Art & Photography

Letting the Light In… to Make the Choice of Hope Easier

January 20, 2023 by John Leave a Comment

[Images (slideshow): “No Evil, #1 and 2 (I-40 Footbridge, Durham, NC),” by John E. Simpson.]

Among the pearls on whiskey river‘s string this week was a meditation on hope. The focus of the passage is on maintaining hope in what is often regarded as a political and cultural environment which discourages it. I’ve chosen to supplement the river‘s excerpt (marked with italics) with a bit of context from the work it comes from:

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Block wrote, “The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.” To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

But hope, of course, comes in many flavors — and is useful in many contexts of (potential) despair, from the global and cosmic macro to the personal micro. For instance (and not from whiskey river):

Hope is the thing with feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

(Emily Dickinson [source])

…to which one observer added a Dadaist footnote:

How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not “the thing with feathers.” The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.

(Woody Allen [source])

[The next — longish — section of today’s post addresses the slideshow displayed above, and gets into some technicalities of photography. If you’d rather skip over that, please skip down to the section which follows it. I’ll never know!]

Thanks to a generous Christmas gift-giver (AKA The Missus), this week I acquired a new lens for my camera. It’s not an exotic thing — not a telephoto lens, not a wide-angle lens, performs no special photographic “tricks,” really… which is why this kind of lens is classified as a “normal” lens. (And yes, that’s the technical term!) Informally, it’s what’s referred to as a “nifty 50” (a reference to its focal length), and I’ve also seen it called a “walking-around lens.” I like that: the whole point of a “normal” lens is that it reproduces, roughly, what the human eye actually sees: it doesn’t bring distant objects apparently closer, and it doesn’t extend the field of vision beyond what we say we’re “looking at” at a given moment.

Weirdly, or so it may seem, I already had two lenses providing such a normal perspective. One is a zoom lens which came with the camera body: a zoom lens ranging from the moderately wide-angle to the slightly telephoto; the other, a slightly telephoto lens which has been designed with (haha) an eye towards close-up work — not quite a “macro” lens (insect eyeballs and such), but allowing me to focus on subjects less than a couple inches away. So why, then, did I decide I needed another lens in the same range?

(By the way, if you’re wondering what all this has to do with hope: hang on; there’s a connection.)

Lenses for serious-amateur and above cameras allow for control of two qualities of objects’ visibility: (1) perspective or field of view (that’s the “focal length”), and (2) how much or how little light the lens passes to the camera’s film or (in the digital-camera era) sensor. The latter quality is controlled by adjusting the size of the lens’s aperture — i.e., the little porthole through which light passes. The bigger the aperture, the more light allowed in. And the term by which aperture is measured is f-stop: the smaller the f-stop, the larger the aperture. For this new lens, the aperture can be set to any of numerous f-stops between 1.7 and 22. Which matters to me because it’s the first lens I’ve owned capable of an aperture setting below 2.8 or so.

Given all the above, you can gather, then, that I was interested in a lens which could gather more light — useful in low-light circumstances like right after sunset, say. But wide-open apertures (smaller f-stops) have one other useful feature: the ability (in certain circumstances, and thanks to the physics of light and lenses) to focus on subjects without focusing on their surroundings.

And that’s what that little slideshow above illustrates. I took the two photos within seconds of each other; for #1, I used the smallest aperture the lens afforded, and for #2 the largest. See the way #2 isolates the pipe and “No Evil” sticker, not just because it’s centered but because everything else is rendered indistinct, almost entirely featureless? (Contrast with #1, which bombards the attention with details of the chain-link fence and even of the grassy background, feet away from the railing.)

That’s what it comes down to: choice. Simple choice.

Almost 50 years ago, I took part in a marriage-counseling program with my then-Missus. Obviously, the program did not salvage our own relationship. But one of its principles has stuck with me ever since; as presented in those sessions, it was, “Love is not an emotion; love is a choice.” In less succinct terms, we cannot control what we feel (which simply results from a momentary flash-flood of one or more hormones); but we can exercise a level of control over what we do with those feelings — what happens as a result of them. We can choose.

