Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Weekend Music Break: Tom Rush and James Montgomery, “Statesboro Blues”

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[Original “Statesboro Blues” lyrics by Blind Willie McTell are here. But of course, since this is a blues song, individual performers often wander away from the “official” version…]

Tom Rush, oh yeah: him I knew about. His Wikipedia entry summarizes:

Thomas Walker Rush (born February 8, 1941) is an American folk and blues singer, guitarist and songwriter who helped launch the careers of other singer-songwriters in the 1960s and has continued his own singing career for 60 years.

…which — because, well, Wikipedia — doesn’t tell you everything (or much, really) that you need to know about him; even the details provided there kinda skim the surface. (Visit his own site to get meatier info about him.)

But James Johnson? I confess — that was a new name to me… See, I subscribe to a newsletter — a blog, really — called “The Lefsetz Letter,” by a music industry insider named Bob Lefsetz; this post of a couple days ago alerted me to the presence of this video. It was so euphoric — rhapsodic — a writeup that I just had to see the video for myself. In typical Lefsetz fashion, he rambles quite a bit, and quite a bit entertainingly, before getting to the point; I recommend the full post, but here’s an excerpt:

Tom talks about playing a song. They’re going to do “Statesboro Blues.”

James says he’s not sure he remembers all the lyrics, but he’ll give it a whack. And then Tom starts strumming his guitar, and then James comes in on his harp… JAMES COME IN ON HIS HARP!

Man, this is the sound that launched a million careers. The blues of yore. We heard it, locked into the groove, and were influenced by it. We played the blues, we listened to the blues, but the blues are nowhere in today’s modern music world. Oh, you can hear influences. But the pure element? That’s gone. But Tom and James are locked right into it.

And then James starts to sing and…

Man, this is good!

So I go back to Wikipedia, to find out more details, I mean where’s this guy been? Performing! But in the Boston area. He’s still doing it, like a bluesman of yore. And he’s got it.

And just like pornography, you know it when you hear it, and I’m hearing it. I’m woken right up. James is positively wailing on that harp, like a pro, not an amateur, it’s everything it used to be, BUT IT’S NOW!

So this, in any case, seems an ideal excuse to resuscitate my old “Midweek/Weekend Music Break” series — something I’ve been contemplating since we finally settled down here a couple months ago. I can’t promise to post regularly in the series… but jeez, I do miss music.

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Not Necessarily Lost; Just Not Nailed Down

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[Video: “Where We Are,” by The Lumineers. (Lyrics here, and elsewhere.) As widely reported at the time of the song’s release, it was inspired by a near-fatal car crash, a decade prior; I think you’d have to be willfully literal-minded to imagine that that’s its sole “meaning.”]

From whiskey river:

Democracy
(excerpt)

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A

(Leonard Cohen [source])

…and:

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

(J. D. Salinger [source])

Not from whiskey river:

“Do you think,” said Mira, leaning on her spade, “that the kind of person who can never say sorry is also the kind of person who can never say thank you, or do you think that those are two different categories of people?”

“Ooh, that’s a good one,” Shelley said. She considered it.

“Because I saw this blog a while back,” Mira went on, “where this woman had just decided to stop saying sorry, like, ever, and every time she would have said it, she found a way of saying thank you instead. So, like, instead of saying ‘sorry for being late,’ she’d say, ‘thanks for waiting,’ and instead of saying ‘sorry for being such a mess’ she’d say, ‘thanks for being so understanding,’ and on and on like that. And she wrote in this blog how this one little change like totally transformed her life and all her relationships, like all of a sudden, her friendships got so much healthier and more mature and more honest, and because she was appreciating everyone in her life way more, they started appreciating her back, and it was this whole thing.”

“Wow,” Shelley said. “Thank you for telling me that story.”

“Thank you for listening.”

“Thank you for assuming that I was listening.”

“Thank you for not making it obvious if you weren’t.”

They dug the ground in silence for a moment, both grinning.

(Eleanor Catton [source — sorry, the book’s too recent for verbatim text to have been quoted anywhere!])

