Art & Photography

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])

The Time Is Ripe: Simply So

August 13, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “:: Equanimity in the City ::,” by user “Jazer” on DeviantArt. (The colons seem significant to the image title, for whatever reason.) The photographer doesn’t identify the setting or subject, exactly, stating in a comment only that it was”somewhere in the Central Business District of Singapore. We went late in the night about 11p.” The photo was shot in April, 2004 — long before RAMH was a gleam in my eye; who knows if this place still exists? or if Jazer himself does? (His last post to that site, at least under that name, was in late 2008/early 2009.]

From whiskey river (minus the first three stanzas):

Dying
Nothing to be said about it, and everything—
The change of changes, closer or further away:
The Golden Retriever next door, Gussie, is dead,
Like Sandy, the Cocker Spaniel from three doors down
Who died when I was small; and every day
Things that were in my memory fade and die.
Phrases die out: first, everyone forgets
What doornails are; then after certain decades
As a dead metaphor, “dead as a doornail” flickers
And fades away. But someone I know is dying—
And though one might say glibly, “everyone is,”
The different pace make the difference absolute.
The tiny invisible spores in the air we breathe,
That settle harmlessly on our drinking water
And on our skin, happen to come together
With certain conditions on the forest floor,
Or even a shady corner of the lawn—
And overnight the fleshy, pale stalks gather,
The colorless growth without a leaf or flower;
And around the stalks, the summer grass keeps growing
With steady pressure, like the insistent whiskers
That grow between shaves on a face, the nails
Growing and dying from the toes and fingers
At their own humble pace, oblivious
As the nerveless moths, that live their night or two—
Though like a moth a bright soul keeps on beating,
Bored and impatient in the monster’s mouth.

(Robert Pinsky [source])

I’ve had the next selection (which, of course, is not from whiskey river) sitting around waiting for an opportunity to post it. I think today is that opportunity:

Even if your house is flooded or burnt to the ground, whatever the danger that threatens it, let it concern only the house. If there’s a flood, don’t let it flood your mind. If there’s a fire, don’t let it burn your heart. Let it be merely the house, that which is external to you, that is flooded and burnt. Allow the mind to let go of its attachments. The time is ripe.
You’ve been alive a long time. Your eyes have seen any number of forms and colors, your ears have heard so many sounds, you’ve had any number of experiences. And that’s all they were — just experiences. You’ve eaten delicious foods, and all the good tastes were just good tastes, nothing more. The unpleasant tastes were just unpleasant tastes, that’s all. If the eye sees a beautiful form, that’s all it is, just a beautiful form. An ugly form is just an ugly form. The ear hears an entrancing, melodious sound and it’s nothing more than that. A grating, disharmonious sound is simply so.
The Buddha said that rich or poor, young or old, human or animal, no being in this world can maintain itself in any one state for long, everything experiences change and estrangement. This is a fact of life that we can do nothing to remedy. But the Buddha said that what we can do is to contemplate the body and mind so as to see their impersonality, see that neither of them is “me” or “mine.” They have a merely provisional reality. It’s like this house: it’s only nominally yours, you couldn’t take it with you anywhere. It’s the same with your wealth, your possessions and your family — they’re all yours only in name, they don’t really belong to you, they belong to nature. Now this truth doesn’t apply to you alone; everyone is in the same position, even the Lord Buddha and his enlightened disciples. They differed from us in only one respect and that was in their acceptance of the way things are; they saw that it could be no other way.

(Ajahn Chah [source])

I/Thou/We: A Surprised Affection

August 6, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Selfie (at Altitude),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I don’t often post one of my photos here within a few days of doing so over at Instagram, but this one felt to me to fit easily into the context of this week’s readings, as a sort of visual counterpoint.]

Here’s one of whiskey river‘s offerings over the past week:

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

In one of those rare, unironically happy coincidences with which social media sometimes blesses us, Facebook offered me a “Your Memories” item a few days ago — I’d shared it on the same day in 2017. Less coincidentally, probably, I’d also shared a chunk of it here at RAMH on the same day I posted it to Facebook (and a different chunk a couple years before that):