That idea, I believe, extends to other emotions besides the tumescent bubble of sentiment and attraction commonly called “love.” If angry in the moment, for instance, we perhaps can’t control the outburst of anger which directs spiteful words at another person, at an institution, at the universe in general. But the flash flood of emotion eventually recedes. What happens next is what really counts. Do we apologize? Do we continue to stoke the resentments which triggered the emotion?

I think hope is like actual love (or anger, come to that), and I think that’s what both Rebecca Solnit and Emily Dickinson are getting at. We have a choice: we can regard the maelstrom of our daily lives in confusion, with everything at once a suitable candidate for our limited attention, skipping from one subject to the other and reacting to it separately, anxiously, the general good and pleasant and merely acceptable being shouted down by the cacophony of the background…

…or we can quickly survey the landscape, disregarding the bombastically abnormal and comfusingly stressful aspects and instead drawing, yes, hope from what remains: the things going constantly, quietly right. And as with a camera lens, the way to bring about this happy outcome is to let as much light as possible into one’s perspective at the moment.

Based on emotions though it may be, I think this is the only way to live rationally. You?

Whatever May Come Tomorrow

January 6, 2023 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “January Morning, New Jersey (with Shuttered Swimming Pool),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Over the last week, whiskey river has run the gamut of emotions surrounding the new year, both looking ahead with cautious and ever so tentative optimism, and looking back a few days — and all around — at what 2023 has actually delivered so far. Here at RAMH, today, newly returned from a holiday road trip to visit family, I’m not quite ready to view the grime of the moment. So I consider, first, this (italicized lines):

At the New Year

In the shape of this night, in the still fall
of snow, Father
In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds
and children
In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys
and the lovers, Father
In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise
of our cities
In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches
where the dead are, Father
In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners
out on the black water
In all that has been said bravely, in all that is
mean anywhere in the world, Father
In all that is good and lovely, in every house
where sham and hatred are
In the name of those who wait, in the sound
of angry voices, Father
Before the bells ring, before this little point in time
has rushed us on
Before this clean moment has gone, before this night
turns to face tomorrow, Father
There is this high singing in the air
Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window
And there are other bells that we would ring, Father
Other bells that we would ring.

(Kenneth Patchen [source])

…and then this:

Hymn to Time

Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.

Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.

(Ursula K. Le Guin [source])

Christmas week — the week before we headed up to New Jersey — the eastern half of the country, all the way down into Florida, was slammed by an unusually severe wave of cold weather. It culminated, that weekend, in the deaths of dozens of people in the Buffalo, New York, area: people without heat, people stranded in the snow, unable to be reached by emergency crews who were likewise stuck in the snow trying to get to them, all of this developing in advance of a holiday break, and a weekend, for hundreds of other service personnel who weren’t even there to handle all the calls, to plow the streets, and so on. A disaster.

Here in this region of North Carolina, things didn’t get so dire. But it was still plenty cold, with overnight lows in the teens (Fahrenheit). Worse, during that week our own heating system, as well as many of our neighbors’, decided it wasn’t ready for that kind of cold, that early in the winter. So we did a lot of bundling up in long undergarments and warm blankets until the HVAC guy arrived on Christmas Eve day. But then, weirdly, things changed post-Christmas. Even in New Jersey, temperatures were up in the balmy 60s. (Luckily, we’d been watching the forecast so were not caught by surprise — it would’ve made for a sweltering “Welcome back to the Deep South!” holiday if all we’d packed in our suitcases were long johns, flannels, and woolen sweaters.)

Well, we’re back now. Not quite prepared, true, to hit the ground running on all the important decisions and actions which lie ahead. But back… and cautiously, ever so tentatively, thinking about the possibilities of the new year.