…and:

The Tale of Two Hands Clapped

Two hands clapped and made a noise. Both hands rejoiced. The noise was such that the clap had seemingly proved, once and for all, the existence of either hand. Flesh had met flesh. Skin, skin. Cells, cells. The slap had even stung a bit. The two hands were very happy with the outcome of their clapping experiment. They congratulated each other with more and more rigorous clapping and even a little bit of waving and thumbs-ups.

Hurrah! the Right Hand shouted. We’re here! We really do exist!

We’re here, said the Left, though a little doubtfully, because what had they confirmed, really, when you thought about it?

(Thomas Pierce [source])

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Relaxing on the Rubble of an Avalanche of Words

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[Image: “Artifact,” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river:

The Summer You Read Proust

Remember the summer you read Proust?
In the hammock tied to the apple trees
your daughters climbed, their shadows
merging with the shadows of the leaves
spilling onto those long arduous sentences,
all afternoon and into the evening—robins,
jays, the distant dog, the occasional swaying,
the way the hours rocked back and forth,
that gigantic book holding you in its woven nest—
you couldn’t get enough pages, you wished
that with every turning a thousand were added,
the words falling you into sleep, the sleep
waking you into words, the summer you read
Proust, which lasted the rest of your life.

(Philip Terman [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Last year’s Lake Wobegon Fourth of July (Delivery Day) was glory itself, sunny and not too hot, flags flying, drummers drumming, scores of high-stepping horses, smart marching units in perfect cadence, and Ben Franklin, Sacajawea, Ulysses S. Grant, Babe Ruth, Amelia Earhart, and Elvis marching arm in arm along with Miss Liberty majestic in sevenpointed crown and wielding her torch like a big fat baton, plus the Leaping Lutherans parachute team, the Betsy Ross Blanket Toss, a battery of cannons belching flame boomboomboom from the crest of Adams Hill and Paul Revere galloping into town to cry out the news that these States are now Independent, God Bless Us All, and Much Much More, all in all a beautiful occasion in honor of America, and the only sour note was that so few in Lake Wobegon appreciated how truly glorious it all was, since Wobegonians as a rule consider it bad luck to be joyful, no matter what Scripture might say on the subject, and so in the swirl of color and music and costumes and grandeur you could hear people complain about the high cost of gasoline and shortage of rainfall and what in God’s Name were they going to do with the leftover food.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

…and:

To learn even something as simple as to water the roots of a plant rather than its leaves was not to be dealt the harsh reality of cold hard fact, but rather to be let into a secret. In a garden, expertise was personal and anecdotal — it was allegorical — it was ancient — it had been handed down; one felt that gardeners across the generations were united in a kind of guild, and that every counsel had the quality of wisdom, gentle, patient, and holistic — and yet unwavering, for there was no quarrelling with the laws and tendencies of nature, no room for judgment, no dispute: the proof lay only in the plants themselves, and in the soil, and in the air, and in the harvest.

(Eleanor Catton [source])

They say — you know who they are; you may even be one of them yourself — that the optimum English-language sentence length lies somewhere south of 25 words. Beyond that, you’re severely trying your hypothetical reader’s comprehension, to say nothing of their patience…

But I do love encountering the occasional monster, especially in fiction. Proust’s (in)famous longest sentence — you can read it here, about halfway down the page and starting with the words, “Their honor precarious…” — is kinda hard to swallow; maybe it’s better in the original French (which I can’t read), but its English translation, at over 950 words of chunky abstraction, indirection, suspended clauses (some dependent, some not…), resists even the most patient taste. But coming upon such a thing in the 100- to 200-word range, especially in the hands of someone who “sees” the reader and not just themselves… well, it’s a source of great pleasure for me.

(As an “exercise” — so I excused the self-indulgence — I once wrote a story consisting of a couple short sentences bracketing a hideous giant sentence nearly 900 words long. You can read “Just So You’d Know” here, if you’re so inclined… although I don’t know why you would be!)

Possibly, one reason I’ve recently turned from writing to photography — the art of saying as much as possible, in as few words as you can — lies in a subconscious shame about this love of long sentences. I shouldn’t be enjoying this, I think; I should be bored by now, I should have turned the page two minutes ago.

