Art & Photography

How to Mean Something, in the Meantime

October 30, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The 8th Floor,” by J. Michel Carriere (username “lazyartist”) on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) The photographer provides few details about the photo, other than that it was taken in New York City — its caption simply reads, “Wishing you were here.” Maybe that means something, after all?]

From whiskey river:

Place to Be
Days the weather sits
in the endless sky,
the clouds drifting by
The winter’s snow,
summer’s heat,
same street.
Nothing changes
but the faces, the people,
all the things they do
’spite of heaven and hell
or city hall—
Nothing’s wiser than a moment.
No one’s chance
is simply changed by wishing,
right or wrong.
What you do is how you get along.
What you did is all it ever means.

(Robert Creeley [source])

…and:

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.

(Henry Miller [source])

…and:

Ungodly
You want to flee, but flee where? The urban concrete elsewhere
does not seethe, does not breathe the scent of carob trees.
Flee, you hear it everywhere, the taxi driver, the farmer at the laiki
tell you, Go! and are puzzled that you are still here,
you who could actually leave with your American passport.
Pack your clothes, leave behind the ruined lives, translate home into
longing, elsewhere you might lift your chin, live unburdened.
The government, the Americans . . . no one cares, the taxi driver complains,
and the farmer at the laiki selling you the sweetest pears, advises
to keep them fresh, Eat them cold, nearly frozen.
He shakes his head, murmurs Ellada . . . , this ancient land of rock cliffs,
seas that bleed their myths, Greece with its tales of flight
and light, returns and rebirths, keeps teaching the stubborn human lesson
still: the gods won’t save you, neither will you stop wishing it of them.
After all, you are human and they are not.

(Adrianne Kalfopoulou [source])

[Read more…]

The Experience at the Heart of the Sense

October 23, 2020 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “April 2020: The Twig Moon,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This is one of an Instagram series tagged #thingsthatlookkindalikeotherthings. At that time, this past spring, it seemed we were being regularly introduced to a new “fun name” for a month’s full moon — “Wolf Moon,” “Corn Moon,” etc.; when I saw this giant concrete manhole cover (or whatever it really is) the title sprang immediately to mind.]

From whiskey river:

At first I couldn’t see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket’s saw, the star’s blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.
I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and:

I do not know what you are supposed to do with memories like these. It feels wrong to want to forget. Perhaps this is why we write these things down, so we can move on.

(Lloyd Jones [source])

…and:

What We Miss
Who says it’s so easy to save a life? In the middle of an interview for the job you might get you see the cat from the window of the seventeenth floor just as he’s crossing the street against traffic, just as you’re answering a question about your worst character flaw and lying that you are too careful. What if you keep seeing the cat at every moment you are unable to save him? Failure is more like this than like duels and marathons. Everything can be saved, and bad timing prevents it. Every minute, you are answering the question and looking out the window of the church to see your one great love blinded by the glare, crossing the street, alone.

(Sarah Manguso [source])

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The Day Your Hourglass Runs Out of Sand

October 16, 2020 by John 2 Comments

[Movie poster for D.O.A. (1950), starring Edmond O’Brien… more, below]

From whiskey river:

If You Knew
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

(Ellen Bass [source])

…and:

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing time will go on without me.
Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

(Sarah Manguso [source])

…and:

For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

(W. S. Merwin [source])

[Read more…]

The Circle Is Not Its Center

September 25, 2020 by John 2 Comments

[Untitled photo by Henri Prestes. First saw it on Tumblr, then double-checked his Instagram account for further description. All he says there is, “At the top of the highest portuguese mountain the dense mist is an almost perpetual occurrence.”]

From whiskey river:

Humility, therefore, is absolutely necessary if man is to avoid acting like a baby all his life. To grow up means, in fact, to become humble, to throw away the illusion that I am at the center of everything and that other people only exist to provide me with comfort and pleasure.