So, about those possibilities…

Poem for the New Year

I’ve tracked myself from day to day
how many steps through a field of snow
how many hours have I slept
what have I eaten
what did I burn
calories or cigarettes
what birds have poured
through Bellefontaine
where mausoleums bear the names
of Busch and Brown
Lemp and Spink
on marble white as winter endive
when I can read my title clear
to mansions in the skies
what have I read
how many words
what facts
statistics biometrics
what data aggregation
what news
of wins and losses
getting and spending
each dawn a color wheel
to gauge the shifting moods
the daylight sunk in trees
an index of attraction

According to the Tao Te Ching
each day brings more
and more of less
less and still less
with no end to nothing
and nothing left undone

Even here in Bellefontaine
along a winding street
silence brings an interval
of yet more distant sound
trucks along the interstate
a plane behind the clouds

(Devin Johnston [source])

…and, finally:

To the New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

(W. S. Merwin [source])

Counting the Steps, Marking the Turns, and Not Getting Lost

December 30, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Road Goes Both Ways (Majestic Mountain, NC, October 2020),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is a hall, through which everyone passes, going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where members of the family come and go as they wish; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the hands of whose doors are perhaps never touched; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the soul sits alone and waits.

(Edith Wharton [source])

…and (italicized lines):

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

(Joy Harjo [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Anything is only one of a million paths. Therefore, you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path. If you feel that you must not follow it, you need not stay with it under any circumstances. Any path is only a path. There is no affront to yourself or others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear and ambition. I warn you: Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. It is this: Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same. They lead nowhere. They are paths going through the brush or under the brush. Does this path have a heart is the only question. If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.

(Carlos Castaneda [source])

…and:

As I walked, I was thinking about the Great and Secret Knowledge, which the Other says will grant us strange new powers. And I realised something. I realised that I no longer believed in it. Or perhaps that is not quite accurate. I thought it was possible that the Knowledge existed. Equally I thought that it was possible it did not. Either way it no longer mattered to me. I did not intend to waste my time looking for it any more.

This realisation — the realisation of the Insignificance of the Knowledge — came to me in the form of a Revelation. What I mean by this is that I knew it to be true before I understood why or what steps had led me there. When I tried to retrace those steps my mind kept returning to the image of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight, to its Beauty, to its deep sense of Calm, to the reverent looks on the Faces of the Statues as they turned (or seemed to turn) towards the Moon. I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.

This thought led on to another. I realised that the Other’s description of the powers that the Knowledge will grant has always made me uneasy. For example: he says that we will have the power to control lesser minds. Well, to begin with there are no lesser minds; there are only him and me and we both have keen and lively intellects. But, supposing for a moment that a lesser mind existed, why would I want to control it?

(Susanna Clark [source])

Outside the Body, but Within the Mind

December 23, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Christmas Without,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

The Missus and I head to New Jersey next week to spend a few days with my family and friends there. This will be our first such trip up there in — well, decades, anyhow. So I’m really looking forward to it. (Especially so, since it appears we’ll be able to travel within a window of time between unpleasant weather — it’ll be cold, yes, but at least not wet.)

In the meantime, whiskey river reminds me to look out the window… but then to go one step further and see out there, too:

Winter Solstice

Claire says the day will be one second longer.
Darkness will no longer exceed light.
But the weather is abysmal,
so hatred of gloom is not an option. I want to live
to be ninety-five, too, and still be assembling
words into music and truth. For now,
I regard a conference of stars, with fast-moving clouds.
Sometimes my dreams are like explosion pits,
with scary lava. Yet the Earth remains constant,
tilting away from the sun and back,
like a robin to a bare branch.
Be somebody with a body, the stars command;
Don’t be a nobody. I know them by heart,
as they sink and as they rise.

(Henri Cole [source — where you can hear it read by the poet, if you’d like])

All of which sounds perfectly unexceptionable, right? Yet I suspect I’m not alone in my difficulty with keeping my eyes physically open and my mind shuttered and clear. Here’s something to help with that, maybe (not from whiskey river):

…do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer. In five or at most ten minutes, your mind will be completely serene and calm. At that time your breathing will become quite slow, while your pulse will become a little faster.