I came away from the [Tucson] zoo with something, a piece of news about myself: I am coded, somehow, for otters and beavers. I exhibit instinctive behavior in their presence, when they are displayed close at hand behind glass, simultaneously below water and at the surface. I have receptors· for this display. Beavers and otters possess a “releaser” for me, in the terminology of ethology, and the releasing was my experience. What was released? Behavior. What behavior? Standing, swiveling flabbergasted, feeling exultation and a rush of friendship. I could not, as the result of the transaction, tell you anything more about beavers and otters than you already know. I learned nothing new about them. Only about me, and I suspect also about you, maybe about human beings at large: We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are stamped with stereotyped, unalterable patterns of response, ready to be released. And the behavior released in us, by such confrontations, is, essentially, a surprised affection. It is compulsory behavior and we can avoid it only by straining with the full power of our conscious minds, making up conscious excuses all the way. Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls. When they are massed together, all touching, exchanging bits of information held in their jaws like memoranda, they become a single animal. Look out for that. It is a debasement, a loss of individuality, a violation of human nature, an unnatural act.
Sometimes people argue this point of view seriously and with deep thought. Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print up leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to all of them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: Be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can’t do this and keep a straight face.
Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our mind of civilization, as affection or friendship or attachment. I don’t see why it should be unreasonable for all human beings to have strands of DNA coiled up in chromosomes, coding out instincts for usefulness and helpfulness. Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.

(Lewis Thomas [source])

Addendum: Another social-media coincidence… For more on the interrelationships between humans and animals, see this Susan Orlean essay over at Medium. It made me wonder about how Thomas’s essay might have differed if he’d imagined the otters as food animals rather than objects of curiosity or entertainment.

Living, Dying, Making Connections, and Living With It All

July 30, 2021 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Danse Macabre,” by Rodolfo Pace. Found on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!)

From whiskey river:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

(Richard Dawkins [source])

Although that passage (as whiskey river noted) was excerpted from Dawkins’ book, Unweaving the Rainbow, that wasn’t where the whiskey river blogger(s) encountered it. Instead, they apparently crossed paths with it at the estimable blog/newsletter called brain pickings.

Contemplating even a single brain pickings post at length can induce a sort of stupor — a mix of awe, secondhand exhaustion, mental overstimulation… It’s possible to subscribe to it, and certainly deserves any pennies you can spare, because it represents the work of a single person, Maria Popova — who also has a day job, and writes regularly for such “lightweight” media outlets as The New York Tmes, The Atlantic… I cannot imagine what her daily schedule must be. (On the other hand, she freely discusses her regimen when interviewed by those same publications. She makes it sound so inconsequentially casual and off-the-cuff that one must conclude: This young woman seriously needs to get her modesty engine in for an overhaul.)

At the core of her brain pickings work: a phrase which, she says, she picked up from elsewhere — combinatorial creativity. (Einstein used the phrase “combinatorial play” — an appealingly lightweight way of saying the same thing.) Her role, she says elsewhere, is that of an “interestingness curator… someone who digs out interesting cross-disciplinary content in a way that allows people to become interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in until they discovered them.”

Anyhow, an essential component of any brain pickings post is its, well, its assemblage — Popova concentrates on a single work by a single writer, painter, sculptor, but apparently she has not just a hard-working modesty machine but an automatic idea-magnetizer as well: she sticks works together from all over, all disciplines, multiple artists…

Consider: in the entry which cites the Dawkins passage, Popova also refers (at least glancingly) to a handful of earlier posts of hers, covering or mentioning in passing:

Jorge Luis Borges,
Milan Kundera,
“French novelist, poet, and philosophical pamphleteer Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846–November 3, 1917),”
the late Emily Levine (standup comic, public speaker, writer, actress, and a friend of Popova’s),
the poet Anna Belle Kaufman,
Marcus Aurelius,
Montaigne,
Charles Darwin,

…and so on and so forth — each a multi-branching rabbit hole of its own, generously illustrated with art and photography (much of it her own). Here’s one of those connected bits, from a post in September, 2012 — a bit crafted by a notoriously cranky sufferer of a cancer which would eventually kill him:

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application to my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read — if not indeed to write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.

(Christopher Hitchens [source])

Visualizing the Soul of the Night

July 23, 2021 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Termination Shock: The Ends of Everythings,” by artist Andy Gracie. Found it on Flickr, where it was posted in the Ars Electronica photostream, and use it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) This is one panel of a “triptych” depicting the gradual disintegration, over billions of years, of matter, light, gravity, and time; you can also view the triptych as a single, animated, eleven-minute video at Gracie’s Web site or on YouTube. I’m pretty sure both plural nouns in the work’s title are plural by intention.]

For no particular reason as far as I know, I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction about astronomy and related matters recently. Some of it is personal (astronomers’ bios and memoirs), some more technical (the history of telescopic observation), some more lyrical. So when I came across this passage, courtesy of whiskey river, I sat right up:

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.

