Art & Photography

The Reassessment

March 20, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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])

[Read more…]

…and Sometimes the Story Chooses You

March 13, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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])

[Read more…]

In the Time of Not Knowing

March 6, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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])

[Read more…]

The World Recalls All You’ve Sought to Forget

February 28, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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])

[Read more…]

So Much That Fills Me

February 14, 2020 by John 1 Comment

[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])

[Read more…]

Truth and Illusion Walk into a Bar…

February 7, 2020 by John 1 Comment

[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])

[Read more…]

Let Go Your Hold on What Holds You

January 31, 2020 by John 2 Comments

From whiskey river:

[Image: “please remain calm, everything is fine,” by Robert Couse-Baker. Found it on Flicker, of course, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you very much!).]

The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair.

(Bertrand Russell [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

9th century Zen master, Tozan Ryokai, attained enlightenment many times. Once when he was crossing a river he saw himself reflected in the water and composed a verse, “Don’t try to figure out who you are. If you figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will have just an image of yourself.” Actually, you are in the river. You may say that is just a shadow or a reflection of yourself, but if you look carefully with warm-hearted feeling, that is you.
You may think you are very warm-hearted, but when you try to understand how warm, you cannot actually measure. Yet when you see yourself with a warm feeling in the mirror or the water, that is actually you. And whatever you do, you are there.

(Shunryu Suzuki [source])

…and:

The Three Goals
The first goal is to see the thing itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
No symbolism, please.
The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.
The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

(David Budbill [source])

…and:

If you are a person of gain and loss, you’ve already lost. It’s a matter of remembering that our business here is to learn to love all the way through to letting go. There’s nothing much else we can actually do with the overwhelming opportunity of a human life, which is shaped exactly like completely accepting the offer of a lifetime, and shaped exactly like finally letting go.

(Susan Murphy [source: nothing canonical, but found it here])

[Read more…]

What to Do, What to Do…

January 24, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Observer’s Paradox,” by Zach Stern (found on Flicker, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!). This photo seems to have been taken at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, during a 2012 exhibit called “Fifteen Pairs of Hands,” by Bruce Nauman. The same sign probably appears on many walls in the museum, and has nothing to do with this exhibit, per se — but the photographer has picked up on the inherent mystery of a hands-off injunction in a room whose contents all appear to defy it. If I’d been the photographer, I’d have been very pleased with myself!]

From whiskey river:

Purring
The internet says science is not sure
how cats purr, probably
a vibration of the whole larynx,
unlike what we do when we talk.
Less likely, a blood vessel
moving across the chest wall.
As a child I tried to make every cat I met
purr. That was one of the early miracles,
the stroking to perfection.
Here is something I have never heard:
a feline purrs in two conditions,
when deeply content and when
mortally wounded, to calm themselves,
readying for the death-opening.
The low frequency evidently helps
to strengthen bones and heal
damaged organs.
Say poetry is a human purr,
vessel mooring in the chest,
a closed-mouthed refuge, the feel
of a glide through dying.
One winter morning on a sunny chair,
inside this only body,
a far-off inboard motorboat
sings the empty room, urrrrrrrhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhh

(Coleman Barks [source])

…and:

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming “This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!” we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.
It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

(Richard Feynman [source])

…and:

If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I’d have to say he can’t do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.

(William S. Burroughs [source])

[Read more…]

Whence, Whither, and How One Becomes the Other

January 17, 2020 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Down & Out,” by user “Alberto_VO5” on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) I really liked this photo, but I’m actually not sure why it struck me as apt for this post… perhaps because Gumby seems so clearly headed in one direction or another?]

From whiskey river:

I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.

(Nicholson Baker [source])

…and:

Sunlight
After days of darkness I didn’t understand
a second of yellow sunlight
here and gone through a hole in clouds
as quickly as a flashbulb, an immense
memory of a moment of grace withdrawn.
It is said that we are here but seconds in cosmic
time, twelve and a half billion years,
but who is saying this and why?
In the Salt Lake City airport eight out of ten
were fiddling relentlessly with cell phones.
The world is too grand to reshape with babble.
Outside the hot sun beat down on clumsy metal
birds and an actual ten-million-year-old
crow flew by squawking in bemusement.
We’re doubtless as old as our mothers, thousands
of generations waiting for the sunlight.

(Jim Harrison [source])

…and:

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all of life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world sorrow.

(E. M. Forster [source])

…and:

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

(Anne Lamott [source])

[Read more…]

Cold. Delicious. Illusory.

January 10, 2020 by John 4 Comments

[Image: “On Ice,” by Michael Pardo. (Found on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!) As the title suggests, this is not a high-speed photo of water splashing, but (as the photographer says) a “strange formation” in his freezer. He adds: “This one looks a bit like a supine gecko holding an Allen key in its foot.” Not sure I get the gecko, but the Allen key: yeah!]

From whiskey river:

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])

…and:

I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature — as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

…and:

We’re told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It’s possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there’s nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.

(Arundhati Roy [source])

[Read more…]