Art & Photography

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.]

Go Through the Door, and Find (Bring) Your Magic

May 14, 2021 by John 4 Comments

[Image: untitled landscape by Ma Yuan (c. 1160-1225); spotted it here This is almost certainly not the painting referred to in the Alan Watts passage below; on the other hand, his “reference,” as though to a specific painting, was only glancing/ambiguous. So we can choose, right?]

From whiskey river:

I live in a world that is completely seamless between the two. Fantasy is the real story. The world in which we live is structured from notions that are completely fabricated; your clothes, your wallet, that we all agree that pieces of paper are worth something. Geography is a complete fabrication. Where does Mexico start and America end? From space, nowhere. We agree to kill each other, to tax each other, to shame each other from notions that are complete fabrications. To me, those are harmful fantasies. Whereas my fantasies are liberating.

(Guillermo Del Toro [source: nothing canonical])

…and:

The Farm When I Was Five
The most magic thing
was the pump in the backyard.
And a dipper to drink from.
For a long time the pump
was as tall as I was
and I used to make it do its magic
even when I wasn’t thirsty.
The sound of the water
coming up from a dark somewhere
was a hollow roaring noise
that broke suddenly loose
and splashed a crystalline miracle
on the darkening cement.
Grandma always said,
“Stop wasting the water!”
I didn’t waste it, Grandma.
There is this poem.

(Grace Butcher [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Where the Poems Come From Now That I Ride a Motorcycle
They don’t come from the sun
so much anymore—
or not from the sun alone
but from he glint of sun on chrome.
And not so much
from the dark roads
as from the unrolling
of the roads with a sound
like wind.
And sometimes now from
the way the quiet stars
blow back behind me
and I have no thought at all
till later.
I notice how everything is changing:
nothing comes from where it used to.
I make decisions at crossroads
I have never seen before.
So does the wind.
The directions we are heading
have not yet even been named.

(Grace Butcher [source])

…and:

We feel, from a Western standpoint, that haiku are unfinished. They are simply titles; first lines of something that could go on to elaborate and express everything. But in this kind of artistry, one leaves the best part unsaid, because the work of the poet is not to impress everybody with how clever he is, and leave them speechless, but to evoke something in the listener. In exactly the same way, the art of the painter–in the tradition of Sung Chinese painting–is to leave something to the beholder’s imagination; hence, there is what is called “one-corner painting.”
A painter like Mahiwon [i.e., Ma Yuan]–or Byon, as he is known in Japanese–is a master of one-corner painting. He indicates a line of hills somewhere near the top, and down at the bottom there is a single drifting boat and a fisherman. This is all there is. The path, as it were, comes to an end in the parsley. To understand this, you have to go back to childhood. Remember how as a child you loved to explore paths and get right down among the stalks of grasses and weeds, to see where it all goes? One of the eternal children’s stories is that you were one day walking along a little lane and discovered a door in a wall that you had never seen before. You opened it, and it led into a magical garden where all the bushes were covered in jewels, and there were marvelous birds and fantastic songs. And you came out because you had to get home in time for dinner, and the next day you looked for that door again but you couldn’t find it anywhere. You knew it was there–it was just between this fence and that fence. But today it isn’t there. And yet somehow it is always there.
So, for every child there is always a kind of funny place that leads to somewhere else, and you don’t figure out exactly where it leads because that would spoil it. You mustn’t know. And all this haiku poetry, and this kind of painting that the Sung artists so marvelously mastered, seeks to evoke that sense of what I would call possibility or potentiality, without actually filling in any details. And that is real magic.

(Alan Watts [source])

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Regarding Incongruity — Baffled, Maybe, But with Eyes Wide Open

May 7, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Now Hiring Parts,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For some rumination about the photo, in the context of incongruities, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Dear Friend
(excerpt)
I become each day more reckless,
too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat,
the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here,
not one, and I’m bored with the stillness
of the yellow field outside my window. And you,
who cannot keep still, who can never
look back, where will you go next?
How will I find you?
Can you feel the world pull
apart, the seams loosen?
What, tell me, will keep it whole,
if not you? if not me?
Send a postcard, picture, tell me
how you’ve been.

(Blas Falconer [source])

…and:

Now, as far as I was concerned, there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it, but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right then, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better.

(Niall Williams [source])

—

Not from whiskey river:

Although nobody planned it that way, most of us wind up emerging from adolescence with a deeply nuanced sense of what is real, with shades of gray all over the place. (However, I have known, and probably you have too, reader, a few adults for whom every issue that strikes me as subtle seems to them to be totally black-and-white — no messy shades of gray at all to deal with. That must make life easy!) Actually, to suggest that for most of us life is filled with “shades of gray” is far too simple, because that phrase conjures up the image of a straightforward one-dimensional continuum with many degrees of grayness running between white and black, while in fact the story is much more multidimensional than that.
All of this is disturbing, because the word “real”, like so many words, seems to imply a sharp, clear-cut dichotomy. Surely it ought to be the case that some things simply are real while other things simply are not real. Surely there should be nothing that is partly real — that wouldn’t make sense! And yet, though we try very hard to force the world to match this ideal black-and-white dichotomy, things unfortunately get terribly blurry.