It will take quite a long time before you find your calm, serene mind in your practice. Many sensations come, many thoughts or images arise, but they are just waves of your own mind. Nothing comes from outside your mind. Usually we think of our mind as receiving impressions and experiences from outside, but that is not a true understanding of our mind. The true understanding is that the mind includes everything; when you think something comes from outside it means only that something appears in your mind. Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.

(Shunryu Suzuki [source])

The Watches of the Night

December 16, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Watches of the Night (Newport, Rhode Island),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Night Walk

The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper—
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

(Franz Wright [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Why is it that so many ghosts prefer to travel the halls of night? Ask the living and they will tell you that these spirits either have some unquenched desire or an unaddressed grievance that stirs them from their sleep and sends them out into the world in search of solace.

But the living are so self-centered.

Of course they would judge a spirit’s nocturnal wanderings as the product of earthly memories. When, in fact, if these restless souls wanted to harrow the bustling avenues of noon, there is nothing to stop them from doing so.

No. If they wander the halls of night, it is not from a grievance with or envy of the living. Rather, it is because they have no desire to see the living at all. Any more than snakes hope to see gardeners, or foxes the hounds. They wander about at midnight because at that hour they can generally do so without being harried by the sound and fury of earthly emotions. After all those years of striving and struggling, of hoping and praying, of shouldering expectations, stomaching opinions, navigating decorum, and making conversation, what they seek, quite simply, is a little peace and quiet.

(Amore Towles [source])

…and:

The moment we find the true reason for some feeling that has an irrationally powerful hold on us, whether it has to do with body image or anything else, the spell is broken.

(Gloria Steinem [source])

How Is It We Are Here, Not There — and for How Long?

December 2, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Work in Progress,” by John E. Simpson.]

Now that it is — as they say — That Time of Year, I am looking for, and (even better) easily finding, reasons to smile even as I look out of this second-floor window to a forest of orange- and rusty-red-colored treetops, with the bare-barked finger bones of winter practically trembling, eager for a chance to shake off the hues of autumn.

I’m very glad to see that our friend over at whiskey river, whoever they may be, seems to have shaken off the bug which has bedeviled their posting schedule and, surely, their real life as well — like with this:

If you’re reading this, if there’s air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories aren’t finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going.

(Jamie Tworkowski [source])

…and, even better, adds (last stanza):

Linear Illusions

Some days seem significant.
Premature lacewings hatch in the house.
Crawling over vast wastes of plastic
they fly toward light.
Outside, snow is crusted. Inside,
insects programmed in perfection—
on the wrong side of the window.

This evening Cabernet Sauvignon,
mushroom omelet.
Outside, rain has brought up worms.
They lie exhausted in straight lines.
Some are drowned.
Narrow and pink at either end,
they cannot decide which direction.

I have decided on blank pages.
In them you can travel forever;
white flying toward your eyes;
as when driving through falling snow
you see only those snowflakes
you are cutting across;
relentlessly horizontal.

(Ruth Stone [source])

Over the last week I myself have encountered in my reading one grace note after another — clicking past like milestones unsought but glimpsed from a train car through the countryside. Like:

You can’t plant a forest, only a forest makes a forest, because a forest is not just a few trees. It’s a huge ecosystem of many related things that we can’t even begin to understand. It changes. Thoreau was writing about that on his deathbed. The life in the soil and everything begins to come back. There’s a point where it begins to take over and do it itself. That’s so moving when you begin to see that. Most people don’t even recognize that is what is happening, but that’s what’s happening. It’s there, the earth has it.

What I mean by our human arrogance is that we think the universe somehow owes us eternal life right here on earth, and that’s not so. The universe doesn’t owe us a damn thing; the universe doesn’t even notice us. This can sound like a depressing viewpoint, but I think it’s an exhilarating viewpoint. Accept your place in this incredible, incomprehensible richness of life, but also accept the unknown in the universe. We’re part of it and it’s miraculous. How did it ever happen that we should be here?

