Everyday Life – Page 39

Wonder, Where You Find It

July 20, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “GRAVES BHAMALA (x2),” by John E. Simpson. When I photographed these bricks, I thought I’d stumbled on some kind of mystery : a reference to a Hindi deity whose name was embossed on building materials at an historic site in the Deep South. Well, duh: the punctuation in the second line — which I hadn’t seen until enlarging the photo — makes a lot of difference.]

From whiskey river:

On the surface and maybe underneath, this may be regarded by some as an idiot’s life. In the very long struggle to find out your own true character there is the real possibility you’ll discover a simpleton beneath the skin, or at least something deeply peculiar. But then you slowly arrive at a point where you accept your comfortable idiosyncrasies, aided in part by the study of your sporting friends, who are capable of no less strange behavior. A few years back I tried to explain to a long table of studio executives the pleasures of walking around wild country in the moonlight. They nodded evasively, but I could tell they thought I was daft. The same tale told to two or three of my favorite hunting or fishing companions would be received as utterly ordinary, say on the level of drinking too much good wine. It’s simply the kind of thing you do when your curiosity arouses you.

(Jim Harrison [source])

…and (italicized lines):

Belief in Magic

How could I not?
Have seen a man walk up to a piano
and both survive.
Have turned the exterminator away.
Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine.
Seen rainbows in puddles.
Been recognized by stray dogs.
I believe reality is approximately 65% if.
All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas.
I believe we’re surrounded by crystals.
Not just Alexander Vvedensky.
Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in.
Nonetheless.
Nevertheless
I believe there are many kingdoms left.
The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.
A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life
even though
even though this is my second heart.
Because the first failed,
such was its opportunity.
Was cut out in pieces and incinerated.
I asked.
And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart
in a jar.
Strange tangled imp.
Wee sleekit in red brambles.
You know what it feels like to hold
a burning piece of paper, maybe even
trying to read it as the flames get close
to your fingers until all you’re holding
is a curl of ash by its white ear tip
yet the words still hover in the air?
That’s how I feel now.

(Dean Young [source])

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Let Me Have Your Abyss

July 13, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Light filling the gap,” by Rodrigo Filgueira; found it on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). I like the shape of this image — the horizontal extreme — and the extravagant use of darkness. But maybe my favorite thing, oddly, is the clock ticking away in the shadows.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Daddy Longlegs

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

We walk around awash in unseen worlds and forces. Sound waves, electromagnetic waves, the subatomic universe, the human aura, the famous quantum soup. All of these are examples of real things that we don’t see. Not only do they exist, they impact our lives continuously, they influence us, they affect us all the time.

Compassion too is real, it’s a solid physical thing, as powerful as gravity, and it affects outcome, turns one thing into another. Compassion, and the lack of compassion, affect us all the time. The fear we feel in the middle of the night can be traced to a lack of this “force.”

When there isn’t enough compassion being generated (either for ourselves as individuals or in the world in general), we become unbalanced; we suffer from it as we would from a lack of fresh air and clean water. It is not an incidental element, it is mandatory. We will not survive without it.

(Patricia Anderson [source])

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Book Review: The Book of M, by Peng Shepherd

July 7, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

One of my very favorite books of recent years was 2014’s Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. I loved that book so much that I couldn’t even bring myself to write a review of it; I just wanted to savor the memory of it, so to speak — to keep the memory unspoiled by words which would linger long afterwards, eventually becoming for me the memory themselves.

Three years after reading Station Eleven, I began encountering advance reviews of Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M, which often compared it — not at all unfavorably — with Station Eleven. Skeptical at first, I poked into the new book’s general nature, its premise and characters; in a way, though, I didn’t want to know too much in advance. Given such a premise and such characters, the anticipation of reading it resembled my memory of having read Station Eleven, in reverse: I didn’t want the words I read then to overhang the reading experience. So I quit reading advance reviews, placed a pre-release order, and just waited.

And all that intertwining of memory and language? It anticipated the very point.

—

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Omnium-Gatherum Quotidian

July 6, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Plum Blossoms and Moon,” by Katsushika Hokusai; woodblock print, ink and color on paper (1803). Found it at the site of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). The museum notes that this comes from a Hokusai album called”Fuji in Spring (Haru no Fuji)”; you can browse the album’s pages online at the Internet Archive (courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries collection). The image shown here is page 17 of the album. Hokusai’s work has made a couple of previous appearances here at RAMH — notably in the site’s banner image (since 2013).]