(Douglas R. Hofstadter [source])

…and:

The Festival of Almost Getting There
At the festival of almost getting there
Zeno pokes his head out halfway, asks
directions, half-heartedly, to the train,
admits he’s been riding on the tortoise,
been running after arrows to watch them
stand still. He understands course, path,
way, even relative position (dichotomize,
divide) but motion’s still a figment:
distance halved and halved (split infinity,
twin trajectory) the long, long way, and all
that longing (two-fold, doubled) (moments,
instants, continuous or discrete) for some
unfamiliar end—such unforgiving progress,
portioned, yes, bisected. A half-assed effort?
No, he’s as good as got it. So much struggle
and amends. Sure, we’re goddamned tired of
this much waiting, but look! He’s halfway there.

(Renée Ashley [source])

__________________________

About the photo: The caption to this entry in my #jesstorypix collection on Instagram: “In retrospect, the HR manager at the heavy-equipment retailer decided, the Spring 2021 recruitment campaign had been quite misguided. If only he’d known the psychiatrist residing next door was THE ‘Hannibal Lecter’…”

Most often, I think of puns as “verbal coincidences”: two meanings just happen to collide at an intersection shaped like a single unit of sound. But “getting” a pun also relies on choosing fun over common sense: not doing the possibly difficult work of choosing “rightly” or “wrongly,” but just lazily recognizing the existence of a choice at all: a choice between the superficial “meaning” of an arbitrary passage (word, phrase, sentence) and the, other, generally more interesting and, well, profound and true meaning. Asserting “I don’t get puns” means, in effect, “I recognize the alternatives, but why should I skip between them when I can simply walk?” But taking just such a sprightly and incongruous leap — from word to word, from concept to concept — is the whole point… not just of puns but of any jokes. No?

[Aside: as clever visitors will have noticed, the very first word in this post’s title is a bit of a pun (albeit not an especially sprightly one): (a) “regarding,” in jargon-speak for “concerning the matter of…”? or (b) “regarding,” literally looking at and taking the measure of?]

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RAMH@13: Scrambling After the Damned Hat

April 20, 2021 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Ballcap Tanoura,” by John E. Simpson. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

I’m preparing to head out of town (actually, out of state) for a week, which feels quite momentous. Yes, The Missus and I took a much needed weeklong break in October. But this one feels riskier — more exposed, y’know? — because that trip was a driving trip, just the two of us, to a destination where we’d be around no one at all for all but a few hours, total. For this trip, I’ll be flying to the Northeast US, to visit with several family members. Still no large crowds, except in the three airports I’ll go through… but, well, you get the idea. The main point now: at this early moment in its composition, this is shaping up as an uncharacteristically brief annual meditation on the state of RAMH.

The very first of those annual meditations offered some basic statistics:

365 days; 310 published posts; 1,295 (published) comments…
…or a little less than one post a day, and a little over four comments per post.

Let’s see the standings as of now:

4,758 days; 1,610 published posts; 7,084 comments (of which I myself apparently posted over 2,600)…
…i.e., about one post every three days, and — still — a little over four comments per post.

It’ can be entertaining, remotely and intellectually, to consider what these statistics might “mean”: for instance, What’s the state of blogging in general, or of this blog’s “popularity” in particular? Why do I blog, and has that reason changed over time, and what does that say about my audience, such as it is? But after 13 years of so much radical change in the context — society and culture, technology, the pandemic — I’m afraid what such statistics “mean” boils down, for me, to approximately, well, nothing at all.

I sometimes get notices from one company or another, alerting me to how I can “leverage” my “platform” by paying more careful attention to SEO, or search-engine optimization. this would basically require me to really sit down and analyze things like how long did visitors remain at the site, what did they look at while here, where did they come here from, and where’d they go next. Or, of course, these companies would be happy to do the analysis for me, and make recommendations for how to improve it all. For a fee. DUH.

Here’s what I’m pretty sure I’ll think of RAMH as of the moment I click the Publish button for this post: First, I know it provides a much-needed rhythm to my week — especially now that I’m free of the metaphorical time clock of a day job, and especially since the COVID-19 (etc.) mess has continued to grind on. That I don’t blog on anywhere near a daily basis is a blessing in this regard: the habit helps me remember which day of the week I’ve awoken to (heh).

For my Friday posts, I’ve settled into a rhythm of three mornings’ activities: (1) reviewing and selecting from the past week’s whiskey river posts, and kind of grope around for a common “theme” among them; (2) locating — from among my own recent reading, or just by looking online for — whatever seems to “go with” the whiskey river theme; and (3) finding an image (usually), a video, or some other media item to head the whole post. Write the image’s caption. I do a bunch of related tasks (proofreading, assigning categories and tags, editing for length if necessary, maybe writing a brief “maxim for nostalgists,” etc. Finalize the title. Click “Publish.” Confirm the post’s automated sharing, as needed/desired, to other social media.

