Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Sacred Necessaries

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[Image: “Four Rock Formation,” by Nicollazzi Xiong (discovered at the Pexels free stock-photography site — thank you!).]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Funny Strange 

We are tender and our lives are sweet

and they are already over and we are
visiting them in some kind of endless
reprieve from oblivion, we are walking
around in them and after we shatter
with love for everything we settle in.

Thou tiger on television chowing,
thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical
roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom
of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation.

Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean’s
harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce
a vineyard of grapes from one’s apron
and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up
bread and offer up one’s armful to the throng?
Let us live as if we were still among

the living, let our days be patterned after
theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

…and:

Braided Creek : A Conversation in Poetry
(excerpts)

Under the storyteller’s hat
are many heads, all troubled.

Rowing across the lake
all the dragonflies are screwing.
Stop it. It’s Sunday.

Only today
I heard
the river
within the river.

I want to describe my life in hushed tones
like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.
His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.

Nothing to do.
Nowhere to go.
The moth just drowned
in the whiskey glass.
This is heaven.

Let go of the mind, the thousand blue
story fragments we tell ourselves
each day to keep the world underfoot.

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.

(Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn’t go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.

(Anne Lamott [source: nothing canonical; possibly a specific edition of this (but it’s not in the copy I own)])

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Still, a Kind of Realism

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[Image: “Still as Rain,” by Tim Sackton. (Discovered on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!)]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

And the Moon on Its Stem Will Steal You Away

That’s a good one, the idea of the moon having a stem and somehow
stealing you, whoever you are, kind of like Persephone or Orpheus,
portrayed or alluded to in countless forms of art and popular culture
including poetry, film, opera, music, and painting. And it kind of fits
my mood this morning, something vaguely cartoonish and devoid
of real gravitas, but still, a kind of realism, even so. And the area
around is the void, outer space, nothing, because explaining things
is never as interesting as wanting them, the desire to know, set against
a backdrop of black velvet and rhinestones. Let’s say that you wake up
one day and realize you don’t remember anything that happened
yesterday. Maybe for five minutes or so. And for those five minutes
you’re thinking, as I was thinking this morning, that this is it. Car keys.
The word for when you really want something and work for it.
Your dog’s name. There are not enough blank pages for all this
forgetting, like debris falling back to earth, you and yours hiding in
the underbrush with hopes of your own, of rescue or escape.
When you don’t remember why you’re hiding in the underbrush,
you’ve been hiding in the underbrush forever. This whole other
existence leaps forward in possibility. And then the five minutes
are up, and it’s oh yeah, eggs, Saturday. Some day that was.
A chemist once told me luminol was her favorite color. It glows
a beautiful greenish-blue when it comes into contact with blood
by reacting to the iron in hemoglobin, looking a bit like the sky
this morning. It’s a kind of truth of blue, that uncovers, that
remembers. It’s used by investigators to detect blood at crime scenes
where no blood is visible. There are so many things to forget,
to lose, and in so many different ways. But even so, one can be wrong
about the past, and deduce from error, but still be right about
the future or the present. And when you don’t remember what day
it is, happy birthday. Despite all our best efforts, there’s a wolf
on the horizon making a movie of your approach, and it’s
a shipwreck playing across me as I’m pouring sugar into my cup.

(John Gallaher [source])

…and (italicized stanzas):

The Face

Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then   
its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant   
by sights that ought to strike the sane   
unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute   
with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth   
at any given time: and if
you got the chance to ask them how they do it,   
they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you
with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile
the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret   
preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure   
one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;   
or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,
to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

(Franz Wright [source])

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The Physiology of the Soul

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[Image: “ThreeWay,” by Daniel Friedman. (Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons License: thank you!) Among the quotations which appear as the image’s description: “A metaphysical conclusion is either a false conclusion or a concealed experimental conclusion.” (Hermann von Helmholtz, from On Thought in Medicine (1877))]

From whiskey river:

The Bodies
(excerpt)

We move, we love, we cry out,
we hold or cannot hold to what we are
and finally wake to find ourselves
changed beyond all imagining.
Was it enough to have lived?
In that moment of still approach,
will it be given to us to know?

(Elizabeth Spires [source])

…and:

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

(Don DeLillo [source])

…and:

No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.

(Sasha Sagan [source])

…and:

One Heart

It is late afternoon and I have just returned from
the longer version of my walk nobody knows
about. For the first time in nearly a month, and
everything changed. It is the end of March, once
more I have lived. This morning a young woman
described what it’s like shooting coke with a baby
in your arms. The astonishing windy and altering light
and clouds and water were, at certain moment,
You.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me.

The brown leaves buried all winter creatureless feet
running over dead grass beginning to green, the first scent-
less violet here and there, returned, the first star noticed all
at once as one stands staring into the black water.

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love.

