Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Facing The Other, Pretending Not to See Oneself

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[Image: “Ukraine, Day 1,” by John E. Simpson.]

This week has certainly delivered to the world a big, heaping wallop of unease, hasn’t it? I’ve found it difficult to be really philosophical about “it all”; mostly, like many people it seems, I am baffled and rather irrationally angry that “it all” has come to pass… and I say irrationally, because after all, what do I know, and who am I to be having opinions about it?

A few days ago, before the invasion, the onscreen chyron beneath a couple of CNN talking heads said something like, How will a Russian invasion of Ukraine affect your pocketbook? I have no idea what the commentators were saying — the sound was off, and there were no closed captions displaying — but those big boldfaced words really hit me wrong. All I could think was, My pocketbook?!? Jeezus, think about what it would mean for the Ukrainians…!

Explicit references to politics and world affairs seldom bob to the surface over at whiskey river, where the current is always gentle. But the anonymous blogger there is human, after all, and in especially fraught times a given week’s selection may be hard to separate in one’s mind from the real-world context. Or maybe it’s just one’s own imagination that fits an interpretation around something like this (italicized portion):

At the risk of telling you
what you already know, Mrs. Cavendish, here’s
something merely true: the insufficiency of the moon
has been replaced by the lantern, the lantern by
the light bulb, but what won’t go away is the promise
of salvation out there in the bright beyond.
There will always be people who think suffering
leads to enlightenment, who place themselves
on the verge of what’s about to break, or go
dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them
and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush
toward that sure thing that awaits us,
which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.
My dog keeps one eye open when he sleeps.
My cat prefers your house where the mice are.
Stare ahead, my friend. The whole world is on alert.
Mrs. Cavendish, every day is old news.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

I read of people who place themselves on the verge of what’s about to break, and think to myself: Yeah. Like Putin, that fool, that dupe of his own aspirations.

And then I cast around for more, not at whiskey river, and come across first this:

Malignant aggression does not reflect true human nature; it is connected with a domain of unconscious, perinatal dynamics that separates us from our deeper identity. Those who initiate war activities and violence in general are typically substituting external targets for elements in their own psyches, which should properly be faced in personal self-exploration.

(Stanislav Grof [source, but original text unconfirmed])

Yes, I exult, yes: that’s it, exactly!

But no, that’s not “it” after all… or rather, that’s not “it” unless I skip conveniently past that last clause: one’s own psyche, subject to self-exploration. And this, I think, is it — as expressed below, with my emphasis added to the original:

You have to want to lose your appetite for violence or aggression. And to do that, you have to lose your self-righteousness. You have to realize that you cannot continue to have your habitual reaction to something, especially if your reaction ends with violence-physical or verbal-against yourself or somebody else, or even against the government of your country or the terrorists or whomever. You have to accept in your gut that the habitual reaction is poisonous not only to you but to the rest of the world.

(Pema Chödrön [source])

When I was young, I knew a man just a few years older, man who suffered violent mood swings. Medication “helped,” after a fashion: as I recall, it rendered him impassive — functioning, as they say, but also strangely not-human. Yet when unmedicated, he tended to destroy the lives of people around him, principally his family. He seemed alternately obsessed and focused on the strangest ideas, and violently angry about injustices he imagined the world and those people had inflicted upon him. Eventually, with the help of improved medications and other therapies, he came to have something of a normal life — but the memories of those past episodes forever seared themselves in the minds of those (including me) who’d known him back then.

I think back to those young men now: him, going through the inner hell he went through and acted out; and me, watching in horror as he figuratively staggered from one violent encounter to another, lapsing only temporarily into dull-eyed “normalcy.” And I think of my helplessness then, and my helplessness now, and my hope that somehow — somehow — the right balance of remedies can be found, or forged. Maybe then madness can finally be laid to rest: an awful memory, but no more than that.

And then maybe we can return to life as it should be — never again “normal” (because it never was), but at least stabilized by fellow-feeling for strangers and an absence of national envies and judgments. (“National” the key word there: I doubt that we’ll ever, as a species, be free of personal envies and judgments.)

