Art & Photography

Reminders to Believe in Always Moving Forward

November 5, 2021 by John 1 Comment

[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?

How to Discombobulate a Demon

October 29, 2021 by John 1 Comment

[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.

Finding Color: Looking for It, and Then Looking Harder

October 22, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[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.

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

October 15, 2021 by John 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

(Samir Chopra [source])

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

We are rational animals, but implicit in that rationality is an anxiety. The rational animal remembers and has learned from its past; it anticipates and plans for its future; it modifies its present, anxiously, in response to these memories and anticipations; it is anxious to avoid mistakes, even those it cannot remember and has consigned to the unconscious forgotten… I propose a ‘self-as-bundled-anxieties’ theory: we are a bundle of anxieties; by examining them, to see what vexes us, what makes us anxious, we come to know who we are. Anxiety is a reminder that our selves are rather more diffuse and disorderly than we might imagine, that there are more bits to be seized as they swirl ‘about’ and ‘inside’ us…
My anxieties tell me I’m still capable of feeling. They provide an acute reminder that I’m alive and responsive, and yes, anxious. My anxieties about my family inform me that I have let myself become wrapped up in their selves; they inform me of the boundaries I have formed around and about myself; they inform me of what my self is. They inform me of the risibility of the claim that we are isolated beings whose boundaries terminate at our fingertips, at the surface of our skins. Thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.

(Chopra, ibid.)

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

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

Being the Bearer of One’s Own Bad News

October 1, 2021 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Riverside Detritus,” by on Willrad Von Doomenstein (a pseudonym???). Photo found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!]

Over the past few days, whiskey river shared a portion of a talk (italicized portion) by a Zen Buddhist teacher. In this apparently verbatim transcription of the talk, the teacher is speaking of the human mind’s awkward and ultimately self-defeating tendency to cling to — and to be clung to in return — by any problem it encounters. He recites a Buddhist koan offered by another, more ancient teacher, named Chao-chou:

As you’re sitting on your cushion [during meditation], if you grab onto anything, if you push anything away, suddenly everything you touch sticks to you. It’s like Br’er Rabbit and the the tar-baby. If you start hanging onto your thoughts, you can’t let go of them. If you try to push them away, you can’t let go of them. So there you are stuck holding onto the tar-baby. We see, too, the emptiness of the things that we’re attached to. How a thousand things fill the mind, but none of them is substantial or real. A thousand passions arise, but if we don’t act on them, they fall away, too. Amazing that something that seemed so important suddenly is not so important. Our weariness that seems as if it will overwhelm us suddenly is gone and we are full of energy.
“The Great way is not difficult. It just avoids picking and choosing.” There is a Taoist flavor to this saying. The sense of following the water path through life: the water if it runs into a stone, it just makes its way around. The water is clear and has no attachments which is why we have a little bowl of water on the altar.
Chao-chou has brought up this saying which he was very fond of and he often liked to bring it up. And then he said that as soon as we speak, that is picking and choosing. If we are clear, we hang onto the clarity. This old student doesn’t even hang onto that. Do you still hang onto anything, or not? So we could say that the greatest method of meditation is that whatever comes up, just don’t cling to it. Whatever comes up, let it go. If you can do this, you’ll find the way home very quickly. But it’s hard. Things stick to you.

(John Tarrant [source])

As you probably know if you’ve hung around here at RAMH for the last few months, The Missus and I have been on a road trip. The travels — so far — have taken us up the eastern coast of the United States: from Florida, through Georgia and South Carolina, and then on up to destinations in North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. By definition, these days anyhow, a “road trip” necessarily involves a car. But the car, like the travelers, is subject to the forces of chaos. And so it was, in early August, that we found ourselves suddenly and unpleasantly, well, carless.

Without getting into the details, of which there are many, imagine the complications:

a driver, licensed by the state where the driver lives;
a car which is “owned” by that driver…
…even though the record of ownership — the title — is held by a bank which loaned the “owner” the money to purchase the car…
…and even though the car is insured by yet another company in the case of an accident…
…and even though the driver’s state of residence still connects the vehicle, uniquely identified, to the driver, by way of yet another document: the registration

To be sure, none of these by itself is necessarily a complication… unless the car and driver are involved in a wreck which crosses state lines. Like, say, in our case: our insurance company totaled the car in North Carolina; we purchased a replacement car in North Carolina; and we financed the new car’s purchase through a different bank than the one which had financed the wrecked car. And all of the required paperwork was nailed down by the dealership — in North Carolina — who sold us the replacement.