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So Much to Know: Give Me Time to Be Whole

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[Image: “I Work Better,” by John E. Simpson. During our road trip, we became intimately, excruciatingly familiar with the stubborn and unpredictable personalities of hotel luggage carts — the resistance to movement forward and back, the eccentric swiveling. At this hotel in Hannibal, Missouri, the luggage carts at least included helpful steering instructions.]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Summer Solstice

I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

(Stacie Cassarino [source])

Not from whiskey river:

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.

(Gabrielle Zevin [source])

…and:

You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.

(Richard Powers [source])

…and:

#50: Memories bind ineluctably to time — not just time since, but time contemplated. To remember a profound experience, it must have lasted long enough for you to consider back then. And later, you must have at your disposal a block of time to fill in all the gaps around the experience, with contexts real or imagined, as the case may be. The sudden sharp pain that time you accidentally slivered off a fingertip: that didn’t qualify as an experience, and to look back on the moment now is not to remember it. But “Born to Run” playing on the stereo; the block of cheddar, with its red wax casing; the small wooden chopping board on which you were preparing a snack, and the wooden-handled cheese knife with the thin, broad blade; the abrupt splash of carmine across the countertop and in the sink; the wad of paper towels swaddling the finger;the panicky stumble down the stairs; the frightened eyes of your landlady; the mad dash to the emergency room; and most of all, the translucent quarter-inch of flesh which you imagined, crazily, might need to be surgically reattached — with all that context, yes: now, that’s a memory.

Further, to be later cemented into your self, a memory — like a garden flower — requires time spent caring for it. It requires water and fertilization; it requires contemplation. With the rest of your life before you, if you flit about madly from experience to new experience, you may “remember” things which have happened to you. But you will not have memories.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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What Might Have Been: The Ambiguities, Collapsing into Life

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[Image: “OK (Santa Monica, California),” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Mind

The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop. What is it
they cast for? The poplars,
advancing or retreating,
lose their stature
equally, and yet stand firm,
making arrangements
in order to become
imaginary. The city
draws the mind in streets,
and streets compel it
from their intersections
where a little
belongs to no one. It is
what is driven through
all stationary portions
of the world, gravity’s
stake in things, the leaves,
pressed against the dank
window of November
soil, remain unwelcome
till transformed, parts
of a puzzle unsolvable
till the edges give a bit
and soften. See how
then the picture becomes clear,
the mind entering the ground
more easily in pieces,
and all the richer for it.

(Jorie Graham [source])

Not from whiskey river:

On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. You would end up a different version of yourself, in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way.

(Gabrielle Zevin [source])

The Missus and I are in San Francisco this weekend for a family wedding. Our hotel’s airport shuttle service has not been restored since the COVID-19 lockdown, so we and a couple of her relatives opted to summon an Uber, which arrived promptly. This was around 5:00 PM, so the highway leading away from the airport were clogged with rush-hour traffic; luckily, there was a nearly-empty express lane available to vehicles with three or more passengers. We were zipping right along in that lane… until the impatient driver of a car with a single passenger suddenly pulled in front of the SUV in which we were riding.

Our driver recovered very well, blasting the horn and slipping juuuuuust through the roughly car-sized gap between the concrete wall on the left and the now panic-stricken driver on the right, who was trying to re-insert himself into the lane he’d veered from. And the remainder of the brief ride proceeded without further incident — albeit with a lot of nervous chatter and laughter from everyone… everyone but me.

All I myself could do was to imagine the intersection now receding in the rearview mirror — not a literal intersection, but a potential divergence which life had suddenly, unprompted, thrown in our path. There really was no “choice,” as such, offered to anyone in our car; our driver’s response was automatic and instinctive. The other driver had made an unconsidered choice, of course, and it had instantly opened up a rat’s nest of alternative if-then-else futures for many others on the highway — not just our car and lives and his own, but the cars and lives of dozens, indeed hundreds of other drivers and passengers all around us (potentially even including those in the oncoming lanes, on the other side of the median)…

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five described the alien Tralfamadorians’ view of creatures’ lives: all moments coexisting, such that any given “I” is actually like a giant caterpillar extending all the way from the womb to the grave, and wriggling — morphing — like mad from one split-second to the next. Years earlier, Robert A. Heinlein’s story “Life-Line” had expressed the idea this way:

He stepped up to one of the reporters. “Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to, perhaps, 1905, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man some place in the 1980s. Imagine this space-time event, which we call Rogers, as a long pink worm, continuous through the years. It stretches past us here in 1939, and the cross section we see appears as a single, discrete body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity to this pink worm, enduring through the years. As a matter of fact, there is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.”

