We all could use a miniature Bob Newhart in our brains…
When It’s Not Quite (Yet, Still) Light
[Image: “Zodiacal Light vs. Milky Way,” by Daniel López;
featured at Astronomy Picture of the Day on March 20, 2010]
From whiskey river:
Incandescence at Dusk
(Homage to Dionysius the Areopagite)
There is fire in everything,
shining and hidden —
Or so the saint believed. And I believe the saint:
Nothing stays the same
in the shimmering heat
Of dusk during Indian summer in the country.Out here it is possible to perceive
That those brilliant red welts
slashed into the horizon
Are like a drunken whip
whistling across a horse’s back,
And that round ball flaring in the trees
Is like a coal sizzling
in the mouth of a desert prophet.Be careful.
Someone has called the orange leaves
sweeping off the branches
The colorful palmprints of God
brushing against our faces.
Someone has called the banked piles
of twigs and twisted veins
The handprints of the underworld
Gathering at our ankles and burning
through the soles of our feet.
We have to bear the sunset deep inside us.
I don’t believe in ultimate things.
I don’t believe in the inextinguishable light
of the other world.
I don’t believe that we will be lifted up
and transfixed by radiance.
One incandescent dusky world is all there is.But I like this vigilant saint
Who stood by the river at nightfall
And saw the angels descending
as burnished mirrors and fiery wheels,
As living creatures of fire,
as streams of white flame….1500 years in his wake,
I can almost imagine
his disappointment and joy
When the first cool wind
starts to rise on the prairie,
When the soothing blue rain begins
to fall out of the cerulean night.
(Edward Hirsch [source]; here‘s a good place to start learning about the mysterious figure whose name appears in the epigraph)
…and:
Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.
(Jeanette Winterson, from Gut Symmetries [source])
…and:
I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.
(Haruki Murakami, from The Sputnik Sweetheart (translated by J. Philip Gabriel) [source])
Marching in Place After My Own Hat
Would I like to report that I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with my writing recently that I’ve skimped on blog posts — and comments on your blogs — for the last couple weeks or so?
Boy, wouldn’t I. But no. I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with everything else that I’ve been cutting corners online. Still, I thought you might appreciate a couple of items in the meantime, not that you need me to entertain you:
First, I’d never have guessed that enough “backwards music videos” have been made that someone reflecting on the matter could actually come up with a list of the top ten of “all time.” (By the way, the backwards here refers to the direction of motion — people running in reverse, fruit falling up into trees, and so on.) So I was surprised that Jason Newman, at the Urlesque site (“Exposing bits of the web”), could post just such a list. His number one selection interested me, all right: a “champion eater… unstuffs his face,” over a song called “From Your Mouth” by a group called God Lives Underwater. But my favorite — the only one I wanted to watch more than once — placed only third in his estimation:
Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water”
One of Michel Gondry’s best videos involves split-screening Cibo Matto members Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, running one member forward and the other backward before they meet and switch positions halfway through. Yeah, it’s complicated. Just watch.
What they said.
Alternatively, if you’ve got a little more time available, I highly recommend this hilarious (and ultimately sobering) account by Jo Walton of an entity she calls the Suck Fairy:
The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading — well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time — or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it.
For those of you who are writers, I don’t have to point out that your personal Suck Fairy especially loves exsanguinating your own work.
One, and One, and One…
From whiskey river:
Dogs
Many times loneliness
is someone else
an absence
then when loneliness is no longer
someone else many times
it is someone else’s dog
that you’re keeping
then when the dog disappears
and the dog’s absence
you are alone at last
and loneliness many times
is yourself
that absence
but at last it may be
that you are your own dog
hungry on the way
the one sound climbing a mountain
higher than time
(W. S. Merwin, from Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment)
…and:
I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A to Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean – 187,796,132, if it would interest you.
(James Thurber, Many Moons [source])
So — A Dream Lover, Are You?
[Video: Dream of the Wild Horses, an experimental short film by Denys Colomb Daunant, initially released in 1960. I first saw this in a film class in the 1970s and never forgot it, although “nothing happens.” I’ve always liked to think that the title doesn’t say this is a dream of someone — some human — about wild horses; rather, it says this is a dream which wild horses themselves have. The wild horses in the film apparently were among the Camargue.]
A subtle but complicated cloud of tension surrounds the topic of sleep at our house. The tension stems from two related facts: (a) The Missus has trouble sleeping, and (b) I myself have no trouble at all.
Confession: I love to sleep. I’d talk about sleep every day if I could do it without upsetting The Missus. (She’s not the only person I know with a sleep problem, which means I almost never bring the topic up because I never want to upset anybody. Which perhaps is your cue to tell me that you, too, don’t want to hear someone warbling a hymn to the infinite pleasures of sleeping. It also hints that I’m not really a good sleeper, but a sleep vampire. But that would be a different post, and a very different confession.)