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To Be as Aware and Alone as Can Be — Naturally

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[Image: “Sedona: Leaf and Shoe,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’d titled the image before realizing it actually depicts two leaves — the obvious one, and the ageing, deteriorated thing up there in the northwest quadrant — which maybe makes the whole thing more poignant, I dunno. I certainly didn’t mean it as a comment on the shoe-wearer’s age and deterioration!]

One of whiskey river’s offerings in the last week was a poem whose ostensible subject might have been familiar to romanticized-nature poets like Wordsworth: the multi-sensory beauties of the natural world. Yet there’s also something distinctly modern about it — something about the natural world as it could be regarded particularly “nowadays,” immersed in a global pandemic and buffeted by techno-socio-political turmoil:

The End of The World

“We’re going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”
So they stopped the car where the river curled,
And we scrambled down beneath the bridge
On the gravel track of a narrow ridge.

We tramped for miles on a wooded walk
Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk.
Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor
While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore.

We came to a bend, where the river grew wide
And green mountains rose on the opposite side.
My guides moved back. I stood alone,
As the current streaked over smooth flat stone.

Shelf by stone shelf the river fell.
The white water goosetailed with eddying swell.
Faster and louder the current dropped
Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped.

I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,
My journey done where the world ended.
I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,
The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

(Dana Gioia [source])

Oh, sure, there’s a mention of a car. But that’s not the modern touch I’m thinking of. I’m thinking more of the sensibility: a progression — from being with others to being by oneself, from a shared to a personal experience. But notice, too, the touch of an ancient tradition: if it were truly modern, that focus on the personal would force an observation on the self. (Y’know, like, “What does this all say about me?”) Instead, Gioia’s poem regards — very obliquely — a self only in a context of nature… as an elementary particle within a molecule, perhaps.

It reminds me of this (not from whiskey river, although it possibly could have been):

Let us change our way of thinking and our way of looking. We have to realize that silence comes from our heart and not from the absence of talk. Sitting down to eat your lunch may be an opportunity for you to enjoy silence; though others may be speaking, it’s possible for you to be very silent inside… Being alone does not mean there is no one around you.

Being alone means you are established firmly in the here and the now and you become aware of what is happening in the present moment. You use your mindfulness to become aware of every feeling, every perception you have. You’re aware of what’s happening around you in the sangha, but you’re always with yourself, you don’t lose yourself. That’s the Buddha’s definition of the ideal practice of solitude: not to be caught in the past or carried away by the future, but always to be here, body and mind united, aware of what is happening in the present moment. That is real solitude.

(Thich Nhat Hanh [source])

Always with yourself, aware of what is happening but not really aware of your self as such. Real solitude. And a real comfort.

By the way, for anyone who might be wondering: the cataract removal surgery in my right eye went just fine. The only real hitch (aside from — surprise! — my elevated blood pressure): the doctor could not use his beloved femtosecond laser, and had to resort, after all, to the good old manually wielded scalpel. But the eye is fine — presumably all but healed. (Next week I meet with him for the last time about the surgery, and also probably to discuss a follow-up surgery in the left eye, sometime in the next few weeks.)

As you may know, I was quite nervous about how or even whether I’d be able to understand the voices of any of the attending medicos. As it happens, they were all very good about either wearing clear plastic shields or simply tugging their masks out of the way, so I could see their mouths as they talked. But… Well, I’m not sure how to explain this… Picture me lying on my back on a gurney or surgical bed-type thing, looking up. Positioned at the top of my head is the surgeon; to the right and left, nurses or other aides. So from my perspective, none of their mouths were right-side-up. It turns out that I can’t lip-read a mouth that’s turned sideways, and can do so for an upside-down mouth only with great difficulty.

There’s always something, as they say. (Only I can’t hear them when they say it sideways.)

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About This Business of Stilling the Monkey…

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[Image: “Gas Apparatus,” by someone on Flickr who identifies there as “Reva G.” (Using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you very much!) The photographer says: “I found this complex array of gas piping nicely sunlit behind a local industrial building. It looks just like the flowchart my brain uses for trying to make mundane everyday decisions!”]