(William S. Merwin [source])

…and then, just yesterday, I read excerpts of an interview published under the title “Life Is Hard. And That’s Good.” This sample comes from a discussion about how the COVID-19 pandemic has distorted our sense of what’s important in day-to-day living:

There’s a distinction I make between telic and atelic activities. The jargon is from linguistics, but it comes from the Greek word telos, for end, where a telic activity is one that has a final end state, something you’re aiming to achieve, like getting a promotion at work or getting married or getting a job. The kind of things we’d think of as projects, and they have this structure where the thing that you want is always at a distance in the future, or the moment you achieve it, it’s in the past and it’s over…

Atelic activities are ones that don’t have a terminal endpoint. So, just as there is walking home, there’s just going for a walk. Or, just as there is having kids or making dinner for your kids, there’s the ongoing activity of parenting. When you’re engaged in an atelic activity that doesn’t aim at some end point in the future, you don’t have this problem that satisfaction is always in the future, or then immediately in the past. You don’t have the problem that what you’re doing is extinguishing or undermining your engagement with the activity, because there’s nothing inherent in your engagement with it that’s trying to extinguish it. A shift that it’s very helpful to make in relation to activities in our lives is to become less focused on telic activities, or projects, and redirect ourselves to the value of atelic activities, the value of the process.

(Kieran Setiya [source (note: site permits two free articles per month)]

…and finally, this:

It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough. But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

But, of course, a thing is just a thing.

And so, slipping his sister’s scissors into his pocket, the Count looked once more at what heirlooms remained and then expunged them from his heartache forever

(Amor Towles [source])

Sleepers in an Elementary World

November 25, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

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

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Dark Pines Under Water

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Erosion. Gnarled roots. The carcass of a dead deer. A flight of swallows. The high spirals of hawks. Bladed reflections of rushing water. Just budding bare branches. Gray rock, cracked, shattered, and worn. A fallen tree. A lone cloud. The laughter of plum branches. Even a little circle of rocks beside the trail—who put them there, or did any hand arrange them, and no matter which, what are the secrets of that circle?

There are a thousand meanings in every view, if only we open ourselves to see the scripture of the landscape.

(Deng Ming-Dao [source])

Seeing (and Treasuring) the Progress in the Standing Still

November 18, 2022 by John 3 Comments

[Slideshow: “An Ecstasy of Redwoods,” by John E. Simpson. (Swipe left/right to alternate between desaturated and full-color versions of the photograph.)]

Turns out that our anonymous whiskey river friend has actually had pneumonia, not flu and certainly not the suspected “ordinary, everyday, common” flu. But this week they’ve managed, even so, to offer us one tidbit “oddly relevant” to that context (it helps that the original source is tagged as a journal entry from the “End of November”):

Whenever I get ready again to write really sincere notes in this notebook, I shall have to undertake such a disentangling in my cluttered brain that, to stir up all that dust, I am waiting for a series of vast empty hours, a long cold, a convalescence, during which my constantly reawakened curiosities will lie at rest; during which my sole care will be to rediscover myself.

(André Gide [source])

This resonates nicely with a passage I first read yesterday — a meditation on, and repudiation of, the notion that productivity requires motivation, drive:

What might change if we understood meaningful action to be something we could let happen, simply by standing out of the way? On such an account, actions are always flowing through you anyway, unless you actively impede them. Your only job is to direct the flow a bit, so that you end up focusing more on the things that matter to you.

The Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama once wrote: “Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity.” Orient yourself to the world in this way, and the question is no longer “How can I get myself to do things?”, with its implicit and unwelcome answer: “By putting in more effort, you lazy jerk!” Instead, the question is something a bit more like “What’s seeking to be done through me, right now?” And then, whatever the response, all you really have to do is to allow it to happen.

