Writing – Page 54

Acuity in the Corner of Your Eye

June 12, 2015 by John 3 Comments

[Image: Untitled photograph by Diana Eftaiha, via Flickr. Used under a
Creative Commons license.]

Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

The idea behind Nowhere — choosing to sit still long enough to turn inward — is at heart a simple one. If your car is broken, you don’t try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems — and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind — lie within. To hurry around trying to find happiness outside ourselves makes about as much sense as the comical figure in the Sufi parable who, having lost a key in his living room, goes out into the street to look for it because there’s more light there. As Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius reminded us more than two millennia ago, it’s not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them; a hurricane sweeps through town, reducing everything to rubble, and one man sees it as a liberation, a chance to start anew, while another, perhaps even his brother, is traumatized for life. “There is nothing either good or bad,” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”

So much of our lives takes place in our heads — in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation — that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it. As America’s wisest psychologist, William James, reminded us, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” It’s the perspective we choose — not the places we visit — that ultimately tells us where we stand.

(Pico Iyer [source])

…and:

Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings

for Charles Fishman

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip — the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.

(Juan Felipe Herrera [source])

…and:

Perhaps I don’t know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don’t know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways—everything, ideas included… It’s only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it… No, I wasn’t wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I—I don’t mean it literally—it’s not that things are alive… it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There’s something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can’t measure out with thoughts, a sort of life that can’t be expressed in words and which is my life, all the same.

(Robert Musil [source (PDF)])

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Others’ Spirits, Others’ Senses, and Our Own

June 5, 2015 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Youth Culture – Mods – Late 1950s to Mid 1960s,” by Paul Townsend on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens… air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.

(Richard Nelson [source, apparently])

…and:

Of all the forms of voice and communication, a song is perhaps the least mediated by the intellect. It ropes its way through the tangle of our cautions, joining singer to listener like a vine between two trees.

It attests to the life of the singer through our skin and through our muscles, through the wind in our lungs and the fact of our own beating heart. The evidence of other spirits becomes that of our own body.

A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.

(Kevin Brockmeier [source])

…and:

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

(Jack Gilbert [source])

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What Made You Think It’d Be Easy?

May 29, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: The Place du Havre, Paris (detail), by Camille Pisarro (1893). Says the Art Institute of Chicago: “This bustling scene, alive with the noise and movement of traffic and pedestrians, was the view from his window at the Hôtel Garnier in Paris, where he stayed for a few weeks early in 1893.”]

From whiskey river (italicized stanza):

If You Knew

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked a half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

(Ellen Bass [source])

…and:

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that’s alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.

(Milan Kundera [source])

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“I See,” Said the Blind Man (As He Picked Up His Hammer and Saw)

May 22, 2015 by John 2 Comments

[Image: Eudoxia, by “Zike Questi.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post. To enlarge, click the image; to see the thing in its full-size glory, right-click here and select “Open in a New Tab/Window” (or your browser’s counterpart). Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing other than the apparition of the non-apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the utterance of the unutterable, the access to the inaccessible, the intellection of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the beyond-essence, the form of the formless, the measure of the immeasurable, the number of the unnumbered, the weight of the weightless, the materialization of the spiritual, the visibility of the invisible, the place of the placeless, the time of the timeless, the definition of the infinite, the circumscription of the uncircumscribed, and the other things which are both conceived and perceived by the intellect alone and cannot be retained within the recesses of memory and which escape the blade of the mind.

(John Scotus Eriugen [source (among others)])

…and:

The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes.

(Eckhart Tolle [source])

…and (from whiskey river):

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

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The Soul and the Sense of All the Waters

May 15, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: The (very recently) late B.B. King with Muddy Waters, recorded at a joint concert in 1973]

From whiskey river:

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers — the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees — must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.

Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering with hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes impetuoso, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.

Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to a wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for their own purposes…? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?

(Aidan Chambers [source])

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Knowing What You’re Looking At, Unsure of What You See

May 8, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: the image being discussed here — in which Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe somehow occupy the same face, morphing into each other depending on how closely you’re observing it — has been making its way around the Internets for a while now. The explanation comes to us courtesy of a YouTube channel called ASAP Science, “Your weekly dose of fun and interesting science.”]

From whiskey river:

Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives — often surprising to you — helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others.

(David Eagleman [source])

…and:

Ordinary Days

The storm is over; too bad, I say.
At least storms are clear
about their dangerous intent.