…and that’s all I put into RAMH, every week, for an average total of six to seven hours. Oh, some bits and bobs of blogging creep in — updating WordPress plugins, moderating occasional comments, that sort of thing. But I generally require a real “something in mind” to blog otherwise… usually, something which I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Which leads me to the two other ways I use RAMH — hence what it “means” to me — right now. Neither will surprise you if you’ve been a regular visitor.

Writing: I don’t write much here anymore, it’s true. But I also don’t write much of anything at all — nothing “writerly,” essays or fiction or what-not — outside of RAMH these days. I do think about it quite a bit, and in particular I keep thinking I should not (haha) close the book on the novel I once called Grail and, later, Seems to Fit. I have entered (as you may know) a handful of short-fiction writing contests, to no great ongoing effect. But I tend to think of writing successfully, outside of RAMH anyhow, as something I once craved but have lost almost all ambition for. The occasional book review or other one-off post here does keep my hand in.
Photography: well, again, you probably know about this. (If not, check out the posts in the “My Photography” category; many of these are only peripherally related — a post might simply include one of my photos, for example — but a reasonable number of them now address specifically one or another photographic technique/project in words (imagine that!).

The next year, RAMH-wise, will be very different from those before it, and I can’t tell you what to expect here at the blog because I don’t know. I’ll have more to say about this over the next couple months, as plans get finalized. For now, though, we will probably be leaving Florida, quite possibly for good, and road-tripping around the US for at least several months. “Homeless,” after a fashion: we’re thinking we can mix short-term rentals and family visits for a few days at a time. During such pauses in movement, sure, I’ll look forward to blogging (and the hope of writing, and photography).

But on a schedule? Beats me!

In any case, thank you for dropping in — and perhaps sticking around — during the (so-far) 13-year-old road trip around my head that Running After My Hat represents.

And thanks especially to The Missus, for her patience with my habit! (Well, I think of it as my routine, but let’s not quibble over word choice.)

_________________________

About the image: You may or may not remember the photo series I did last summer, called “Hat Dance” — mostly just an experiment in lighting a “still”-life subject which also happened to be in motion. (I posted about it, including the five shots I actually used, in July.)

I was so pleased with the results of that test that I tried again, a week or two later, using four or five baseball caps instead of just the two felt Indiana-Jones-style fedoras. The results: less pleasing. (The problems were many, and my time on the day of the shoot was limited.) Still, I found one shot I could do something with…

As for the title, I wanted to continue the “dance” theme of the earlier series. It just refers to the Egyptian Sufi folk dance called the tanoura. Dancers, traditionally male, wear brightly colored skirts with weights sewn into the hems, so that as they spin, the skirts flair out almost into two-dimensional disc-like shapes. (Of course, any patterns inherent in the skirt’s weave then blur and become unrecognizable while it’s in motion.)

Hunting for Clues in (of) the Interior

April 16, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “She Got a Lot Out of Those Physics and Shop Classes,” by Alan Levine; located this clue to someone’s interior at Flickr, naturally, and share it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) Posted there about 10 years ago, the image seems to have been one of a daily series — all telling (one enigmatic story? several enigmatic stories?) of a woman named Lori. The story itself seems to be in rough-draft form — typos, ever so slightly “off” phrasing, and so on — and I’m guessing it went straight from Levine’s keyboard, to the Flicker post, without an intervening spell-check and so on. But it was an interesting story nonetheless, and, most importantly, I do like this still life… especially as metaphor.]

From whiskey river (highlighted stanzas):

Wildly Constant
(excerpt)

The first thing I saw
the first morning I went out for a walk in Stykkishólmur
was a crow

as big as a chair.
What’s that chair doing on top of that house? I thought
then it flapped away.

A crow that big is called a raven.
Corvus corax in Linnaeus’s binomial system.
Each one makes a sound

like a whole townful of ravens
in the country I come from.
Three adjectives that recur

in the literature on ravens are
omnivorous.
Pernicious.

Monogamous.
I’m interested in monogamous.
I got married last May

and had my honeymoon in Stykkishólmur.
This year I returned to Stykkishólmur
to live with my husband

for three months in one small room.
This extreme monogamy
proved almost too much for us.

Rather than murder each other
we rented a second place
(Greta’s house)

near the pool.
Now we are happily
duogamous.

There are ravens on the roof
of both places.
Perhaps they are the same ravens.

…

I should learn more about signs.
I came to Stykkishólmur
to live in a library.

The library contains not books
but glaciers.
The glaciers are upright.

Silent.
As perfectly ordered as books would be.
But they are melted.

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.

…I
stand amid glaciers.
Listen to the wind outside

falling towards me from the outer edges of night and space.I have no theory
of why we are here

or what any of us is a sign of.
But a room of melted glaciers
rocking in the nightwind of Stykkishólmur

is a good place to ponder it.
Each glacier is lit from underneath
as memory is.

Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is the daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses

and there is a deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart

involuntarily.
At sudden times.
For surprise reasons.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Proust wrote
in 1913:
We think we no longer love our dead

but that is because we do not remember them:
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove

and burst into tears.

(Anne Carson [source — do consider reading the entire long poem!])

…and:

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

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