This perception is compounded by all the overlapping, wriggling routes of all the other caterpillars or worms, none of whom exactly occupy the exact same point in time and space (except perhaps in catastrophic explosions in which many individuals at once are vaporized and, for a time, share the same cubic foot of air). To consider the multi-layered overlapping and intertwining complexities of all the possible futures which those lives don’t actually have, don’t actually share, and all the possible branches of life — of infinitely wriggling worms — which might have erupted from those futures…

Well, the mind reels.

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A Stage Too Big for the Drama

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[Image: “Map (May, 2023),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

(Richard P. Feynman [source])

…and:

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.

(Douglas Adams [source])

Not from whiskey river:

#87: An exercise, requiring only the use of a camera (a smartphone camera will do):

Take a photo of a wall in your home. Any wall will do, but a familiar wall is best, from a perspective and with a view unlikely to change over the next few weeks — a wall you look at several times during every day on which you’re at home. Having taken the photo, look at it a few times. Then email it to yourself — just the photo, no text. Leave the email unopened for a week; set a reminder for yourself just to be sure you don’t forget.

After the week has passed, on a morning after you’ve just awoken and indeed before you’re even out of bed, picture that same wall, from the same perspective, in your mind’s eye. Note the placement of the window, if there is one, and the books on the shelves, and the location of the calendar and wall clock relative to each other, and so on — whatever details you can remember. (Ideally, write these details down as you “see” them.)

Now go ahead and open the email message you sent yourself, and blow up the photo so it fills the screen on which you’re looking at it…

You did a pretty good job remembering, didn’t you? Everything is, yes, just as you recall— Well, yes, all right, technically there’s a wall switch just to the left of the window (but that doesn’t count because you never actually use it, just leave it in the On position all the time); and technically the wall-mounted TV’s power cord hangs down on the right, not the left (but that doesn’t count because the extension cord into which the power cord is plugged does hang down on the left); and, true, the window curtains are blue-gray, not pale greenish (but that doesn’t count because the whole wall is painted pale green)…

Now: extrapolate from this experience to every other experience in your life. Do you really believe — really, now — that it all unfolded as you remember?

Furthermore, if you’re feeling ambitious: what do you make of all of recorded history? what do you make of all of unrecorded history?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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The Complete and Utter Loss of One’s Sh!t

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[Image: “Eye Deals,” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river:

Yamaoka Tesshu, a samurai and student of Zen, traveled around Japan studying from various Zen masters. One day, he wandered into the Shokoku Temple and happened upon the monk Dokuon.In a desire to show his comprehension of Zen, Tesshu stated to the Master, “The mind, the Buddha and all beings are empty. The true nature of all things is emptiness. There is no enlightenment, no delusion; no sages, no commoners; no toil, no reward.”

Master Dokuon remained quiet for some time and then banged him on the head.

Tesshu fumed in anger and asked, “What did you do that for?”

Master Dokuon replied, “If everything is empty, where did the temper come from?”

(Isha Foundation [source])

Well, there’s anger… and there’s anger. It’s one thing to lose one’s temper, at a slight real or imagined, and then to talk oneself out of it — or to remind oneself, pace Master Dokuon, that the anger is actually, well, nothing at all. But it’s something else entirely when one, like, loses one’s shit completely. After all, the 21st-century media/commerce/technology complex depends, for its success, on so-called “engagement” at any cost: the continuously active attention of as many human minds as possible — attention not to single stimuli, over sustained, thoughtful periods of time, but rather to rapid-fire machine-gun bullets of stimulation, fired one after another after another… Those institutions don’t “care” if your attention is favorable, unfavorable, or outright hostile, and in fact the extreme responses work effectively as fodder for even more hungry appetites…

Coincidentally, as I was thinking about whiskey river‘s little sliver of insight into anger, I was unpacking a box of old papers. Among them: a manuscript of a novel I wrote in 2007-08, called Merry-Go-Round. This was a near-future alternate-world science-fiction/humor/political thriller which I last wrote about here on RAMH in 2013, and I hadn’t peeked into the text since then.