Ordinary days are what I fear,
the sneaky speed
with which noon arrives, the sun

shining while a government darkens
a decade, or a man
falls out of love. I fear the solace

of repetition, a withheld slap in the face.
Someone is singing
in Portugal. Here the mockingbird

is a crow and a grackle, then a cat.
So many things
happening at once. If I decide

to turn over my desk, go privately wild,
trash the house,
no one across town will know.

I must insist how disturbing this is—
the necessity
of going public, of being a fool.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

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Just Enough World, Just Enough Time

May 1, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Boro’d Time (We have all the Time in the World),” textile art by Lucy Portsmouth (magpieslaundry), found at Flickr.com. (Used under a Creative Commons license; click image to enlarge.)]

First, something a little different for a Friday here: a musical intro…

I’ve always liked Gustav Mahler’s “Titan” Symphony, No. 1 in D Major. The first movement drew me right in the first time I heard it, and for decades it’s been one of my favorite accompaniments during writing sessions. The title of that movement is Wie ein Naturlaut, that is, like a sound of nature. Mahler felt so strongly about how this should be played that he wrote to conductor Franz Schalk, “The introduction to the first movement sounds of nature, not music!” I love that instruction.

From whiskey river:

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it’s just wonderful. And… the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

(Douglas Adams [source])

…and:

Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

Day follows day in endless succession, and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.

(Chaim Stern [source])

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Ecstasy in the Commonplace

April 24, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Mill City is Crumbling and I’m going to Art-A-Whirl!,” by user jadammel on Flickr. com. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) This is an example of something called a Holgarama: a panoramic photo taken with a camera called a Holga, whose cult status is attributable to the weirdly and unpredictably flawed photos it takes. Wikipedia calls this, delicately, “its low-fidelity aesthetic.”]

From whiskey river:

Everything Is Going to Be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate

the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window

and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?

There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.

The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.

The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.

I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.

Everything is going to be all right.

(Derek Mahon [source (and elsewhere)])

…and:

Every day my early morning walk along the water grants me a second waking. My feet are nimble, now my ears wake, and give thanks for the ocean’s song.

This enormity, this cauldron of changing greens and blues, is the great palace of the earth. Everything is in it — monsters, devils, jewels, swimming angels, soft-eyed mammals that unhesitatingly exchange looks with us as we stand on the shore; also, sunk with some ship or during off-loading, artifacts of past decades or centuries; also the outpourings of fire under water, the lava trails; and kelp fields, coral shelves, and so many other secrets — the remembered and faithfully repeated recitations of the whales, the language of dolphins — and the multitude itself, the numbers and the kinds of shark, seal, worm, vegetations, and fish: cod, haddock, swordfish, hake, also the lavender sculpin, the chisel-mouth, the goldeye, the puffer, the tripletail, the stargazing minnow. How can we not know that, already, we live in paradise?

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Seeking Reflection

April 17, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “reflections (A),” by Camil Tulcan (camil_t) on Flickr. (Click image to enlarge.) Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

You can’t see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end — at least as far as others are concerned — your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and:

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You’d dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You’d see the face of a stranger. And you’d know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

(Milan Kundera [source])

…and:

I Have Decided

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation.

Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am.

Are you following me?

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Book Review: Galore, by Michael Crummey

April 13, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

The bookish audience includes enough people, of sufficient diversity, that someone has surely been wondering, roughly, “Why don’t they ever publish any sweeping family epics anymore — spanning multiple generations, in some out-of-the-way location? The Australian outback, say? Or Mongolia, or the Argentine pampas? Or — heck, why not Newfoundland?!?”

I’ve never counted myself among the audience for that sort of fiction, so I’ve never asked a question like that — even rhetorically. Historical fiction proper? Oh, sure, that: I do like to read on occasion about a handful of characters in some (real or imagined) past time.

But big, sprawling family sagas too often seem (to me, from the outside) entirely too, well, Biblical. There’s a lot of begetting going on, of course — offstage if not on the page — so you’ve got a large cast of characters, and a lot of tangled relationships, and often big and actual historical events looping through and around all these private lives, and you’ve got to carry it all around in your head at once because at any given moment you may need to know that Daisy was Dorrie’s granddaughter — that’s Daisy, Doris’s daughter, the one married to Darryl, remember? the one with the misspelt tattoo reading “Darren” which was really awkward because Darren was actually her first and dearest (but now long deceased) love as opposed to Darryl, who was merely the most durable…

So what, then, was I doing reading Michael Crummey’s Galore?

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