One of the best things about sleep: dreams.
Pocketing the Key to Your Own Cage (or Not)
(Yes, I know: a day late…)
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
[Skeptics, on why they dislike dogma] mean that the universe is itself a universal prison; that existence itself is a limitation and a control; and it is not for nothing that they call causation a chain. In a word, they mean quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least that they are unworthy of belief. We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth. It is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a rational negation, for which I for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the bird and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.
(G.K. Chesterton, from The Everlasting Man [source])
…and:
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
(Gary Snyder [source])
In Absentia
It has been one hell of a week. Not a bad one, but an extremely busy one.
And it’s not over yet. As it happens, I’ve been summoned to jury duty tomorrow. As these things go, most likely I will spend a good part of the day in an uncomfortable chair, actually waiting to be called upon — or not — as a real live jury member. But it threatens to jeopardize my regular Friday whiskey river-inspired post. I’ve worked on it some, but it’s not ready; I might but probably can’t wrap it up tonight or tomorrow morning. We’ll see.
In the meantime, please enjoy the music haunting me from the playlist of the moment: Patty Larkin, “Anyway the Main Thing Is” (lyrics below).
(It’s a shame that this is a static video: if you’ve never witnessed Larkin actually play the guitar, you’re missing the great pleasure of witnessing someone do effortlessly, yet perfectly, something she doesn’t even have to stop and think about.)
Lyrics:
Anyway the Main Thing Is
(by Patty Larkin)I took the train
Just for the view
I took my boyfriend’s last name
For something to do
I took advice
Now I regret it
I took my time
Cause I could get itI shook my head
And it woke me up
I shook a strange hand in my bed
And that was enough
I shook the truth
Out of the tree
It shook my faith up good
But it satisfied meAnyway the main thing is
Regrooving the dream
Regrooving the…Love doesn’t think
Love doesn’t look
Love takes a flying leap off the brink
Love swallows the hook
Love doesn’t sleep
Love is out of control
Love is only human it can swallow you whole
For Lack of Better Words
[Image: “Zip Your Lips,” from A New Me’s photostream at Flickr]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
The Peninsula
When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all around the peninsula,
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arriveBut pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you’re in the dark again. Now recallThe glazed foreshore and silhouetted log.
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog.And then drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this; things founded clean on their own shapes
Water and ground in their extremity.
(Seamus Heaney [source])
…and:
It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.
(Margaret Atwood, from The Handmaid’s Tale [source])
The “Thud” of Adult Cool
Once, when I was teaching, I had this fabulous idea for a series of lessons. I just knew it would be a hit with the kids. I just knew I’d love teaching it. It would dazzle my peers. And quite possibly I’d get written up in the local paper — in a, y’know, good way. I could even imagine the headline: Local Teacher “Rocks” Poetry.
Yes. I cringe with you.
Especially do I cringe in memory of some of my selections. This was the mid-1970s, for gods’ sake. It’s not like there wasn’t any, y’know, actual rock music to choose from. So what did I think would happen when I played for my high-school juniors and seniors the Kingston Trio, performing “MTA”? If you don’t know the song, its lyrics, in part, go like this (and by the way, “MTA” is an acronym for Metropolitan Transit Authority):
Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTACharlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
“One more nickel.”
Charlie could not get off that train.Chorus:
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn’d
He may ride forever
‘neath the streets of Boston
He’s the man who never returned.…
Charlie’s wife goes down
To the Scollay Square station
Every day at quarter past two
And through the open window
She hands Charlie a sandwich
As the train comes rumblin’ through.
Yes: a socially-conscious folk song, accompanied by banjos, about a long-forgotten political issue in Boston, of a nickel increase in subway/train fares… in a well-to-do suburb in New Jersey with absolutely no subway/train service of its own.
When it finished playing through, I lifted the needle from the turntable (!) and said something like, “So…” (I had no idea what to say.) “…What’d you think?”
The quick-thinking football player a couple rows back, sprawled carelessly at his desk, growled: I thought it sucked.
I couldn’t help it; I burst out laughing. “What… sucked about it?”
Football Player: Why’d she hand him a sandwich? Why’n’t she just hand him some more money?
And thus ended that lesson.
Sky-Blessed
[Image: ‘Untitled, Hateruma-jima, Okinawa, 1971,’ by Shomei Tomatsu]
From whiskey river:
How to Grow Clouds
It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds.
(Karel Capek, translated by Andrew Malcovsky)
…and:
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
in September or October, when the wind
and the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
with foam and glitter, and inland among stones
the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
a hurry through which known and strange things pass
as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
(Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level [source])
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