Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Experience, Meet Hope

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[Video: “Wiley vs. Rhodes,” a live-action Road Runner cartoon]

From whiskey river:

Ten Thousand Idiots

It is always a danger
to aspirants on the Path

when they begin
to believe and act

as if the ten thousand idiots
who so long ruled and lived inside

have all packed their bags
and skipped town
or
died.

(Hafiz [source: none canonical, as far as I can tell, but it’s quoted at various places around the Web, including here])

…and:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It’s true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

(Carl Jung, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections [source])

…and:

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

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When Bad Writing Throws Down with Good Intentions, Which Wins?

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Bad Writing, per its production company:

…is a documentary about a wannabe poet who sets off on a quest for answers about writing — bad writing, good writing, and the process in between. What he learns from some leading figures in the literary world will inspire anyone who has ever dreamt of creating art.

Here’s the trailer:

It’s just gone into very limited release, at maybe a half-dozen cities so far. Bet it’s that pesky It Was a Dark & Stormy Night Fan Club keeping it from wider circulation.

This comes courtesy of our friend Marta, over at the fairy tale asylum, who calls it a horror movie. Oh yes.

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Ingredients of Revelation

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From whiskey river:

Shinto

When misfortune confounds us
in an instant we are saved
by the humblest actions
of memory or attention:
the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of November,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million the deities of Shinto
who travel the earth, secretly.
Those modest divinities touch us,
touch us, and pass on by.

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

…and:

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have. Art work is ordinary work, but it takes courage to embrace that work, and wisdom to mediate the interplay of art and fear. Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light.

What veteran artists know about each other is that they have engaged the issues that matter to them. What veteran artists share in common is that they have learned how to get on with their work. Simply put, artists learn how to proceed, or they don’t. The individual recipe any artist finds for proceeding belongs to that artist alone — it’s non-transferable and of little use to others.

(David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear [source])

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“What If You Get a Question Wrong?”

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[Image: detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch
(click image for a much larger view of the whole triptych)]

From whiskey river:

You Learn

You learn.
After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises,
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
and you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure.
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn. And learn.
With every good-bye you learn.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

…and:

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.

(Terry Tempest Williams [source])

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“I’m Everywhere! I’m Everywhere!”

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“Why do you watch this stuff?”

That was baffled I, speaking to The Missus. She was telling me about a reality-TV show she’s become obsessed with fascinated by, called Hoarders. If you don’t know the show, here’s the opening paragraph of the current “About” page at the official site:

Each episode of this groundbreaking series follows two different people whose inability to let go of their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of personal disaster. In season three of HOARDERS™, the stakes couldn’t be higher as the people profiled are faced with life-changing consequences including eviction, divorce, demolition of their homes, jail time, loss of their children, and even death.

(I can’t bring myself to include a video clip here, but if you poke about on that site you’ll have a pretty good idea what it’s like.)

The reason for the obsession fascination, explained the love of my life, is that she believes us to be hoarders, and hence almost certainly — unless we take drastic action! — doomed to trip down the same cluttered, tragicomic path as those featured on the program. The appeal lies in the cautionary tale, not in mere voyeurism.

(I myself am not so sure. Our stuff doesn’t lie thick on the floor, after all. On only one small room’s door could you fairly hang a sign labeled Et Cetera. And I’d guess, without a formal inventory, that 95% of all the — limited — clutter is more than fifteen years old. We’re not accumulating new stuff. We’re hanging onto scraps of our pasts. Or maybe hoarding begins in this sort of rationalization?)

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What You Think, What You Know, What You Can and Can’t Have

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[Longer trailer for The NeverEnding Story (1981); you can see the whole film on YouTube, if you’d like, broken up into nine or ten parts]

From whiskey river:

I see human beings as a self-regulating system that wants us to discover our own nature. Our imagination, our deep mind, so to speak, wants to help us to do this. In part, that’s why it gives us the thoughts and feelings and associations it does. That’s why we dream what we dream and “think up” the imagery that comes to us. When we take all of this seriously, when we use it, that is, and are willing to risk releasing our tight grip on ourselves by writing what we don’t yet know, to paraphrase Paul Klee, we demonstrate to our own imagination that we can be trusted with its gifts. Of course, our imagination likes this. It says, “Hey. She’s serious. Let’s give her more.”

But when we turn our back on this powerful inclination toward completion, we risk losing contact with the gift-giving nature of the imagination. We risk damaging the relationship we’ve developed. Think of it as a relationship to “the muse,” if you will. As the poet Stuart Perkoff wrote in regard to abusing the gifts of the muse, “Be careful. It’s hers. She’ll take it back.”

(Peter Levitt, ZinkZine, Fall 2003 [source])

…and:

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. [*] A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

(Carl Jung [source])

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What’s in a Song: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (2)

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[Another entry in an occasional series about American songs with long histories. This one follows Part 1, about the history of the composition of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” You can read Part 1, posted last week, here.]

[Video clip above assembled from the first film version of Roberta (1935); Irene Dunne sings it here. Later in the film, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance to an instrumental version, and their dance is what people usually remember from the film. This clip’s uploader helpfully tacked the dance scene onto the vocal: it begins at around 4:03 into the clip.]

By the time the 1940s rolled around, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” had already established itself in the pop songbook. According to at least one observer, pianist Joe Bushkin of the Tommy Dorsey band, it provided the pivotal moment on “the night Frank Sinatra happened.” (Something of a storyteller, Bushkin apparently told the story many times; the details below come from Sinatra! The Song Is You, by Will Friedwald.)

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All in Good Time

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[A favorite minute from Citizen Kane. See the note at the end of this post.]

From whiskey river:

To Waiting

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

(W. S. Merwin, from Present Company [source])

…and:

We’re here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

(Jeanette Winterson. from Lighthousekeeping [source])

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