Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

It Is Important to Let Sense Quiver

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[Image: “Sacudiéndome::Shaking::Tremblement,” by Oiluj Samall Zeid; found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons License (thank you!). The photographer affixed a small GoPro camera to the harness of his dog, named Fray, and took him for a walk around the streets of León, in north central Spain. This shot was taken just as he and Fray were at a crosswalk; the dog stopped for a moment, in mid-shot, to shake his head and body.]

From whiskey river (second stanza):

Steady, Steady

I believe you can build a boat.
I believe you can get to water.
I do not believe you can get the boat on water.

How do other people bear
what you are still afraid of? The answer
is that when big things happen
you do go through the looking glass,
but it is still you who goes through,
the inner text is all still right to left,
so you just keep reading.

Because there is no boat and there is no water.
I stare at my tiny baby’s face
but he so wriggles he can’t quite be seen.
He grows steadier, more the blur
is gone; joins us in the myth of the stable.

Of the quakiness of infancy and old age 
we shimmer and shimmy into being 
and out again. In the mean-
time, we’re horses in the stable of the myth.

A quick check of the ocean, or any fire, 
is a reminder of how things seem; 
I can’t seem to see them.

You’re on the beach and you find out the secretary
of defense thinks calico cats are agents of the devil.
Your friend asks if they get 10 percent.
She was funny, your friend.
The water in this metaphor
is unreal because of the way time passes, 
so you can’t quite get the boat on water, 
but you can build the boat,

and a boat is good for a lot of things 
not just on water.

Will we, without the boat on water, 
always feel that we are missing 
something basic to the picture?

No. That is what I’m trying to say. 
It is important to let sense quiver; 
even in this stable of the myth of stable, 
even living aboard a boat mired 
in mud in view of the sea.

Who wants yet another world? 
It’s enough already.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

…and:

With the passage of days in this godly isolation, my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything—where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth—struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God’s wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.

(Nikos Kazantzakis [source])

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Large, Containing Multitudes

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[Image: “DCI Mooreland,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) To see the microfiction behind its title, refer to the original in my SmugMug “#jesstorypix” gallery; just click on the title at the bottom of the photo, and the story will appear at the left or bottom (depending on your screen’s orientation).]

From whiskey river:

“Shoot, I can’t remember her name. What is her name? Darn, here she comes. What is it… Sally… Sue? She just told me yesterday. What’s the matter with me? This is going to be embarrassing.”

In case you haven’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important? And if right now you are hearing, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any voice inside my head!”—that’s the voice we’re talking about.

(Michael A. Singer [source])

…and:

Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree a castle.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people… Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time. Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.

(Jandy Nelson [source])

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Grasping Sanctuary

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[Image: “Three Worlds” (1955), by M.C. Escher. As you can read in this essay at the website of the Escher in Het Palais museum, this was actually Escher’s third attempt to capture the effect, starting in 1950. The print served as the front-cover illustration for Beaver & Krause‘s influential electronica album, In a Wild Sanctuary (1970).]

From whiskey river:

The American Sublime

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

(Wallace Stevens [source])

…and:

A normal existence—what could be more irrational? It’s fantastic the number of things you’re forced not to think about in order to go from one end of the day to the other without jumping the track! And the number of memories that have to be driven from your mind, the truths that have to be evaded!

(Simone de Beauvoir [source])

…and (last stanza):

There is a dream going on while I am awake.
Because I must pay attention to what
is happening around me, I am unconscious
of the dream. When I sleep, the daylight
things fade out and the perpetual dream
surfaces fully and is memorable.
When I die, the dream is the only
thing left. It balloons and fills the world.

As a writer, I coax partly into action
that internally coherent, silent story.
I let my conscious life yield a little,
and a little more, and occasionally a great way,
to my best needs and hopes: whatever
I mean by my best, whatever I mean
by my judgments on the happenings around me,
that center and guide is invited to have its way.

