Reading – Page 8

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])

[Read more…]

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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Summoning the World, Sending It Away

March 20, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Domain Field (2003), by Antony Gormley. (Click to enlarge.) See the note below for more information.]

From whiskey river:

A Valley Like This

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened —
there was nothing, and then…

But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?

We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don’t watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hand to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us

(Maya Angelou [source])

[Read more…]

“The Evanescence of the World”

March 13, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: the twelve images from Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, combined into a single image. Says Wikipedia: “The paintings in the series each capture the façade of the cathedral at different times of the day and year, and reflect changes in its appearance under different lighting conditions.”]

From whiskey river:

How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name. In the word, the earth breaks silence. It has waited a long time for the word. Concealed beneath familiarity and silence, the earth holds back and it never occurs to us to wonder how the earth sees us. Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there? Perhaps your place loves having you there. It misses you when you are away and in its secret way rejoices when you return. Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it? Perhaps your favorite place feels proud of you. We tend to think of death as a return to clay, a victory for nature. But maybe it is the converse: that when you die, your native place will fill with sorrow. It will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places. Perhaps each day our lives undertake unknown tasks on behalf of the silent mind and vast soul of nature. During its millions of years of presence perhaps it was also waiting for us, for our eyes and our words. Each of us is a secret envoi of the earth.

(John O’Donohue [source])

…and:

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.

(Sue Monk Kidd [source])

…and:

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

(Eugène Ionesco [source])

[Read more…]

What’s the Matter?

March 6, 2015 by John 2 Comments

[Image: ‘Jeu injuste’ (‘Unfair game’), by Rémy Saglier (user “doubleray”) on Flickr.
Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.

(Chuck Palahniuk [source])

…and:

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.

(Marcel Duchamp [source])

…and:

Concerning the Atoms of the Soul

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the center

of whatever everything is. And we don’t see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That’s what weight is, that communal process of falling.
Furthermore, these atoms carry hooks, like burrs,

hooks catching like hooks, like clinging to like,
that’s what keeps us from becoming something else,
and why in early love, we sometimes
feel the tug of the heart snagging on anothers’ heart.

Only the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres
with no means of holding on to the world
or perhaps no need for holding on,
and so they fall through our lives catching

against nothing, like perfect rain,
and in the end, he wrote, mix in that common well of light
at the center of whatever the suspected
center is, or might have been.

(John Glenday [source])

[Read more…]

Perspectives, Inside-Out

February 27, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: the caption at Flickr says only: “Reversed (original): OM AH HUNG, Mind Speech Body, blessing letters on the reverse of a Tibetan Buddhist Thankga, red ink, Seattle, Washington, USA: written in reverse so they are correct from the deities (sic) point of view.”]

From whiskey river:

But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

Empty me of the bitterness and disappointment
of being nothing but myself
Immerse me in the mystery of reality
Fill me with love for the truly afflicted
that hopeless love, if need be
make me one of them again —
Awaken me to the reality of this place
and from the longed-for or remembered place
And more than this, behind each face
induct, oh introduce me in-
to the halting disturbed ungrammatical soundless
words of others’ thoughts
not the drivel coming out of our mouths
Blot me out, fill me with nothing but consciousness
of the holiness, the meaning
of these unseeable, all
these unvisitable worlds which surround me:
others’ actual thoughts — everything
I can’t perceive yet
know

know it is there.

(Franz Wright [source])

…and:

We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

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All the Directions of Time

February 20, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Clock with Blue Wing, by Marc Chagall (1949, oil on canvas). Translator Susanna Nied identifies this painting as the source or inspiration for Inger Christensen’s poem, below.]

From whiskey river:

A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a “thus” and an “otherwise”, with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.

(Vladimir Nabokov [source])

…and:

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.

(Franz Kafka [source])

…and:

If I Stand

If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock

how else would eternity
find its way around

(Inger Christensen [source])

[Read more…]

The Door Open, the Light Tentative, the Compass Uncertain

February 13, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: a colony of chinstrap penguins in the bowl of Mount Michael — an active volcano in Antarctica. Photo by Sebastião Salgado, from his spectacular book Genesis. “These landscapes are as alive as I am,” Salgado has said. “One day I was walking around rocks near a volcano that were one day old. They had just become solid.”]

From whiskey river:

The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.

(Clarissa Pinkola Estes [source])

…and:

Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade pulled
not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Sea rippled here and
there. Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has —
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses — as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren’t enough,
as if joy weren’t strewn all around.

(Holly Hughes [source])

…and:

The wind of longing blows to your right, from the orange groves, and to your left, from the sea salt. A fog, approaching the chambers of your heart from the north, makes it difficult for memory to distinguish what is private from what is public. You fear for the present stifled by the hegemony of the past and fear for the past from the absurdity of the present. You do not know where to stand at this crossroads. Are you what you were, or what you are now? You fear you will forget tomorrow while mired in the question: In which time do I live?

(Mahmoud Darwish [source])

[Read more…]

The Gravity of the Unknown

February 6, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

'Remarkable things, passing,' by user PhotoGraham on Flickr

[Image: “Remarkable things, passing,” by user PhotoGraham on Flickr.com. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time, of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

Abraham Joshua Heschel, a very interesting rabbi and mystic, said he didn’t pray for faith; he prayed for wonder.

That is also my prayer. Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table; a tiny fleck of it stops time. My periodic table of the heart also has many other elements, still unidentified by science. One of them is unattainium. That’s the one that continues to drive us forward whether or not we expect to succeed.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and:

Balance

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude —
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport’s labyrinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

[Read more…]

Enough

January 23, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

Illustration by George Herriman, for Don Marquis's 'archy and mehitabel'

[Image: illustration by George Herriman, for Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel. And let’s change things up this week by starting with a song, because wotthehell archy wotthehell… Click Play button to begin The Only Joy In Town. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 5:13 long.]
(Lyrics here.)

[audio:theonlyjoyintown_jonimitchell.mp3|titles=’The Only Joy In Town’|artists=Joni Mitchell]

From whiskey river:

I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us.

(Rachel Naomi Remen [source])

…and:

working it out
(excerpt)

once in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own
tail, it swallowed and swallowed until
it got halfway round, and there it stopped and
there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own
self. some fix, that.
we only have ourselves to go on, and it’s
enough

(Charles Bukowski [source])

[Read more…]

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