(Thomas Merton [source])

…and (italicized lines):

Am I Not Among the Early Risers
Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers?
Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees
blue in the first light?
Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though
sheets of water flowed over them
though it is only wind, that common thing,
free to everyone, and everything?
Have I not thought, for years, what it would be
worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,
to gather blueberries,
thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?
What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly
at the top of the field,
her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,
has not already done?
What countries, what visitations,
what pomp
would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods
on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?
Here is an amazement — once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
Above the modest house and the palace — the same darkness.
Above the evil man and the just, the same stars.
Above the child who will recover and the child who will
not recover, the same energies roll forward
from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.
I bow down.
Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment,
or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other that mine
in the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table?
Have I ever taken good fortune for granted?
Have I not, every spring, befriended the swarm that pours forth?
Have I not summoned the honey-man to come, to hurry,
to bring with him the white and comfortable hive?
And while I waited, have I not leaned close, to see everything?
Have I not been stung as I watched their milling and gleaming,
and stung hard?
Have I not been ready always at the iron door,
not knowing to what country it opens — to death or to more life?
Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold
or the night too long and as black as oil anyway,
or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely
of the second-rate, less than happiness
as I stepped down from the porch and set out along
the green paths of the world?

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]

To Craft (Pretty Much) Anything from (More or Less) Nothing

September 18, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Circuit Breaker,” by Daniel Friedman. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) This is the second of Friedman’s creations I’ve used here at RAMH; the first was just this past April. It doesn’t really depict a circuit breaker — it just (apparently, and not implausibly) suggested one to Friedman. Among the quotations he chose to caption the drawing is this, from Montaigne: “Quintessence is no other than a quality which we cannot by our reason find out the cause.”]

From whiskey river:

Mirror Image
Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death, to the exclusion
of other sensual matters,
so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing: even
my mother’s voice couldn’t make him
change or turn back
as he believed
that once you can’t love another human being
you have no place in the world.

(Louise Glück [source])

…and:

History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality — if only for an instant — by means of creation.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and:

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.

(Pico Iyer [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

We are born with nothing outside ourselves, and so we leave the world as we proceed to the unknown, yet dimly remembered, realms that lie ahead of us. As we have conducted ourselves here, so will the realm be that awaits us and the souls with whom we can communicate most easily. While we are alive on the earth, we have to encounter much darkness as part of the greater unfolding of our personality, but the end of all this suffering is our identification with the inner lives of our fellow creatures. Our experience of the polarities of darkness and light, of evil and good, is a part of the pageant of universal growth. If there were no temptation of evil, there would be no awareness of goodness. In a society where hatred was not countenanced there would be little love (of the type that will sacrifice itself), but only a safe, detached benevolence that effected no relationship with anything. Out of the terrible events of our tortured century much potential good has emerged.

(Martin Israel [source])

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The Paradox: Waiting to Be Caught Off-Guard

September 11, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Ties That Bind,” by user “wetsun” (found at Flickr, of course, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!). When I first saw this photo, I liked the look of it — composition, lighting and contrast, that sort of thing. I had to look at it two or three times more before the surprise set in.]

From whiskey river:

When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, ‘Look!’ The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold.

(C. S. Lewis [source])

…and:

I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

…and:

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective. We have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.

(José Saramago [source])

…and:

Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
in September or October, when the wind
and the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
with foam and glitter, and inland among stones
the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
a hurry through which known and strange things pass
as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

…and:

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

[Read more…]

To Recognize the Rarest Part of You

September 4, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “L’Empire des lumières” (commonly translated as “The Empire of Light,” although I’ve also seen it as “The Dominion of Light” — which I myself rather prefer), by René Magritte. This is one of somewhere between a dozen and sixteen works by Magritte bearing the same title, all on the same general theme: a quiet street scene at night, illuminated here and there by individual lamps… while overhead, the sky is a daytime sky. All the paintings in the series were painted over the last couple decades of Magritte’s life. As for how I got to this painting for today’s post, let’s just say I blame Elizabeth Spires’s “Pome,” below.]

From whiskey river:

Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn’t even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don’t dare to — they don’t dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone — that is what they suffer from — and so they don’t find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia — the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything — but they don’t want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value — and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.

(André Gide [source (in a slightly different translation)])

…and:

It is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find true liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.
Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for spiritual JOY. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and spiritual joy you have not yet begun to live.

(Thomas Merton [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

Mindful
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for—
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]

What to Believe In (When Belief Seems Distant)

August 28, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Hard Lesson (Detail),” by Lewis Minor; found it on Flickr, and use it here of course under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). Minor is one of numerous photo-artists on Flickr who assemble found photos into collages of often eerily photorealistic quality. (Some are more successful than others, of course — just as is true of the component images.) In this example, captioned “Messin with Banksy and Bouguereau,” he’s combined portions of each of those artists’ work with some Pop-art-style scraps from here and there. This is a detail which he selected from the full image, here. Really, I could’ve used any of a dozen or more choices from Minor’s photostream.]

