entry hall in The Breakers — you know, the same entry hall depicted in all the postcards and coffee-table books in the gift shop, or even at The Breakers Web site? (Especially considering that flash photography of the interiors is forbidden to the public, but professionals engaged by the governing body may use soft but artificial lighting under controlled circumstances.)

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

So I’ve worked at no longer photographing subjects easily available, in better form, from other sources. Which begs the question: why take photos otherwise? (Note the similarity of this question to the one, “Why write?,” which has obsessed me in the past. For instance, scroll down on this page to the section headed “Background, for Interested Parties.”)

With such thoughts in mind, earlier this week I read the following, on whiskey river of course:

To restore you and myself, I return to my state of garden and shade, cool reality, I hardly exist and if I do exist it’s with delicate care. Surrounding the shade is a teeming, sweaty heat. I’m alive. But I feel I’ve not yet reached my limits, bordering on what? Without limits, the adventure of a dangerous freedom. But I take the risk, I live taking it. I’m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I, who have barely begun my journey, begin it with a sense of tragedy, guessed what lost ocean my life steps will take me to. And crazily I latch onto the corners of myself, my hallucinations suffocate me with their beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

And a day later, not on whiskey river, I read this:

Song of Ryokan: III
(excerpt)

True, all the seasons have moonlit nights,
But here’s the best night to see the moon.
The hills never so aloft, the streams never so clear,
In the infinite blue of autumn sky flies a disk of light,
Neither light nor gloom is graced with a life of its own.
The moon and the earth are one, and myself one with them.
The boundless sky above, and autumn chill on my skin,
I stroll about low hills, leaning upon my priceless cane.
Quiet night has held firm the flitting dust of the world.
The bright moon alone pours streams of rays all about me.
I mind it not if another like-minded is also admiring it,
Or if the moon deigns to look on others as well as on me.
Each year as autumn comes, the moon will shine as before,
And the world will watch it, will face it, till eternity.
Sermons at Mount Ryozen, lectures in the Vale of Sokei,
Were teachings so precious, the audience needed the moon.
My meditation under the moon lasts till the ripest night.
The stream has hushed its cry, dew lies thick everywhere.
Who, among the moon-viewers tonight, will have the prize?
Who will reflect the purest moon in the lake of his mind?

(Ryokan, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa [source])

I’m still working my way through the answer(s) to the “Why photograph (or write) at all?” questions. But I sense the presence, in these two passages, of something verging on understanding.

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In a State of Grace, Where We Can Find It

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

From whiskey river:

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

(Clarice Lispector [source])

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“Food Is Very Important”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Lewis Richmond [source])

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

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

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

(Charlotte Joko Beck [source])

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

First Step

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

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

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

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

(Robin Heerens Lysne [source])

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

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

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How to Set Aside the Unwanted: Foreground the Diversions

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

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

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

(Chet Raymo [source])

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

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

(Derek Walcott [source])

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

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

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

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

Funny how that all works out, eh?

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

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Reminders to Believe in Always Moving Forward

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[Image: a panel from Linda Ciccarello‘s interactive digital story called “Everything Makes a Noise When It Reveals Itself.” As you move your mouse over the screen at that site — or your fingertip, if using a mouse-less, touch-sensitive device — something like the light of a flashlight appears to reveal each succeeding bit of the story (if “story” even comes close to describing the thing revealed).]

Over the past week, the anonymous curator of thought- and soul-provoking quotations who blogs as whiskey river seems to have been preoccupied (as one can be, at the end of October) with matters of mortality. For example:

It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays an interest in the art of shrunken heads. Men, women, and children walk on the streets, they cross fields and enter forests, they run along the edges of oceans, but none of them, to the best of my knowledge, are thinking about shrunken heads.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

Where the text says song, see ghost.
Where the text says ghost, see further.

(Brenda Steczkowski [no authoritative source that I could locate, although it’s quoted in a handful of places online])

…and:

You lock the door. You lock the window. You dream of the dead. You salt the sills from the inside. You are going to dream. You check the window. You burn a piece of paper. You burn a piece of hair. You check the door. You put a root beneath your pillow. You put the candle out. You bite the root before you put it beneath your pillow. You dream of the dead. You keep a candle burning. You bite the root. The dead put their fingers in your mouth. You are dreaming. You draw the dead & burn the paper. The dead have no doors. They have no salt. Each one takes a grain of salt. There are more dead than salt. You bolt the door. You are dreaming. When the salt is gone the dead touch your mouth. When the salt is gone you buy more salt. When the salt is gone the root does nothing. The salt does nothing.

