Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

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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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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