(Chet Raymo [source])

Now, as so often when I come across something unfamiliar but eye-catching at whiskey river, I immediately seek out its source — the surrounding context, if prose; if poetry, other poems by the same poet or in an anthology with poems by others. (I’ve acquired a lot of books that way!) So it was with the above passage, which, as it happens, appears way down almost at the end of the book. But here’s the opening of The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage:

Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the grey wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still.
All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy was happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope, utterly silent. It was like that.
During the time the child was in the air, the spinning Earth carried her a half mile to the east. The motion of the Earth about the sun carried her back again forty miles westward. The drift of the solar system among the stars of the Milky Way bore her silently twenty miles toward the star Vega. The turning pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy carried her 300 miles in a great circle about the galactic center. After that huge flight through space she hit the ground and bounced like a rubber ball. She lifted up into the air and flew across the Galaxy and bounced on the pavement.
It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos. The child sent flying by the skateboarder bounced in slow motion and lay still. There was a long pause. Pigeons froze against the gray sky. Promenaders turned to stone. Traffic stopped on Beacon Street. The child’s body lay inert on the asphalt like a piece of crumpled newspaper. The mother’s cry was lost in the space between the stars.
How are we to understand the silence of the universe? They say that certain meteorites, upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrate with noticeable sound, but beyond the Earth’s skin of air the sky is silent. There are no voices in the burning bush of the Galaxy. The Milky Way flows across the dark shoals of the summer sky without an audible ripple. Stars blow themselves to smithereens, we hear nothing. Millions of solar systems are sucked into black holes at the centers of the galaxies, they fall like feathers. The universe fattens and swells in a Big Bang, a fireball of Creation exploding from a pinprick of infinite energy, the ultimate firecracker; there is no soundtrack. The membrane is ruptured, a child flies through the air, and the universe is silent…
Yesterday on Boston Common a child flew through the air, and there was no protest from the sky. I listened. I turned the volume of my indignation all the way up, and I heard nothing.

Needless to say, I now have another book about astronomy (laughing (silently)).

Flywheel of the Heart

July 9, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Drive!,” by a photographer — or a collective, or something — who’s chosen to self-identify only as Listenwave Photography. (Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license.)

High summer, 2021, in Florida: so many people walking around with bombs of one kind or another in their chests (fitted with timers of sickness, anxiety, anger, fear)… I don’t think these folks suffer from defective hearts, so much as from hearts without a regulator, a flywheel…

Heart
The heart shifts shape of its own accord—
from bird to ax, from pinwheel
to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest,
a brown bear groggy with winter, skips
like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade
of the fireworks booth, the fat lady’s tent,
the corn dog stand. Or the heart
is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead
wait, paging through magazines, licking
their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks
through a door into a maze of hallways.
Behind one door a roomful of orchids,
behind another, the smell of burned toast.
The rooms go on and on: sewing room
with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles,
room full of file cabinets and torn curtains,
room buzzing with a thousand black flies.
Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke,
a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets
its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt.
Heart makes a wrong turn.
Heart locked in its gate of thorns.
Heart with its hands folded in its lap.
Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake.
It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats
when it’s hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down.
Bored, it watches movies deep into the night,
stands by the window counting the streetlamps
squinting out one by one.
Heart with its hundred mouths open.
Heart with its hundred eyes closed.
Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel,
heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence.
Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked
in devoted rows, their dusty spines
unreadable. Heart
with its hands full.
Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history’s lists,
things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart.
Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal.
Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues.
Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe.
Heart with its feet up reading the scores.
Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster.
Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club,
banging on the lid.

(Dorianne Laux [source])

Over at whiskey river a few days ago, I found this brief account of one such flywheel:

As in nature, the soul and the spirit have resources that are astonishing. Like wolves and other creatures, the soul and spirit are able to thrive on very little, and sometimes for a long time on nothing. To me, it is the miracle of miracles that this is so.

(Clarissa Pinkola Estés [source])

Like an Animal Crossing a Highway

July 2, 2021 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “Double exposures: Sunset & Night,” by Pawel Jusyn; found it on Flickr, and use it here, with gratitude, under a Creative Commons license.]

The Missus and I have embarked on a months-long road trip around the US. It’s an odd feeling not to be (as they say) “moving someplace else”; we have no “home” to come home to. We’ll just have to see where each succeeding horizon takes us.