There is so much to see in the world — to know, to experience. How do we decide what to attend to in the first place? And once we’ve attended to something, how best to understand it, to know it as fully as it can be known — to “get” it? Herewith, some thoughts on the subject… courtesy of whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Groundedness comes in many forms: resolute common sense, daily prayer or meditation, a regular job that keeps us engaged with material realities, physical exercise, or something as simple as family life. One needs a sufficient engagement with the requirements of the so-called “real world” so that one is less likely to fall prey to flights of fancy or become engulfed by archetypes, repressed complexes, or manias that will make one lose one’s wits. The specter of madness haunts the spiritual search…

A recurring motif of the esoteric traditions is the realm of the unseen — other dimensions, invisible entities, inner planes, etheric bodies, energy centers, planetary forces, hidden masters, the list goes on and on. Some people with a tendency toward paranoia are strongly attracted to the esoteric precisely because it mirrors their secret fears: unseen forces affect our lives, consensus reality is a sham, the universe is somehow converging on our personal slice of life. The spiritual landscape is littered with addled mystics who jumped into esoteric belief systems that were more than their sanity could bear…

Which leads us to a skill that it would be wise to cultivate: the ability to maintain a simultaneous belief and disbelief in all matters esoteric until you have undeniably experienced them for yourself. Let us call this “faithful skepticism”…

The kind of “knowing” that one finds in gnosis is personally verified. It isn’t based on the hearsay of another’s experience. And even when you have experienced something that seems real, it is well to keep room in your worldview for the possibility that it is all in your imagination. Keep things in perspective.

(Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney [source])

Well, I started thinking about this (as one does). The passage highlights multiple dichotomies or divergences in types of experience: different forms or sources of “groundedness”; the divide between the sensed outer world and the unsensed but known inner; what distinguishes paranoia from a world simply imagined…

And all the this-vs.-that, in turn, got me thinking about the restless mind which besets me during some nights. What if… On the other hand… How about if…? I think I could… No way could I… They (the people who name such things) often refer to this as “monkey mind,” and offer various prescriptions for, well, tranquilizing the monkey.

Here’s one of those prescriptions — not from whiskey river — on letting silence simply settle in and take up residence in our heads:

When you are practicing zazen, 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.

(Shunryu Suzuki [source])

Most of us have not trained — have not even contemplated training — in the formal practice of zazen. So for most of us, simply shutting off the monkey is, well, easier said than done: something to aspire to, I guess, without necessarily being able to pull it off on the spur of the moment. I just came across the following this morning, in fact, after a very restless night of my own; the author had found himself “wide awake” at four o’clock in the morning:

I fell back asleep at some point, but it wasn’t the kind of sleep that felt restful. I thought I was reading the paper that entire time. Then I realized that there was no Times article about puppets filling my suitcase with grapes.

(David Sedaris [source])

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Asking the Hardest Question, and Not Reaching for the Easy Answer

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[Image: “A Hallway of Unopened Doors,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I can’t possibly need to hammer the metaphor in, can I?]

This week, whiskey river offers us a quote pulled from their commonplace book (something like a blog archive). They’ve used the same quotation in the past, and — as it happens — so have I (about five years ago), thanks to their trustworthy influence:

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing — not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision — a cocktail, a remix — of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes — we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don’t you dare.

(Caitlin Moran [source — subscription probably required])

When I used the quotation before, I didn’t know where it originally came from (book, blog post, etc.). This time around, I found the source (thanks to a generous subscription offer): an essay from The Times (i.e., of London) back in 2014. This offered me the opportunity to place it in context with the text preceding and after the quoted passage…

It turns out, see, that Caitlin Moran wasn’t really speaking of what she believed then, at the time she wrote the essay; she was thinking back to her younger self. The paragraphs preceding the excerpt above reads:

In my teens and twenties, I took after [my mother], and became a passionate advocate against any notion of an afterlife. Ninety per cent of the problems of humanity, it seemed, stemmed from a simple cognitive dissonance: refusing to acknowledge that this is it. That we are alive now, and there will be nothing else later — no second chances, no higher levels. No Heaven. No Nirvana. That if there is joy, or progress, or enlightenment, or love to be had, it must be had now: between your birth and your death; as fast and fiercely as you can. All we have is the breath in our bodies and a finite share of seconds, and each one must be spent with the same joyous reverence as a gold coin.