From whiskey river:

Moon, plum blossoms,
this, that,
and the day goes.

(Kobayashi Issa [source: none canonical, but whiskey river found it here])

…and:

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

(Oliver Sacks [source])

…and:

Nirvana is this moment seen directly. There is nowhere else than here. The only gate is now. The only doorway is your own body and mind. There’s nowhere to go. There’s nothing else to be. There’s no destination. It’s not something to aim for in the afterlife, it’s simply the quality of this moment.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

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Spelunking the Extraordinary

June 29, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: illustrations and captions from “Radio Milks Cows, Runs Street Cars,” in the February 1931 edition of Modern Mechanix. Found it here, at the Modern Mechanix blog (it’s a bit extraordinary that such a blog even exists). To see the whole page on which the photo appeared, including more detailed text, just click on the image.]

From whiskey river:

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Saving Daylight

Suppose for a moment you live in a land,
Amazed at what happens during summer solstice.
Very strange things begin to occur,
Instantly, there is little darkness,
Night that we are so used to
Gone; what is left is the brilliant colors.

Daylight from dusk to dawn to dusk again,
Alight in all its energy and brightness.
Yes, we are north of the sixtieth parallel;
Land of the midnight sun.
I have been here before and seen things,
Gazed upon the horizon, waiting for darkness to reappear,
Holding on to summer in all its life, love and beauty;
To see it ebb once more as daylight fades to night.

(C. M. Davidson-Pickett [source])

…and (italicized portion):

There is purity in living beautifully. To indulge in the small ecstasies, the small pleasures. Silk dresses, white tea, gold, sunshine, carved crown molding. It is all malleable, atmospherically — our lives. Simplicity, blue palms, white wines, whipped espresso. You create your paradise out of all these simple luxuries, and that’s purely religious. True divinity wades in the warm oceans of bliss.

(“Dove Mother” (quoted by Linden Fern) [source])

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Something Still Wild and Unpredictable

June 22, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Dare You — Truly Dare You?,” by JES; photo of a door in the wall at Ludlow Castle, Ludlow, UK (taken May, 2018; shared here under a Creative Commons License — for more information, see this page at RAMH)]

From whiskey river (italicized stanzas):

When planets softly collide

This is not a poem about dust,
there have been too many of those,
but may be about wind, who knows,
the remaking of deserts, endlessly,
when sand becomes a definition
of scale or boundaries or change
like weather squeezing out lines of heat
that drives from solid midnight freeze
up into the sweat pressure of midday.
These conditions are inescapable, no relief —
still there are flowers, stubborn and pink.

Yesterday, strangely, began with showers,
laying the heat demons down and out
for a moment and the air, wet
with the ghost of something old.
Whispers like clouds of aimless particles
which one day could form something solid,
whispers and the slight reverberation
of planets softly colliding,
showering each other with dust,
which they have been trying to avoid,
hoping for a poem about something greener.

As if rock didn’t survive,
and dust didn’t dance on air.

(Jill Jones [source])

…and:

“A steep and unaccountable transition,” Thoreau has described it, “from what is called a common sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men cannot describe them.” Man’s mind, like the expanding universe itself, is engaged in pouring over limitless horizons. At its heights of genius it betrays all the miraculous unexpectedness which we try vainly to eliminate from the universe. The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness. One does not see, one does not hear, until he speaks to us out of that limitless creativity which is his gift.

(Loren Eiseley [source])

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Potpourri, June 18th (2018 edition)

June 18, 2018 by John 1 Comment

[Above: I have had this track playing incessantly in my head for the last couple of weeks… maybe by posting it here I’ll free myself of it, at least for now. The performance is not a particularly famous one to those who haven’t heard it; it came at the tail end of a suite of songs, a sort of “history of jazz” which Goodman et. al. performed that night (particularly for the sake of those unfamiliar with the sound of jazz in such a venue). Billed as a “jam session,” although they’d rehearsed it earlier in the week, it worked out more or less to earn the billing. A series of foreground soloists (some from Count Basie’s and Duke Ellington’s bands as well as Goodman’s) take turns improvising against one another’s themes — all over Gene Krupa’s driven backbeat. Harry James’s trumpet, it seems to me, kind of owns the thing.]

This oddball amalgam of science fiction and 1930s-

Find the story via the "#jesstorypix" link in my p

Another year gone by… time for my annual brain dump on no particular theme, for no particular reason other than because I can… It occurs to me now that — except for the word “annual” — that pretty much describes how I started blogging at Running After My Hat in the first place, haha.