Meanwhile…

#98: There’s never enough time — for doing the things you want to do or for having done them, let alone for remembering them afterwards. No one has ever lived that long, no one ever will. And yet, people do die contented — always have, always will.
How to explain this seeming contradiction?
Easy: the ones who die with something of a smile on their faces have acquired the gift of drawing pleasure from whatever experiences have been in front of them. Note that “in front of them” doesn’t mean physically, right there and then — it simply points to what they’re sensing, one way or another, at any given moment.
We know the dangers of confusing memories of events with the events themselves, and have often discussed in these pages such dangers. But the eyes, too, can be fooled. We can misunderstand sounds; confuse one spoken word for another; suffer from the pings, whistles, cracks and rattles of tinnitus. And the blind men and the elephant — they’re us, grasping at things and confabulating explanations for them from faulty premises. We excuse all of these sensory mistakes, one way or another. Yet for some reason the sensing of the past — the sensing which we call memory — is scorned for its imperfection. I think those smilers at the moment of death know better than the rest of us just how precious their world is, when handled with love by whatever senses, including nostalgia, they can command.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

Loved the below from whiskey river over the last week — much of it chiming in resonance with things going on in my (our) life right now:

Choosing to Think of It
Today, ten thousand people will die
and their small replacements will bring joy
and this will make sense to someone
removed from any sense of loss.
I, too, will die a little and carry on,
doing some paperwork, driving myself
home. The sky is simply overcast,
nothing is any less than it was
yesterday or the day before. In short,
there’s no reason or every reason
why I’m choosing to think of this now.
The short-lived holiness
true lovers know, making them unaccountable
except to spirit and themselves – suddenly
I want to be that insufferable and selfish,
that sharpened and tuned.
I’m going to think of what it means
to be an animal crossing a highway,
to be a human without a useful prayer
setting off on one of those journeys
we humans take. I don’t expect anything
to change. I just want to be filled up
a little more with what exists,
tipped toward the laughter which understands
I’m nothing and all there is.
By evening, the promised storm
will arrive. A few in small boats
will be taken by surprise.
There will be survivors, and even they will die.

(Stephen Dunn [source… and I don’t mind at all that I also used in a post about two-and-a-half years ago])

Smitten: Summer

June 25, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Let Me Rest, Human,” by John Brighenti. (Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you very much!) Depending on your point of view and willingness to suspend disbelief, the squirrel may seem either (a) stupefied by the colossal heat of a summer day, or (b) distracted to the point of immobility by some thunderous emotion. Knowing that the photo was taken in midsummer 2020 doesn’t make choosing the point of view easier.]

Summer in Manhattan, circa 1949:

It is seven o’clock and I re-examine an ex-speakeasy in East 53rd Street, with dinner in mind. A thin crowd, a summer-night buzz of fans interrupted by an occasional drink being shaken at the small bar. It is dark in here (the proprietor sees no reason for boosting his light bill just because liquor laws have changed). How dark, how pleasing; and how miraculously beautiful the murals showing Italian lake scenes—probably executed by a cousin of the owner. The owner himself mixes. The fans intone the prayer for cool salvation. From the next booth drifts the conversation of radio executives; from the green salad comes the little taste of garlic. Behind me a young intellectual is trying to persuade a girl to come live with him and be his love. She has her guard up, but he is extremely reasonable, careful not to overplay his hand. A combination of intellectual companionship and sexuality is what they have to offer each other, he feels. In the mirror over the bar I can see the ritual of the second drink. Then he has to go to the men’s room and she has to go to the ladies’ room, and when they return, the argument has lost its tone. And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little dinners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin.
Another hot night I stop off at the Goldman Band concert in the Mall in Central Park. The people seated on the benches fanned out in front of the band shell are attentive, appreciative. In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the underside, translating them into a new language. Overhead a plane passes dreamily, its running lights winking. On the bench directly in front of me, a boy sits with his arm around his girl; they are proud of each other and are swathed in music. The cornetist steps forward for a solo, begins, “Drink to me only with thine eyes…” In the wide, warm night the horn is startlingly pure and magical. Then from the North River another horn solo begins—the Queen Mary announcing her intentions. She is not on key; she is a half tone off. The trumpeter in the bandstand never flinches. The horns quarrel savagely, but no one minds having the intimation of travel injected into the pledge of love. “I leave,” sobs Mary. “And I will pledge with mine,” sighs the trumpeter. Along the asphalt paths strollers pass to and fro; they behave considerately, respecting the musical atmosphere. Popsicles are moving well. In the warm grass beyond the fence, forms wriggle in the shadows, and the skirts of the girls approaching on the Mall are ballooned by the breeze, and their bare shoulders catch the lamplight. “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” It is a magical occasion, and it’s all free.