I don’t know if the manuscript from which this excerpt comes was a first or subsequent draft. But for what it’s worth, here’s all you need to know in advance: a prisoner in a Federal penitentiary, Walker Bryce, is being quizzed for the umpteenth time about what exactly had happened at the time he committed the offense for which he was imprisoned. The thing is, he really doesn’t know. He remembers it was Election Day, sure. He remembers his pre-voting “competency interview,” required of all citizens who wanted — or believed they wanted — to vote; he remembered some of the couple dozen questions he’d been asked whose answers would confirm (or not) his competence to cast his ballot. He even remembered some details of the interview room.

But as for what followed, well…:

It all seemed so irrational, in retrospect, especially given the consequences (which to be fair, of course, Walker had never anticipated).

The weather: pleasant enough, in fact it had been pleasant for several weeks. There was plenty to be happy about just looking out the window, nothing rebellious-making about the immaculate blue sky and sunshine on that day. Walker had been having an exceptionally good week at work, although it was only Tuesday at that point. His boss and co-workers had smiled, Walker had smiled back, he looked up from his desk at breaks and lunchtime and was pleasantly surprised to learn that he had actually gotten a measurable amount of work — good work — done in the last couple hours. It was Election Day, so the ’rail had dropped him at the poll on the way home after a brief, trouble-free ride. He had enjoyed the program he’d watched on television (an old situation comedy, he thought) while sitting in the poll’s Green Room, waiting for his competency interview. And he’d really liked the interviewer that year, a woman who treated him very nicely, even flirtatiously teasing him about having such a serious face when voting was so pleasurable an activity.

The questions had been the same questions, or at least the same kinds of questions, that interviewers always asked on Election Day. They never asked your opinion, of course — that was practically sacred information, to be shared only among you, the voting machine, and the interviewer who would visit you in a few days just to be sure that these were, indeed, the votes you had cast. The pre-vote interviewers, they just asked what you knew, to make sure that you knew enough to cast a responsible ballot.

One year, for example, concentrating on economic questions per the parties’ platform, they might ask you where you worked and the nature of your work there. Naturally they would then need to ask your salary, and then it made complete sense that they would want to be sure you knew your tax rate, and whether your benefits were taxed as well, and which ones, and at what rate or rates. (After all, you were about to vote regarding things that your tax dollars would be paying for.) Did you obtain your information about tax rates from official sources, such as a government Web site? Yes? (At what URL would that be?) Or no, you got it from a knowledgeable friend: What friend was that? Where did he or she get his or her information? What were his or her salary, benefits, and tax rates?

And so on.

It was all perfectly reasonable. Of course you needed to be able to answer such questions if you took the idea of voting seriously — however pleasurable an activity it might be — and Walker had always taken it seriously, and he had always been proud never to have failed an interview, although he assumed he’d gotten some questions wrong, over the years.

But this year something had just… something had just happened. The interviewer, whose name tag said that he should call her Sandy, had just asked him the next-to-last question, number 24, which this year was “How many documentaries have you viewed in the last eleven years?” Walker was mentally running through the list (he thought the answer was two, he just wanted as a matter of pride to be sure), and he looked up at the ceiling in the corner, up and behind Sandy’s left shoulder. There was a small beige box mounted up there, with a transparent glass disk in its face, and a little red light next to the disk was blinking metronomically: blink (1)… blink (2)… blink (3)… blink (4)… Something which Walker could no longer recognize as his mind had suddenly, however momentarily but quite definitely, gone sproing at that moment. He remembered suddenly leaping to his feet (both ankles were functioning fully back in those days). He remembered shouting something like, “Why are you asking me this?” and he remembered planting his hands on Sandy’s desk, leaning across her blotter and her well-manicured hands holding one of several pencils there, and he remembered yelling something else now unimaginable, something like, “Do you even fucking know what the right fucking answer is?” and he even remembered grabbing the collar of her shirt, below her trembling jaw and her mouth formed in a perfect O, and he remembered the sound of the door slamming open behind him and he even remembered grabbing one of the pencils off of Sandy’s desk. Where his memory broke down, without fail, was in recalling what exactly happened in the next several moments. In particular, he didn’t remember what he had done with the pencil, although it had something to do with why he was in prison and he knew that assaulting a State election employee was considered among the most despicable of crimes, and had put it all together into a chunky, indigestibly ill-blended stew of a theory. All he remembered in the moment after that brief gap was lying on the floor of the interview room, the sensation of something — something at once slippery and sticky — being removed from his fingers while someone stepped on his wrist, and the blinking, blinking, blinking of the red light on the little box on the ceiling. And then he remembered nothing, until he was already here and on the first checkpoint in the journey — endless, he had thought at one time — through a jungle of questions, always circling but never satisfactorily alighting on the answer about his intentions.