For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance. We ride the wave and are
the wave. And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

(William Stafford [source])

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Backing Away from #everyday

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[Photo: “Newscoop,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I like several things about this photo, which I won’t detail here other than the one more or less insignificant detail I briefly mention in the post.]

In the last several weeks, I’ve been nibbling away at the fringes of the fast-food meal of what passes for my writing aspirations. In the meantime, a hungry little insect has been nibbling away at the me who’s been nibbling away at the fringes of etc. To wit: photography.

The specific trigger here, or rather now, is the daily Instagram series (black-and-white, with occasional splashes of color) I’ve been running since October 2017 — specifically, the approach of Day #1000 in the series.

My Instagram account is here; the hashtag I’ve used for the series is #everydaybandw… which, alas, is also in use by a other photographers. That’s “alas” because Instagram has never supplied a means to search/filter by both the account and a hashtag. So the only practical way of seeing #everydaybandw photos specifically by me is to view my account page, and tap on individual pictures in the grid. (Note: some of those in that series are tinted black-and-white — e.g. this one — or contain “color splash” effects, like this one.) You can also see a selection of my favorites from the series over at SmugMug, with the caveat that it’s updated only occasionally. (If you want to see all #everydaybandw photos, by anyone, try this. Most of those right now are mine, but not all of them.)

Now, there’s nothing inherently special about reaching Magic Number 1000 (or any other — even Magic Number 1). But I’m at a point now where I think I’ve got about all the satisfaction I can out of a series of “one black and white photo a day, of everyday scenes/objects/moments, which have been shot, post-processed, and posted with minimal effort.” At the time the series began, I desperately needed to spend some time “outside my head,” as it were:

  • The Pooch had died just a few weeks before.
  • I was still working a full week, every week, with no paid leave of any kind…
  • …which was taking place — largely by my choice — in a small, enclosed, windowless office I shared with no one at all.

I also had pretty much ignored the whole digital-photography thing, and — although I’d loved photography in general since the 1960s — had not even picked up my film camera gear in probably 15 years.

So the daily photo mission forced me to do something — however glancingly “creative” — not on a specific schedule, but every, single, day.

…and then of course, recently, I’ve had all this opportunity, suddenly, to structure my time anew somehow. Over the last three months, I’ve started to run out of gas on the #everydaybandw journey for a couple of reasons.

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Revisiting the Tiny

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A simple placeholder announcement for now… You may recall that last month, I entered a “100-word Microfiction Challenge.” (If you have no idea what this refers to, I first posted about it here; the, er, post-mortem post — as of the first round’s completion — is here.) That contest’s organizers will announce the results of the first-round judging process on Wednesday, June 24. The top 20 (of no more than 100) participants in each group* will advance to the second round; this runs from 11:59 p.m. Friday, June 26, to 11:59 the next night.

…all of which is to say: I hope to occasionally post a new practice story here at Running After My Hat over the next three weeks. Sadly, I can’t promise that this will be to your benefit; odds are, after all, you won’t even get to experience vicariously the thrill (such as it is) of my advancing to Round 2. And as you already know from last month’s eight practice samples, the quality of the stories themselves will be uneven. No, these practice sessions are mostly for me: to force me into something like the mindset required to “write short,” on random assignments of no more than 100 words each.

I drew my first one of these practice assignments last night:

  • Genre: comedy
  • Word: stir
  • Action: yanking my chain

…and so I’ll post a micro-story sometime today.

Thank you for continuing to indulge me!

_____

* For the record, I was in group 66, consisting of 95 participants. (All but eight groups included 95 entrants; those eight had 96.) My group’s assignment was to write a 100-word (or shorter) story in the romance genre, featuring some form of the word forget, and involving the act of roller skating. I’ll post I’ve posted the story in an entry here after the first-round results are announced, regardless of whether or not I’ll be going onto Round 2.