From whiskey river:

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

If we look at this conflict as a straight eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Empire and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing.
But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to Empire.
We may not have stopped it in its tracks—yet—but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness.
…Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

(Arundhati Roy [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will get worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

(Roy, ibid.)

…and:

Happiness
A state you must dare not enter
with hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marshes, and all
the roads leading to a castle
that doesn’t exist.
But there it is, as promised,
with its perfect bridge above
the crocodiles,
and its doors forever open.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

[Read more…]

Too Much… But Listen to It, Ringing Soft and Low

August 21, 2020 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “Black Walnuts, by the Thousand,” by John E. Simpson; a sample from my gallery called #plantsthatlookgood. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This photo, taken in early 2018, doesn’t do justice to the enormous quantity of the things beneath the tree from which they’d fallen. Nevertheless, in my mind, for some reason I’ve always associated it with the notion of “profusion.”]

From whiskey river:

The History of Too Much
There is too much here, the sapphire, the thistle,
the oregano blooms in June, everything extravagant —
the rich peat of what decays, the ruins that don’t decay,
these especially are too much, the temples and statues
in their stark marble glow, that simplicity which is not simple at all.
This sheen of time, the wear of wars, the famine years
of Occupation, lucent as the columns standing stoic, Doric —
their weight has whittled the people: the weight of that antiquity,
of those stones, the grandeur and pride — too much
in this moment, this present crushed by the evidence,
the result of living with beheaded gods, and maimed still
beautiful torsos, the muscled limbs in chipped robes.
They plague our dreams, what was once achieved is now
incomplete, these pieces of the golden age aging
in the midst of traffic, too much, the yelling and honking,
the protests in the middle of everything — people are impatient;
how can anyone be patient, overwhelmed as they are.
Even the oregano’s thick perfume, the sapphire sea, remind people
of extravagant loves and sacrifice, while here, now,
ghosts live on as gods and their impossibility.

(Adrianne Kalfopoulou [source; also see here])

…and:

I had this sudden awareness […] of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves. You know, like those mythical pictures of constellations traced between stars.

(Stuart Dybek [source])

…and:

Singing Bowl
Begin the song exactly where you are.
Remain within the world of which you’re made.
Call nothing common in the earth or air.
Accept it all and let it be for good.
Start with the very breath you breathe in now,
This moment’s pulse, this rhythm in your blood
And listen to it, ringing soft and low.
Stay with the music, words will come in time.
Slow down your breathing. Keep it deep and slow.
Become an open singing bowl, whose chime
Is richness out of emptiness,
And timelessness resounding into time.
And when the heart is full of quietness
Begin the Song exactly where you are.

(Malcolm Guite [source — and don’t miss the video of Guite voicing the poem himself])

[Read more…]

Only the Heart of the Matter Genuinely Matters

August 14, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Enigma with Key, Ocean Falls, BC,” by user “adavey” (Alan Davey) on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) From the photographer’s caption there: “Someone must have a quirky sense of humor and enough spare time to do something with it. The key behind the glass is attached to a door. Farther down the door, and not shown here, is a hasp with a padlock. What we don’t know is whether the key opens the padlock. In some places, this installation would be considered art. I’ve seen worse stuff at the Whitney Biennial. Here in the real world, it doesn’t really matter, because at the moment the padlock isn’t locked.”]

From whiskey river:

Nocturne II
August arrives in the dark
we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

What matters is that you allow your heart—not your ego—to rule your life. Then very little matters because you will be a humble person and you’ll take most of life as it comes. If it rains, you get wet; if they don’t show up on time, you wait; if they don’t pay you, you eat less; if they don’t love you, so what, you didn’t come to please them anyway; if they don’t think you’re special, that’s marvelous, it frees you from having to thank them for their compliments. If life doesn’t go the way you want, accept the way it does go, use it as your teacher.

(Stuart Wilde [source])

…and:

The less we cling to one side of reality—betting on either or or, arguing for for or against—the more we can be aware of the exquisite counterpoint of things. Everything matters: how we vote, how we tie our shoelaces, how we respond to the faintest whisper of a thought. And nothing matters, because (look!) it’s already gone. When we understand this, we’re home free.

(Stephen Mitchell [source])

…and:

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

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