This is because, at 19, I’d read a sentence that had re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

So she had that one sentence’s revelation, as she describes. But then, in 2014 and not years before, after the ringing “Don’t you dare” conclusion she added:

But that, as I say, was in my twenties. Ten years later, things have changed. I want there to be an afterlife, now. I wish it devoutly — not from any unhappy desire for an afterlife to be better than this one, but from sheer curiosity.

At 38, I think when I die, I need desperately to be handed a stiff drink and be allowed to ask, “What the hell was going on all that time? Come on — why did they build Stonehenge? Where did my first passport disappear to? What were Neanderthals really like? Where did my second passport disappear to? What would the third Amy Winehouse album have sounded like? Where did I lose my wedding ring? Can I have a map of the world, in fact — with each thing I’ve lost marked with a luminous pin?”

I don’t want swan’s wings. I don’t want my own planet. I don’t want eternity. I just want to know everything, ever — then be reordered across the universe, again.

I myself have nothing I could honestly call “a belief in the afterlife.” But I love the idea of a brief but ambitious interlude of revelation which precedes the ultimate atomization of whatever the hell my self is: a chance to “know everything, ever”… or at least, maybe, the answers to twenty or a hundred questions. The last one of which would simply go something like this:

And now the very last, final thing I want to know: after I get the answer to this last question, well… what happens next?

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A Worldview Shaped by Others’ Eyes and Ears

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[Image: “The Curse of Milhaven,” by Elias Ruiz Monserrat. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you very much!)]

Like many (most? all?) people, at least those influenced by Western culture and values, I go back and forth in my general outlook: Things are so bad, as opposed to Things aren’t as bad as they seem. I’ve been kept awake at night both by crippling, flailing despair and by excited anticipation. But also like many people, I tend to occupy one end of the continuum vs. the other. And for me, the world is generally happier than not.

Many times over the years, I’ve thought about why this might (or might not) be so: why do we favor one vs. the other? The thought experiment that finally nudged me towards an answer was to imagine myself born into a world with no other people at all. (Yes, yes, I know: if there’d never been any other people, I couldn’t have been born at all. Repeat after me: thought experiment.) In such a world, would I — or anyone — tend to be more one than the other?

Last week, as though reading my mind on the subject, whiskey river offered me this:

For when cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are scared someone will take advantage of them. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them — that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world in their mouth, someone will try to poison them.

(Caitlin Moran [source])

Suppose I pose to myself a question: what is this passage about? The answer might unfold like this:

Oh, surely it’s about cynicism… No, wait, it’s actually about cynics — people afflicted with cynicism… and it’s about innocence, and fear, and…

But that doesn’t seem right. Or not complete, anyhow…

And then I got to thinking about Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, the book which I mentioned in last week’s Friday post. In particular, I thought about the chapter in which Foster tries his damnedest to “be” a badger; here, he’s writing about his eventual comfort — his deep satisfaction — with finding himself lying in a Charles Foster-shaped hollow in the earth, about his no longer feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic in such a setting:

…all that swirling atavistic panic slowly cleared. I didn’t hyperventilate if I wasn’t on my actual and metaphorical hind legs, manfully scanning distant vistas and making sense of and plans for the big picture. It was okay to lie in the dark, surrounded by the scratching and humming and thrashing of animals that would one day eat me. From there it was a small enough step not to mind being eaten, and not to mind being in, or getting toward, the state in which one is eaten. And once you’re there, you’re at last a proper ecologist, knowing your place, all ecocolonialism gone. Only then, at the end of a weary and distressing metaphysical road, can you really begin the business of being a badger…

What does the individual badger “hear” as a result of the changing pressures on its tympanum that we choose to call a sound? Strictly speaking, I have no idea. I have no idea what Mozart sounds like to anyone apart from me (and even that sound changes massively with my state of digestion). This isn’t a problem of physiology; it’s the problem of otherness, which we inadequately physiologize as a difficulty in inquiring into the nature of complex central processing. We can’t know that we’re not alone. It is an act of pure faith for me to declare that there are some things I share with my children and my best friends.