(Franz Wright [source])

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Tonight, I’d Really Like Not to Choose

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[Image: sculpture in black iron, Durante o Sono (“During Sleep”) by Rui Chafes. (Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, found on Flickr and used here under a Creative Commons License — thank you!) The photographer’s description of this work says, among other things: “The equilibrium is presented as being solid, but unexpected; the ratio of the image of weight to that of fragility is inverted, the question of gravity is raised. Might the title, Durante o Sono, refer to a nightmare moment? Does this organism represent the dream itself? Or a frightening perception of its strangeness?”]

From whiskey river:

There’s more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You’d think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we’re going to join.

(Meghan Daum [source])

…and:

As for this reclusiveness — I think of it as profoundly helpful to my work. Darkness, silence and solitude, by throwing their heavy cloaks over my shoulders, have forced me to recreate all the light, all the music and the joys of nature and society in myself. My spiritual being no longer comes up against the barriers of the visible world and nothing hampers its freedom…

When by chance a thin ray of sunlight manages to slip in here… my whole being, like the ancient statue of Memnon, that gave out harmonious sounds when the rays of the rising sun struck it, bursts with joy, and I feel myself transported into realms of radiant light…

I have tried to follow life itself, in which unsuspected aspects of a person suddenly reveal themselves to our eyes. — We live alongside people, thinking we know them. All that’s missing is the incident that will make them suddenly appear other than we knew them to be…

Throughout our lives we have alongside us like a fellow prisoner shackled by the same chain, a man who is different from our physical self — You see, when you think of yourself, you create a certain idea of yourself. And when one looks in a glass, the mirror reflects our real image. — The other was a stranger — It was the spiritual self. — Well, it is this one alone that matters to me.

I only consider my objective self (take this word in the sense meant by philosophers) as an experimental instrument which has no inherent interest but that links me to my spiritual side so that I can penetrate certain realities and especially the shadowy areas of consciousness on which I try to throw light —

(Marcel Proust [source])

…and:

The Bookstall

Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were
freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open—that one
and that—and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.

For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read—these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to the earth.

(Linda Pastan [source])

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The Reassessment

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[Image: “Do I Know You?,” by Tom Waterhouse (an old favorite, whose work I last featured just about exactly a year ago). As with his other photos, I found this one on Flickr (and use it here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!). This is not a posed photo, Waterhouse says: “I’ve not really come across the concept of ‘testing’ a mirror before — you know, presumably in case it doesn’t reflect what you want to see — but this man went through a whole range of exercises, even going so far at one point as to wave at himself.”]

From whiskey river:

Debtors

They used to say we’re living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I’m alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

(Jim Harrison [source])

…and:

Guidelines for The Honorable Harvest

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

(Robin Wall Kimmerer [source])

…and:

…Disease empties a sector, a billion sectors.

People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves.

Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end?

Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?

(Annie Dillard [source])

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…and Sometimes the Story Chooses You

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

From whiskey river:

As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more simple than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god?  And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—-how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Blessing for a Writer

May you hear in your own stories
the moan of wind around the corners
of half-forgotten houses
and the silence in rooms you remember.

May you hear in your own poems
the rhythms of the cosmos,
the sun, the moon and the stars
rising out of the sea and returning to it.

May you, too, pull darkness out of light
and light out of darkness.
May you hear in your own voice
the laughter of water falling over stones.

May you hear in your own writing
the strangeness, the surprise of mystery,
the presence of ancestors, spirits,
voices buried in the cells of your body.

May you have the courage to honor
your own first language, the music of those
whose lives inhabit your own.
May you tell the truth and do no harm.

May you dare in your own words to touch
the broken heart of the world.
May your passion for peace and justice be wise:
remember—No one can argue with story.

May you study your craft as you would study
a new friend or a long time, much loved lover.
And all the while, lost though you may be in the forest,
drop your own words on the path like pebbles

and write your way home.

(Pat Schneider [source])

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In the Time of Not Knowing

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[Image: “portrait of ourself (myself being as a time of understanding-with others),” by Stan Bonnar; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thanks!).]

From whiskey river:

Intake Interview

What is today’s date?

Who is the President?

How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?

What does “people who live in glass houses” mean?

Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?

Name five rivers.

What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?

How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?

If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him?

What should you do if I fall asleep?

Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps?

What is the moral of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”?

What about his Everest shadow?

Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations?

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?

Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an even to those of the underworld, or vice versa?

Would you visit a country where nobody talks?

What would you have done differently?

Why are you here?

(Franz Wright [source])

…and:

There is a rumor of total welcome among the frosts of the winter morning. Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives and at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine. Nothing outside ourselves makes us desire to do so; the questions, and the striving toward answers, come from within. The field I am looking at is perhaps twenty acres altogether, long and broad. The sun has not yet risen but is sending its first showers over the mountains, a kind of rehearsal, a slant light with even a golden cast. I do not exaggerate. The light touches every blade of frozen grass, which then burns as a particular as well as part of the general view. The still-upright weeds have become wands, encased in a temporary shirt of ice and light. Neither does this first light miss the opportunity of the small pond, or the groups of pine trees. And now: enough of silver, behold the pink, even a vague, unsurpassable flush of pale green. It is the performance of this hour only, the dawning of the day, fresh and ever new. This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings, or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn—dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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The World Recalls All You’ve Sought to Forget

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[Image: “Mind Your Head Signage,” by Arthur Brognoli (found on the free-stock-photos site Pexels).]