…until the day, this week, when we found out that no, there had been no nailing-down. Somehow, although we were already making payments to the bank and the insurance company, we had no legal claim to the vehicle in which we were traveling around.

The nailing-down has begun. In the meantime, we’re still in motion, just praying (to the extent we ever do) that every other driver on the road then will be even more cautious than we are. And in the same meantime, I’m waking up almost every night, with little tar-baby scraps and smudges clinging to my mind through all the sleep cycles, imagining dreadful scenarios — scenarios in which the tenuous paper trail we’re building (across hundreds of miles, among a half-dozen institutional landmines), suddenly collapses and renders us not only homeless, but without transportation… in our seventies, with nothing like a social or family net to catch us.

No, it’s not helpful to be so bedeviled. It’s probably not healthy, losing so much sleep. But I am not like water (yet?) about such stuff. I bump into an obstacle and I come to a standstill; I circle it, examining all its jagged edges, feeling my way around the crevices and hollows of its shape, trying to imagine how each possible thread of reedy disaster can be skirted or even woven into gold.

It occurred to me this morning, in fact, that the metaphor I’m seeking is not a solid object like rock or a tar-baby. Even if I have (as I have not) “mastered” myself to be like the water, there’s still the detritus problem: even, say, just a cup of flowing water carries along in its course countless bits of trash. Each little broken twig, each seed and leaf, every drinking straw and scrap of torn candy wrapper, they’re all just flowing around the damned rock with me. How do I shake my hyper-awareness of this?

Sigh. Like the Magic 8-Ball says: Answer hazy. Try again later.

Seeing the Opaque and Pronouncing It Transparent

September 24, 2021 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “Autumn Reflections on Lake Taneycomo,” by Moose Winans. (Stumbled upon it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photographer explains, sorta: “I was walking along Lake Taneycomo late in the day breathing in crisp cool air, when the sun kissed a nearby hillside. The trees seemingly lit on fire with an abundance of yellows, oranges and reds. The sky was a rather bland, so I opted to focus on the reflections of the colorful trees. I found a little ripple in the water that created a nice leading line and added a deep shade of blue to the surface of the lake.” I’m not sure I understand this, exactly, but the effect is undeniably… zen.]

A new(ish) pop-philosophy meme has made its way into American discourse — maybe worldwide, I don’t know. It boils down to a single word, by nature a noun but repurposed as an adjective: “I’m feeling very zen these days,” says the celebrity on a talk show; “So zen, y’know?” says the flirtatious drunk at the bar.

I don’t know who first popularized this construction, and — honestly — I don’t know enough about Zen Buddhism itself to rigorously, intellectually rebut the casual association of lowercase “zen” with a phrase like “chillin’ out.” It doesn’t feel right to me, but as another common saying goes, “Whadda I know?!?”

On the other hand, I’m confident that “still and impassive” does not equate to “cold and unfeeling.” The former describes a demeanor, a shell; the latter, a state of inner emotion. The old metaphor about wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve used to describe individuals who departed from the societal norm in that way — nowadays, it seems, not to wave one’s heart about, openly, is regarded practically as antisocial behavior.

This week, whiskey river reminds us of the difference, from someone who certainly knew whereof he spoke when the subject turned to Zen:

The unspoiled colors of a late summer night,
The wind howling through lofty pines —
The feel of autumn approaching;
Swaying bamboos keep resonating,
Shedding tears of dew at dawn;
Only those who exert themselves fully
Will attain the Way.
But even if you abandon all for the ancient path of meditation,
You can never forget the meaning of sadness.

(Dogen [source])

Nor is it (again from whiskey river) only sadness and other “negative” feelings which the Zen exterior may mask when one declines to separate Self from Other:

Moon
Open the book of evening to the page
where the moon, always the moon, appears
between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours
will seem to have passed before you reach the next page
where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path
to lead you away from what you have known
into those places where what you had wished for happens,
its lone syllable like a sentence poised
at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name
once more as you lift your eyes from the page
and close the book, still feeling what it was like
to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.

(Mark Strand [source])

I’m put in mind of a film of a towering but slender waterfall — a film taken from some distance away. And unthinking observer might say, “What a peaceful scene! The water flows so gracefully!” Had the photographer situated the camera at the foot of the falls, though, looking straight up, the noisy, chaotic reality would have pretty much silenced all commentary.