(E.B. White [source])

But as whiskey river reminds us, many summers elsewhere, elsewhen, provide glimpses of such magic:

Later in Life
(excerpt)
I step out and suddenly notice this: Summer arrives, has arrived, is arriving. Birds grow
less than leaves although they cheep, dip, arc, a call across the tall fence from an invisible neighbor to his child is heard
right down to the secret mood and the child also hears. One hears in the silence that follows the great
desire for approval
and love
which summer holds aloft, all damp leeched from it like a thing floating out on a frail but
perfect twig end. Light seeming to darken in it yet
glow. Please, it says, but not with the eager need of
spring! Come what may, says summer. Smack in the middle I will stand and breathe.
The
future is a super fluidity I do not
taste, no, there is no numbering
here, it is a gorgeous swelling, no emotion, as in this love is no emotions, no, also no
memory—we have it all, now, & all
there ever was is
us, now.

(Jorie Graham [source])

Your World Among Many, Many Worlds Within Yours

June 18, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

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

Consider:

Emerald Spider Between Rose Thorns
Imagine, not even or really ever tasting
a peach until well over 50, not once
sympathizing with Blake naked in his garden
insisting on angels until getting off the table
and coming home with my new heart. How absurd
to still have a body in this rainbow-gored,
crickety world and how ridiculous to be given one
in the first place, to be an object
like an orchid is an object, or a stone,
so bruisable and plummeting, arms
waving from the evening-ignited lake,
heading singing in the furnace feral and sweet,
tears that make the face grotesque,
tears that make it pure. How easy
it is now to get drunk on a single whiff
like a hummingbird or ant, on the laughter
of one woman and who knew how much I’d miss
that inner light of snow now that I’m in Texas.

(Dean Young [source])

…and:

There Is Another Way
There is another way to enter an apple:
a worm’s way.
The small, round door
closes behind her. The world
and all its necessities
ripen around her like a room.
In the sweet marrow of a bone,
the maggot does not remember
the wingspread
of the mother, the green
shine of her body, nor even
the last breath of the dying deer.
I, too, have forgotten
how I came here, breathing
this sweet wind, drinking rain,
encased by the limits
of what I can imagine
and by a husk of stars.

(Pat Schneider [source])

….all of which flowed just from having brushed up, lightly, against this (courtesy of whiskey river):

Who do you think you are? Imagine there’s a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. All truths about all parts of our self. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don’t always have your own best interests at heart. That’s true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You can’t trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know what you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you. And that’s me. And I’m telling you: you are the only you.

(Charles Yu [source])

__________

P.S.Traditionally on this day, I add an entry to my Potpourri series. I hope one will make an appearance later today… but it might get bumped to tomorrow. Who knows? In the series’ Oh, whatever the hell I want spirit, maybe I’ll post it anytime in the next several days… and just back-date it to today. *mad, evil laughter*

Everything Continuing in All Directions

May 21, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image — more or less untitled — by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) It does in fact have a functional “title,” but not one I’m particularly fond of, nor chained to. Ideas?]

From whiskey river:

The Wonder Is
The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so that it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close,there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants . . .
One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions — into evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.

(Jaan Kaplinski [source (among others)])

Not from whiskey river:

#23: To appreciate post-apocalyptic fiction, we generally must imagine being among the survivors: the last person to eat a can of beans, say; the last to “own” a pet dog or cat; the last to consult — let alone to care about consulting — a wristwatch. In a world of uncontrolled entropy, we wonder, what must it feel like to defend (successfully or not) the ramparts of order and routine?
Here’s the mystery: any apocalypse — fictional or real, without a “post-” — marks only one point in the timeline. And of course we all know what a given midpoints feel like, in the moment. But what happened at the starting line?
What must it have felt like, say, as the very first person to perform some action that one was aware of performing? Not just the first to open a can of beans, but the first to remember something — something from even a moment ago, let alone from decades ago? What does it mean to “know” something at all, let alone to “remember” it later? When you type a sentence which begins with a capital “W,” do you “know” you’ve just struck that particular combination of keys? Do you “remember” having done so, a split-second or a minute afterwards? Did you ever know or remember it? And if so, did you fail to notice the miraculous first moment when that thing apparently happened on its own, without decision or reflection? Can you even imagine such a moment, as it must have felt when it popped and sparked in your ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestor’s head…?
Maybe living through and then, later, remembering complex experiences — phases of life, everyday (or, for that matter, uncommon) events, people and relationships we consider unforgettable — is like typing a sentence. It’s impossible not to notice a given first-time experience. (To experience something is to notice it, no?) But thereafter? Within the cavernous, routinely mined spaces of our souls, re-experiencing something we’ve lived through consists of just taking a scoop from the tailings piled off to the side, from an imagination-dump — a muddied or gloriously colored dump, as the case may be. But the outcome scarcely resembles anything we might call conscious or controlled… let alone (the gods know) true.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

[Where’s the rest of this “Fridays at RAMH” post? See this note from a couple of days ago.]