(Charles Foster [source et seq.])

Back to my thought experiment: had I been the only human ever on the planet, I would never have known cynicism. Fear, sure; desperation even, of course. (Never having known another person, I doubt that bitterness would have ever occurred to me.) But cynicism (like envy, jealousy, and so on) — that requires an Other. It’s a response not to the way the world is, but to the way people are in the world.

And yet it’s not the only response possible to a world shared with others, as Foster seems to be saying. Once we get to know the others, we can choose to like them, to not like them, to be indifferent to them. If we try hard enough, we can even become them, to a limited extent. But to be cynical about them is no more than a glib prediction of their behavior and its effects on oneself. It’s a vow, furthermore, never again to be surprised.

I think I’ll choose surprise, thanks all the same!

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To Know the Unknowable Other

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[Untitled image by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The photo’s caption on Instagram read: “The end-of-year holidays are a time for families to draw together and, as families will, poke one another to the point of discomfort”… Now I’m thinking I should entitle it, “Poking the Unknowable.”]

This week, whiskey river reminded us (via its characteristically impeccable curatorship of others’ words) that (a) this is a very weird time to be traveling, but also that (b) aside from current travels, just the memory of past ones feels a little alien — even to those who haven’t been on the road:

But time has got very slippery these days. Days, weeks, months and years merge into one another. Images will pop up of work trips to the US, or Australia in the Photos widget on my phone and not only will I struggle to remember when the trip happened, the very fact that it did is becoming increasingly unreal.

All I know with any certainty is that I get up, stuff happens, and I go to sleep, over and over again. The past is a dream that I have here and now, the future a fantasy that likewise is a figment of my imagination that I experience here and now.

(Euan Semple [source])

The book I’m reading now, too, feels rather alien, exactly because it records an itinerary — several of them — formerly unimaginable to me. The author, Charles Foster, is a British naturalist; the book itself, Being a Beast, is predictably therefore about the natural world. But it’s “about” the natural world in the sense (as the title suggests) of inhabiting the natural world — not as a human, striding about on two legs and occasionally crouching down to observe wildlife, patronizingly, as though doing the creatures a favor. No: Foster set out to live the daily lives of the animals he discusses — badgers, otters, foxes, red deer, and swifts.

Like most journeys, Foster’s — into the heads of the creatures he’s curious about — mix aspirations satisfied with intentions foiled, plans (always for good outcomes) with surprises (disappointing mixed with good). (I’m only about halfway through the book so far, but have not yet encountered any disasters or tragedies. Foster’s a gifted writer, an entertaining eccentric, so perhaps he simply avoids reporting of great and genuine unhappiness.) As a badger, he manages to adjust his sleep cycle — creeping out of his Welsh hillside burrow for nocturnal foraging — and learns to eat worms, to recognize their varieties by their textures and unique slipperiness. As a fox in East End London, he’s awakened by a policeman from his daytime snooze by “under the rhododendrons.” The policeman says:

“Why do you have to sleep here, may I ask?”

“You may indeed ask, but I don’t suppose you’ll like the answer. I’m trying to be a fox, and” (I rushed on, trying to avert my eyes from the torrential hemorrhage of the officer’s residual goodwill) “I want to know what it’s like to listen all day to traffic and to look at ankles and calves rather than at whole people.”

This last observation was a bad, bad mistake. I knew it as soon as it was out…

Uncertainty and workload trumped his instincts, and he told me to “bugger off home, sir” (the italics were powerful on his lips) “and get a life.”

“That,” I said, “is exactly what I’m trying to get.”