(Lisa Ciccarello [source, apparently])

While researching the source of the Ciccarello quote, I found this description of it, per Google Books:

Told in an age we can’t quite put our finger on, the poems in Lisa Ciccarello’s debut collection twist up from tales of witchcraft and the punishing morals of the Newgate Calendar. Vulnerable in the darkness as the dead watch behind salt-lined windows, we are led to explore a world of simple objects through a complex fog of cruelty and longing, strength and feebleness, folklore and familial traditions. Violence, love, death, jealousy, sex, and shadows fill the pages of At Night. If you seek comfort, you will find none here.

[source]

And then, as sometimes happens, I fell into an even deeper rabbit hole… I won’t even try to recreate for you the chain of links — graphically, it’d probably resemble a map of our ongoing road trip (haha) — but here’s one of the treats I encountered along the way:

After Stephen Dunn

If you are sleeping when the axe buries itself
in the stump outside your home, wake and walk
softly through your halls. Walk softly through
this house that is like your heart, built in the solace
of these woods from things you claimed as your own.
Touch everything. Touch it roughly, and
think of the heartbeats of the trees giving
their lives, each swaying wood grain a
skipped beat of gasping titans beneath
your hands, your careful eyes, your gentle
push, the settling of these quiet things.
But your hands are not in this house. Your
heart is not in this house. Your love is not in
this house. This house was not built from tall,
certain things, but from the surest things
you could find: roots, nests, not clocks
but the parts hidden behind their faces,
reminders of belief in always moving forward.
One morning you will wake in this home that
is like your heart to find that the axe, the certain
and the strong, has buried itself in the wet stump
outside, you will touch everything roughly, this
house will sound no longer like your heart but
your heart will sound like this house, built tall
from imagined things, high ceilings, echoes,
stopped clock pieces, empty nests, gasping
roots. Your heart will feel like this house. You
will burn it to the ground.

(Lewis Mundt [source])

A real haunted house of the heart, eh?

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How to Discombobulate a Demon

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[Image: “Demons,” by a Flickr user who identifies themselves only as “Ken.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!)]

That time of year again, as whiskey river reminds us:

Scary Movies

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,
and I keep expecting some enormous
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops
to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean
and drag me from my kitchen
to the deep cave that flickered
into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless
between my older brothers, pumped up
on candy and horror — that cave,
the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This
is how it feels to lose it —

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.
I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine —
Hi, I’m not here —
the morning of her funeral,
the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies
when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead
were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air
they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me
under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older
I would know better, and now
they’re dead, and I’m older,
and I know better.

(Kim Addonizio [source])

A newsletter I subscribe to also offered this, in perhaps (and perhaps not) coincidental manner:

One day Milarepa left his cave to gather firewood, and when he returned he found that his cave had been taken over by demons. There were demons everywhere! His first thought upon seeing them was, “I have got to get rid of them!” He lunges toward them, chasing after them, trying forcefully to get them out of his cave. But the demons are completely unfazed. In fact, the more he chases them, the more comfortable and settled-in they seem to be. Realizing that his efforts to run them out have failed miserably, Milarepa opts for a new approach and decides to teach them the dharma. If chasing them out won’t work, then maybe hearing the teachings will change their minds and get them to go. So he takes his seat and begins teaching about existence and nonexistence, compassion and kindness, the nature of impermanence. After a while he looks around and realizes all the demons are still there. They simply stare at him with their huge bulging eyes; not a single one is leaving.

At this point Milarepa lets out a deep breath of surrender, knowing now that these demons will not be manipulated into leaving and that maybe he has something to learn from them. He looks deeply into the eyes of each demon and bows, saying, “It looks like we’re going to be here together. I open myself to whatever you have to teach me.” In that moment all the demons but one disappear. One huge and especially fierce demon, with flaring nostrils and dripping fangs, is still there. So Milarepa lets go even further. Stepping over to the largest demon, he offers himself completely, holding nothing back. “Eat me if you wish.” He places his head in the demon’s mouth, and at that moment the largest demon bows low and dissolves into space.

(Aura Glaser [source])

We’re in central Ohio at the time I’m posting this, having stopped for just a single night en route to Kentucky, Tennessee, and points beyond. Hope you’re all staying safe, and keeping the monsters at bay… as with a frustratingly tenacious bout of hiccups, sometimes it can help just to distract yourself enough: they get bored and move on. Heh.

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Finding Color: Looking for It, and Then Looking Harder

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

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

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

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

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

Fall Song

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

(Joy Harjo [source])

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

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