[See original at toothpastefordinner.com]
From whiskey river:
Report From A Far Place
Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.Be careful, though: they
burn, or don’t burn, in their own
strange way, when you say them.
(William Stafford)
I had occasion recently to hunt down a story by James Thurber which I hadn’t read in *counting*… uh, many years. But the first time I “read” it, I didn’t actually read it: I heard it, read aloud, by my seventh-grade English teacher.
The story itself has nothing to do with Christmas or even winter (as far as I can tell), but the day Mr. Krause read it to us and his other seventh-grade class was the last schoolday before Christmas break — when no one, teachers included, had much interest in academic matters. (An innocent time, eh?)
Mr. Krause’s voice had a flattened, slightly nasal quality to it; years later, as a teacher myself, I heard a recording of Kurt Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse-Five (“Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn’t a melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore”) and thought I recognized in his voice my old teacher’s. As he read the story that day, grinning almost the whole time, he sat on the desk and kept having to stop and laugh. Indeed, even not counting the jokes, it must be a fun story to read aloud — all those smackings and tockings of all the k-sounds. But I’m surprised, in retrospect, that he read it to seventh graders; the diction and sentence structure, the almost literal slipperiness of the writing, seems to me a tad above listening-comprehension level.
(Most of all, I guess, I’m surprised that even one of those listeners still remembers as much about the day as he does.)
The title is “The Last Clock,” not to be confused with Thurber’s more well-known, full-length book, The Thirteen Clocks. Online, the story seems to be available nowhere except at the site of The New Yorker, which originally published it in February, 1959; to read it there, you’ll need either to be a New Yorker subscriber, or you’ll need to purchase (for $5.99) one-year access to the digital version of the issue.
Offline, the most obvious choice is to find the issue in some form at a library… or obtain a copy, one way or another, of the Thurber anthology called Lanterns and Lances.
In the meantime, as a little bit of a tasty holiday treat, I thought I’d transcribe the first section (and a bit more) into a page here at RAMH. (Links to both the New Yorker site and to some places to obtain Lanterns and Lances appear at the end of that excerpt.)
Enjoy!
Read “The Last Clock” (excerpt), by James Thurber
Marta was wondering earlier this week about pranks, harmless or funny or otherwise. Coincidentally, at about the same time that she posted that, I received a funny reminder of a successful but harmless prank I’d been involved with from years ago. Thought I’d share the story with you (even though some of it, in retrospect, will embarrass me and make me wish that some things weren’t true).
Some background:
I attended a small high school in southern New Jersey in the late 1960s. Most school dances, at least back then (what do they do now, anyway?), were held in the gym, suitably transformed into romantic wonderlands by crepe paper
and complicated lighting. But in our junior year, the prom — the Big Event — took place at a popular club some 10 or 15 miles away. Called the Latin Casino, it was a big deal, with big-name entertainers on the calendar, and at the time our prom took place the big name was big indeed: The Supremes, with Diana Ross.
So yes, we always got a rise out of telling people that we’d had The Supremes — The REAL Supremes — at our junior prom. We always got a rise out of that, even if we hadn’t gone to the prom ourselves. Which was the case with Yours Truly and most of his friends, none of us having yet fully (or at all) emerged from our cocoons of bachelor-boyhood.
(To be fair, it was a plain old economic calculation, too; two tickets to the Latin Casino cost a heck of a lot more than two tickets to the RHS gym. You practically had to believe you meant to marry the young lady in question.)
So that’s the background story. Now scroll the calendar forward, not quite a decade…
[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original, “a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang.” More info here and here.]
From whiskey river (which excerpted from this poem, in different words, via translation):
The startling reality of things
The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.
I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea that other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.I was once called a materialist poet
And was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.
(Fernando Pessoa [source])
…and:
Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.
(John O’Donohue [source])
When I was a boy, among my adventure fantasies was being a fighter pilot. There was something tremendously exciting to me in the idea of traveling at superhigh speeds and concentrating not just on the flight path ahead, but on the split-second change in circumstances in all three dimensions at once. You’d have to keep looking up, behind, down, to both sides… and never, ever relax.
(One obvious fallacy seems never to have occurred to me: if Dad’s characteristic high-speed highway driving gave me the willies, as it did, in actual aerial combat I’d almost certainly bail out more often than not.)
Later, fresh out of college, I first worked not as the English teacher I’d been trained to become, but as a cab driver — a position for which, excuse the boast, I was eminently suited.
Two apparently unrelated factoids about my life, separated from each other (and from now) by decades. But if you let your conceptual vision blur just a bit, you might discern the connection: spatial relationships; geography.
For whatever reason, I’ve always been interested in, not to say obsessive about, how one gets from here to there. Even now, I can spend hours poring over maps and atlases; Google Maps (and its macro-offspring, Google Earth and Google Sky) would be like a crack pipe to me if I let it. Furthermore, I’m blessed (or cursed) with a good intuitive sense of direction, so after I’ve driven someplace once I can almost always get back to it without conscious thought. (I say “cursed” only because this sometimes makes me impatient with others’ reluctance to venture into unfamiliar territory.) I actually hold a mental map of the route, including landmarks, traffic bottlenecks, relationship to other routes to other nearby destinations, and so on.