Comedy aside, note about this passage that it presents a Janus of alienness — an animal’s face gazing at the human, a human’s at the animal, across a barrier which neither of them can ever actually climb or penetrate. The same barrier, indeed, exists between you and me, or between you and anyone else you have ever encountered — will ever encounter. Foster himself acknowledges this, in a sort of side jaunt into the nature (!) of animal/human consciousness:

The universe I occupy is a creature of my head. It is wholly unique to me. The process of intimacy is the process of becoming better at inviting others in to have a look around. The sensation of loneliness is the crushing acknowledgment that however good you get at giving such invitations no one will be able to see very much at all….

What might it mean for an unconscious creature to dream? Indeed to sleep at all? What’s being lost when “consciousness” is lost? What accompanies the creature into the world beyond the veil? If badgers aren’t conscious in a sense comparable to us, their sleeping smiles and winces are more inscrutable than consciousness itself. I prefer the lesser mystery…

When I experience a pleasurable stimulus, my facial muscles contract in a particular way. When a dog experiences a stimulus that indicates a benefit to the dog that is comparable to the benefit of which my pleasure is an index, its facial muscles contract in a more or less identical way.

And so on.

Being a Beast was published in 2016, well before the coronavirus tide flooded the world. But — in that context, and taken together with Euan Semple’s words above — it’s interesting to note: even when we’re sharing life only with other humans (and some animals, if we’re lucky), those we already “know” intimately, even after a seemingly interminable period of adopting one another’s rhythms as our own, the barriers of consciousness remain. We still live in our separate heads. We may think — fool ourselves into thinking — we know the minds on the other side of the impermeable membrane, because we know the behaviors which (surely?) highlight those minds’ motivations, decisions, and, well, essences. But no: as always, the operative word there is impermeable.

There is no challenge, no mystery at all, in thinking “I know X.” No, what makes each “same” day different, and differently worth living, is always trying to know X: trying, failing, trying again. There’s an inexhaustible source of surprise, delight — and sure, occasional disappointment — to be found on that journey. Maybe, in this small way, we can regard the pandemic as an opportunity we’d never have been offered otherwise, as — gasp — as a blessing?

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The Finding — and Making — of Relevant Time

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[Image: “Future Past + Presence,” by a photographer and digital artist who goes by the handle “Hartwig HKD.” Found on Flickr, of course, and posted here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!), having trimmed only a black top and bottom border from the original.]

It’s been one of those weeks — you know, the ones in which time lays a hand on your wrist and, with restless taps and nudges from its bony fingers, keeps reminding you… reminding you that while you may have forgotten it, it has been keeping careful tabs on you. (Lucky you!)

While we were both working, The Missus and I shared a sort of mental fountain which burbled with the waters of our everyday life for years, with only minor adjustments. Then came 2020, a year which (for pretty much everyone) sneered at the notion of everyday life — or rather, mandated that we rethink it. What does it mean to have a “schedule”? How many layers of fallback schedules are required to keep us feeling “on track”? And so on.

Particularly, for me, this past week reminded me of the tyranny of small-scale, immovable schedules, those bound up with the schedules of other people — of whole institutions, particularly bureaucracies. I’ve had to deal with some of that while on the road, of course, but the first week of 2022 has brought a bunch of them into close jigsaw-puzzle proximity. Medical appointments and re-appointments, car maintenance, summons to answer civic duties back in Florida, missed video calls requiring recalendaring…

Ironically, early this week, whiskey river offered up a question which seemed to speak to this:

Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant?

(Franz Kafka [quasi-canonical source])

A couple of days later, the whiskey river blogger even seemed to present an answer to their own question:

We respond to this question through our deeds, through the action of writing. We know that to answer it directly would be impertinent, not necessary, but we also recognize that imagination has to struggle with the dragon of time afresh each day. Time brings about new things, good and bad; we must ascertain them. Time kills people and civilizations; we must save them, to remember them in poetry. We understand that the ongoing war between imagination and time (alas, a war that will never be won) cannot end, that we cannot turn, all of us, into historians of poetry and content ourselves with reading old poets. Poetry must be written, continued, risked, tried, revised, erased, and tried again as long as we breathe and love, doubt and believe. We always remember, of course, that we write our poems in the gigantic shadow of the dead and that we should be humble, at least in those long hours when we do not compose. (Being too humble in the very moment of creation would not be very wise.)