(JES, Merry-Go-Round)

So, then: had Walker Bryce lost his shit? If so, could it be classified as an expression of, y’know, anger? Had he “gone mad”? And would it have all worked out better if he’d been interviewed not by the good-natured Sandy named in the excerpt, but by, say… Master Dokuon, wrapped in his inscrutable, Zen-temple equanimity?

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Bringing the Inside Out, and Vice-Versa

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[Image: “Three Worlds (After Escher),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Yes, it’s true: I posted no “whiskey river Fridays” installment last week. In fact, a week ago I was en route from our new home to visit family back in New Jersey; although I knew I’d dropped the Friday-blogging ball for the first time in a long while, I simply could not pull everything together… (This qualifies as a benefit of retired life: leaving jobs undone even when you know they need doing.)

So this week, I was pleased to discover resonances from the past two weeks over at the river. First, consider:

About the Phones

Closing my car door, you always say Watch
for deer and text when you get home.
I want to, I do, but I will forget.
Time moves and I forget. Look
I am trying, I am, but it’s not the kind
of thing that trying solves.

Once
on the side of a highway, a cop told me
about dragging a full grown buck out
the windshield of a wrecked car all by himself.
About the sounds it made, Like the devil learning
what regret feels like. About the woman it kicked
to death in the driver’s seat. The phone call
he had to make to her grown daughter after
whose first question was, Did the deer survive?

Different cop, different time, different highway.
Said she keeps her phone on silent then spoke
about securing the crime scene in that classroom
in Blacksburg where one student shot
all the others. Every single one of them
had a cell phone, she said, and for hours after
every single one rang and rang or vibrated
across the floor in the same slow way
that blood pools. No one was allowed to answer,
no one, so instead the phones rang all night
until batteries were empty, voicemails full
of a thousand Call me when you get this so I know
you’re okays. Turns out time moves the way
blood does. Batteries too. Runs out
like a startled deer across a road. Listen
I am trying to find a way to tell you this.
There are things that trying solves but this
is not one of them.

(Robert Wood Lynn [source])

…and then this, from just a few days ago:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

(Derek Walcott [source])

And having considered those two glimpses of inner life made manifest, through the skin, consider the following depiction (not from whiskey river) of a setting which tells you all you need to know about a human element it includes:

London slept, but fitfully, its every other eye wide open. The ribbon of light atop the Telecom Tower unfurled again and again, traffic lights blinked through unvarying sequence, and electronic posters affixed to bus stops rotated and paused, rotated and paused, drawing an absent public’s attention to unbeatable mortgage deals. There were fewer cars, playing louder music, and the bass pulse that trailed in their wake pounded the road long after they’d gone. From the zoo leaked muffled shrieks and strangled growls. And on a pavement obscured by trees, leaning on a railing, a man smoked a cigarette, the light at its tip glowing brighter then dying, brighter then dying, as if he too were part of the city’s heartbeat, performing the same small actions over and over, all through the watches of the night.

(Nick Herron [source])

I love this sort of synchronous chiming between unrelated sources.

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Raised in the Institution of Dreaming

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[Video: Florence Welch (and — or and not — the Machine), “Free”… featuring Bill Nighy “as her anxiety.” Lyrics here and elsewhere.]