From whiskey river:

Bedtime Story

The moon lies on the river
like a drop of oil.
The children come to the banks to be healed
of their wounds and bruises.
The fathers who gave them their wounds and bruises
come to be healed of their rage.
The mothers grow lovely; their faces soften,
the birds in their throats awake.
They all stand hand in hand
and the trees around them,
forever on the verge
of becoming one of them,
stop shuddering and speak their first word.

But that is not the beginning.
It is the end of the story,
and before we come to the end,
the mothers and fathers and children
must find their way to the river,
separately, with no one to guide them.
That is the long, pitiless part,
and it will scare you.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

Instructions for the Journey

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.

And if all that fails,

wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

(Pat Schneider [source])

…and:

People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.

(J. Michael Straczynski [source: one of those great quotations which seem to have no confirmed point of origin: everyone just knows this is by [X], from one work or interview or another, and passes it along])

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So Much That Fills Me

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[Image: “DCI Mooreland,” by John E. Simpson — one of my #jesstorypix series of photos (many highly post-processed) which inspired mini-narratives in me. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The story I saw in this one: DCI Selwyn Mooreland thought he’d seen it all — but he hadn’t. He realized that now… now that they’d arrested Harry Rightback’s widow, Marjorie, and had time to search the house. Bad enough, it was, that all the bodies in the back yard matched up with name tags tacked up on the corkboard on the basement wall. But Mooreland knew the worst was yet to come. For there were still a hundred more tags there — tags with no corresponding bodies. Yet… (I’m afraid the inconclusive concluding ellipsis is a feature of many of those stories.) You can find the large version of this photo at my SmugMug site.]

From whiskey river:

Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful… and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and:

Not Only the Eskimos

We have only one noun
but as many different kinds:

the grainy snow of the Puritans
and snow of soft, fat flakes,

guerrilla snow, which comes in the night
and changes the world by morning,

rabbinical snow, a permanent skullcap
on the highest mountains,

snow that blows in like the Lone Ranger,
riding hard from out of the West,

surreal snow in the Dakotas,
when you can’t find your house, your street,
though you are not in a dream
or a science-fiction movie,

snow that tastes good to the sun
when it licks black tree limbs,
leaving us only one white stripe,
a replica of a skunk,

unbelievable snows:
the blizzard that strikes on the tenth of April,
the false snow before Indian summer,
the Big Snow on Mozart’s birthday,
when Chicago became the Elysian Fields
and strangers spoke to each other,

paper snow, cut and taped,
to the inside of grade-school windows,

in an old tale, the snow
that covers a nest of strawberries,
small hearts, ripe and sweet,

the special snow that goes with Christmas,
whether it falls or not,

the Russian snow we remember
along with the warmth and smell of furs,
though we have never traveled
to Russia or worn furs,

Villon’s snows of yesteryear,
lost with ladies gone out like matches,

the snow in Joyce’s “The Dead,”
the silent, secret snow

in a story by Conrad Aiken,
which is the snow of first love,

the snowfall between the child
and the spacewoman on TV,

snow as idea of whiteness,
as in snowdrop, snow goose, snowball bush,

the snow that puts stars in your hair,
and your hair, which has turned to snow,

the snow Elinor Wylie walked in
in velvet shoes,

the snow before her footprints
and the snow after,

the snow in the back of our heads,
whiter than white, which has to do
with childhood again each year.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

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Truth and Illusion Walk into a Bar…

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[Image: “Childhood Memories,” by Liz West (from Flickr; shared here under a Creative Commons License — thank you!). This — evidently an entry in a group contest on Flickr in 2010 — is actually a composite of several photos manipulated into one: the children; the tree and barn in the distance; the tree trunk at the left; and the underlying texture.]

From whiskey river:

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

(Richard Feynman [source])

…and:

Living with the News

Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me
it is not mentioned on the front pages
but somewhere far back near the real estate
among the things that happen every day
to someone who now happens to be me
and what can I do and who can tell me
then there is what the doctor comes to say
endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

In the beginning there was the ‘One’ and it was bored out of its frickin’ mind…  and so it became two, just for something to do. Yin and yang, nothingness and somethingness, space and object, tumbling eternally.

I imagine those two would have quarreled endlessly had they not become lovers and given birth to an eternal spring of impermanent forms, the “ten thousand things” (as we are known in Taoism and Buddhism).

Perhaps this ephemeral impermanence of things is a sort of truce that was made between the abyss of absolute nothingness and the possibility of something actually existing…  a truce that makes it possible for everything imaginable to rise and fall, in and out of existence temporarily, throughout the boundless cosmos, for eternity.

(Alan Watts [it certainly sounds like him; unsourced, but see citation here])

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