We need to go on, paying the price, sometimes, of being not only imperfect but even, who knows, arrogant and ridiculous.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

Zagajewski, an internationally famous poet, was no doubt speaking literally of poetry at the time. (He was reflecting on having received the Neustadt Prize in Literature.) But his words have value as metaphor, too, even for those of us who don’t write poetry — or those of us who go through similar motions with prose, but only when prodded hard by circumstance…

…which reminds me of a passage I remember from an early 20th-century “fantasy” I read back in college. Here, a character identified only as “the Philosopher” has been through a certain number of trials and revelations in old Ireland; as he returns home to his wife, pursued by police, he is joined by a group of leprechauns who accompany him the rest of the way. They offer him sanctuary, and this conversation ensues:

One of the Leprechauns here interposed.

“Noble Sir,” said he, “there isn’t much room in our house but there’s no stint of welcome in it. You would have a good time with us travelling on moonlit nights and seeing strange things, for we often go to visit the Shee of the Hills and they come to see us; there is always something to talk about, and we have dances in the caves and on the tops of the hills. Don’t be imagining now that we have a poor life for there is fun and plenty with us…”

“I would like to dance, indeed,” returned the Philosopher, “for I do believe that dancing is the first and last duty of man. If we cannot be gay what can we be? Life is not any use at all unless we find a laugh here and there.”

(James Stephens [source])

I never knew James Stephens, obviously, so have no way of knowing for sure what he really wanted us to see and hear in this passage. Still, if anyone who reads his words wants to insist that he here speaks literally and only of dancing… well, perhaps I should gently escort such folks to the emergency exit.

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Turmoil in the Thing Observed, Serenity in the Observer

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[Image: “Work Glove and Woodpile (Livingston, NY; October 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

The Missus and I have made it to Las Vegas for several weeks’ year-end downtime, here at the end of Roadtrip 2021. We’ve little idea what’s ahead for us in ’22 (aside from threading our cautious — and a bit nervous — way among more coronavirus mutations). We’ve considered a few further destinations, but thanks to winter weather they are by and large inaccessible to us… for a few months, anyhow.

And really, the big question remains: wither, ultimately, goeth we? Where are we gonna live?

Came across this item yesterday, posted earlier in the week on whiskey river:

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, are borne along during the waking hours, and at their best they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They may be not quite right, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism, too, is something I particularly want to hold onto. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned to prefer being not quite right, out of place.

(Edward Said [source])

Hmm, I thought. He preferred a dissonant life? One of my pet terms for The Missus is, “my personal disruptor” — it sums up her (to me) charming habit of overturning my own best-laid but generally trivial plans with her more impulsive, grand-and-sweeping ones. So yes, I know the pleasures of occasional dissonance. Even so, I find them pleasing in contrast — against a more neutral, conventional backdrop: colorful accents placed on a tweed fabric, say…

Las Vegas (or anyplace like it) will not become our hometown. I know many people live here in stability — in quite-rightness and in-placeness — despite the conventional view of the city as a place where anything can and often does happen, at any time. But I also know myself: freeing the elephant, right?

I couldn’t possibly regard Edward Said’s view of his life as “wrong.” On the contrary, I think he was right in a way: his self seen as “a cluster of flowing currents,” for example. But I don’t think he had to stop there and say, in effect, I choose a dissonant self over a static one. All that noise and clatter and all those free-flowing forms needn’t be participated in to be appreciated. Regardez, s’il vous plait, this morning’s whiskey river meditation — a sort of “on the other hand…” response to the week’s earlier one:

Time for Serenity, Anyone?