(Oliver Burkeman [source])

In these terms, I welcome whiskey river‘s unsolicited break in routine — and very much look forward to seeing whatever emerges from this fallow spot in their calendar!

At the moment, not really by choice — but nor by necessity — I’m kinda wallowing fallow myself.

It’s not unusual of course for me to go a week or two without a photo session somewhere or other; my rhythm, generally, calls for a photo shoot of a day or maybe two, followed by a week-plus of “clearing the deck.” (This involves transferring photos to a computer, which I then cull and organize — eliminating (near-)dups, categorizing one way or another, and touching up with software for what passes for “publication.”)

As for writing, well, outwardly the years-long stasis on that front remains in place. Emphasis on “outwardly,” though — and this represents progress. There’s no major writing project in the offing, but I’m toying with a few ideas — especially now that The Missus and I are “planted” for a few months and minding our own schedule. Last week I submitted a haiku (“come out of nowhere,” much???) to a contest, and am reworking a short story slightly to meet the requirements of another, due next week. Downstream, once we’re really settled, and once I again have a real honest-to-gods computer at my disposal, I have a short-story anthology project I’d like to tackle…

So real progress, I think, lurks behind the scrim of everyday life. Premature still to announce a Grand Opening. But the crew behind my eyes seems very busy, and I hope you’ll excuse me if I seem distracted — it’s just hard to pay attention with all the hammering and sawing in there!

Finding the Divine in the Commonplace

November 11, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Divine Commonplace (Railroad at Twilight, 2022),” by John E. Simpson]

We’re so inured these days to public self-disclosure of private lives; when we “know” someone online who zealously, and rightly, hides themselves online for the sake of the unfiltered virtues of what they do post there, it seems not just an anomaly, but a sacred one — a privacy we come to treasure just as much as the privacy of any real friend who keeps themselves to themselves. I hadn’t seen anything from whiskey river in days, which was very, very unusual… so was relieved when they simply mentioned, in an off-handed post early this week, that they’ve been sick: “…caught a virus. Not the famous one. Just an ordinary, everyday, common influenza virus.”

In the meantime, I went rummaging about in their archive, referred to as whiskey river’s commonplace book. When you visit the “commonplace book’s” home page, you’ll find a sort of topical index; it’s not organized chronologically, or by the name of the quotations’ authors, or in any other conventional way. A good way to browse this list is not to worry too much about what the chapter headings “mean”; instead, just look away from the screen and randomly, blindly tap on one of them.

That’s how I found myself in the chapter called “ordinary life” — which includes the following (in slightly different form):

For [Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav], the way of the heart was the surest path to exalted states of consciousness. “Always be joyful, no matter what you are,” he taught. “With happiness, you can give a person life.” Every day, he further stressed, we must deliberately induce in ourselves a buoyant, exuberant attitude toward life; in this manner, we will gradually become receptive to the subtle mysteries around us. And, if no inspired moments seem to come, we should act as though we have them anyway, he advised. “If you have no enthusiasm, put on a front. Act enthusiastic and the feeling will become genuine.”

(Edward Hoffman [source])

…and also this:

When we go to a medicine person or a healer because we are feeling disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, he or she might ask questions like,

“When did you stop singing?”

“When did you stop dancing?”

“When did you stop being enchanted by stories?”

“When did you begin finding discomfort in the sweet territory of silence?”

(Angeles Arrien [source])

…and also this:

Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and [the Divine] is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or fable. It is true.

(Thomas Merton [source])

This was a week during which it helped to be reminded of everyday divinity. It started with the cacaphonic final clatter of US midterm-election news and panic notes, eased into the midweek “How come it wasn’t a disaster?” second thoughts, and wrapping up today with the always somber annual lookback at the consequences of war, called Veterans’ Day.

My dad — whom I did not then know, of course — apparently faced the prospect of going overseas in 1943-44 with a grin. (That’s him over at the right, in khakis as he wrapped up his basic training on the campus of Texas A&M University. (He was a mechanic in the armored corps — responsible for repairing tanks and halftracks and such.)