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

September 17, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

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

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

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

(Stephanie Danler [source])

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

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

(John Green [source])

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

I was having a hard time falling asleep the other night because I’d thought of something that I was afraid of forgetting if I fell asleep, which was keeping me awake, not that it was the sort of timeless thing you see printed on coffee cups sold in bookstores, like “Hope is the thing with feathers” or the one Thoreau said about confidently pursuing your dreams, which now I forget the rest of…
In retirement, as I say, my nocturnal life has blossomed into extensive dreams, pastoral epics in which I am a great sailor, an artist, a standup comic, a race car driver, a ballet dancer — dreams of competence and authority — and the other night (I am now getting back to what I started to say in the first paragraph) I dreamed that I had written a perfect limerick and in my dream I was afraid that if I fell asleep I’d forget it, but in my dream I was arguing with myself and thinking, “You’re awake” and the conflict, knowing that my sleep self was wrong, that I was sleeping, woke me up, and I sat down and wrote the limerick, about the famous podcaster Phoebe Judge, host of “Criminal,” which everyone except me (I?) has heard, but I refuse to hear podcasts because earbuds look funny on me, and the challenge was to not use the rhyme “heebie-jeebie.”
A girl who loves radio, Phoebe,
Has AM and FM and CB,
And plays them proudly,
Constantly, loudly,
At 370 dB,
And when she was caught
She fired a shot
At the cops with her personal BB,
And when she turned deaf
She shouted the F-
Word that’s not found in Mister White, E.B.
It is a perfect limerick, not that this is the solution to our national dilemmas, but the limerick is one enterprise in which perfection is possible, and that is why I keep returning to it. I look back at my life and I see a series of sinking ships and gunshot wounds in my feet, but “A girl who loves radio, Phoebe” is right up there with the five or six perfect ones I’ve written. This column is not perfect. It strikes me as somewhat disorganized and scattered, but, as I say so often, it is what it is. Someday I’ll write about that.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

Keep Your Eyes Open, and Wonder

September 10, 2021 by John 2 Comments

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

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

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us – that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.
I took one of those nests and pinned it to a wall in my study. Then I pinned a folded handwritten letter inside the nest. I did this years ago. I don’t know why I did it. I just did it.
Nothing I understand haunts me. Only the things I do not understand have that power over me.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

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

…and:

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

(Albert Einstein [source])

…and:

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

(Bill Bryson [source])

Stumbling, Surely; Blind, Maybe… But Wildly Free, by the Gods!

September 3, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: untitled painting by Lino António (1923). I found this on Flickr, without really looking for it (or, really, anything like it), but it felt particularly well suited for a post wrapping up with Diane Ackerman’s poem “Bluenoses,” below.]

whiskey river reminded us recently:

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, “being here is so much,” and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.

(John O’Donohue [source])

…which was something of a relief to read, coming as it did on the heels of this more emotionally tricky thought from a couple days earlier:

You will see it coming. Not you actually because you don’t see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don’t take and trite warnings you can’t hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came.
When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent.
When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

(Stephanie Danler [source])

…which drew me back to this — not from whiskey river of course — from years ago (when, of course, I was too busy doing something I thought of as “living” to be in fact alive):

Dreaming, we become the earth’s dream.
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However, many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. “For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb, aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…which, in turn, made me wonder how Ackerman might regard the same “savage and beautiful country” decades later. I turned to an anthology of her poems, published in 2011:

Bluestockings
Oh lovely girl, once a mischief hound with me
when we twentied through school
as boy-brained, romping word-flingers
who gabbed the telephone wires thin,
studied, craved, shared revelations,
and wrote colorful wind-sprints for poems.
What a pang to see you, decades later,
over nouvelle pizza and cappuccino,
—a beautifully suited, associate dean
at a large rambunctious university,
where you hold the entrails of academics
in perfectly manicured hands.
Married long, mother of two teenage girls
(How did you raise daughters?
We could barely raise ourselves),
you’re a distinguished folklorist with a penchant
for fascinating, perfectly researched “smut”
(so the mischief remains!).
As we talk like old friends no longer intimate,
laughing, nostalgic, visibly older,
and our eyes ransack the other’s face,
reading lines etched by unshared dramas,
I keep slipping off the rind of the present,
through mind mirage, deep into the theaters of memory.
I see you perfectly then: a young woman
in her padded cell on the ledge of the galaxy,
wide-eyed, foul-mouthed, vision’s pupil,
shooting the rapids on an optic nerve;
my wicker self, but in a pink corduroy smock,
analytical and macabre, not yet disabused;
growing bone-tough, and agile as a lizard’s tongue,
immune to fear’s teeth in desire’s throat
draining new loves starch white as old wounds;
eager to pin back the ribs of the world;
seductive as a cipher, and nobody’s victim.
But the passing years, the disobedience of distance!
I cheer your victories, wish on your wishes.
Heart’s tinder crackles in my words.
You manage to keep a little something in reserve.
We are the same and not the same,
uniquely other, but with pages of shared history.
Like grown sisters, we were young together.
Now accomplished and admirable,
we greet in public clothes, accept invented selves,
mix goodwill with the genteel respect
we save for distinguished strangers,
as we talk ideas, mothers, jobs, old cronies,
avoid the minefield of marriage,
romp a bit, indulge in the cozy pastime
of whatever happened to that scallywag so-and-so.
When you’ve gone, I dream of flame pots
set out on a moonless runway in darkest Arabia,
and a pilot me piecing together a way home
between the treachery of fog and mountains,
searching down through darkness
for streaks of familiar, precious landmarks
leading to where we might have been.

(Ackerman [source])

As for me, well, you probably don’t really want to know how tangled are my thoughts on all of this… A question on Quora recently asked something like: “What’s the one thing you wish you could do to reset your life?” I started to offer my own answer; after it had ballooned to a couple thousand words, I realized the answer’s bottom line, really, was Nothing I could have done then would have made it better, and might have made it worse… and deleted it all. As you probably know, I’m fond of looking backwards — but the practice doesn’t always reward!

When the Not-World Is Too Little With Us

August 27, 2021 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “Tales from the Loop,” by Thorsten Bonsch; found on Flicker, using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you! The photographer explains the title: “‘Tales from the Loop’ is a series of illustrations and short stories by Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag about fictional 1980s in which robots and magnetrine (antigrav) ships exist. The Loop is a particle accelerator close to the city, where strange things happen… I love his art, his books and together with some friends, we enjoy the ‘Tales from the Loop’ RPG.” He also refers to the Amazon Prime streaming TV series by the same name.]

Those of you who’ve been stopping by RAMH regularly over the years may be wondering about the USA road trip The Missus and I had been talking about so much (and I, occasionally mentioning here). The bottom line:

We moved out of our apartment in North Florida as scheduled, put into storage all we wouldn’t need for the next six months, and set out in our 2016 Honda CR-V.
After completely leaving Florida at the end of July, we stopped briefly in Savanna, GA, and Charleston, SC.
In North Carolina, we stayed in Airbnbs in a couple of towns we might consider as “retirement destinations,” post-trip.
Stopped for a night in NJ to visit The Brother and Sister-in-Law.
Spent a couple nights in Salem, MA, three in Bar Harbor, ME, two in Lincoln, NH, and four (!) in Saratoga Springs, NY.
At the moment, we’re still in upstate New York for a few more nights, then off to central Vermont for what we hope will be a quiet, restful, full week stay in an Airbnb.

I’m leaving out a lot of stuff that completely whacked out our schedule and caused us to gallop through or past things we’d imagined to be “destinations”: a so-called “breakthrough” case of COVID-19 while still in Florida; two hurricanes (Elsa in Florida, Henri in New England); a collision which totaled our car (no injuries, thank the gods) and required the purchase of a replacement, ASAP; the temporary loss of a really nice digital camera (well, it was a permanent loss — electronics damaged in the car crash — but again, managed to be replaced, just yesterday, thanks to the wonders of Internet shopping and overnight delivery); a hearing aid put out of commission thanks to an inadvertent bath in a sinkful of water; …and I know I’m omitting a lot but trust me: the world has been just a bit too much with us since we’ve been out in it.

So I read this over at whiskey river a few days ago and was reminded of the balm which certain kinds of fantasy provides:

Children understand that Once upon a time refers not only—not even primarily—to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.

(Stephen Mitchell [source])

…and that (as often happens after I’ve visited whiskey river) inspired a memory of something somebody else once said about holding reality at bay, if just for a while — this, from Albert Einstein, in a 1929 interview published in the Saturday Evening Post:

[Einstein:] I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.
[Interviewer:] Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?
[Einstein:] I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

(George Sylvester Viereck [source])