This obsession extends, bizarrely, even into my dreams. I notice and generally remember how I’ve “gotten” from one place to another. As my dream life goes on over the course of years, I recognize intersections I’ve “been to” before (although I’ve never seen them in real life). And, what’s more, I sometimes record these routes — write them up the morning after, in the course of recording especially notable dreams.
(Yes, I’ve tried to keep paper and pen by the bedside so I can jot them down at the moment, so to speak. It never works for me: I’m too caught up in my dreams to want to wake up.)
The most recent such report took me about an hour to write on Saturday morning, when I should have been working on Seems to Fit instead. You can read it here (irrelevant, non-setting-related portions excised, and hyperlinks to real-world places added (because — ha ha — doing so gives me a chance to use Google Maps)).
In the meantime: how about you? Is there any ongoing thread to what happens between your ears as you sleep? Consider the common “Color or black-and-white?” question. Beyond that, though, think of your dreams as a very particular sort of fiction. Do you tend to remember the plots the next morning? or are you a character specialist? what about dialogue?
Have you had the deja vu moment in which you come to a real place for the first time… and realize you’ve already been there in your dreams? Do you find yourself dreaming about the same things, people, places, even in non-recurring dreams, even spread out over years or decades?
C’mon. Spill.
From whiskey river:
The Story, Around the Corner
is not turning the way you thought
it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,
the way a child draws the tail of a pig.
What came out of your mouth,
a riff of common talk.
As a sudden weather shift on a beach,
sky looming mountains of cloud
in a way you cannot predict
or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,
takes its own side. And it is strange.
Far more complicated than a few phrases
pieced together around a kitchen table
on a July morning in Dallas, say,
a city you don’t live in, where people
might shop forever or throw a thousand stories
away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it
aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted?
Stories wandering out,
having their own free lives?
Maybe they are planning something bad.
A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember
is growing into a weird body with many demands.
One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,
knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.
(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])
…and (italicized portion):
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.
(Joan Didion, The White Album [source])
[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]
On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist and one or two background instruments. The lyrics aren’t even all that special, in one respect: very simple words (with one exception), in a more or less conventional order. At that, the title itself appears six times over the course of the three stanzas, and a slight variation of it thrice more.
But given the right singer, oh, how loudly this song speaks…
(Who’s “the right singer”? Hard to say. Wikipedia lists a sample of about 150 of them. Amazon’s MP3 download store includes over 600 hits — many duplicates, of course, but still… And if you go rummaging around on iTunes and elsewhere on the Web, you can quickly fill your hard drive with unique versions.)
Here’s the story:
A somewhat slapdash whiskey river Friday post this week, its author having been pretty much laid low by the stupidest of ailments — a cold — since Tuesday night.
From whiskey river’s commonplace book (a thematic archive):
Can You Imagine?
For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now — whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade — surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.
(Mary Oliver [source])
From whiskey river:
The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
(Frederick Buechner [source: quoted many places online])
I like to think of myself as a flexible guy — able to roll with the punches, able to work around problems, able to, y’know, cope. It’s amazing how quickly and how profoundly that self-image can be shaken simply by adding an extra person to the household.
Recently fallen on some sudden, transitory, but inarguably hard times, The Stepson will be staying with us for a while. Whatever other effects this has wrought and will continue to wreak on the delicate ballet of The Missus’s and my everyday life, it has revealed in me — to myself — a deep attachment to Keeping Trivial Things Unchanged.
Case in point: tableware. It really doesn’t matter that The Missus and I (mostly I, probably) have always kept the matched flatware in the drawer in the plastic bin with the variously sized and shaped little niches: one each for big knives, butter knives, dinner forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, and dessert forks. It doesn’t really matter that the various mismatched flatware (teaspoons, mostly) is just sort of tumbled together at the front of the drawer, where it can be easily retrieved without having to root around. It doesn’t really matter that we use the mismatched teaspoons just for dishing out canned pet food.
And, especially, it doesn’t really matter that all these neat little anal-retentive/obsessive-compulsive categories of household objects and their uses are suddenly blurring around the edges.
So if all that doesn’t really matter, whence the pursed-lips exasperation I suddenly find on my face when I go to feed the dog or cat and can’t find any mismatched teaspoons, but plenty of the matched sort? or when I pull open the drawer and find dessert forks and dinner forks shamelessly copulating in each others’ apartments?
What’s wrong with me?
I know: nothing is wrong with me. Everybody has his or her little “things” (or so goes the palliative advice which I can even now hear myself offering someone else in similar straits). Crotchets, right?
And yet, dang, I’m disappointed in myself. None of it is worth making an issue over, all of it could be corrected simply by putting a bug (or series of bugs) in The Stepson’s ear — or The Missus’s, come to that. But nope. Me, I’d apparently prefer to pout.
From whiskey river:
Morning
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?This is the best–
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso–maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins–
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,and, if necessary, the windows–
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
(Billy Collins [source])
…and:
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.
(Jeanette Winterson [source])