I always wondered about that grin in this and other photos from the time. I mean, I saw it often enough over the decades after I finally did make an appearance in the early 1950s. It came so easily to him. There’s other evidence that he didn’t sweat the prospect of overseas battle; maybe it wasn’t anything remotely like excitement, just simple relief not to be — as his brother Bob was — bound to play a role in the infantry.

He wrote occasional letters home, like the one whose opening is shown below — “A Young Draftee;s Lament about his first hair-cut”:

Nearly always, these letters had this sort of jocular tone… I recognize the tone because I see it in my own email reports to my family, say, about our recent months on the cross-country road. It’s a tone which discloses nothing beyond the good-natured superficial, the equivalent of his grin in the photo (traces of which I also see in the mirror) — making, as I imagine, deeper jitters about what lies ahead…

…and then I think about how often I saw it when I was growing up, how usual that attitude seemed. Perhaps (and perhaps not!) it masked a commonplace darkness, something Dad just preferred to keep to himself. But maybe it also doesn’t matter — because now, looking back on such photos and memories, I can in fact see the divine revealing itself in the cocky grin. I may have to attend to it out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, but it’s there, damn it.

And if the divine is so obviously, insistently real, then what does that say to me about the incorporeality — the inconsequentiality — of the commonplace?

[Best wishes to whiskey river for a speedy recovery!]

Forget the “Light at the End.” What Happens in the Meantime?

November 4, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “ESA (East Side Access) 6988,” posted to the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Flickr account (photographer: Patrick Cashin) and modified, by me, in accord with the Creative Commons license they offer — thank you!]

From whiskey river, late last week — an uncharacteristically lengthy quotation, from a favorite author (of mine as well as whiskey river itself):

The real problem here is that we’re all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres stretch and the heart gets closer to its last beat. The real cost of living is dying, and we’re spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes.

Personally, I like the fact we’re going to die. There’s nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going “WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!” It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realize that, in the scheme of things, you really don’t have time to sit on the sofa in your pants watching Homes Under the Hammer.

Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant—after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road; the one that did the pickled eggs—is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it’s the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly non-religious people think they’ll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they’re getting a harp.

But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilizing mental illness. Underneath every day—every action, every word—you think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents, and become a better person and lose that final stone in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You’ll have time, after all! It’s eternity! And you’ll have wings, and it’ll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lacklustre waiting room you’re only going to be in for 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all, and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world—famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ringpulls and shattered fax machines—it’s right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.

Only when the majority of the people on this planet believe—absolutely—that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings. For whilst the appeal of ‘being good’ is strong, the terror of hurtling, unstoppably, into unending nullity is a lot more effective. I’m really holding out for us all to get The Fear. The Fear is my Second Coming. When everyone in the world admits they’re going to die, we’ll really start getting some stuff done.

(Caitlin Moran [source])

I love that Moran turns the standard premise on its head. She doesn’t admonish us to rage against the dying of the light, nor does she urge us to eat-drink-and-be-merry. She doesn’t accept the “…for tomorrow we may die” epilogue to such sentiments. Yet she doesn’t say, y’know, to embrace death, either. She encourages us to be grateful for the implicit incentives death offers us, unbidden — the incentives to live, fully, in the meantime. She says, in effect: Assume you’ll die tomorrow, or if you’re lucky maybe next week or in a year or two. The time grows ever shorter. So what matters to you? And what are you doing about it?

Let’s see what someone else has to say about it:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

(Philip Larkin [source])

“This is what we fear—no sight, no sound,/No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,/Nothing to love or link with,/The anaesthetic from which none come round”: yes, just so. The point being that it’s coming, oh it’s coming all right — inexorably, undeniably — but for now: we have sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, a brain to think with, a hear and soul with which to love or link, a blessed every-waking-hour gift. Can we use it? If not for our own sake, for the sake of everyone else?

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