I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world is still alive,
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing
enters into this elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon. day or night.
winter, summer, storm, still—this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

(William Stafford [source])

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On the Road to What Lies Within, by Way of What Lies Without

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[Image: “Eclipse Crescents,” by Jon D. Anderson. (Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photo was taken during an eclipse, obviously; the photographer had the camera pointed at the ground, in a filbert orchard — where he caught all the little pinhole-camera-style images of sunlight created by the leaves overhead. My favorite thing about this photo, though, is the scattered greens of fallen leaves and blades of grass: beautiful reality superimposed on the monotone dreamlike nominal subject, as though to remind you where you are.]

On our Roadtrip 2021 mini-adventure, I’ve probably taken thousands of photographs just with my “real” camera (i.e., not counting the — hundreds? thousands? — taken with my phone’s camera). I haven’t done any kind of statistical analysis, but I bet well over 95% of them will never see the light of day, so to speak: “public” exposure here on RAMH, or over on Instagram or (rarely) Facebook. I doubt that I myself will ever go back to look at the unused ones.

About a month ago, the absurdity finally hit me: by far, most of the photos I was setting aside or discarding depicted subjects already publicly available — generally, depicted them better. Consider, for instance, the hundreds I’d taken while touring the interiors of a couple of the Gilded-Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Oh, I’d shot a handful which turned out satisfactorily as photographs, and I’d kept and “promoted” them, so to speak. The rest, though? Why did I take these half-dozen shots of a grand entry hall in The Breakers — you know, the same entry hall depicted in all the postcards and coffee-table books in the gift shop, or even at The Breakers Web site? (Especially considering that flash photography of the interiors is forbidden to the public, but professionals engaged by the governing body may use soft but artificial lighting under controlled circumstances.)

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

So I’ve worked at no longer photographing subjects easily available, in better form, from other sources. Which begs the question: why take photos otherwise? (Note the similarity of this question to the one, “Why write?,” which has obsessed me in the past. For instance, scroll down on this page to the section headed “Background, for Interested Parties.”)

With such thoughts in mind, earlier this week I read the following, on whiskey river of course:

To restore you and myself, I return to my state of garden and shade, cool reality, I hardly exist and if I do exist it’s with delicate care. Surrounding the shade is a teeming, sweaty heat. I’m alive. But I feel I’ve not yet reached my limits, bordering on what? Without limits, the adventure of a dangerous freedom. But I take the risk, I live taking it. I’m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I, who have barely begun my journey, begin it with a sense of tragedy, guessed what lost ocean my life steps will take me to. And crazily I latch onto the corners of myself, my hallucinations suffocate me with their beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

And a day later, not on whiskey river, I read this:

Song of Ryokan: III
(excerpt)

True, all the seasons have moonlit nights,
But here’s the best night to see the moon.
The hills never so aloft, the streams never so clear,
In the infinite blue of autumn sky flies a disk of light,
Neither light nor gloom is graced with a life of its own.
The moon and the earth are one, and myself one with them.
The boundless sky above, and autumn chill on my skin,
I stroll about low hills, leaning upon my priceless cane.
Quiet night has held firm the flitting dust of the world.
The bright moon alone pours streams of rays all about me.
I mind it not if another like-minded is also admiring it,
Or if the moon deigns to look on others as well as on me.
Each year as autumn comes, the moon will shine as before,
And the world will watch it, will face it, till eternity.
Sermons at Mount Ryozen, lectures in the Vale of Sokei,
Were teachings so precious, the audience needed the moon.
My meditation under the moon lasts till the ripest night.
The stream has hushed its cry, dew lies thick everywhere.
Who, among the moon-viewers tonight, will have the prize?
Who will reflect the purest moon in the lake of his mind?

(Ryokan, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa [source])

I’m still working my way through the answer(s) to the “Why photograph (or write) at all?” questions. But I sense the presence, in these two passages, of something verging on understanding.

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In a State of Grace, Where We Can Find It

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[Image: “The Missus in the Temple of Athena (Nashville Parthenon; November, 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’ll let my anonymous friend from over the way do the verbal honors solo today; nodding in agreement, I’ll just, well… just point, so to speak.]

From whiskey river:

In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. One starts to feel that everything in existence — whether people or things — breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. The world’s truth is impalpable.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

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