From whiskey river:

Meditations in an Emergency

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

(Cameron Awkward-Rich [source])

Per usual for my Friday posts, for each quotation I found at whiskey river this week I tried to include two links: one to whiskey river itself — credit for bringing it to my attention; and one to the original, “canonical” source of the quotation, in case you want to see the context in which it originally appeared.

Tracking down those “canonical” links can be tricky, because there’s not always an “original source” to be found online — and this leads me down many rabbit holes and side alleys. I generally do a search on (in my opinion) the most striking, original phrase in the passage, to eliminate duplicates as much as possible; for Cameron Awkward-Rich’s prose poem above, I went with the same phrase I’ve used as this post’s title.

Well, I found general blogs which quoted the work in full. I found out that it came from a 2019 collection of Awkward-Rich’s poems, Dispatch. But I couldn’t actually preview the book anywhere… which is why I ultimately just fell back on a non-canonical source.

But along the way, I also searched for the phrase “Meditations in an Emergency.” This led me to Frank O’Hara’s 1957 collection of poems, which took that title from one of his own poems. It led me to a reminder that the O’Hara book was referenced several times in the Mad Men TV series, especially the second-season finale (which also shared the title). And finally, it also led me to a 2022 interview/profile of Florence Welch… which gave me the music video with which this post is topped. (In the interview, she quotes the last few sentences of Awkward-Rich’s poem as one of her “cultural hobbies and passions” of the moment.)

Of course, it helped that the video seems — to me — strikingly appropriate as a lead-in to “Meditations in an Emergency.”

The following, needless to say, does not come from whiskey river but from a book I recently read:

There’s an old story, which I’ve always liked, about a holy man who yearns for an epiphany. So he leaves the city and his rich family, sells everything he owns and gives the money to the poor, and builds a hermitage in the wilderness. For sixty years he lives there on his own, praying and fasting. He’s taken a cartload of books with him—the complete scriptures and all the commentaries—but as the years go by, he stops reading them, because he knows them all by heart. He stops praying too, because he’s said it all so many times that he can’t see the point anymore; either the Invincible Sun has heard him or He hasn’t, and isn’t there a commandment somewhere about Thou shalt not nag the Lord thy God? So he spends most of his time outside in his garden, growing food for himself and the very occasional passerby. He grows cabbages and leeks and turnips and peas and nine different varieties of beans, onions and shallots and carrots, strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants, grapes, cherries, apples, pears, plums, marrows and squashes and pumpkins the size of an ox, though he doesn’t like pumpkin very much, and who can blame him? And one day, God comes by and leans over the gate and stands there for a while, watching the old hermit raking over a seedbed. The hermit notices him and says hello, and they have a nice chat about greenfly and pumpkin blight and what to do about carrot-fly, concerning which the Omniscient turns out to be pretty well-informed, although the hermit’s able to teach Him a thing or two about earthing up fennel. Then He says he has to be getting along and they part; nice chap, the hermit thinks to himself, and not a bit like how you’d expect. And then he dies, but he doesn’t go to heaven because he’s already there.

(K.J. Parker [source])

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Looking for the El Dorado Glittering in Your Heart

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[Image: “El Dorado (Twentynine Palms, California),” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river this week:

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it. If you don’t understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of “trying to find myself.” They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.

(Michael Singer [source])

…and:

The Weighing

The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

Mood of the moment: dark, dark, dark… for the most ridiculous of reasons: an inability, so far, to acquire drivers’ licenses in our new state.

The first Catch-22: NC law says that you have 60 days after moving here to get a driver’s license. But you have to go to the DMV office to get it. So, fine, there are lots of DMV offices around… except if you just go there, unannounced, you’ll be at the end of a room full of other people waiting to do one thing or another. But good news! You can make an appointment for a specific day and time— But wait, no, that’s not good news after all. Why? Because the earliest appointments available at ANY of the offices are 90 days or more out.

In the meantime, here are a couple of things you can’t do here without proving NC residency (via driver’s license) — things which we need to do sooner rather than later: vote, and take things to the county landfill, and confirm to the postal service that we do indeed live at this address. We’re almost afraid to ask further.

So, yeah. Not a happy place right now. I know there’s metaphorical gold to be had, without going far at all. But for now I’d just settle for a damned DMV appointment.

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