—

Over there at the right, we have evidence of one highlight of my past year: the two most recent posts from my Instagram feed, most recent one first. And yes, I really mean two most recent: every few hours, the feed as displayed here will be refreshed — the one at the right will be replaced by the one to its left, and a different “most recent” one will shown up in the primo spot. (Obviously, or maybe not, if I haven’t posted anything new on Instagram in the interval, the “refreshment” will have no obvious effect.)

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Give Anything to Find That Birdy Boy

June 15, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Hit Like A Girl Contest 2018/Good Times Bad Times – LED ZEPPELIN,” a cover version by one Yoyoka Soma, an eight-year-old drummer. Hit Like a Girl is self-described as “the global online contest for female drummers.” Soma did not “win” HLAG, even in her “Drumset <18” category; I haven’t watched the other videos, but it’s hard to imagine that they all radiate quite this — or this much — spirit.]

From whiskey river:

…joy is not a concept, nor indeed a word, that we are entirely comfortable with, in the present age. The idea seems out of step with a time whose characteristic notes are mordant and mocking, and whose preferred emotion is irony. Joy hints at an unrestrained enthusiasm which may be thought uncool… It reeks of the Romantic movement. Yet it is there. Being unfashionable has no effect on its existence… What it denotes is a happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.

(Michael McCarthy [source])

…and:

Pay attention to the gentle ones,
the ones who can hold your gaze
with no discomfort,
the ones who smile to themselves
while sitting alone
in a coffeeshop,
the ones who walk
as if floating.
Take them in and marvel at them.
Simply marvel.
It takes an extraordinary person
to carry themselves
as if
they do not live
in hell.

(D. Bunyavong [source])

…and:

Advice to the Actress C.N.

Refresh yourself, sister
With the water from the copper bowl with bits of ice in it —
Open your eyes under water, wash them —
Dry yourself with the rough towel and cast
A glance at a book you love.
In this way begin
A lovely and useful day.

(Bertolt Brecht [source])

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Fresh Starts

June 8, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “happy 1st day of january, ’11,” by user “muffett68” on Flickr.]

From whiskey river:

This Blank Page

is where I begin to exist. See, and already you
begin to know me, an insistence somewhere
that your eyes transmute into Voice—thence
the somebody as much as I am that you
apprehend. But I am more arrogant than this, I
am here before you, making the paths through
blank lines of space,
a detergent across the glass of your language,
restoring the shock of perspective
to the household kitchen window
(the view that you had grown up with
till you could see behind all the fences)
so that, following the footprints of my eyes
already quite outside the walls of
this page
you may be lured somewhere further enough to be
more than the small note that was
extension of me.

(Thomas Shapcott [source])

…and:

Last Spring

Fill yourself up with the forsythias
and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too
with your blood and happiness and wretchedness,
the dark ground that seems to come with you.

Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome.
And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows,
then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you
into June, when the roses blow.

(Gottfried Benn [source])

…and:

Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious. Luckily for artists, they don’t require art to do a good day’s work. But critics and teachers do. A book, a story, should be smarter than its author. It is the critic or the teacher in you or me who cleverly outwits the characters with the power of prior knowledge of meetings and ends.

Stay open and ignorant.

(Grace Paley [source])

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Phantom Realities

June 1, 2018 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Translating Architecture into Instruments,” TED video by “contemporary sound, performance and installation artist” Allard Van Hoorn. Van Hoorn’s Urban Songlines project of a few years ago experimented with ways to generate sound — “songlines” of a sort — from various architectural elements. Although I can’t embed the video here, I was especially taken with his “Lusophonic Storyboard,” which you can read about (and whose video can watch/listen to) here. As for songlines in general — the Australian Aboriginal variety — you can read more below.]

From whiskey river:

Phantom Blues

I have the phantom blues.
I’m too tired to be blue.
This is what phantoms do.
They only almost have the blues.

Maybe I’ll get some rest
so I can get depressed.
Yes, that’s it. I need to
feel better to feel worse.

Maybe I am a phantom.
I hadn’t thought of that.
Just an old weary ghost
with an invisible hat.

(Hans Ostrom [source])

…and:

Antilamentation
(excerpt)

You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

(Dorianne Laux [source])

…and:

Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy. Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys. And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me… And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet [source])

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