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The Seer, the Seen, the Not Quite Seen

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[Image: “Covered Window,” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH). This is one of an Instagram series I’ve done for a while, tagged “#jesstorypix” and cross-posted to SmugMug; each photo, generally post-processed to within an inch of its life, is captioned with a brief micro-story which the photo inspired (if that’s the word). For the story of “Covered Window,” see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (which paraphrases the full passage below, as does nearly every other Internet source; it’s an excerpt from a fictional dialogue between the narrator, C.S. Lewis, and his Victorian “mentor” George MacDonald — Lewis opens, describing an unhappy woman they’re observing while touring Hell):

“…she’s only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling, and one feels that a little kindness, and rest, and change would put her all right.”

“That is what she once was. That is maybe what she still is. If so, she certainly will be cured. But the whole question is whether she is now a grumbler.”

“I should have thought there was no doubt about that!”

“Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman—even the least trace of one—still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there’s nothing but ashes we’ll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up.”

“But how can there be a grumble without a grumbler?”

“The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye’ll have had experiences… it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”

(C. S. Lewis [source])

…and:

The One Who Is at Home

Each day I long so much to see
The true teacher. And each time
At dusk when I open the cabin
Door and empty the teapot,
I think I know where he is:
West of us in the forest.

Or perhaps I am the one
Who is out in the night,
The forest sand wet under
my feet, moonlight shining
On the sides of the birch trees,
The sea far off gleaming.

And he is the one who is
At home. He sits in my chair
Calmly; he reads and prays
All night.  He loves to feel
His own body around him;
He does not leave the house.

(Francisco Albanez, translated by Robert Bly [source])

…and:

(That’s Believable! [source])

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Never in a Million Years

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[Image: excerpt from Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (“Dancing”); you can see the whole thing over on Salon. The caption to panel not only appeared at whiskey river over the last week (see below), but has been widely quoted elsewhere around the Web in the 20 years since Barry’s comic appeared at Salon.]

From whiskey river:

The Mystery of the Hunt

It’s the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me,
                   That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously—
The search for a bright square cloud—the scent of lemon verbena—
                    Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters
                                      Play in the surf.

                  It is these small things—and the secret behind them
                                    That fill the heart.
                        The pattern, the spirit, the fiery demon
                                That link them together
                      And pull their freedom into our senses,

             The smell of a shrub, a cloud, the action of animals

         —The rising, the exuberance, when the mystery is unveiled.
                                 It is these small things

                   That when brought into vision become an inferno.

(Michael McClure [source])

…and (last two stanzas):

Clouds

The clouds moved in another hundred feet
during the night, just as they have done
each night for the past two weeks.
Now they hang barely above the range
of thrown stones. The sun is someone else’s story,
the rich relation of a slight aquaintance.

Bending over us, the clouds have the texture
of faces seen through smoke.
Thoughts in a confused mind look like that.
Tell me again that they are not hostile,
that they have come merely out of curiosity
to see again that we are possible.

If so, then why are doors more difficult to open,
as if some sadness were leaning against them?
Why do windows darken and trees bend
when there is no wind? You call that occasional
roar the roar of a plane and I imagine
a time when I might have believed that.

But now the darkness has been going on
for too long, and I have accustomed myself
to the pleasure of thinking that soon
there will be no reason to hold on in this place
where rocks are like water and it’s so difficult
to find something solid to hold on to.

(Stephen Dobyns [source])

…and:

The groove is so mysterious. We’re born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.

I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.

(Lynda Barry [source])

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Life, Oblique

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[Image: “Georgetown,” by Kevin Dooley. Found the original at Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!).]

From whiskey river:

Road Warriors

My traveling clothes light up the noon.
I’ve been on my way for a long time
                                                            back to the past,
That irreconcilable city.
Everyone wants to join me, it seems, and I let them.
Roadside flowers drive me to distraction,
                                                                    dragonflies
Hover like lapus lazuli, there, just out of reach.

Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy,
Unsettled, seven yards short of immortality
And a yard short of not long to live.
Better to sit down in the tall grass
                                                        and watch the clouds,
To lift our faces up to the sky,
Considering—for most of us—our lives have been a constant mistake.

(Charles Wright [source])

…and:

If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.

(Pablo Neruda [source])

…and:

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

(Dan Albergotti [source])

…and:

Things happen to a person; that is, life deals you a set of cards and you play them as you are able. If I do my best I can and make no trouble for my neighbors, then surely I cannot be blamed either for my existence or my government. There are forces that buffet us through life that no mere individual can withstand. Better to stick to my books and musings about literature and leave the government to those who know best. That was certainly what I believed for years, but this evening I had begun to wonder, foolishly perhaps, if it wasn’t that sort of thinking which had helped bring about this current state of affairs.

(Stephen Dobyns [source])

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All the Wisps of a Day

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[Image: “Ghostweed (#everydaybandw 868 / 2020-02-11),” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH).]

From whiskey river (a few additional sentences included here):

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a November 2? Living like this means you don’t have a container anymore for the different days, can’t hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn’t seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like under sea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.

(Charles Yu [source])

…and:

Summer Solstice
(excerpt)

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

(Stacie Cassarino [source])

…and:

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.

(Franz Kafka [source])

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Working in the Small

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[Image: “#everydaybandw 699 (2019-08-26),” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I’ve never thought about my fiction in terms of its scale — its genre (if any), sure; its word count, of course (one must at least feign practicality, even if one seldom practices it)… But are my stories, y’know, sweeping? Am I a miniaturist, or do I paint with a big brush? And, for that matter, do any authors typically think of themselves in these terms? Or is it all just a critic’s shorthand for the endpoints of a continuum…?

A couple years ago, in my annual mid-June “Potpourri” post, I described a writing contest I’d been participating in that year. For that contest, whose three-round timeline sprawled across five or six months, entrants in each round had to compose a short story of N words or fewer, in a particular fictional genre (mystery, romance, etc.), on a given subject, and within a particular period of time. The maximum word counts and times-to-write were shared by everyone in a given round, and both went down as the contest went on: ranging from a maximum 2,500 words, written over eight days, for Round 1, to 1,500 words and 24 hours, for Round 3. Of the 4,000 entrants at the start, I placed sixth overall. This sufficiently swelled my self-regard that I entered the 2019 edition of the same contest… with a much more humbling outcome: I wiped out in the first round.

This year, I promised myself I wouldn’t get sucked in — a promise I kept… sort of.

Because, you see, I remain on the mailing list for the contest organizers, an outfit named NYC Midnight LLC. They’ve been running writing competitions since 2002 — short stories, screenplays, and so on, pretty much year round, contest after contest. And this year they added a variation which seems tailored to a quarantined-at-home-and-retired-to-boot writer’s context: a 100-hundred word microfiction contest.

I suspect the number of entrants for this one to be orders of magnitude larger; a hundred-word maximum, for aspiring writers who are confined at home all around the world, will most likely prove just too tempting a target to ignore.

Aside from the word-count ceiling, to meet the contest requirements each story must meet several other requirements, as I described the other day. Also as I explained then, I threw together a list of over 20,000 “prompts” to be used to practice with during the next week — I have vanishingly little experience “writing small” like this, and I want to be in something like (haha) shape for the first 24-hour round (which begins at 11:59 PM on May 8). (By contrast, my photography — as in this post’s cover image, above — very often drifts small-ward.)

Yesterday afternoon, I posted the first of those practice-session results. Today, and on subsequent days between now and then, I hope to post a new practice micro-story sometime in mid-afternoon. Maybe by Friday it will feel like a ho-hum challenge.

(And for the curious: today’s prompt is: romance genre (crap…!); required word “price”; required action “searching the files.”)

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